9) Micro-Eureka Moments

Behind-the-scenes building Vambrace AI, a company on a mission to forge deeper relationships with customers. Subscribe to follow along or visit the site here:

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Introductory Remarks

Dear Vambracers —

In last week’s post, Signal in the Noise, I announced the release of an 11-track album to help with top-of-funnel marketing for the company. I know it’s silly, but in general I believe that unique-and-novel trumps tried-and-true in this digital environment, and I’m proud of the authentic nature of the work.

Micro-Eureka Moments

In today’s post, I’d like to explore this concept of “micro-eureka” moments. Since launching the platform, I’ve started very light user acquisition efforts—and through early feedback and in interacting with the world there have been several moments where some obvious-feeling insight has smacked me in the face.

I’m going to explain some of those specific insights below. But the experiences compelled me to reflect more generally on the entrepreneurial journey, and I had this thought that these moments of unforeseen and impactful inspiration are what will keep me going. And now I think my North Star is having as many conversations as possible with as many people as possible so that the probabilistic surface area for micro-eureka moments is as big as possible. And then for particularly impactful-feeling micro-eurekas we can do a depth assessment and see how long it takes us to touch the bottom.

Prelude: Necessary Preconditions

Before diving (no pun intended) right into a couple micro-eureka moments from this past week, I want to mention the attitudinal orientation that creates an environment for micro-eurekas.

• Kindness: I’m not sure how popular this concept is within the startup discourse, but I do genuinely believe that being a kind person and being respectful of and towards everyone you talk to can be a huge advantage in building a business and getting customers and validating ideas, etc. In general, we are a highly social species, and we like to spend time with people that feel authentic and respectful, and so I just think in this early stages of pretty much begging people to tell me what they think about what I’m doing and to use my platform and give me feedback being kind to them and to everyone I speak with goes a long way.

  • Note: I sure hope that acknowledging the importance of kindness doesn’t diminish the authenticity of my kindness, which has been forcefully ingrained in me by my wonderful mother since birth. :)

• Enthusiasm: Starting a company is really really hard and building something new is really really hard. Despite the difficulties, if this truly is your life’s work, then I think there’s a natural enthusiasm and energy and excitement that comes from constructively pursuing your life-passion. And I think that energy and enthusiasm is infectious and intoxicating to other folks. I was fortunate to be raised in an environment where I witnessed intense passion and enthusiasm around me, and I think that intense focus and energy and utter devotion to some problem or some practice or some craft was really informative. I think the highest use of our time on the planet is to become utterly devoted to the pursuit of excellence for whatever unleashes your soul—and I think there’s an enthusiasm at the intersection of authenticity and mastery, and I think people can feel that and want to be part of it.

• Curiosity: The pre-product-market fit days of a startup must be defined by an intense and voracious appetite for learning. Every single conversation I have and every single thing I read adds to my understanding of the world and the customer journey that I aim to be part of. And so cultivating an attitude of deep curiosity around pretty much anything and everything that intersects with my idea-space and problem-journey is critical. It’s like I’m in a video game with a map that isn’t entirely revealed, and so only by exploring new areas and meeting new people can I discover more and more of the map—and then eventually I’ll sharpen my “sight tools” to extract more insight-per-conversation-minute or something like that. [Also, it felt very good to write “insight-per-conversation-minute.. I’m definitely going to figure out some way to use that.] But the point here being that curiosity is the animating energy of this journey.

• Humility: The last precondition I’ll mention is humility. I want to learn as much about this space and I want to build something that solves a real problem for a lot of people—and I do have genuinely grand ambitions—but also I’m not entitled to success, I’m not entitled to anyone’s time, and I’m not entitled to anyone’s money (revenue and fundraising). And I think even more importantly is that I don’t really know sh*t. Every single person on this planet has a compelling story to tell, a novel worldview, and a unique life-experience-dataset to train on—and I want to extract as much of that information as possible so I can learn as much as possible. But I think it’s easy to get caught up in my own cognitive training data and lose sight of what really matters: and that’s what people are telling me, and how that shapes the problem and experience I’m trying to address. Everyone has a song to sing, and I want to always be willing to tune into their radio station.

Okay, enough of those dramatics. Let’s move on to a few micro-eureka moments that gave me life throughout the past week or so.

Some Micro-Eurekas

I was able to onboard my first user this past week (s/o you Lauren, my customer-queen) and actually two of the micro-eurekas that I experienced were attributable to her—which is great. And I think that’s also how I realized that I really just need to ramp up user acquisition as soon as possible (after I take care of some technical glitches..) and then have as many conversations as possible with those folks. In any case, let’s dive in:

Micro-Eureka One: Acquisition

User acquisition is really hard. I was listening to an interview with Eric Glyman, Co-Founder & CEO of Ramp, and he says something like “it’s really hard to get people to care in the early days.” And I feel that so much. I’m not so much competing against existing solutions, or like not making a compelling enough case. Really my main enemy right now is apathy. And so my first user was actually conducting a feedback session with me regarding my experience with a software platform—and during that call I had this realization that this is exactly the type of use-case that I envision for my platform. And so after the session had formally ended I asked what she was going to do with the transcript of our conversation and see if she might be willing to test out my platform.

