#224 - Deploying Empathy to Build Better Businesses with Michele Hansen of Geocod.io

Courtland Allen: 0s

What's up, everybody? This is Courtland from indiehackers.com and you're listening to the Indie Hackers Podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these indie hackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of, so the rest of us can do the same.

Alright. I'm here with Michele Hansen. Michele, you are many things. You are the founder of Geocod.io, a cohost of the excellent podcast Software Social. You are the author of a brand new book called “Deploying Empathy”, which we're going to talk about a lot today. Welcome to the show.

Michele Hansen: 47s

Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.

Courtland Allen: 49s

So, why don't we start by talking about Geocodio, because this is the most indie hackerish thing that you do, although every one of these other things is a very indie hacker thing to do. What is Geocodio and how did you come to start it?

Michele Hansen: 1m 0s

Geocodio is a software as a service company that my husband and I started together in 2014.

The genesis of it is that we had a little mobile app called “What's open, nearby?” that, at the time you couldn't just type into Google, which grocery stores are open right now. You had to remember that there was a Safeway near you, then go to the Safeway website and go to their store locator and type in your zip code and find the one near you and then find their hours. And it was like five clicks deep.

We built this app and said that you just pulled it up, and it was a map and it showed you which grocery stores and convenience stores and coffee shops were currently open, so you didn't have to do all of that. The whole idea of it, is if you needed milk at midnight or a coffee at 3:00 AM, and you didn't have the brain power to do all that searching, you could just pull up the app.

The central point of this app was this map. For geocoding, which is the process of turning addresses into latitude and longitude, so a computer can understand them so you can, for example, show a map on a mobile app. Basically everybody got it from Google and they would give you 2,500 lookups for free per day, but you couldn't cache them or store them. Then if you needed any more than that, you needed to pay like tens of thousands of dollars a year for an enterprise contract, that gave you like 100,000 a day.

We had this app going and we had some ad revenue, a couple hundred bucks a month. It felt like it was working and we were adding more and more stores, getting some good press about it. But we had 3,000 stores at one point and we're 500 over this limit. There's just nothing, we just can't get the data. How are we going to keep this going?

So, we initially built a super rudimentary geocoder just for our own purposes for this app, just to keep it alive. As we talked to other friends about it, who were developers, they were like, I have the same problem. Eventually somebody was like, have you guys ever thought of just slapping up a paywall in front of this and then maybe other people could pay your server costs so that you don't have to pay to host this. And we're like, that would be amazing, if other people paid the server costs.

So, we launched Geocodio in January of 2014. We had two tiny little digital ocean droplets for 10 bucks a month each. So, our expenses were basically $20 to keep it going. To our great surprise, we put it up on Hacker News and prayed, and then somehow it ended up on the front page the whole day. Tons of sign-ups, of course we've never come anywhere close to that traffic that we got on the first day and most of it didn't stick around, but we got some customers out of it.

We ended up making about $31, our first month. So, about $11, when you take out the server costs. We were so surprised that anyone wanted to pay us that we actually had not written the code to tell Stripe to bill people. Because we did pay as you go for one of our plans. That was the only one we launched with initially. But that to us was a smashing success, because we had more than paid our servers' cost. That was the goal.

That was such a crazy experience. Getting so much feedback from people on Hacker News and that was really where I started to be interested in the role of customers in building a business.

Courtland Allen: 4m 54s

There's so many lessons in that story. Particularly, this idea that as you're building your first sort of side project or business, you're building tools to help you out. The fact that these tools that help you out could be useful to other people, this geocoding service that you've created for yourself, is something that others might need is such a cool insight.

I consistently see this pattern of founders who end up pivoting to a business that at first, was just a helper for their previous business. It's almost as if the best way to come up with business ideas is to start something, literally anything, and then when you find yourself needing problems solved, they're valuable. Go do that as a business instead.

Michele Hansen: 5m 29s

Yeah. What I love about that approach is, you are already passionate about the problem. Worst case scenario, you have solved the problem for yourself, you have made yourself more efficient, you have an accomplishment you can feel good about, and maybe nobody is paying you, but you have solved your own problem.

Courtland Allen: 5m 54s

I think the other thing that I take from your story, which you didn't quite dive into, but you hinted at, was that you are a husband and wife team, working on this side projects and also working on Geocodio. What do you think is a lesson that you've taken from seven plus years of working together, for other people who are working together with their partners?

