Product Market Fit | David Fradin

David Fradin has experience in building successful products since 1969, at organizations including HP as well as Apple, where he was at the same management level as Steve Jobs. David also heads a professional development company specializing in building insanely great products, product management, product marketing and has trained thousands of managers throughout the world based on his experience at Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and across 75 products and services and eleven startups. He is the author of these books:

https://linktr.ee/JRBolton

Transcript

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Welcome to the Josh Bolton show where we dive interesting and inspiring conversations. And now your host, Josh Bolton. Hi, welcome everybody. Today, we have David friend, and I think I said his last name correctly. Perfect, thank you. We're going to go over the five keys of product success, the different ways to implement it and how to dissect it. Actually, I'll just let David explained it. Well, it's actually an acronym for by companies named spice catalysts. So for the word spice, S stands for strategy. P stands for process. I stands for information. C stands for customer, ID, E stands for employees, per staff. You want me to go through each of those in detail? Absolutely. Well, the first one, which is the most important one is strategy. And that's your marketing strategy for your product. And that is defining what is your product? What does it do for the customer? How does it do it? Why did the customers want to do that? When does it get done? What's standing in their way, that type of thing. And then that rolls into a value proposition. And incorporating design thinking and the innovation, which is doing things bigger, faster, better, higher quality, lower cost, then from that you do your competitive and your market research to help build out your product market strategy. From that you get that do your product positioning, identify the personas of the types of customers, that will be buy and or using your product. And then your distribution strategy, your target markets, your market segmentation, your market size, so you can do a sales forecast. And then lastly, your pricing strategy, you put all that together, there's actually 32 elements of a price of a product market strategy, which gives you a plan because strategy and plan are words that can be used interchangeably for development of the product. In design, sorry. The second part of the spice is the process. And you need to have a go up the maturity curve of process so that you can repeat success over and over again, I had one client once they hired me to come in to assess their process and develop a process for them. The VP of product management there said that they've developed and introduced five new products. So the last year or so at all, five of them failed that because they lacked a process. The people just pointed fingers at each other blaming each other for those product failures. So his comment was the lack of a written down agreed upon process results in a culture of blame, as opposed to a culture of product success. The third element of spice the AI is make sure you have the information you need available when you need it. Otherwise, you're flying blind and taking guesses in terms of making decisions. The C is clearly understanding what it is that your customer wants to do. How do they do it? Where do they do it? Why do they do it? When do they do it? what's important to them? how satisfied are they with the current solution. And that can then be used in design thinking innovation. And that helps you come up with a very clear value proposition, which then when you go into marketing and into sales, you now know what your key copy points are. Your key sales points are your sales pitch can be then derived from that by understanding your customer. And over the last 10 years, more and more companies have become what's called customer centric and where they're focusing on customer satisfaction. Like Amazon's number one goal is Complete customer satisfaction. Apple goal is also customer satisfaction. It stems from their values that they developed back in 1978, which is empathy for the customer. And lastly to have amongst your employees are the E is spice, the skill sets necessary for success. And in the book that I wrote on foundations of product success for Wiley, which is used as a textbook in executive education. MBA courses in several universities in India identified 130 skill sets that a company has to have amongst their employees in order to have product success. Interesting. I like the way you presented it. I've had other people like talking about implementation for But they were more like, oh, here's the 19 Steps to Success and it's like, but like three of those, you could have just like bundled it into one kind of thing. That's really nice. Others, others talk about things like product market fit yet Well, before you can get to a product market fit, you got to understand what it is that your customers want to do, and then aggregate them amongst common personas into a market. And then then you're know you're going to have a product market fit. But there's work that has to be done before that. Others have Kate, ready fire aim, fail fast, which comes out to some of the venture capitalists and angel investors here in Silicon Valley where I'm located. And that assumes that you're shooting in the in the general right direction. But if you have no idea what it is that your product is supposed to do for the customer, you can easily take a pot shot at this. And that's hell hence explains why about 40% of all new products each year failed in the marketplace. And that represents a waste of about a half a trillion to a trillion dollars each year in research and development. Because that fundamental understanding of what it is that your customer wants to do, and how your product can solve that. That work hasn't been done. classic example of this is Henry Ford went out and asked people, Hey, would you like to have a car? And they said, No, I just want a faster horse. If they had, if Henry had sat on the stoop and Detroit, and watch people galloping down the street or whipping their horses to make their their carriage go faster, he would realize that the question