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Guest: West Stringfellow, Past Executive at Target, Amazon, & TechStars.
Host: Kevin Mako, founder of Product Startup and the leading expert in hardware startup consulting. A hardware entrepreneur since 1999, Kevin has advised more than 1,500 founders and built and scaled MAKO Invent through its acquisition by TriMech in 2024.
How Prospective Customers Improve Product Development
Former Amazon and Target product leader West Stringfellow explains how customer understanding can guide early product decisions, marketing, and innovation. The conversation also examines customer research, product-market fit, MVP scope, validation, positioning, and commercialization planning.
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Kevin Mako: Hello, product innovators. Today we learn from a past executive of both Amazon and Target on how to gain game-changing product development insight from potential customers.
Narrator: You're listening to the Product Startup Podcast, the show that helps bring your product idea to life by chatting with successful inventors, product developers,
Narrator: manufacturers, and hardware industry professionals. Our goal here is to get to the bottom of what makes a product successful, from initial idea to getting your product on store shelves.
Narrator: taken you step by step to build a functional product and scale your product business. Hosted by Kevin Mako, one of North America's leading experts on hardware development for small product businesses. Now, onto the show.
Kevin Mako: Welcome back, everyone. Today I'm very excited to introduce West Stringfellow to the show. West rose the ranks in the early days of Amazon emerging as a senior product manager. He's also been an executive in innovation at Target, PayPal, Rosetta Stone, and Visa. He even ran a tech star's incubator for a couple years.
Kevin Mako: Now West runs How Do, a completely free education platform to help anyone become a successful entrepreneur. Today, West is going to share some valuable insight on how inventors, startups, and small manufacturers
Kevin Mako: should focus on understanding the customer to gain strong insight into early product development and even marketing planning. He will explain how some of the best customer-facing companies in the world do this and how you can learn from that to do this for your next hardware product.
Kevin Mako: Now on to the episode.
Kevin Mako: West, welcome to the show. Hi, Kevin. Thanks for having me. Happy to have you on. You know what? You're the first guest that we've had that has been entirely
West Stringfellow: surrounded by musical keyboards. This is incredible. Yeah, I love, I love music, man. It's a really good
Kevin Mako: when I'm stuck creatively or stuck emotionally, it's a really good way to find my base. You know, I used to do that growing up as well. Right beside my desk in university, I had a keyboard and I just bang away at it. And yeah, it definitely, you can totally alter your mood or you just think,
Kevin Mako: differently or uniquely or sometimes just take a break, right? It's a really amazing resource. So, So good to see that you're continuing to do it. And shame on me for not having it anymore beside my desk here.
Kevin Mako: Look, I'm excited today to talk about all kinds of things. You've got an incredible history. You've worked for some amazing big companies, PayPal, Amazon, Target. Just give us a
West Stringfellow: quick run-through of your background. Sure. So I kind of see my career in three chapters. The first chapter was trying to get going. Started in a trail crew in the mountains and cut my thumb off. And I was doing
West Stringfellow: house framing and got a major concussion and decided I'd start working indoors. And I was really, really, really lucky to discover computers in 1997 when, you know,
West Stringfellow: being an engineer and going to a startup was not really something that most people considered. I was in Boulder, Colorado, and I was able to get into some startups in really early in the
West Stringfellow: startup craze, rode that first wave and, you know, up and down, and then moved to San Francisco to test my my skills as a self-taught engineer. I did okay.
West Stringfellow: And one of the companies that I worked for did a lot of back-in integrations for used books. And one of those integrations was Amazon. And because I had done all their point-to-point integrations with about the startup that I
West Stringfellow: worked for, I had integrated with them, them with about 12 other used booksellers. By the time I got to Amazon, I pretty much knew what the industry was doing. And Amazon had a very different approach to it, which I didn't think would be efficient. And I pointed that out. to them.
West Stringfellow: And over time, ended up, you know, I was right. And they, uh, not saying I was good or anything. I just happened to be right about that one specific thing.