Michele Hansen: 6m 14s

Working with my spouse, for me, is my dream job. In a way it's a reason why I never planned to get a job again, if I can help it. Because we work so well together, that it just works. We both bring unique things to the table. We respect each other professionally and as people so much, so it works for us.

It doesn't work for all couples. I think whenever the topic of founder couples comes up, there's always at least one person who has a horror story about working for a founder couple that should not have worked together.

So, it's so funny, because I think people self-select into it, because I remember I think I was at MicroConf where this happened, where I was just chatting with people and whatnot. People who don't work with their spouse, who knew that we worked together would be like, how do you guys work together? We would kill each other. Then the people that do work with their spouse, they would be, isn't it just the most amazing thing. I'm so happy for you. It was just this huge dichotomy. There are two reactions to hearing that we work together.

Courtland Allen: 7m 33s

It sounds like people have slotted themselves into the right buckets, because the people who aren't working together, the people who know that they would kill each other. Did you and your husband have to do a lot of work or any work to make it work or was it just naturally natural from the very beginning?

Michele Hansen: 7m 48s

We met at work, working at a pretty small company, and we actually worked together as coworkers for six months, without any sort of romantic spark or intentions or anything.

Courtland Allen: 8m 5s

You have never not worked together.

Michele Hansen: 8m 7s

Yeah, since we have known each other, we have worked together.

Courtland Allen: 8m 10s

There is no before. That's cool.

Michele Hansen: 8m 12s

Yeah. So, it's normal to us. In a way, when Mathias finally went full time in 2018, I went full-time in 2017, it was like returning to normal.

Courtland Allen: 8m 25s

Very cool. Obviously the two of you are doing a great job. I don't know how many employees Geocodio has, but I do know that you're making north of a million dollars in annual revenue. You're crushing it. You've had the time on the side of that to engage in some other side projects.

I feel like I need to have you on the show like three times. I want to talk about your podcast, Software Social. We don't have time to do that now. I want to talk about the whole story of Geocodio, because there's a lot of interesting insights there. But in this episode, I want to talk about your book that you recently just published. It's called “Deploy Empathy”. I read it. It's great.

What inspired you to write a book though? Why write a book? If you've got a company that's making millions of dollars? If you've got a podcast, if you got a family, you've got all this stuff going for you. Why do you do the arduously tough task of sitting down and banging out a book, that's I think well over 330 pages?

Michele Hansen: 9m 13s

There's two directions for that answer. One of them is where the need came from. Then the other one, that's a bit simpler and I think makes it all make more sense, is that I have ADHD. Doing many things at the same time is completely normal to me. I actually need to have multiple projects going, because that just makes me excited about things. I get bored and I want to move on to something else. Having multiple projects going is just, super normal for me.

Where the book come from? For years now, I guess I've been on and off having calls with people who are trying to get started with customer research. It's my favorite topic. My functional expertise is in product management and my little niche within there is customer research. At one point, I was one of the leaders of the Washington DC Jobs to be done meetup, gave some other various talks. I gave a talk at MicroConf about interviewing customers.

I guess some people knew that this was my area, because most of the writing on customer research, with the exception of “The Mom Test”, is not written for indie hackers. It's not written for developers. It's not written for people who are getting started on their own without funding. It's written for UX people. It's written for product people.

But it really wasn't until last fall, when I was mentoring a sprint group through the Founder Summit. They were asking me questions about customer research more frequently, because I was meeting with them every week. I didn't have one good place to send them with the stuff they needed, that I started to be like, maybe I should do something with this.

Courtland Allen: 11m 15s

Yeah. It's interesting, because you're experiencing this problem that people have. People clearly find it valuable to get this advice. They clearly have a problem talking to customers, learning what to build, learning how to build it. Then the solution to that problem is shitty.

It's like you said, it's this piecemeal collection of breadcrumbs through a bunch of different books and blog posts and sections, to ignore and pay attention to. I think that's again, another perfect formulation for business idea, validated problems that people actually have existing solutions are really crappy for this particular group of people.

Michele Hansen: 11m 47s

Yeah. To what we were talking about Geocodio and solving your own problem. In many ways, the book came out of solving my own problem. I had this thought, one day that I was like, maybe I should write a book. It was like, everything I have read from writers makes writing a book sound awful and really lonely, they had to go lock themselves in a room for six months and not see other people and have these strict rules for themselves on how many hours they write a day. This is mid-February, we're in the middle of a strict lockdown. I did not need any more loneliness in my life.