is, would you like to get from point A to point B faster? And of course the answer to that is yes. If he had done what Google has done, that is did a keyword search to see how many people were searching on the internet, if the internet existed that how many people would like to have a car or a automobile, he would have come up with no hits. Therefore there was no market on that basis for our car. And therefore what we see today in terms of traffic, and highways is simply a mirage. And that's one of the dangers of this wisdom of the crowds notion that Facebook has exploded tremendously, where the most important thing was, how much time you spent on their page, and how many things you click on, called clickbait. And that, of course, led to the major perturbations in our elections and democracy over the last six, seven years, ever since the Russians decided back in 2014, that they could weaponize social media tools like Facebook and disrupt democracies around the world. Yeah, no, that was very disheartening to hear when that came into be. Yeah, as Kira Swisher I think your David's the columnist for The New York Times, and has a bit commenting on technology for a long time. tried to explain this to Zuckerberg, but he is so naive, he refused to listen. It was only just recently, I think last week or so there. Facebook decided to police what politicians say the same way they'll police what everybody else says that if you got there and you tried to incite violence, or are lying, they will not promote those posts. Where as in the past, they made a lot of money off of that because bad news and rumors spread a lot easier than the truth. Yes, yes. That's I was in analogy I figured out a while ago when I was working at a warehouse. Is there like Oh, the bad news is spreading quickly. But I'm like, Yeah, but it's fear. It's like the basics of the market fear and greed kind of thing. Yep. So it's interesting. Well, then being the the product success guy Facebook's structure to use fear until recently with the government forcing their hand. Geez, that would be something to implement in like a SAS kind of business. What do you mean by SaaS? software as a service? Um, well, there are a number of sass products out there. I don't know if any of them that are using fear to make money like Facebook has. Eventually, the loyalty that people have to Facebook, I think is pretty thin. As soon as one could move to a different platform now You have a higher level of trust in, that loyalty could evaporate very quickly. In fact, about two or three years ago, the Senate committee that follows high tech wrote up several 100 page of report calling on social media companies to make the data that their users have stored in their platform, portable. And Facebook has participated in such a development of such a tool. So I think any day now there could be an alternative proposed to Facebook at people will be able to go to Facebook, download all of their conversations, more importantly, download all their pictures, and all their posts, and then move that over to another platform and also download and bring along with them their friends. Because I think people are loyal to Facebook because it has their connections to social connections to their friends. Plus, they might have their pictures there. My daughter, several years ago, started storing her pictures on Instagram. And the Russians were able to hack in and steal her account. And she even went so far as to say that Zuckerberg who by the way, Facebook owns Instagram, a FedEx letter said, hey, my accounts been hacked, can you help me get it back? got absolutely no response. And she knows a number of other people have had a similar thing happened to them. And therefore she doesn't use Instagram anymore. I think it's just a matter of time that the fear mongering that Facebook has enabled will result in people leaving the platform. I know, for my purposes, I barely look at it anymore. Because I didn't like the manipulation of what they did. Yeah, it's very, it's almost toxic. You can like feel how your mind is, is almost a ramping up when it shouldn't kind of thing. Oh, there's a product manager. I think he graduated from Stanford that he went to work for Google, in the group try to figure out how to get people engaged more and how to get them to click More. Because at Google, if you click on stuff, then the ad advertisers spend money on your site. He sits left there and he's written a book. And I think he teaches a course back at Stanford, on this topic of opportunities, the third clickbait and how to reduce that. When you have your Facebook icon on your iPhone, for example, a little one they're showing you or a little exclamation mark saying that you've got a message or you've got something you need to look at. People feel compelled, they have to go there look at it. That's the all of these kinds of nefarious ways of getting people's attention. Is is of concern. It is and that you what you just pointed out that is the biggest one for me swag, got rid of a lot of my social media and I just use third party apps post for me. Because if I saw the little notification, even if it's just like, oh, like suggestion, I have to go in and clear the notification. Yeah, I can think it is just it bugs me. Yeah. So interesting. Yeah. So then, for all that, how would you from your position? How do you think we could fix it? Then social media stuff? Yeah. First is the recognition that freedom of speech does not equal freedom to lie. Okay. And to go back to trusted sources, like professional journalists, that will, will also have editors, and they jury what's published in their their newspaper or their magazine, or what's broadcast on national news. Now, certainly, some mistakes are going to be made, and some games will be played. But for the most part, you can trust what the journalism is telling us, contrary to what the fastest, and dictators want us to believe that it's the media's fault. While the media doesn't do anything, it's just a carrier of the information. So it's a recognition by social media that the First Amendment does not say you can say anything you want about anything at any time. It's, instead of allowing everybody to post whatever they want, on Facebook or any video that they want on YouTube. I think those companies should have a jury put together that will review that