West Stringfellow: And, uh, they ended up hiring me. And I joined Amazon, uh, before, before they had product managers as a job title, but ultimately that's what I was, uh, for marketplace. And then I helped, uh, design their
West Stringfellow: first billable web service and ran fraud for Europe, built their India office, uh, helped build their first digital video product and then ran the affiliate marketing program for the UK.
West Stringfellow: I then joined Visa and was the vice president of innovation and e-commerce for Europe. And then went to Australia, helped flip a company down there. They were trying to move their business model and buy out some partners.
West Stringfellow: And then I was the head of product for PayPal in Australia. And then ultimately the head of innovation and platform for PayPal globally. Then I was the chief product officer at Rosetta Stone, chief product officer of Big
West Stringfellow: Commerce and then joined Target as their first entrepreneur in residence and ultimately their vice president of innovation. And then about three years ago,
West Stringfellow: I stopped working for other people and started working full time for myself, building HowDo, which is teaching the world to innovate.
Kevin Mako: So the first chapter was kind of digging out of the hole. The second chapter was climbing the corporate ladder till Target. And the third chapter is just starting now with Howdo.
West Stringfellow: That's unreal. Great, great story. What a ride. And amongst all that, you also managed to run a tech stars.
West Stringfellow: That's correct. For a couple years, right? That's correct. At Target, when I became the vice president of innovation, one of the, you know, Target brought me in as an entrepreneur in residence. And I, you know, Target owned my company at that point.
West Stringfellow: And I really cared about my companies,
West Stringfellow: you know, having only one owner of and one funder of the company, I really wanted to make sure Target did well. And so I built them a corporate strategy using some of the funding that they had given
West Stringfellow: my company. And then I printed out that corporate strategy and handed it out to all the executives in the company and then ultimately got a call from the CEO and became the vice president of innovation. And my first conversation with some of the leadership there was, you know, if you want
West Stringfellow: startups, there are way more efficient ways than entrepreneurs and residents. Like we can get an accelerator in here and that we can get a lot of startups in here much, much faster. And so yeah, we built a tech star's accelerator, which was so much fun. I mean, it was honestly one of the most fun things I've ever done in my career.
West Stringfellow: And we ended up getting, you know, 10, 10 startups in our first cohort, but we had 550 applicants in the first year. So yeah, it was really, really strong
West Stringfellow: applicant pool. And that was a very strong sign for, for us at Target. Like, we should do this more often. And so now if you look at Target, they have a ton of accelerators for different things. And yeah, that was a lot of fun. Yeah, and Techstar is a great program. They really are a big fan.
Kevin Mako: do a good, great service. So they're very, when I thought about why I'm building how to tech stars was a big inspiration. Amazing. Well, today we're talking about the customer, which is incredible because you've dealt at very high levels with big products, small products, whether it's startups, whether it's massive
Kevin Mako: products, moving through major, both online and physical retailers. You've seen what it takes to really succeed as a new product in the market. And a lot of that comes down to the customer.
Kevin Mako: So just give us a big overarching view of why the customer. and thinking about, even in your early phases, even when you're starting to sketch or design,
Kevin Mako: why is the customer so important to those early development pieces of thinking and to your early
West Stringfellow: research when you're coming up with that new idea or a new version of an idea or your next version of an existing product or whatever else? Talk about customer. So I'm a big fan of business literature. I'm kind of a nerd in that way. And one of my favorite
West Stringfellow: writers is Peter Drucker. I mean,
West Stringfellow: he's, some might consider him a little. little old school, I consider him rock solid.
West Stringfellow: He says the purpose of business is to create a customer.
West Stringfellow: And if you look, you know, I honestly didn't really think about the customer very much until I got to Amazon. And then it's all you think about it, Amazon, literally.