So, I was like, I should not write a book. I was like, but you know what? I could write a newsletter. People are doing this newsletter thing now, maybe I could just start writing stuff as a newsletter as I need it, the stuff that I need to be able to send to people. Then the archive of that newsletter, the next time somebody asks me, hey, how do I do this? I can just send them this newsletter archive. Then I don't need to have this conversation over and over again. So, it was solving my own problem.

Courtland Allen: 12m 59s

Yeah, I think the topic of the book itself, talking to customers is a challenging topic to get people to care about, too. Because having worked with a lot of indie hackers, if I think about the problems that are at the top of their mind, it's things like, how do I come up with an idea? How do I even know what to build? How do I find the time in my day to even finish building this product and get it out the door? It's so hard just to finish it and have something that's releasable. Then, how do I find customers? Nobody's paying for this? I don't have any money. How do I continue making this business work?

These are ten of the biggest pressing problems. I think when people hear you need to go do customer research and talk to customers and check out this book “Deploy Empathy” and check out this book, “The Mom Test,” people are like, I don't have time for that. I barely have time to do all the other things I'm trying to do.

So, how do you address that notion? How do you contend with the fact that a lot of founders don't see customer research as something that's worth putting the time into doing?

Michele Hansen: 13m 55s

Yeah. There's something I'm very aware of that understanding customers is perceived as a vitamin, rather than a painkiller. But what has been really unexpectedly delightful about this process, is learning that it's more like a gummy vitamin. Once people know how to do it, they actually get really excited about it.

I have had people tell me who have been running their own businesses for years and barely spoken to their customers, never mind interview them, now they're excited about it after doing it, after reading my stuff, which is really exciting. You know what? I sometimes find that the people who are the most against it, are the people who tried it, but they went into it without enough guidance.

They went into an interview and they asked someone, is this a good idea? Would you buy it? What should I build next? Then they did that, and then the person didn't buy it, and they're like, that was a waste of time, I'm never doing that again.

I actually posted on Indie Hackers a couple of months ago when I was writing, have you found talking to customers to be useful? Cause I wanted to understand what people's perceptions of it were, what their experiences were, what those hesitations were.

And someone actually commented on it, that they were meeting their potential customers in coffee shops near them. Robert Belz. I'm sorry. I'm probably butchering your last name, Robert. He's an indie hacker in Romania. He commented this whole thing about how he was meeting people for coffee and understanding their process and all the stuff. I was, I need to talk to you because you are exactly in this group of developers, who people often think are not going to go out and talk to the customers and don't want to, and you're getting all this out of it and you're doing it. You're living it. This is so incredibly exciting. He told me it really was possible to get people excited about this.

I had so many soul nourishing phone calls with people about their customer research during the process of writing the book, and that one really stands out and it just came from a comment thread on Indie Hackers. Because I think people believe that stereotype that developers are bad at talking to people and it's just not true.

The research shows that it's not true. Research actually shows that engineers were actually better at pulling insights out of a usability session than experts were. That's a study from 1993. his has been known for a very long time and yet people believe that, and allow it to hold back their projects and then you wonder, why isn't anyone buying it? They could have talked to people and took their idea and found that thing that really did make it work.

Courtland Allen: 16m 53s

There's always these stereotypes, that I think society tends to propagate. They're really easy to buy into. Once you just accept them as true, you end up succumbing to confirmation bias, where you're looking for evidence that these things are true. You're ignoring evidence against it.

Engineers suck at talking to people. It's if you think that, you're really gonna see the truth of that all over the place, but if you actually look at the data, like you're saying, it's actually not true, that's the case. I think it’s even worse if you believe that, you might fall into the trap of saying, I'm not going to be good at talking to people, and it's a waste of time for me to talk to people.

But I think given how many people are good at engineering nowadays, how many people can code an app, how many people can build the sort of fundamental parts of a business that way. I think one of the best differentiators is to get good at talking to people. It is to develop these soft skills and read books like yours and figure out how to actually talk to customers. I think that helps you.

If I was trying to sell somebody on why they should read this book or why they should talk to customers. Quite frankly, the number one problem that indie hackers have is building something that nobody wants. You spend six months, nine months, twelve months of your life coding this thing. You're super excited about it, and at the end of it, nobody pays for it and it doesn't grow and you're dejected and you quit. And that sucks. A lot of that can be avoided if you're really good at talking to customers. Which doesn't take that much effort to get good at.