material before it's presented to anybody else. But that costs money and of course, they make make more money by not having to jury anything that goes out. That's interesting. Yeah. I mean, like YouTube, I think it's statistics, like every hour, like 100 million hours worth of content uploaded on YouTube alone. Yeah, like, humanly, that's not possible for us to review that we don't have 100 million uploads. have 10 that are good. Yeah. And but the others are, oh, crap and fear mongering and then the 10 that were good never get seen. Exactly. They get gets drowned out in the the avalanche really does, and especially how the algorithms are. And we'll even as naive people, like my co workers now, don't even touch articles on their Google feed, because they're like, it's cool. But I don't want them my algorithm. I don't want to see stuff like that in the future. So I'm not even interacting. And I'm like, interesting. You're not even like savvy in that. And you know, not to do that. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. And also appears that a lot of people do not have the critical judgment to ascertain where something is true or not. And that kind of critical thinking used to be taught in school, at least I thought it was, doesn't appear to be taught or people aren't paying attention. And that's one of the reasons why they fall down the rabbit hole. I was gonna say that was now that you mentioned the critical thinking on do you. Do you think it's the school or do you think it's also because parents are not taking time to actually work with the kids because they're on their phones to go, go? Go go? I mean, I had civics when I grew up. A lot of people don't even have civics. Now, they have no idea how the government works like I was somebody very prominent Republican. That said, Yeah, there's always the new senator from Alabama. football coach, he says, Yeah, there's three branches of government, the executive branch, the House of Representatives and the Senate. But about Congress. Well, that's Congress. What do you forgot about what the supreme court? Oh, yeah. I'm trying to think the President and the two houses and Mike was like, Wait, where's there is one missing somewhere? Yeah. And then Marjorie Taylor green says, What is it getting a vaccination that is equivalent to the Holocaust? That's just horseshit. Yeah, she obviously doesn't know or history, or does it because it's not going to kill you know, I mean, I got COVID, back in December, and then I got the vaccination. So I could go on my vacation. But I mean, the December one was worse than the March or April, whenever I got fully vaccinated. It was just, I had to call into work and just be able to be down for the next 24 hours kind of thing. So you're like, in two days, give her like a COVID. God, I was down for like two weeks. Well, you're also more immune to it now that you've had both the actual disease and the vaccination, according to studies from the CDC. And it's, it's super funny, a lot of my co workers, they're still super scared. And like, you have to wear masks and like I, I live at home, like you can see I'm in my room, in my house kind of thing. I don't leave my room. You all go to the bar in Disneyland. I just stay in my room. Well, the interesting thing about COVID is that I was suspicious. I'm an engineer. By training. I was suspicious that its primary mode of transmission is through the air. And that's the purpose of the mask and social distancing. But early on, the CDC thought it also spread by contact because previous COVID viruses, like a common cold is a COVID virus, right primarily spreads by contact by you touching something and then scratching your nose or rubbing your eyes or something like that. That's why Anthony Fauci did not emphasize mass back in February of 2020. By the end of February, some studies were coming out of the CDC suggesting that it was being transmitted by being airborne. And that's what Fauci started talking about wearing mass. And of course, Peter watts is the teal advisor to Trump and Trump right now. The old Trump administration is running a campaign to discredit Dr. Anthony falchi. Because he did not emphasize masks at the beginning, saying he He therefore was wrong. Therefore, the whole COVID epidemic pandemic is Fauci his fault, which is absolutely ridiculous. Yeah, that's that's just ridiculous. He's just grabbing straws now. But it's interesting. You brought up the origin where they thought it was mouth and eyes, not mask. It was an article I was reading and I also heard it, I listened to investors, podcasting. And one of them. The guy said, yeah, if you go to the South China post right now, you'll see that they're the people researching and China even said, there's something wrong with this virus. It has an HIV connector, which No, no, no normal Coronavirus has ever had an HIV connector. He's like another 2000. Like variances. They don't have a HIV connector. So he's like, I think it's man made. It's weaponized. I read the CDC studies. I get an email from them once a week with their latest studies, and I've not heard anything about an HIV connector on the Coronavirus. Interesting. So that's fake. Probably then. But it was just the the manmade part is what I took it from, because he was the way he said it's it's not normal, how its structured kind of thing. Yeah, but neither are bats normal. So, yes, they are not normal at all. Yeah, I think part of the human nature is if something goes wrong, you have to find somebody else to blame. And that's part of this whole thing. It's not part of the scientific method in order to solve a problem or to find a cure, but it's certainly part of the human condition that if something goes wrong, you got to find something to blame. Okay, what are your insights on that? And why would Why would we resort to that as an engineer is easier than trying to figure out what the problem is and what the solution ought to be? It's convenient. So we just blame China for the virus. Blame. What was what was the, the pandemic 100 years ago? What name did they put on there? I think what's this? Was it the Spanish flu or something like that? Something like that? It actually originated in Kansas City. Really? Yep. I did not know that. That's interesting. So I think Kansas City flu doesn't sound as bad as the Spanish flu. Although it sounds kind of