West Stringfellow: And if you can materially justify why you think the customer will benefit from, or at least when I was there, this was 2004, so pretty early days. But, you know, if you could materially justify why you think the customer
West Stringfellow: would benefit from a new product, a new feature, a new service. It was pretty easy to get it done. Pretty easy to get executive support and pretty easy to literally get just people who had free time. Not like a lot of people at Amazon had free time, but they would spend their
West Stringfellow: time helping you solve customer problems because that's what was rewarded there. And when I left Amazon, you know, I kind of came in at a very low level, realistically. A guy was the back-in data
West Stringfellow: person at a startup in a warehouse in Emoryville. And when I left, I was the vice president of European e-commerce and innovation for Visa. And that was, you know, that was a pretty radical transition.
West Stringfellow: And when I got to Visa, one of the things that surprised me immediately, and this is not a criticism of Visa, but it's just, you know, the conversations focused a lot on how a lot of the other
West Stringfellow: executives felt about a topic or how they thought about a topic or maybe how the board felt or thought about a topic. And it just surprised me that, you know, the word customer was not said
West Stringfellow: very often, especially when we were talking about innovation. And so, you know, I started to kind of, it was a very jarring experience, let's just say that, to come out of an company that only talks
West Stringfellow: about the customer to a company that, you know, they talk about the customer, but it's a part of the conversation, not the entirety of the conversation. And so I started trying to pull, you know, customer focus into Amazon, or sorry, into Visa. I ended up hiring several of my colleagues from
West Stringfellow: Amazon into Visa, they experienced the same kind of like, wait a minute, where's the customer? And the focus that we were able to create around the customer for innovation and for e-commerce
West Stringfellow: radically changed the conversation. Innovation went from not really a priority to the number of priority, same with e-commerce. And it taught me at that moment like, okay, in my career, you know,
West Stringfellow: I didn't go to business school. I wouldn't say that I'm a particularly smart person, but I do think that that one little piece of insight has just given me a lot of credibility at a company
West Stringfellow: that I just walked into. And so it really stuck with me that when you use the customer as your orientation point, you know, they're your true north and you sail towards them, it's very easy
West Stringfellow: to get people aligned because it's hard to argue when the customer tells you that they want something.
Kevin Mako: It's also really, really, if you use the right process to deeply understand your customer, it's very hard to not give them what they want. And if you iterate,
Kevin Mako: sorry, go ahead. No, no, let's talk about process because that's, you know, really interesting here. You've seen it at the highest levels, but you've also seen how that trickles down to early stage hardware companies and they do it. Like what is, you know, imagine you're a home inventor. You've got this
Kevin Mako: idea. What are some of the first steps that you would use at the biggest levels? And how, how does a startup kind of apply that to their first steps in understanding the customer?
West Stringfellow: so that they can at least mimic part of, you know, what you found to work the best in understanding your customer. And then let's talk about how that actually applies to, you know,
West Stringfellow: creating an exceptional product for that customer. Yeah, no, it's a great question. And I think there's this, you know, I have a unique perspective because I got to work at big companies. I got
West Stringfellow: to build my own company. I got to work at a lot of startups when startups weren't even a thing
West Stringfellow: most people have access to a lot more information than they give themselves credit for. And most people are capable of doing things that they wouldn't think that they're capable of. You know,
West Stringfellow: for example, big companies hire management consultants.