I would expect a book like this to be called, “Learn How to Talk to Customers” or “Customer Conversations” or something like that. But it's called “Deploy Empathy”. The sort of main theme running through the book are these tactics and techniques to help you become more empathetic and demonstrate empathy in these conversations.

How would you define empathy and why is it important to have empathy when talking to customers? Why is it the title, so important that it's the primary concept of your book?

Michele Hansen: 18m 35s

This is such a good question, because I think people mix up the definitions of empathy and compassion and sympathy very often. The definition of empathy that I use in the book, which is a quote of Brené Brown, is - empathy is understanding that somebody else's thoughts and emotions and actions make sense from their perspective. t's seeking to understand their perspective, appreciating it as valid from their perspective and that it makes sense from their perspective, even if it is different from your own perspective.

It's important to talk about the definition of empathy, because there's also sympathy, which is feeling bad for someone. I think sometimes people give me a little bit of pushback here, because they define empathy as feeling what the other person is feeling. I don't use that definition.

Brené Brown doesn't use that definition either. I think actually attempting to feel, truly feel what the other person is feeling, is distracting. Because then you are focusing on your own feeling, and the whole point is to focus on the other person and understand what they are feeling and almost suspend your own judgments and preconceived notions and your own feelings about what they're saying, and just completely submerged into the other person.

I like to think of it as becoming a sponge or as it's phrased in the book and with the cover, picturing yourself as the rubber duck that is just there to listen to whatever it is they have to say.

Courtland Allen: 20m 24s

This is way easier said than done. It is not easy to just sit down, especially if somebody is describing an industry you know a lot about, or they're describing using your own product that you spent years building. It's hard to just sit there silently and just try to empathize with their point of view.

You're like no, you're doing it wrong. You should have put this button or you should've done it this way. It's just hard not to interrupt. But if you do that, you're taking yourself out of an effective interview remote, and you're making it about you.

In fact, in your book you have, what you call the most important section of your book. It's section number four. Basically, it's all about how to talk, so that others will talk to you. It's intriguing, because right in the beginning of that section, you say, look, this is going to be a list of tactics and tips, and you need to promise me, reader, that you will not be manipulative. You will not use what people say against them. You will not use these tactics to do harm unto others because they can make somebody open up to you much more than people normally would.

I think normally if I see something like this in a book, that's kind of on the cover or like on the very first page, it's like an ad to get people intrigued. But in yours, it's an actual promise that you want to extract because the tactics that follow actually could be pretty manipulative. They're very powerful techniques. There are things that therapists do to have very good conversations with people and they're very effective.

If you're willing, I want to go through this list of techniques, because I think they're very fascinating and there's something important to be said about every single one of them.

Michele Hansen: 21m 47s

Yeah. On that, it is very important to me that people use these tactics and what they learned from people ethically. Someone asked me recently about the fear that people might manipulate it and am I just giving fuel to people who are manipulative. That is a question I have thought about quite a bit over the past few months.

Someone pointed out to me that people who are manipulative and who seek to do harm to others, they do not need instructions on how to do that. They instinctively know how to do all of this and so much more and use it in ways as weapons against people.

It's people like us who are a bit more naive, maybe a bit more on the socially awkward side, who actually need instructions on validating what someone is saying and leave a pause for them to fill. The people who are charming and manipulative don't need to be told how to be charming and manipulative, because they have probably known how to be that way since they were children.

Courtland Allen: 22m 54s

Maybe before we jump into this list, what's the broad strokes of why this list is even important, because the book's kind of divided into these tactics for empathetic conversations. Also, these very useful scripts for, hey, do you have this problem? Are you at this stage in your journey? Here's a script for how to talk to a customer about topic X or topic Y. Why do you need these soft, empathetic, conversational skills before you can just jump into the scripts?

Michele Hansen: 23m 20s

Because how you ask the questions and how you treat the other person matters so much for the kind of output that you're going to get and the kind of results you're going to get. The book has all of these scripts. In some ways I often think about what questions I have to ask someone, as the first half of an interview, and what you're doing is priming someone to think about the topic you're building rapport with them, you're showing them that you care.

Which you know for many indie hackers, especially if you're building something B2B, you're asking somebody about an everyday business process that nobody in their life has ever cared about. So, you're getting them comfortable talking about it and comfortable talking to you.

Then in the second half, you use all of that rapport and they open up to you about how they really think about it and what they're really doing. The tactics are so important because the questions are really only a small part of building that rapport. Asking the questions in a harsh tone of voice or interrupting someone or talking over them or not making them feel comfortable, you're not going to get very good results back.