wholesome when you see Kansas City flu. It's probably the only thing Kansas City is known for. Damn, well, that's rough for them. That's that's not tied into history books. They barely talk about the 100 year old plague the Spanish flu, or whatever it is. Yeah, they've been. I think they're now taking out World War Two, because it's like, it's more than 100 years. We don't need to learn about it. Well, it's funny when, you know, I had history classes in junior high school and in high school. And they the planning at the time was not good enough. So we usually the class was over, before we got into the last 150 years of history, which I think is kind of silly, because I think the last 150 years of history has more influence on our society and our our politics today than all of history combined before 150 years ago. Yes, yeah, very much. So. The racial discrimination, dating back to the Civil War is still going on today. Yeah, it's just much louder today with the internet. Yes, it's been able to spread easier, or it's more visible. I think a lot of things were more visible when they used to not be. I think a few years ago, I thought about 10% of the US population was racist. I'm now beginning to think that it's more like 30 to 40% of the entire US population. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's not half and half the way that social media makes it seem like Oh, you're this party or this party? I think it's more, or it could be 5050. But 20% of the 50. That is racist. It's just more was a taught habit. If they were corrected, they wouldn't even say it kind of thing. Yeah. I think brock obama once commented that when a baby is born, it's not born racist. You have to find somebody else to blame. So for example, a few years ago, someone said to me that, that black people are lazy, they just want to collect welfare. I said, Well, wait a minute back in the mid 90s. That was all corrected between President Clinton and Congress, but here we are, what 25 years later spouting the sableye My dad told me growing up in Detroit, the reason there were so many blacks in Detroit is because they were looking for welfare. Well, it turns out that they left the South because of the persecution that they were receiving as a result of the color of their skin. And they are searching for a better economic opportunity for themselves and for their family. It's the same reason that my grandfather emigrated from the Ukraine to the United States, also looking for a better future for him, his wife and his family. He was told that if he didn't get out of the country, he would get killed in the seventh Holocaust to occur in the Ukraine in the previous 150 years. Yeah, so he was running for his life. Same way, the people from Central America are trying to immigrate to the United States. And as long as they do the proper paperwork and do the process, like my martial arts instructor, he's I'm an immigrant from he tried to see the name, I don't know how to pronounce it, sneer Iran and Iraq. But, um, so he left that area of the Middle East to come here. And he said, I'm a legal citizen, I literally renounced my previous country, that kind of thing. Like, there's no going back now. He's like, but though he's like the ones that are local, like, they're not citizen, they're here. And he's like, I respect them and are hustlers. But he's, like, teach again, citizenship kind of thing. And I'm like, I agree. I mean, if they come and they do their time, they should get it. two aspects to that. One is, international law says that if you're afraid for your life, you can ask for refuge in another country, as soon as you set foot on another country. That's international law, right? international law does not say take the kids away from the parents and put them in a in a cage and make them sleep on a concrete floor. That's cruelty. Most people don't know is that if you feel your life is threatened, threatened, you don't have to apply for asylum. In fact, right now, there are 1000s, of interpreters in Afghanistan. For the United States, Who all are being threatened with death by the Taliban, as soon as the Taliban gets stronger, and all American troops are gone. And they're all tied up in paperwork to get out of Afghanistan. In fact, one fella who was a decorated helicopter pilot, has been in hiding for the last year and he finally got permission to come to the United States after Trump turned them down. So much for loving our troops. The second thing is, Congress has been unable for what 25 years to modify our immigration laws, so as to make the whole process better. And it's the result of the failure of Congress that he may be here, allegedly illegally. It's because Congress can't come to an agreement on how to deal with immigration for which is what built this country in the first place. And the whole reason of that story was just the like him. He's not a true citizen, but he's a citizen by like, whatever it is. verbals and semantics. But, um, he gets a little intense, that's where I'm, like, calm down, buddy, but he brought up a good point. He's like, cuz you you're in California, you probably heard about it, like in San Diego, the homeless during COVID. Were in the stadium. And then I think it was within the last two or three months, they kicked him out to bring all the immigrants in Canada are the ones seeking asylum. Did you hear about that? Or? No, no, no, it was something like that. I could be really butchering all the details. But essentially, we kicked out our own people, the homeless to bring in people from like Mexico. And I was just he was just like, why can't we take care of the homeless kind of thing? Like, why can we take over our own people? I jokingly told him like that's not caring enough for the other people. And he's like, that is whatever with his walk America shit. He's like they're homeless like help them? Well, Governor Newsome is trying to do that. I forgot how much money he has set aside in the latest budget. But at the beginning of COVID, he tried to buy hotels, and house homeless people to hotels to get them off the streets of the city of Los Angeles. And I think it was a Canadian city. Both have run experiments to found that if you get the homeless off the street, they can usually rehabilitate themselves and become a taxpaying member of society at a much much higher rate. The people that are