West Stringfellow: You can be your own management consultant. The processes that they use are public. And on how do the thing that I'm building now, I'm pointing out where they are and how to use them. And so I strongly encourage
West Stringfellow: anyone, every entrepreneur, anyone even thinking about becoming an entrepreneur to start with researching your customer. Literally, get online and Google your competitor to figure out, is there someone in
West Stringfellow: the space doing something similar to you? And then look upstream. Don't focus on the competitor. Look upstream. Go to their social media channels, go to trade shows, go to any place you could
West Stringfellow: potentially find some of their customers and literally talk to them. Like, figure out. who they are and talk to them. There's a structured way of talking to them, qualitative research,
West Stringfellow: where you try to remove yourself and your biases and you ask open-ended questions so that you truly hear what the customer is saying. And if you open your mind to what the customer is saying,
West Stringfellow: they tell you exactly what they're looking for. They may not use the language that you are currently using to define yourself, your product, your brand, whatever it is. But the language that they're using is the language that you then need to use. So many times I see people say like, oh, I've got this
West Stringfellow: widget and it's amazing. And I go, great, please explain it to me. And they explain it to me and something that, you know, I may not understand or, you know,
West Stringfellow: the way they're saying it is so wrapped in passion. I love it. But then I'm like, what is it? And if I can show it to a customer and say, would you please describe that to me? And the customer says it to me in real straightforward, simple
West Stringfellow: English. That solves this problem. The way that they describe it back to me is the way that you you should describe it back to the customer. Listen to your customer and let them tell you what they need and how to talk about it. And so many entrepreneurs get so excited, so many creators and designers
West Stringfellow: and inventors get so excited about their idea that they just want to build it and put it in the customer's hands. And I'd strongly encourage everyone to look at the way that the best companies in
West Stringfellow: the world do this. You know, Steve Jobs didn't just throw an iPhone at someone. He started with the iPod and then went through several iterations before he got to the iPhone and several. iterations before the app store and iterate and iterate and iterate. But at every point in that
West Stringfellow: journey, they learned important lessons that allowed them to extend the product farther, extend the relationship with the customer,
West Stringfellow: and buy more permission from the customer to do more radical things. And now we just assume it. You know, now we just wait, we literally turn on the TV, or at least I do, I'm that kind of a nerd. And I watch and I wait and I can't wait to see what
Kevin Mako: kind of stuff they're going to impress me with. But I, you know, that didn't happen because a bunch of smart people closed the door and sat in a room and figured it out, that happened because they went out there and they looked at every product that worked, every product that didn't work,
Kevin Mako: and they learned where the opportunity was then and only then did they start designing and building. I love how you bring up that Steve Jobs example and something, I know you listened to a number of
Kevin Mako: our podcasts. You've heard me talk about it before, minimum viable product. Coming out with a very focused, very high quality, but very simple version of your product to start, to start generating
Kevin Mako: user, real user feedback on your thing to then scale it to all these different features from there. Right. So it's this theory essentially that you want your audience to direct you. And a couple
Kevin Mako: other things that are very on point with what you mentioned is first and foremost taking out that bias. Yeah. So it's really important to understand your own bias. And I really like that you brought
West Stringfellow: that up because when you're talking to these customers, it's key not to try and push them in absolutely any way. And one of the things that you mentioned there in terms of bias, which really supports it, is asking those open-ended questions. So, Wes, I'd like to hear just
West Stringfellow: from you, what are some of those open-ended questions that you like to ask? What are some of the good ones that really incite that knowledge that you're talking about so you can actually use that customer feedback effectively?
West Stringfellow: So a lot of it depends on where I am in the exploration with the customer.
West Stringfellow: And honestly,
West Stringfellow: I tend to over-research things because success is built on information nowadays. If you look at any company that's doing great things, they start with a lot of data. And in order to give yourself an advantage, you have to
West Stringfellow: similarly accumulate that data. So I tend to do a lot of secondary research, reading existing research and build my own perspective before I talk to the customer.
West Stringfellow: I also look at the competitors and really think about how is the competitor talking about their product? So if I hear the competitor's language in my perspective customer's wording, I need to be able to identify that. Likewise,
West Stringfellow: I need to be able to reflect on their words and perhaps introduce some existing solutions that are maybe not exactly like mine, but similar or substitutes to mine, so that I can have a
West Stringfellow: real dialogue with the customer. But with that research in mind, I go in and I really want to start with who they are. How do they describe themselves? You know? Like,
West Stringfellow: Hey, I'm West, you know, we're here to talk about a product and I'd really like to first get to know you. Could you please introduce yourself? Like, tell me about you. And then they will go somewhere. And generally, I'll try to grab onto something that they said and maybe dive a little deeper.