I could ask you what led you to sign up on Indie Hackers today? You would be like, huh? You're like I don't know, I just wanted to comment on something. But if I ask you, what led you to sign up on Indie Hackers today? You're trying to be, as I often put it, as harmless as possible.

Courtland Allen: 25m 6s

Yep. So, the scripts are what you do, and the tactics are how you do them.

You've got a list of 12 tactics and you just used the very first one, which is to use a gentle tone of voice, which I think just from your example it demonstrates, obviously, why am I gonna react very differently to the first question than to the second.

But what are your thoughts on using a gentle tone of voice in a customer interview? How does this help put customers at ease? How does it help you learn more as the person interviewing them?

Michele Hansen: 25m 34s

You need to speak in a gentle tone of voice in order to put them at ease and to make them feel safe and to show them that whatever they say is acceptable. You can do that through your tone of voice.

I mentioned in the book that a lot of the tactics come from tactics that therapists use and negotiators as well. Speaking in a calm, gentle tone of voice helps the other person calm down. Therapists do this intentionally to bring calm to maybe someone who's agitated. So do negotiators.

Courtland Allen: 26m 14s

Yeah. It's cool because it has that effect on yourself as well. If you just try talking in a gentle tone of voice, you end up calming down yourself. I guess if you were new to customer interviews and it's something you haven't done a lot as a founder, you might be a little amped up, a little nervous, a little shaky.

So, if you can calm yourself down, and calm them down, I think that sounds great. If it's good enough for someone who's a hostage crisis negotiator, then I think it's probably good enough for founders.

Michele Hansen: 26m 40s

For those first couple of interviews, if you notice that you're shaky and you're excited and you're talking over them and you're not following these tactics, it's okay. But what's important about that is that you noticed you were doing that and that gives you the opportunity to improve on it the next time.

It takes time to understand how to use these tactics and use all of them in an interview. But starting to notice where you're not using them is so powerful. That in and of itself is a sign of growth. It doesn't mean you're doing this process wrong. It doesn't mean you're learning it wrong if you find yourself accidentally not speaking in a gentle tone of voice. It's okay. You can do it the next time.

Courtland Allen: 27m 22s

So the second tactic is I think my favorite, it seems, I don't know if you would agree, but it seems to me one of the most powerful tactics on the list, and it's just the word validate. Validate what people are saying. But what does that mean?

Michele Hansen: 27m 36s

We talked about the definition of empathy and how it in some ways means simply acknowledging that what the other person thinks and does makes sense from their perspective. You can make that known by when they say something to you, simply by replying with, “Yeah, that makes sense.” That is a profoundly powerful phrase because it gives them permission to keep sharing.

Courtland Allen: 28m 4s

It's super unintuitive, because it's okay why would you need to tell somebody that what they said makes sense. Of course, they think it makes sense, they just said it. What possible help can it be for you to tell them something that they already know?

Michele Hansen: 28m 17s

It's all about building that environment of safety and calm and where you're putting them in control. You're also elevating them in many ways to the position of teacher.

You were saying earlier about interviewing people about an industry or a problem that you're very familiar with, saying I'd like to understand how this works from your perspective. Then you're elevating them to that teacher position. It's one of the most powerful ways to influence someone as found by the marketing researcher, Robert Cialdini. He found that, when he was doing research for his own book “Influence.”

Courtland Allen: 29m 0s

One of my favorite books, by the way, I love that book.

Michele Hansen: 29m 2s

He did a podcast with, I want to say it was Freakonomics radio, a couple of months ago. He was saying how he embedded himself into all of these companies with really spammy marketing, basically. At the time it was encyclopedia salesman and used car dealerships, all those sorts of things. He would be a trainee in their programs, and then he wanted to use that for his research for his book.

When he asked people, he outed himself and said he was actually a professor and he wanted to use this in his book. He asked them if he could use it, if he gave them a copy of the boo, only about half of them said yes. But when he said, I'm a professor of marketing, but I wanted to come learn from you because you are an expert in how to influence people, a hundred percent of them said yes.

These tactics of validating what they're saying, and basically elevating them to the position of teacher. Even if you are the founder of the company, even if you have decades of experience in something, it makes them feel complimented. It makes them feel like they have something to say. It makes them feel like what they're saying is important, which, if you are building a company and this person is representative of the customers that you might have for that company, or is a customer of your company, it is incredibly valuable to make them feel valuable themselves.