homeless or living on the street Many people are just one accident away. One disaster away from being homeless on the street. Right? Oh, and there's a lot of effort in trying to fix that problem. But then you also have the situation of the not my backyard thing. One of the peninsula cities there, me and Silicon Valley. The city council blocked the ability to buy and and put homeless in those and a hotel there along the El Camino Rial that runs through Palo Alto, outside of Stanford University. There used to be blocks and blocks of RV vehicles parked along the road where people were living in those RV vehicles. Well, the city of Palo Alto, I think city council said no, you can't park there anymore. It didn't provide an alternative. Which is kind of crazy, because you had shopping malls with huge parking lots that were empty. Where's our compassionate? You know, you could buy a used RV for what 1015 $20,000? Maybe even finance it's only cost you like 100 bucks a month. Yeah. provide shelter for you and your family and your kids. Because the cost of housing here in Silicon Valley is astronomical. I think the average price of a home is now about 1.5 million in your area. Yeah, that's insane. Yeah, like even a normal Joe like me can even get that. I was really rare to find a house in California under $100,000. Oh, yeah, that's right. Oh, yeah, even in like Victorville in the middle of nowhere. That's that's 200k right there. That's interesting, because the one thing I thought I could, it wouldn't be a permanent structure. But it would be enough to get the people off the street. It's like, as an NTSB and shouldn't hear your take is, because we have a lot of plastic problems. Why don't we collect it all melted into a brick kind of like super Legos, and is basic tin roof and literally say you live here to get a house, then you can move on to something else more a bit safer place. Because this is not meant to be lived in forever. You know, the cost of building housing is very expensive, even for the homeless. And manufactured homes really haven't taken off that much gets bogged down by building codes that are different city by city. Yeah, there is a company in Austin, Texas, that's using 3d printing of homes. And there's a whole developer there. I think they're building like 20 or 30 homes. It takes like three days for this 3d printer to print out the whole and that I forget, I forget the exact number, but I think it cuts the cost per square foot by 50%. That's interesting. Is it? Is it like plastic? Or is it more like a mud? It's more like more like a mud I think. Okay, I'm gonna say that would be a lot of plastic if you're gonna do that. Well, the problem with plastic is not all plastics are recyclable. They're not. I used to work at a plastic plant. I was I got my hand mol to work in there. And yeah, that was the biggest one to like, if you want to put I don't ever never have something like this bland of whatever which needs to mill at 400 degrees Celsius. And I'm like, Well, what the heck like yeah, Celsius, not Fahrenheit. They're like we literally have to put in a magma chamber just to get liquefied. Yeah, they're like so don't try to put that in a pot. You'll just have random chunks floating around by how and like oh, because that's how I got my hand messed up. We had to literally grab it put it on the table spin the thing to get the shavings off but the thing still like this sanely high and we didn't have gloves I was really set they did not give you gloves. Oh geez. Nope, it was just one of those. I actually did ask him like do I need to go buy my own pair of welders gloves kind of thing because like this is stupid. I'm literally playing with molten stuff right now. But that was the thing that they said their process their product. We don't have that priced in and I'm like well that's it i mean if you malo your employees who's gonna want to come in kind of thing. So I was like, you should file a whistleblowers report with OSHA. Yeah, yeah, it was it was one of those I because I was unemployed for like six months. So I went to a work those jobs centers where you go and apply and they get you a job. And I just went to them because like, I need work kind of thing. And that was the they sent me there. And I'm like, I just told them when I got back don't send anyone there. That's literally hell. No, I'm like, I don't care. They're gonna have to like double our pay kind of thing. And it was, I think, how they ever legally structured it. I was not even getting full Minimum Wage kind of thing. So it was just one of those like, did they need to at least pay 20 an hour? Give us gloves? Well, the republicans have been saying lately that because people are getting unemployment compensation that they don't want to work, yet, companies and businesses are saying they have tried to hire people, they can't hire them. It's a wage from one company. I just saw yesterday, tried to hire people at $7.25 an hour over a two three month period, that they raised, what they're going to pay up to the minimum wage, well, what the minimum wage should be $15 an hour. And they got 1000 applicants. So it's a lot of these things are just supply and demand. Yeah, yeah, that's the biggest one. I like, because I'm a grocery store worker, I work at night. And the biggest one, we were just saying, like, we don't mind this work, but it's one of those like, we can literally make more money at Starbucks kind of thing with tips than we can here. So why should we be loyal? When we can make more over there? You can get a free college education. If you're working at Starbucks. Exactly. It's just one of those. It's like, it's not really rocket science. It's like, if you pay them more, they'll stay at home. And they'll actually want to be there. Yeah. So that's interesting. So I went, we went down this whole rabbit hole, let's get back onto the product stuff. I love the chats though. So you were saying strategy, the process? And what was I, again, for spice nation? Have the information available in order to make an accurate decision decision? We're just talking about some of that, you know, what is the nature of the homeless condition? And what's the cure? And if you have that information available on those studies, then you know, what, what you need to implement in your community? That's interesting. Yes, no, it's very true. I'm