David Bland - The interview

Hello David, you have been an ambassador for the lean startup movement for many years. What drives you personally to get up in the morning?

DJB - I remember hearing and reading the first things from Eric Ries and Steve Blank about ten years ago. I was working at a startup company at the time that was using Agile, but developing things that no one cared about. I felt like we were just efficiently delivering garbage. I thought there must be a better way. 

Incorporating these principles into customer discovery and testing really impressed me at the time. Ten years on, these principles are still relevant. When you put things in perspective, ten years is not a long time to change the way people approach their work. I'm thrilled every time I can help someone find a way to test their ideas.

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You are also the founder and CEO of Precoil. You help companies develop a repeatable process for quickly testing new business ideas. What inspired you to found this company?

DJB - I had worked in Neo's office in San Francisco. Neo had some really amazing talent. With the support of Eric Ries and other people like Josh Seiden, Jeff Gothelf and Giff Constable, just to name a few. We were essentially a Lean Startup as a Service, which was very forward thinking at the time. Maybe we were a little too far ahead of our market, now that I think about it. 

As Neo was coming to an end, I thought, why not start my own business to help people learn this kind of work? I was firmly convinced that there would be a new market for this. This went against all the advice I had received from experts. As a rule, you don't quit your job during the Christmas vacations without already having your first orders. But I happened to find a large company that wanted to carry out experiments over the holidays. They couldn't find anyone else because everyone was on vacation. I gladly accepted the job, tested ideas with teams and then found another company that needed help after New Year. Four years later, I was helping teams all over the world test their ideas. It was very fun and challenging. My approach is to teach them how to do it all themselves. At some point, I want to make myself redundant.

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You co-authored the book "Testing Business Ideas" with Alexander Osterwalder in 2019. How did the process work?

DJB - It was wonderful and the hardest thing I've ever tackled professionally. The way Alex writes is just "wow". It's hard to explain. I had to get used to the concept of a book without having to write most of the text. I'm a visual thinker, and yet it was a challenge for me. I had the feeling that I only really got the hang of it when we were almost finished with the book a year later. He and I complement each other well. We didn't have any big debates about the principles of the book. It was mainly about the details of how to get it across. We both made compromises and tested the book over time.

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A printed book is static by nature. How did you go about creating the book?

DJB - I was intimidated by the static nature of a big physical book. I built a following over the years by writing mostly online, but I could always go back and edit things as people commented. Their thinking influenced my thinking and helped me recognize my own blind spots. With a physical book, the dynamic with readers is different. 

So Alex and I agreed early on that we couldn't write a book about testing without testing it. We would share initial content with readers. We tested book titles online to see what people thought of them. We ran user tests for the book covers to see if people understood what the book was about. We summarized our notes to see what themes emerged. We created a value proposition for each of our reader segments. On my book tour, I give a talk about how we tested the book over time. I recently gave the talk to about 400 people in Florida and then another 350 people in California. A lot of people who didn't want to write a book came up to me afterward and thanked me. I think the finished product is the result of all the testing we did with readers along the way. We had different opinions about how the book should be structured, but when it was obvious that there were problems, we took a step back and solved them.

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You have repeatedly mentioned that Minimum Viable Products are about learning, not scaling. What do you mean by that?

DJB - We are obsessed with scaling our ideas to thousands of customers before we even test them with ten customers. Over the last ten years, this has led to some of the biggest product failures we've ever experienced. I'm a big fan of doing things early on that can't be scaled so you can find out if an idea is desirable, economically viable and technically feasible. A lot of what you learn doing things manually can be automated and scaled later. It's a bit frustrating that teams feel they don't have time for this kind of work. It's almost as if they're afraid of what they might find out from manual work and would therefore rather skip that part and automate everything. 

Many of the MVPs I've worked on in the past have been completely thrown away, even if they were successful. We quickly tested an idea with customers, and if it was a big success, we reworked it with more robust technology. When you try to scale something that you've quickly cobbled together to test with customers, it usually doesn't end well.

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There are so many ways to test a hypothesis. How do you decide whether to conduct an interview, create a landing page or develop a clickable prototype?

DJB - I like to test assumptions for their desirability, profitability and feasibility. I learned this from design thinking, but it's hard to figure out who coined this way of thinking. I was able to trace it back to Larry Keeley's work through IDEO. In a talk I recently gave in Chicago, it was mentioned that it came from the Institute of Design. I may never find the single source of truth for this, but it just works really well for framing assumptions. 

When you first come up with an idea, the risk is usually on the customer and your value proposition. So these types of experiments are a good place to start (although they don't have to focus exclusively on desirability). So you can survey customers and use their quotes on your landing page. When your early adopters sign up on the landing page, you can show them your clickable prototype to learn even more. It just works really well together. As you learn more, the risk shifts to other hypotheses. Eventually, you'll want to run experiments to see if people are willing to pay enough for it. Or whether you can reliably deliver the value proposition. You could say the testing never ends.

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What will David Bland be doing in 20 years?

DJB - I hope that in 20 years we will be a little more successful in democratizing innovation. The idea that innovation is a secret process that only geniuses can master... that it all goes back to a single, brilliant thought... that innovation is incredibly laborious... That doesn't help us or society.

‍Almosteveryone I meet has a business idea, but they don't know what to do with it and there isn't a lot of good, accessible content for them.

I believe that our global economy will be more resilient if people know how to start their own sustainable businesses.

The no-code movement should help non-technical founders, but it is only just beginning. 

In 20 years, I would like this way of thinking and the corresponding tools to be more mainstream. I would then like to focus more on how to fund people who want to test their ideas. I mean really test them. In Silicon Valley today, people still invest far too emotionally: A team, a dream and a PowerPoint presentation. I want to give others who are willing to roll up their sleeves and do the hard work of entrepreneurship the opportunity to do so. I want them to take their ideas apart and reformulate them. They should test their ideas in the real world to see the flaws and contradictions. I think there is a gap in the market to invest in people who want to do this. Maybe these people will then have a real "aha" moment based on what they've learned. I'm not quite sure what that might look like specifically yet, but I have a few ideas on how to test it....

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We interviewed and transcribed David Bland via video call in 2019. If you're interested in finding out more, drop me a line via email.