West Stringfellow: And then I ask them, tell me about your day. What did you do today? What's your average weekday? What's your average weekend? What do you like to do for fun?
West Stringfellow: Do you have a family? Do you like hanging out with friends? Where do you like to eat, just stupid stuff like that. It starts to help me get an idea of how I'm going to
West Stringfellow: relate to this person. It may sound like a waste of time, you know, relative to the information that you want to get from this person. But the reality is to get really quality information from
West Stringfellow: people, they want to have a relationship with the person they're talking with. You need to be an actual complete human. And in order to do that, you have to talk to them and acknowledge them as a complete human. So I start there. Once we're through that,
West Stringfellow: I tend to try in my head or in notes, make some hooks. Okay, well, they, they drive a lot or they sit at their desk a lot or something like that. And I'll be like, that may have something to do with my product or my hypothesis or the research I'm trying to, you know, conduct.
West Stringfellow: And so, you know, I go in with a broad, broad topic and then I try to use what I get from those initial conversations as hooks to dive into the specific topic. So let's say, let's use a note taking app because it's, I think when I did a
West Stringfellow: I had a terrible idea to build a note-taking app about like six years ago. And I looked up,
West Stringfellow: I hired a team to do some research. There was like 190 of them. And I'm like, okay, clearly not a good use of my time.
West Stringfellow: But one of the things that I thought about there was, you know, what are the competitors? And a non-traditional competitor to a note-taking app is the traditional product, pen and paper, pencil and paper, whiteboards, you know, day timers, things like that.
West Stringfellow: And so, you know, let's say I'm researching a note taking app. I'll just ask, how do you take notes? If they say no, how do you remember things? If they describe it. And a lot of times when, you know, I'll say, do you take notes? They say no.
West Stringfellow: How do you remember things? They'll go, oh, I write it down.
West Stringfellow: And it's like, okay,
West Stringfellow: they're not thinking that's a note.
West Stringfellow: That's like something else. That's a chore. That's a to do list. That's a something. And so then I'll start to adjust my language to, okay, so when you're making a to-do list.
West Stringfellow: How do you prefer to do that? How often do you check it? Where do you place it? You know, just really kind of starting to get specific around that concept.
West Stringfellow: How do you use them? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I go deep as to what it is and then I go horizontal into how it's used. And then from there, I try and figure out, you know, where can we go from here? Like a lot of,
West Stringfellow: for me at this point, like in my career and having done this with, I mean, quite literally thousands of customers, a lot of it starts to just take shape organically. And that's when you know you're really
West Stringfellow: having a conversation, you know, start really broad with who are you? What do you do? Start really broad with your product. Do you do this activity? How do you talk about this activity?
West Stringfellow: What kind of value do you place on this activity? Is this activity useful? And then get real specific. So you mentioned that you keep it on your, you mentioned you keep a whiteboard on your refrigerator. Why do you keep it there?
West Stringfellow: Who else uses it? Do you try to commute, share notes with other people, blah, blah, blah.
West Stringfellow: So, you know, a lot of it becomes contextual thereafter. But start broad, get specific and have somewhat of a pretty deep foundation of information that allows you to really relate with this person.
West Stringfellow: And I think the most important thing is listen, like really listen. Listen to what they're saying. Maybe not what their words mean, but what they're saying. Watch their body
Kevin Mako: language. Watch their eyes. Watch their head movement. Watch how they're
West Stringfellow: they gesticulate, listen to the tone in their voice. People have so much power in their nonverbal communication that I think is often overlooked because we're simply trying to get our point across or trying to get them to understand what we have to say. And in the initial days of talking
West Stringfellow: with the customer, it's quite the opposite. You need to be a sponge and you need to learn to listen to their emotions, listen to their body and listen to their words. And at what point do
West Stringfellow: you introduce your actual idea to them? And do you have any tips around that? You know, I'm assuming it's towards the end. I'm in the private development life cycle. If I'm very, very early days,
West Stringfellow: I would not generally. I would try to learn as much as possible before I even come up with a hypothesis.