curious from you, from the businessman, but also engineer, let's say someone's trying to find a niche or a segment of the market, but they don't know. How is it? That's where the information comes in. But let's say, I don't know, I make a wish list almost in my container. Let's just say I make a container like this. And but I don't know who to market it to, would I be what I call you for that kind of thing? Yeah, you could, the best way to get started is, again, going back to understanding what it is that people want to do. And you start doing that, by observing you observe what people do. And then from that, you can then derive an interview questionnaire, and go out and interview 50 to 100. People, classify them into different personas. And then if you can find a market, which those personas map into, that's large enough, that you know how to target your marketing. And if you, you could then quantify the size of the market by then surveying somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000 to 1500 people, again, in terms of what it is that they want to do. So it's observation, then interviews, then surveys. And if you're lucky enough, like Google and have a lot of big data available, you can then look at the big data and analyze that big data for other insights into what it is that people want to do. It's interesting, yeah, that's the biggest one, as I've talked to people, and that's a appreciate the way you broke it down, because they're like, Oh, you just need to find a pattern in the market. It's like, Well, how do you find a pattern kind of thing? Well, that's backwards. Use, that's assuming the market knows what it is that people want to do. And market is nothing more than an amalgamation a conglomerate of the same interests and doing the same things. That's how you define a market. Give me an example of this. When I was General Manager, business unit manager flee Apple three product line at Apple. And at that time, we had Apple to Apple three, the Mac had not yet been reduced, and the Lisa had just been introduced. So my division was generating about a third of the profits of the company at the time. But we had a lot of MBAs at the company. And because no one had yet define the small and medium business market, SMB, or the small office and home office market or so whole market. All those MBAs thought that my product, the apple three, which is a business computer, that there was no market for it as therefore they didn't want to support the product. internally with anything, it was a constant fight inside the company to remain relevant and be able to get our message out to the sales force in order for the product to get sold. So if you go backwards, if you say, okay, I've identified a market, now we build a product for that market, chances are, it's not going to succeed because if you're wrong, in your identification of the market, like those MBAs, Apple didn't think there was a market of SMB or Soho, then you usually conclude that the product is not going to be a success. Far better way is to let the market decide. Give me a classic example of this when I was in aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan, the Apollo 15 astronauts were all Michigan aerospace grads. So the aerospace engineering department chartered an airplane and flew us all down to Cape Canaveral, I think it was called Cape Canaveral with the time before it became cape Kennedy and watch the Apollo launch and it took his my bus to Disney World, which was under construction at the time south of Orlando. And we met with the chief Imagineer. They don't call them engineers and Disney. They're called Imagineers. And one of my fellow industrial engineering students in the back of the room said, How did you guys decide where to put the sidewalks? And everybody else in my class laughed. I thought there was a dumbest question that you could ever ask. The chief Imagineer said, you know, it's a really smart question. We argued about where the sidewalks were gonna go for over three days. Then finally, one of the junior Imagineer says, Let's still put it in any sidewalks. And they thought that was, you know, blasphemy that have a huge world class amusement park and no sidewalks. And he went on to say, we're not smart enough to know where people are going to walk. So let's just plant grass everywhere. And at about three weeks, we can go back and see where the grass has been worn down by people walking on it. And we can put in sidewalks there. And that's really smart. That's what Disneyworld did. And that's what I kept trying to tell my fellow Apple lights at Apple, don't you decide whether there's a market for the apple three or not let the market decide. And they'll decide by not buying the product anymore. That's when we just continue it. And that until then, do we get rid of this cash cow? Well, the notion of the cash cow didn't come out till about five years later. So nobody at the company could conceive of the promise of the opportunity to take a mature product, whose r&d is all been completely paid for, and make money off of it until the market decides that no longer wants that product. That's interesting. That's That's some great insight. So I'm curious for you, I don't know if you get this deep in technical if your clients for the observing in surveying, or you could bypass all that and use Pay Per Click ads on like Google and Facebook to see if there's even a market now. They're $100 out and see if anyone's clicks kind of thing. Is that in our method for the modern day, yeah, that's using big data. Certainly, you could put up different ads for the same product, and see which one gets the most clicks. In fact, that's what Google does all the time. They're changing the colors on their homepage, waiting to try to figure out which ones will get the most clicks. They're constantly running what's called a B tests. There's a test versus B tests. They compare them. And all of the decisions at Google, if you take a look at the book called what would Google do, tells you that they're all their decisions are data driven. Write that down on my list to buy would Google do? It boils down to it's the data stupid. Okay. So it's just pure numbers. If the numbers say it, keep doing it, if it doesn't get out of it before it's run a different test. Okay. Interesting. So do you think in this day of being inundated