Guy Kawasaki
speaker
235 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Guy Kawasaki’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Now, the way you figure out what to make for this person, this customer, this you're trying to create, is you have to work backwards. You have to work backwards from what people need as opposed to what you like to do. So you may like to do something, but that doesn't mean that it's going to sell. You have to work backwards from what they want.
And the way you figure out what they want, that's called empathy. And the way you do empathy is you have to either go and see them in real life, or even better, you go and be them in real life. And I'll tell you an exercise that I ripped off from my friend Martin Lindstrom. He was retained by a pharmaceutical company who wanted to get, quote unquote, closer to the customer.
So this is the most powerful metaphor you're going to hear in this episode. You want to get closer to the customer. If you work for a large company, when you hear that, most of the time that parses to, oh, we're going to hire McKinsey for $5 million to do consumer research. So I'm telling you, I'm going to save you $5 million right now.
You should at least listen to my podcast and buy my book for the $5 million I'm going to save you right now. So if you wanted to get closer to the customer, the way to do this is to be the customer. And I'm going to give you a story that you can use as a metaphor in your brain whenever this occurs to you. So my friend Martin Lister was working with this pharmaceutical company.
He took them on an offsite. And he passed out straws. I actually did this in Maui two weeks ago. I passed out straws to the executive team of this company. And I made them breathe through the straw doing my presentation. And at the end of that, I said, listen, this is about empathy. Let me tell you a story about my friend, Martin Lindstrom, the pharmaceutical company.
He passed out straws like I just did. He made them breathe through straws just like you did. And the reason is, he said, because your customers have asthma. And that's what it feels like to have asthma. Like you're breathing through a straw every minute of your life. So you want to get closer to your customer. I just made you into the customer.
So now if you're listening to this podcast, you take that metaphor and like, how can you be the customer? How can you be the customer? You breathe through a straw. If you, you know, designing minivans, you actually use a minivan and you try to figure out, well, how do I get two baby seats, two strollers and two baby bags in the back of this thing?
And, you know, if you are a camera company, like, you know, Have you ever tried to go through the menu structure of a Japanese digital camera? I mean, it's like they sat down and they said, oh, how can we confuse these Americans the most? Let's just put the things you need the most buried in the 14th menu of the 14th menu. And maybe an example every day we encounter is like...
Well, we're going to give away all this free information. All we ask is people set up an account. But to set up an account, we first want to get their credit card, even though we're not going to bill them for the first month. So, yeah, we're going to ask everybody to give you their credit card for a free account. Like, in what planet do you live on?
And then they say, yeah, and then we got to make sure it's not some kind of Russian bot. So we're going to make people, you know, complete a cap test.
Yeah.
So yeah, so there's, here's a three by, it's actually a four by four matrix. And, you know, click on the pictures that have motorcycles. And I have literally, Ilana, never, ever succeeded in doing that the first time.
I mean, it should be pretty obvious that, oh, you know, click on the pictures with a school bus. I mean, a school bus is not a subtle thing, but I cannot get that right. You should be the customer. So, you know, the underlying principle here for an entrepreneur is assuming you're not a psychopath, you should never ask people to do something you would not do yourself.
And you wouldn't give a credit card. You don't like filling out CAPTCHA. You know, you don't like putting up with all that bullshit. So why are you making your customer do that?
Being remarkable is not easy. If it was, there would be more remarkable people, quite frankly, right? So the way to be remarkable is not to decide to be remarkable. The way to be remarkable is decide to make the world a better place. So this could be as a teacher, as a coach, as a mentor, as a parent.
You could also make the case you could make the world a better place by turning your own life around.
Yes, thank you. But if I could just issue a couple corrections there. Yes. I am no longer on the board of trustees of Wikipedia. You roll off those things. And I am no longer a brand ambassador for Mercedes. They kind of did not continue that program. Although I still have one. And actually, I have one on order, too.
I was an advisor to the president of the Motorola division of Google, but that was sold off. So what I am is I am the chief evangelist of Canva. I'm the host of the Remarkable People podcast. And I do live in Watsonville, and I love to surf. So that's the three most important things.
Well, I mean, I think that as I write about, I think that people go through, like, if they do it and they're lucky, they go through three phases. There's the growth phase where you're learning new skills and embracing new things. There's the grit phase where you're paying the price and you're working hard. And there's the grace phase. And I hope that I'm in the grace phase now.
And so I, being a podcaster, I don't know about you, but we get about 10 requests a day to be on our podcast. And so I'm rejecting hundreds of people every year. So I know that the fact that I'm on your podcast. I'm at least one or two of the most important people that sent you a request of the 10 that day. So that means you're doing me a favor and it's a privilege and an honor.
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