Courtland Allen: 30m 28s

Yeah. Then you're in a chapter about validation you talk about something I think is fascinating, which is, not only do you use validation and when you don't necessarily agree with what the other person is saying, even if it sounds absurd to you, you're not agreeing with them. In fact, you're going out of your way not to give any opinions at all. You're not saying that's good or that's bad, or I like that, I don't like that.

You're attempting to become almost inhuman, like this object in the room with them that isn't even capable of having opinions or judgments, it's all of these validating phrases, I can see why you do it that way, Michele, or I can see what you're saying, or it sounds like that's frustrating, or it makes sense that you think that. None of these are opinions, none of these are judgements,

Michele Hansen: 31m 11s

But they are also profoundly validating at the same time.

Courtland Allen: 31m 13s

Right. Why is it important to not have opinions? Why is it important to not give judgments?

Michele Hansen: 31m 20s

On the flip side of talking about putting them in the position of teacher, it's also very important that they don't start trying to impress you because then they will start holding things back, and they will start trying to craft narrative around why they do things and make themselves look good.

If you were to say, I love that idea, when they share a feature request with you, they're going to then feel like she thinks my idea is good. What does she think of my other ideas? If I say something else, I want her to think that's good. You’re reminding them of their own insecurities.

But instead, if they request a feature and you say, can you tell me more about how you might use that? You're just diving deeper into what they think, how they see things and you're leaving those opinions and the quality of what they're saying completely to the side. It's irrelevant. You're just looking to understand their perspective, looking through their mental closet and asking permission to open up all of the drawers.

Courtland Allen: 32m 20s

I love that. It's like this idea that if you are someone who's capable of giving opinions and making judgements, then as you said, you trigger something in them to be like, this is a person that I need to impress. That's the last thing that you want in a customer interview. You don't want somebody saying things that aren't necessarily true. You want somebody giving you the most accurate, possible, revelation of their experience.

Michele Hansen: 32m 39s

It's a really hard one for people to learn, because socially we're often conditioned to be agreeable, to build rapport with people, but in this case it's actually detrimental.

Courtland Allen: 32m 51s

Right. It's hard to go into customer interviews and not already know what you want them to say. If you were a new founder, you've been working on your baby for a while and you go talk to a customer about it, it’s probably scary to know that they might say bad things about it.

They might not need what you're building. They might not have ever bought something like that before. So, it's easy to gradually subtly coax them into saying good things. I think this is true for anything. Even if,, let's say you're going to fight with your partner and you want to go talk to a therapist, right? It's easy to give your therapist a very biased version of what the situation is because you want them to agree with you.

Or if you're interviewing customers, it's easy to talk up your product and subtly, without saying it explicitly, put them into a situation or mood where they feel like they need to say good things about your product. Then you can trick yourself into walking away from that conference thinking, people like what I'm doing, I should keep doing what I'm doing. When it really, you manipulated them into saying good things.

Michele Hansen: 33m 51s

That's a very natural instinct to want to hear positive things about what you're building and doing, especially when you need motivation and you're going on your own. That's very normal.

A customer interview can surface a lot of things about how you're helping someone. Rarely will it come in the form of, I love you, this product is amazing. It's not going to come to you like a testimonial, but it will come to you in hearing, wow, this thing they're doing it took them so much time before, and now it just took them 15 minutes to get it set up and they don't even think about it, and they're super grateful to me for that.

It's really different, but we have to check our own instincts to be praised and feel good about ourselves. To what you were saying earlier about this, this isn't just about customer interviews, it's about all of these complicated human emotions and how do we handle them? It's important to have empathy for your customer, and it's also important to have empathy for yourself.

If you find yourself in an interview, looking for praise and looking for validation, rather than evaluating an idea, but trying to validate it, understanding that your desire to feel good about what you're doing is completely normal and it's natural and it's okay. Have empathy for yourself as well.

Courtland Allen: 35m 22s

Another point in this list, you called mirror and summarize their words. What does that mean, in the context of a customer research interview?

Michele Hansen: 35m 30s

That's to rephrase what they have just said. Again, without any opinions. There are two different ways of mirroring and summarizing. Basically, what this does is it prompts someone to keep talking but is not actually a question.

For example, before we started recording, you started talking to me about how you're buying furniture for your apartment and you just bought a chair. I could ask you, how did you decide to buy that chair? Or I could say, so you just bought that chair?