with constant ads that it's is that still a viable way? Or do you think it's more we're transitioning to like a renaissance more like word of mouth kind of thing? Well, the word of mouth has gotten colored by the things we were talking about. from Facebook in the past, okay. That is word of mouth through the internet. Word of mouth has always been the most trusted way that products have been recommended. But we've also seen the recommendations on number of sites were conjured up by giving things away. Like I buy products from Amazon. And many of them now are coming with a little postcard inside, that if you go rate our product that you just got, you haven't even opened the box yet. We'll give you another one for free, or we'll give you a discount or something like that. So the best word of mouth is where the person is not not compensated for making the endorsement. There are people on what Tick Tock and on YouTube that make a lot of money just doing recommendations. And then big brands are going to them and hiring them to recommend their product. Well, if I know that that's going on, that's first in the ethics of persuasion. That's unethical to get compensated and give a recommendation and not disclose that you're getting compensated. Isn't that this at least for California? I don't know about the whole USA. But I know in California, you have to disclose that kind of information. Really? I didn't know that. At least for California. I know you have to disclose that information, like same with cookies for your websites got to disclose that you need a kind of thing as like the full transparency you have. So they technically if they're based in California, and like showing their videos and whatever California technically they're breaking the law. about who's going to enforce that. That's the biggest problem. Who are we gonna have a little AI robot team going after everyone that become a technical nightmare? Well, as soon as they can stop all the robo calls that I probably don't know, how many. What phone Do you have Apple or Google? I've got an iPhone, and I use xfinity mobile. Okay, just a virtual network on Verizon, and both Verizon and xfinity mobile blocked those calls. So if I get a call from someone who I don't know, it's all automatically silenced. Okay, cool. Yeah, I have. I had the Google Pixel and there was a setting they just did. We're now any call that's not in my contact. It's really screened. It sends me a transcript and everything. If it's an actual human, like, you might want to answer this kind of thing. But other than that, yeah, I have said to the if I don't, it's not my context. It's dismissed that kind of thing. Yeah. Because it's like, it's a waste of time. Yep. Well, there's an app you can get I was just reading about, it cost you I think, like $18 a month, that will help you track down whoever made that call, and help you to help you sue them. So if if you got nothing else to do, you could probably go out and Sue these spammers and make some money off of it. Well, here's the thing with the spammers. Because they're notorious for keeping keep moving, how are you going to actually get them to come to court kind of thing? I don't know. I just I think this was a New York Times article about that subject just in the last couple three days. Okay. That'd be interesting. Look into. Yeah, especially for those who have nothing better to do. It's like, All right, we're gonna witch hunt, this person that keeps calling me every five minutes? No. company should block the ability to spoof the phone number that the kit comes from. Yeah, that's similar to also with we were talking about the the fake news that propagates on Facebook and YouTube and so forth. Don't allow anybody to post anything unless we know who they are. Or just don't recommend it in my feed. If it's like, if it's my friend, I should be able to tell the algorithm don't actually show me this kind of thing. Yeah, well, if it's a person that is real, and you know, where they're from, where they where they live, then you could recommend whatever they post, assuming that it's not a lie. And it's not not hurtful. But that's part of the problem with the platform's is they let anything, post anything. I think Facebook is banned millions of not hundreds of millions of accounts. Because they are fake, the Russian spy agencies, or the internet research institute, I think it's called which was part of the KGB during the Trump campaign. They would have 1000s of fake accounts. And they would tweet something or post something. And then there's all these other accounts, with robots with bots would automatically pick up those things and retweet them, creating a signal to Google that thing is an authority because so many people retweeted it, or clicked on it. And that was part of the search engine optimization that the right We're able to do to weaponize social media. So again, go back the solution of that is to require anybody that posts something be a real person. I'm curious, because then let's say that kind of like me, I don't really use social media, but I'm logging into whatever the new platform is. How am I supposed to prove it? Do I just give them my driver's license and have them check it? Or? You have, they have to send me a letter and like email? Twitter used to do this, they used to have a trusted user thing? And I think, I don't remember exactly, but I think I took a picture of my driver's license and said, Okay, did you think any social media now we should be given them our license to be verified as a real person? Yes, I think so. You have to use your birth certificate to get a passport. Okay, but that's the government documentation, social media, like the Russians just earlier, that can be easily infiltrated, and they could take all our data. Now they have our name, or driver's license, address, date of birth, but anything they're missing is social. But they can find that later. Now, they could fake your identity. Or they could steal your identity, certainly. But there are there are ways to confirm, you know that the two factor authorization is one way to do it. So then you, you know, you try to sign up, and then they text you a message to your phone, that you have to reply to that before the access or the signup is complete. Okay, it's usually under a minute kind of thing. But that's it's interesting, because even