Synthetic user research, AI fog future, and AI readiness with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton
On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we talk about synthetic user research, the future of AI fog, and why most companies aren't anywhere near ready for AI. Let's get started
Podcast Interview Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton
[00:00:00] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and with me I have Robyn Bolton. Robyn, how are you?
[00:00:21] Robyn Bolton: I am doing great. How are you, Brian?
[00:00:24] Brian Ardinger: We are doing well here in Nebraska. We're getting ready for summer, all the fun things that are happening. So it's always fun to start a new season with some new information about innovation, so I figured we'd have a podcast and talk about it.
[00:00:36] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, let's definitely do it.
[00:00:38] Brian Ardinger: All right. We've got a number of articles that we want to talk about today. The first one we're going to talk about is The Counterintuitive Case for Building in Markets VCs Don't Understand by Todd Gagni. He's from Wildfire Labs. He has a interesting blog post talking about how startups can actually get a pretty big advantage if they zig instead of zagging when it comes to VCs and focus it on how do you actually build in particular markets that are very specific and niche such that you can gain some flywheel effect of knowledge and create a moat that a lot of other companies that are out there trying to do it if they're trying to go too horizontal.
One of the interesting things in the article, he talks about the, it's not the technology or first mover advantage, it's not funding, it's the learning that you have when you start working with specific customers in a specific market and it's over and over again, and that mode is that you understand the customer's world so well that it will help protect you against horizontal competitors that would need to catch up and they don't have the breadth and depth that you would have in that particular market.
Thought it was a fascinating way to look at how do you actually break into a market as a startup.
[00:01:44] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, I love this. And usually, the advice I think that all entrepreneurs in any industry get is, pick an industry, pick a niche, and go all in. And, usually I don't love that for myself because I love the randomness of consulting.
But this I fully agree with because, success, in my opinion, is all about customer empathy and deeply understanding your customer and serving your customer. And especially if you're an entrepreneur who's building something, an app, a platform a whatever, a widget really deeply understanding your customer and their pain points and how they use things and what works and what doesn't. That will always get rewarded.
One size fits all doesn't exist, and so when companies come out like, "Hey, we do everything," I'm reading more and more about the Everything app, it's ugh, you're not going to do anything well. But that's what VCs want to hear, right? That's what funders want to hear, because it's a big total addressable market.
And so I was just, I thought it was great that this got called out as hey, you know what? Go really narrow, deeply understand your customers, and don't worry about VC, because the market will reward you. And that's ultimately what you want.
[00:02:57] Brian Ardinger: And I think the other thing that often gets missed, and I think we talked about this in past episodes, is the fact that a lot of times it's very easy to say, "Go and find your particular niche and just nail that particular customer profile," and that.
But a lot of times at the early stages, you have a hunch about a particular problem or s- solution out there, and y- you have to hunt and wander and explore sometimes to find that core niche... to find those early adopters that actually you know, match the problem and solution that you want to try to build with them.
And so it's not, it's not to say that you have to have the niche from day one, but the closer you can find to finding that group of people that have that particular problem that you can solve, and you know inherently how to solve that for them you have a much better chance of creating those relationships, creating that moat versus trying to serve everybody at once.
[00:03:43] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, it's a great point. You want to be flexible, and I think that's why so many of the entrepreneurs or the startups we look at now who've been wildly successful, a lot of times it's the founder who had that problem and was in that niche and- was that customer and, went from there to, to make sure it wasn't just a market of one.... But that there were other people, and so they were out there willing to learn.
[00:04:05] Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. All right. The next article is from our friend Ben Yoskovitz. He has an article launching his new synthetic user research platform called Candor. And so, I've got a call with Ben next week. I think you met with him this week. And what Candor is a synthetic user research tool. So basically, what they're trying to do is create a AI that creates personas that allow you to interview the personas and get, feedback from what are effectively AI customers either manually or automatically through a particular process that allows you to get some additional insight versus having to go out and interview real humans.
And obviously there's, nuances to all that. But I'd love your take on the move from AI to kind of creating personas and using AI as your customer.
[00:04:50] Robyn Bolton: Yes, so this is something that actually for the last couple of years I've been looking at. So, a couple years ago I tried a service for quantitative research using synthetic personas, and I was really impressed by what it did, but I was still very skeptical about synthetic personas for qualitative research.
I think I've talked before about how jobs to be done is the hill that I will die on. It requires a very specific way of interviewing that is much more natural conversation. It's not following, a script. And for that reason, I was like, "There's no way synthetic personas in qual will work."
And so after reading this article a couple weeks ago, I reached out to Ben and had a, actually, as you said, had a conversation with him this week, and he took me through Candor. And I haven't used it, but I was impressed with what I saw, because what Candor does is it actually, as it's ... It's funny, you can have the AI Candor, interview the synthetic persona, so it is bots talking to bots.
But the interview, and you can get a transcript of the interview, follows a conversation. It doesn't follow a script. And, having trained a lot of people on how to have jobs to be done interviews, I can tell you that's the hardest thing to train a person to do, which is have a conversation and not follow a script.
So, I was really impressed with the thoughtfulness and what looks like, a really high-quality experience, high-quality learning. Now, like I said, I haven't used it yet, so I can't say how well does it work, how well do the personas come in. But this really was the first thing that I loo...
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