And so I think it was this significant-feeling acquisition micro-eureka because I realized that, I can actually just try to find and do as many feedback sessions as possible with people that I find on Reddit or whatever, and offer to give them feedback on their products or whatever they’re building, and then ask them at the end of the session what they’re doing with our conversation and if they could try it on my platform. I think I need to make sure that I’m really engaging with them for honest feedback, so that it doesn’t come across as duplicitous or transactional. But I love talking about what people are building and I’m not lacking for words, and so I think I can pull it off. Because then there’s this dynamic of mutual benefits and what-have-you. And then I know that they have a transcript they can upload to the platform, and if there’s even the slightest sniff of data security concerns then it’s like, it’s our conversation, so, like, what’s the worst that could happen?

But what I’d like to drive home here around this micro-eureka is that it was also my first micro-eureka, and I was so inordinately happy when it happened, and it also like just happened very organically. I was’t consciously seeking user acquisition methodologies or anything, I just was immersing myself in the world and trying to seize opportunities. And so this felt like a big breakthrough.

Micro-Eureka 2: Multi-Modal Text Feedback

My first user provided me with a ton of incredible feedback and thoughts via email, which I’m so grateful and thankful for, and I went through this like 5-minute experience of (my internal monologue follows (I’m experimenting with fun-formatting here don’t judge)):

[The mid-Summer sun seeps into a worn home office; a mid-late-20s man (me) is intently focused on his computer, an email flashing on his screen; a pensive look on his face, his pointer finger and thumb nestled just beneath his chin; a quiet-yet-firm resolve implicit within the interstitial intensity of his existence.]

…

(1) oh wow this is amazing she’s giving me a ton of super valuable thoughts and feedback here over email →

(2) I really need to like start a list or something to keep track of all this feedback so that I can make sure that I don’t miss anything here or lose her suggestions →

(3) and then once I get more users to try it and give me feedback it’ll be really important that I keep it all somewhere, right? →

(4) maybe I’ll make like a google doc or something to make like a list of feature requests or something? →

(5) WAIT A MINUTE. WAIT JUST ONE MINUTE. WHAT IF I TOOK THE TEXT OF OUR EMAIL THREAD AND FORMATTED IT AS AN “INTERVIEW” AND THEN UPLOADED THAT TO MY PLATFORM →

(6) because after all an email thread is pretty much just an asynchronous interview if you realllllllly think about it →

(7) and then that lets me keep track of and interact with her feedback recommendations and unify them within the broader context of other feedback sessions and interactions I’ve had →

(8) and so what if I basically eventually integrated with email somehow to structure conversations as “interviews” and what if I really expand the aperture here to be any conversational customer feedback across talk, text, and web (s/o the cell phone industry circa the late 2000s) →

(9) and then we sort of unify all that unstructured textual data and then orient more around source-of-truth for customer interactions? →

(10) and then what if we then lean into sharing and cross-functional insights and/or capabilities to help facilitate collaboration and “de-silo” customer data?

…

[And, scene.]

And so that was pretty much the journey of the second micro-eureka that I went on which felt very energizing and clarifying, and also gave me a clearer sense of near-term product direction and longer-term competitive differentiation and value proposition.

But business verbiage aside, I realized that it’s the most obvious truths that feel the most impactful, and that are also the most difficult to identify (s/o David Foster Wallace).

My First Micro-Eurekas: A Retrospective

This is I think the beauty of the entrepreneurial journey. You hit your head against so many walls, hard, but so long as you just keep fortifying your helmet and trust that you’re making progress—even if it feels imperceptible—then eventually you’ll make some real cracks and start seeing some light.

And the biggest biggest takeaway for me is the importance of interacting with the world in arriving at micro-eurekas. I need to constantly and continually put myself out there, especially when it’s most scary and uncomfortable, and just keep consciously cultivating the pre-conditions for serendipitous micro-eurekas, and then make sure I never stop listening to what the universe is trying to tell me. Much easier said than done! But c’est la vie.

Looking Forward

Honestly I have no idea what I’m going to talk about next week. There are some topic-kernels starting to pop in the microwave of my mind, but it’s too early to tell which ones will yield the best corn.

Have a wonderful week! I wish you many micro-eureka moments! They’re all right there just waiting to be discovered!

Sincerely,

Luke