for like the spammers, now, it's getting automated because they you have Google text and Google Voice. So all they got to do is just call the meetup account, or texting meetup account, and then send an email to whatever it is that corresponds. They could still bypass everything. Yeah, there's always a way to get around stuff like this. But I'm sure there's enough security people that are clever enough to invent a system that would be nearly foolproof. Yeah, I actually I had a guy come on, we were just we're supposed to do like a casual talk like this. There's this new thing with podcasters. They want to do a pre meeting before the meeting. He thought it was that. And we were talking about that with the solar wind tack. And they'll there's like, it's like an old Goro or something hack. And he and it was just one of those. He was telling me He's like, it's actually a shame that the No one's talking about this literally, these agents in Russia or China, whatever it is, we can't figure that out yet. zingy have seen the American ecosystem within the system. And he's like, no one's freaking out about this. They're asking like, what's the process, then? What's a step I can do to not 100% proof me but like more than 60 and he's like, two factor. He's like email and text or email, and they send you like a Google Authenticator number. Because he's, like, 60 to 80% of time. The other hacker can't do that. He's like, there. There are ways he's like, they can circumvent like forward your text to them. We think they really have to try for that. Yeah. So I agree. But it's the expression with everyone's like, not in my house. How do we convince them to do it? I was just, how would would you think we would convince them to do it? To do the Google or just the masses in general to embrace more two factor authentication to? Will Actually, no, I just thought of something. If we're gonna post something or retweet, it'd be really horrendous bad user experience. What if we two factor authentification? Like a tweet? So if you want to read tea, maybe you have to like press your fingerprint on the phone? Well, no. What I was talking about is verifying the identity of anybody and it's on everybody's platform. Interesting. So if their identity has been verified, and they retweet something, that's fine. So they're in that like that percentage, we just we don't bug him anymore kind of thing. Well, those that are not authorized or authenticated as, as real people should not be on the platform. Okay. If I, if I mail you a letter, the post office knows what mailbox it was dropped off at. And all the stops in between to Yeah, yeah. Well, they can, you know, when poisons were being mailed to people. The post office was able to trace back to whoever sent the thing. But if you Have an email today, it's hard to trace back to who sent sent it. If you're smart enough, you could look at the raw header file, it'll tell you the IP address from which it came at that you can do Oh, who's it on that IP address? And they'll tell you from where that email originated. Who has control of that particular IP address? See, actually, that's interesting. See, for me, the tech person, I did not know it could do that, to look at the raw file, find IP. Interesting. So if I didn't know this, and I just grew up on the internet, and a lot of people don't even know about that process, then probably. That's correct. I get an email every now and then allegedly, from DocuSign. Say, here's your invoice. That's about all it says, click here. And it has a person's name in the from thing and you go up there and you click on that person's name. And it's some other email address, not something from DocuSign. So the crooks get pretty clever at these kinds of phishing attacks. And the fact the democratic ago was, Hillary Clinton's campaign was hacked. before the election, when the guy that was running the campaign, I forget his name offhand. was told to change his password. They were using Gmail, apparently. And he checked with his, his it office and they said, yeah, it's okay to click on that thing. We clicked on it, they immediately got hacked, and then they are able to get into the system and download all of Hillary stuff. Interesting. I'll say, Hey, we're using two factor auth. authentication, that would not have occurred. In fact, the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, went exclusively to two factor for the past election. It did not have any problems that I thought I would say that we know of who might hear about in 10 years. Maybe, maybe I'll just keep it quiet the whole time. I love it. Absolutely brilliant. I want to get you on in future. It's about an hour. So I guess I'm going out questions for you. Okay, so, first one is during these lockdown times of Corona, what have you been doing to keep yourself busy? Other than work? I'm riding my bike. Planting food in my container garden. Nice. That's about it. Also, just pretty much business as usual. Yeah. Because you're mostly because you predominately from homework. Yeah. 100% from home, working from home since 1993. Wow. So you were doing the work from home thing before even was the thing? Exactly? as cool. So then my follow up question is what are some tips and tricks someone aspiring to be like you working from home working with big companies successful on on your own? Well, well, if you want to offer a product or a service and a service is an intangible products are treated the same way. Again, figure out what it is that people want to do. And then develop a product or service that helps them get that thing done easier. better, faster, higher quality. That's interesting. The way you say service is an intangible product. I've never looked at it that way. I thought it was more like an act you But yeah, okay, that would actually be an intangible object. Wow. Thank you. I really that was a game changer right there. Then the last one is where Can everyone contact you to be like, Oh, we heard you on the show kind of thing. Yeah, if they go to my website, spice catalysts, one word calm. There's my contact information there. And products and services that I offer. Wonderful. Yeah. Then I'll shoot you an email later on. Get all the contact info and put it in description too. Thank you again, David. This has been absolute pleasure an eye opener. Glad to be with you. Stay safe. You too.