Courtland Allen: 36m 5s

Right? Even after I just told you that I bought the chair.

Michele Hansen: 36m 8s

You’re correct. Then I repeat it back to you, that you just bought the chair. It's a way to prompt elaboration, but is less threatening than a question, going back to that whole theme of being as harmless as possible.

Courtland Allen: 36m 27s

Yeah. That’s super interesting, because I think sometimes in conversation it's easy to feel like, especially for being almost successively polite, that you need to shut up. And that okay, I said the thing, I answered that question, that's all I'm gonna say. If you repeat back to me what I said, then, it’s like you've given me permission to just go on and elaborate and tell you much more about whatever it is I was talking about.

Michele Hansen: 36m 48s

Another way to do this is to summarize what they said wrong. For example, let's say that you told me that you brought an end table last week and you bought a chair today. If I was trying to elicit elaboration, what I could do is prompt you to correct me and then elaborate on top of that.

I could say, so you bought a chair last week and then you bought an end table today. Same tone of voice, same way, but then you would say, no, it was actually the chair that I bought today because last week I bought the end table, because I was at this store and they were having a sale, and then you start going into it because you're correcting me and giving me more details so I understand.

Courtland Allen: 37m 25s

Right. Right. That super smart. All these things - validation, mirroring and summarizing - we've got another one on here, which is asking for clarification, even when you don't need it. It seemed to be methods of just getting the person to not only feel safe, but to get them to just keep talking and giving you more and more details.

Why do you need so many details? Why does it matter that they keep talking and sharing more and more about their experience with you?

Michele Hansen: 37m 47s

Because it's important you understand the problem from their perspective. We always have a sense of a problem from our own perspective, but if we want to build something that solves a problem for somebody else and is also intuitive for them and solves the problem in a way that they would understand, and that they can interact with, and they're able to implement it. We need to fully understand their perspective, even when you think something is obvious.

I see this time and time again with Geocodio, where I'm pretty sure I know why they need this but let me just ask anyway. Then I ask and then I'm like, that was not at all what I was thinking. I'm so glad I asked that. The more you do that and you ask people things that feel to you like dumb questions. gain, I feel like we're socially conditioned to not ask dumb questions and we're so afraid of that.

We're so afraid of the shame that comes with someone saying, “That was a dumb question,” but you need to ask those questions to clarify, even when you think you understand. Because it's often such a valuable doorway to learning new things and new avenues of the problem that you didn't even realize were there.

I think this is the big shift that people go through when they're learning how to interview from the very beginning of feeling scared that they're going to say the wrong thing and threatened that their idea may be incomplete or wrong, to then realizing that they will discover things and then going into them and being excited for finding out when they're wrong and excited to discover some new angle and perspective on this, that they didn't know before.

I experienced this myself when I learned how to interview. It's so amazing to watch people go through that transformation, who I have helped start interviewing as well. They just go from being scared and nervous to being, I can't wait to tell you what I learned.

Courtland Allen: 39m 43s

Very cool. You've got a couple items in this list that are things not to do. They say, don't explain anything. When you say don't negate the person in any way, what does it mean to not explain things?

Michele Hansen: 39m 56s

This often comes up when you're interviewing someone and let's say you are doing a screen-share interview with them. Maybe they're testing a prototype or testing a landing page you have. They say, “Why is this button over here? Or this doesn't work,” even though it's working as you had built it.

There's a very natural tendency, especially as the person who built a thing to say, “What I meant there was actually that you should do this, and this is how it's intended. This is what I was thinking when I was doing it, and you start explaining it.”

Then you're like, and actually, if you just click on this thing and the new over there, then you'll be able to get to it. You can't do it. Because the whole point is to understand how they experience it. If you start talking about what you intended or what you think how it should work, then you're turning the interview on yourself and you're not understanding, why is it that they expected that button to be somewhere else? And why is it that they missed that menu item? How can I understand where they expected those things to be? Is it possible that the process you're solving is in a different order than they expected, or there's something going on there?

You can't start explaining yourself, which again is this very natural inclination to defend yourself when you feel like someone is saying that you built something that's bad, right? That is super natural to feel that way, but you have to check that feeling and say, how can I understand why they think that way? What did they expect to happen? And then with also not negating them, again, you're building this environment of making them feel safe, making them feel like the teacher, removing your own opinions from this. If you tell them that something they think is wrong, they are going to shut down right away.