West Stringfellow: You know, I might have a working thing. Like I think that notes are, or let me say it more specific to that use case, I find current note-taking apps inadequate. That was my problem. Do other people empathize with that sentiment?
West Stringfellow: And I went out and asked people and, you know, I learned that a lot of, a lot of people don't think that's a broken problem. You know, a lot of people aren't as kind of anal as I am,
West Stringfellow: you know, and so it started to turn into something, you know, can I do this and can I do that and can I do this? The exploration got much, much broader than note taking. And ultimately, I shut that down and picked up another question.
West Stringfellow: But I, you know, a different example would be the company, that was my entrepreneur and residence company at Target. I had an extremely, extremely rich research process,
West Stringfellow: qualitative and quantitative before I even came up with a real hypothesis.
West Stringfellow: And then when we got to designing it, so I know what I want to build, and I feel pretty confident that this is the thing that we're going to build, I actually brought customers in and took competitor experiences that were not my experience,
West Stringfellow: like customers need to log in, right? So I took Amazon's, Googles, Facebooks, LinkedIn's, logins, and I said, which of these do you like?
West Stringfellow: You know, which do you and why do you like it? And then like people need to check out. Which of these do you like? Why do you like it? And so I had the customer actually designed the app and the service for me.
West Stringfellow: And it made it so much easier for me to figure out how to build things than trying to guess what the customer needs. And ultimately, that's that kind of collaborative design ethos is something that you You see it the world's best companies, both hardware and software.
Kevin Mako: You know, they build, they mock it up, they test it with the customer, mock it up, test it with the customer. And in the world of 3D printing, it's so, so much easier to do that than it was just a decade ago.
Kevin Mako: So, you know, I think that that iterative customer design, it's not just talk to the customer at the beginning, but it's really make the customer part of the process, make them part of the strategy, make them part of the validation of the product at every stage.
Kevin Mako: That's how you really ensure that when you get the product into the customer's hands and, you know, in the market context, you're going to find, or I should say, you have the highest probability of finding product market fit. Yeah, that's great.
Kevin Mako: And, you know, bringing it back to your earlier conversation about simplicity, the more that you are focused. And I love that you brought up that, that Amazon, that login example, because it was laser focused. You're only looking at one thing here, one thing very specifically. How do you log into the website?
Kevin Mako: We're not focusing on any other bells and whistles at that. time, it's just keeping it extremely laser focus. So that also comes back to the importance of having that MVP product, something that very, that has a very clear pain point that so you can
Kevin Mako: actually go out and talk to people who may be exploring that same pain point and really drill into it in a very specific, very clear level. I love the fact that you're bringing it in at multiple phases too, right? The fact that you can, and I would almost take it one step further, as you're
Kevin Mako: ideating this thing, you can talk to customers. That might be hard to find, but you can, you know, talk to your neighbor, but the beauty of what you said, too, is especially with hardware products,
West Stringfellow: the way that you said it without actually giving them the idea,
Kevin Mako: allows you to keep your idea confidential. And that's very important to many people, especially in early phases, right? You've come up
West Stringfellow: with some golden nugget. You want to go out and validate it. You're extremely nervous to tell somebody, well, what West has just told you is you don't actually need to give them that product idea if you don't want to, right? You can keep that close to the heart and then look at everything
West Stringfellow: surrounding that to make sure that your product is actually solving a real a real pain point with those customers. So that's at that surveys. You mentioned in the design phase, you know, whether design or prototyping, so you can actually get a real unit in someone's hands, get some real feedback. It's great as well.
