Deploy Empathy is a practical guide to interviewing customers. The book was written in public as a newsletter and is now available to order.
February 24, 2021
Deploy Empathy Newsletter
When I started writing Deploy Empathy, I started writing it as a newsletter. The full newsletter archive is still available, and I occasionally write new issues. Here’s what I wrote when I launched it in February 2021: I love helping people figure out how to do customer research. But I find myself without one book to send people to help them get started and get over that initial hump of
February 16, 2021
Highlighted in Adam Grant’s Book “Think Again”
Adam Grant highlighted my application to a past job in his thought-provoking new book, Think Again. The story is about how I applied to a job and acknowledged up-front that I did not meet their criteria. Adam first shared the story in this blog post in 2016, and I also joined his TED Work/Life podcast to share the story in 2018. The story was also mentioned in Forbes in 2017.
December 15, 2020
Software Social Nominated in Three Categories in SaaS Podcast Awards
Over 50 podcasts were nominated in the 2020 MicroConf SaaS Podcast Awards, and Software Social made the top 5 in three categories. See the full list here. Best Episode: “The Feelings Episode” Michele and Colleen dive into striking a balance between business, founder, and lifestyle fit, and the trade-offs of running your own business versus working for someone else. Best Hosts Best Podcast for SaaS Founders
November 24, 2020
Startups for the Rest of Us Podcast
Mathias and I were on Microconf Founder Rob Walling‘s Startups for the Rest of Us podcast. We shared the founding story of Geocodio and talked about competing in a commodity industry. The transcript is available here.
November 19, 2020
How We Bootstrapped: The Nitty Gritty
The first year of a business can be the most precarious. You don’t know if things work. You don’t know how you’ll pay for them. You don’t know how it will turn out. So it makes sense that there is intense interest on how companies got started. I get questions about this often, so I wanted to break it down — with real numbers and cents — exactly how we
August 10, 2020
Software Social Podcast
After years of being a guest on other podcasts, I’m finally a podcast host myself! The premise of the podcast is following two SaaS founders: one transitioning to SaaS from consulting, Colleen Schnettler, and myself, with a more established SaaS. Every week, we each share what we’ve been working on and workshop our challenges together. You can listen to our first two episodes below: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts
June 22, 2020
Build Better Software Podcast
Integrating customer feedback — whether it’s from interviews, usability sessions, or testing — can be tricky. Not because the methods are hard… but because of people. Many people resist new things and things that challenge their existing ways of doing things. We also talked about Jobs to Be Done and how to validate product ideas — and how to find problems when you don’t have users. I talked about how
March 19, 2020
Washington Post Highlights Maywood Response
In early March of 2020, I started organizing my neighborhood to help prepare for Covid-19. We ended up building a group of volunteers to get groceries, medications, and other supplies for high-risk neighbors. The effort was highlighted in the Washington Post: The brigadier general in the Virginia operation is Michele Hansen who moved into Maywood two years ago and runs a geocoding software company with her husband. Her sister is a nurse
March 12, 2020
Using Customer Portfolio Analysis
It’s been a hell of a week. I will not mince words: the news is all-consuming right now. And if your brain is like mine, when it takes a break from thinking about our public health emergency it jumps to the next big risk: the economy. And our business. And how things will go. And it’s scary to think about. We all knew the risks of working for ourselves. But