Courtland Allen: 41m 46s

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. It's so inaccurate to be coaching a person and explaining them through the process of using your product or how they go about their day, because you're not there when they're doing this stuff. Somebody goes to your website, they're not going to have you over their shoulder, teaching them how to use it. You're totally right. I think it just gives you the wrong idea if you're injecting yourself too much into the interview.

Michele Hansen: 42m 7s

There's a place for onboarding calls. There's a place for customer support. The interview is not it.

Courtland Allen: 42m 16s

So these are all tactics for basically how to conduct yourself when having an interview, how to be empathetic. There's also the question of what are you even trying to learn in the interview? Why are you talking to customers? What do you hope to get out of this?

Because even if you get them talking, even if you are validating and you're not interrupting, and you're not explaining things and you're mirroring their words, what is it that you're even listening for? How do you take that information back and make better decisions as a founder?

I realized this is a tremendous question. This is basically what your whole book is about, but what are the sort of broad strokes that we can leave listeners with so that they have an edge in the customer interviews going forward and they can find your book and find out the rest of the story after that?

Michele Hansen: 42m 55s

You can use these tactics to steer the conversation in a direction that is useful for you, that helps you understand what might be valuable to someone, or what might a usable product look like to them, in the case of doing a screenshare interview. You're not just letting them talk about anything forever.

Two of the questions I was saying to you earlier about buying furniture, if I had actually been wanting to interview you about sound dampening paneling, and why you bought the paneling that you did, it would be pretty irrelevant to ask you about chairs and to let you keep talking about chairs, even though I personally love chairs.

All of these tactics help you guide the conversation toward that direction that you needed to go in. So, you can understand what I need to build? What do I need to do to get more customers to come? Why do people stick around? What should my marketing say about what the best customer is for my product? How do I stop churn? How do I see if people can use the thing that I build?

Those are the core problems that the book helps you solve. All of those tactics help you pull out information that is relevant to those problems that you are having. So, you're not just letting them talk about any old thing. You're getting them to talk about the topics that are relevant to you in a way that makes them feel like they are steering the conversation, which in turn makes them feel open with you, which allows you to understand their process from their perspective and what might cause them to switch products or what might make them stay with the product or why they canceled something.

Courtland Allen: 44m 50s

Very cool. I think it's an excellent book. I think there are plenty of reasons to read it. I think the cool thing about books like this is there's always going to be some subset of people who aren't sure they should talk to customers and they're not sold on that, and they're going to do things the wrong way.

There's always going to be some subset of people who are completely sold that they should be doing this and they just need the definitive guide to do it well. I think your book is the definitive guide to doing it well, and these tactics about empathetic conversations are applicable to pretty much any conversations, even outside of talking to customers. So, I hope people read the book.

We didn't get as much time to go into your code, your story of geocoding, as much as I would love to. Maybe in a future episode, but you've done a lot. You've been a founder, you've written a book, you've interviewed thousands of thousands of customers yourself. What would your parting advice be for indie hackers who are just getting started? What's one thing you'd want them to take away from your learnings and your journey that might help them on theirs?

Michele Hansen: 45m 46s

Don't be afraid to be wrong, I would say. Follow what you are passionate about. I think people are afraid of being wrong. They're afraid that maybe they built the wrong product, or they're solving something that people don't care about or that this isn't going to make their dream come true about being financially dependent or whatnot.

You don't have to stick it all on one thing in the beginning and it's okay to be wrong. It's okay to change directions. It's okay to pivot. It's okay to make changes. It's okay for other people to introduce ideas to you, but keep following that thing that you're passionate about, whatever it is, and be open to what other people are saying, but let yourself be wrong. It's okay.

Courtland Allen: 46m 38s

Don't be afraid to be wrong. Michele Hansen, thanks so much for coming on to the Indie Hackers podcast.

Michele Hansen: 46m 43s

Thank you so much for having me.

Courtland Allen: 46m 44s

Where can people go to find your book “Deployed Empathy?” Where can they go to find the other things you're working on online as well?

Michele Hansen: 46m 51s

So “Deploy Empathy,” the print version is available from Amazon. You can find other versions available from the book's website, deployempathy.com. You can also sign up for the deploy empathy newsletter there. You can still see all of the rough drafts, because I wrote the book in public as a newsletter. You can see them all there. You can also find me on Twitter @MJWHansen. And of course, I have my own weekly podcast that I co-host with Colleen Stetler called Software Social.

Courtland Allen: 47m 29s

Alright, thanks again, Michele.