West Stringfellow: Again, I would say be careful with, you know, make sure you've got a non-disclosure agreement. If it's not yet public info, but everyone signs in India. Yes, definitely. But one step further, even is even when you're selling and you're in production,
West Stringfellow: continue to do this process. Never stops. It never stops. It never stops. It never stops. It never stops. No, especially when you're selling, especially when you're selling. Because, you know, when you test,
West Stringfellow: so for example, the, the, the EIR company I did at Target. I think by the end, by the time we were ready to launch, we had talked to customers for over a thousand hours. You know, like we knew our customer.
West Stringfellow: And, and, you know, the thing I tell everyone is the day you launch your product is the actual first day that you.
West Stringfellow: you have a job. Everything up and to that point is just a warm up. As soon as your product is live, I mean,
West Stringfellow: all you should do for a very long period of time is deeply, deeply, deeply understand every aspect of your customer experience. You know, how is the messaging in the marketing aligned
West Stringfellow: with the messaging on the box? How does it look on a shelf? You know, when people take it off the shelf, what messaging do they see that encourages them to, you know, engage with the product more, maybe put it in their basket. How do they mess? Is that the same messaging that you need
West Stringfellow: online? Like online, there's infinite competition one click away or at least, you know, 12 keystrokes away. How are you differentiating online? You know, a lot of that information,
West Stringfellow: you can try to predict, but once it's in market, you start to actually get the volume of exposure that gives you deep, deep, deep insight. So, yeah, I'm very, very insistent.
West Stringfellow: You know, when I run innovation programs, it's talk to the customer, talk to the customer, talk to the customer. So many people will come into my office and be like, you know, hey, what do you think we should do? And I'm like, why are you asking me? I'm like, ask the
West Stringfellow: customer, please go talk to the customer. If you need time, money, resource, whatever it is to get to the customer, go that way. And then come back to me and if there's a disagreement with the customer, let's figure out how to get more data to resolve that. But let, you know, the,
West Stringfellow: the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the ones that,
West Stringfellow: you know, have some sort of, I don't know, magical insight, you know, like, it, it, there's no such person. The, the only person who has the magical insight is your customer. And by the way, they're the one who's going to give you the money. They're the one who's
West Stringfellow: going to promote your brand, you know, and, and everything that I've learned about marketing says that if you can get your customer to promote your brand for you, then your marketing is phenomenally efficient.
West Stringfellow: A great example is I ran, you know, air quotes,
West Stringfellow: marketing for Amazon in the UK.
West Stringfellow: That means that I took a marketing budget and reduced prices on products.
West Stringfellow: That was marketing for Amazon. They did not need to do like brand marketing or above the line marketing or anything like that. They were so
Kevin Mako: specifically focused on creating a positive customer experience. And they had such confidence that if they did that, that the customer would do the marketing for them. And that has become
Kevin Mako: inherently true to Amazon. Think about Facebook. Now, Facebook will, Facebook will market products every now and again. But, you know, Facebook really didn't need to market. Think about Apple.
Kevin Mako: Like, I hear about Apple on the news. They just came out with some new tablets and computers. And I don't need to see the keynote. I know I'm going to buy it.
Kevin Mako: So it's those kind of brands that have that iconic faith from the customer in their products, those are the brands that truly scale.
West Stringfellow: They're the ones that really differentiate themselves because that differentiation is the belief that the customer gives them. And remember, as a startup, it's generally free to talk to your customers or at least close folks who might be a customer or whatever else, right?
West Stringfellow: You can find somebody that may buy your product. and get some insight.
West Stringfellow: And you really don't have to look that hard. You may find it in your own household. You may find it on your street, whatever else. It's not going to take you too long to figure out who those people are and just ask some of those preliminary questions and get some
West Stringfellow: of that direction. So now, Wes, and how does all this fit in? Now, you're doing how do. Speaking of finding a niche and, you know, solving a major pain point, talk about how do, how this all
West Stringfellow: kind of fits together with with with what you're doing there and how that helps startups really find their find their focus find their customer and create amazing products
West Stringfellow: sure so uh how do is uh yeah i'm super excited about how do so how do is a open source innovation education
West Stringfellow: program so you know i i had the privilege of leading innovation uh for paypal rosetta stone Target and Visa at, you know, the executive level. And I got to work on some pretty aggressive
West Stringfellow: innovation teams at Amazon and then, you know, seven years in startups before that. And all those lessons were rattling around in my head. And when the 2016 election happened, I had just moved
West Stringfellow: back from a pretty long stint overseas. And I was surprised at how much people were disagreeing
Kevin Mako: about stuff. And so I hired an independent research team. We looked at all the facts associated with
West Stringfellow: the 2016 election and found that, you know, most Americans have like literally statistically. a lot more in common than our disagreements would imply. And so I started looking deeper and realized that, you know, there are some structural things that we could do better in companies.
West Stringfellow: We pay shareholders more than we pay employees. Well, you know, maybe we should fix that. Employees are valuable people. And then there's a lot of structural impediments to building a new company. Having done it myself, I was really fortunate, as I said,
West Stringfellow: to kind of be early in the startups and then be, get to go to some big startups that did some things well and learn from them. And I think that everyone, everyone should know how to build a business. Everyone should have business best practice.
West Stringfellow: We live in a capitalist society, and I therefore think it's an inalienable human right for everyone to know how to build a successful business. That's great. And so talk about how do and how that fits in.
West Stringfellow: Howdo is a full course from how to prepare yourself for the challenges of innovation because it's a lot of problem solving and learning, which can be very exhausting. and mentally taxing. But that's the fun. If you look at it with a growth mindset, that's the fun.
West Stringfellow: How to build a plan so that you're successful doing deep research on your customer,
Kevin Mako: competitor, the market, available technologies. And then ultimately, what kind of capital should you
West Stringfellow: get if you need capital? And then it looks, how do then kind of focuses on what tools are available to build a company? A lot of people think about build. Finally, how to build a team to do all that.
West Stringfellow: Once you've kind of prepared yourself, built a plan, understand what tools you need to build your business,
West Stringfellow: build the team that's capable of doing it because as much as there's like the solo entrepreneur mythology, I think the real reality of every company that's ever been successful
Kevin Mako: at scale, you have to have a team. And learning how to attract the right people, motivate them,
West Stringfellow: incentivize them, retain them, develop them, grow them. That's how you really. honestly successfully build a business. You know, you can do a million things for yourself.
Kevin Mako: You can do a million things with a customer. But if you don't build a team that falls in love
West Stringfellow: with solving problems with you, you're not going to scale.
West Stringfellow: It's great, great advice and an amazing platform. And right now, from what I understand at the moment anyways, it's free. It's free forever. It's free forever. So I spent over half a million dollars building it and I'm
West Stringfellow: giving it all the way. I truly believe that the world needs it. I think that we will solve. you know, pick a challenge that you think the world has. And I promise you, if it's going to be solved,
West Stringfellow: it'll be solved with innovation. It'll be solved by entrepreneurs. And so I truly believe that we need to give every person on earth the ability to innovate if they want to. That's amazing. Wes,
West Stringfellow: really appreciate having you on the show. Where do they go to learn more about that program or whatever else you want them to check out? Howdo.com.
West Stringfellow: How do we save the world? we do something about it. How do?
West Stringfellow: Right on. West, much appreciated for all your insight today, especially around customers and everything else. Thanks again. Thank you for the opportunity,
Narrator: Kevin. I appreciate it. All right. Take care. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Product Startup Podcast, the show that teaches you what it really takes to bring your product to market
Narrator: and turn it into a big success. This podcast series is brought to you by Mako Design + Invent,
Narrator: the original and leading firm in North America to provide global caliber in-to-end physical consumer product development to startups, inventors, and small product business clients.
Narrator: If you're looking for product development help on your invention, head over to Mako-design.com. That's m-a-k-o-design.com for a free consultation from one of Mako Design's Ford Design Studios from coast to coast.
Narrator: Thanks for listening and see you next time.
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