Knowledge about talking to customers was always free enough

If you have ever felt behind on customer interviews because you have not read the right book yet, this post is for you. Nobody kept the knowledge from you. It has been getting cheaper for a very long time.

Books got cheaper, again and again

A long-run study of European books reports that from the 1470s on, after the printing press, book prices declined very rapidly [1] [2]. The paperback took another step, as a cheaper and more convenient alternative to the hardcover [3]. Public libraries then put the same books on a shelf you could borrow from for free [4].

Then the internet gave the rest away

Practitioners started writing about their work on blogs [5]. Video arrived with YouTube in 2005 [6] and conversations with experts arrived as podcasts [7]. Whatever you want to know about interviewing customers, there is a talk, a transcript and a summary of it. The method behind this blog is written down in books, in countless talks and in a free 28-page flyer.

So why is nobody an expert already?

Free knowledge is written for nobody in particular. A book answers the question the author imagined and a talk answers it for the room. You still have to translate it to your product, your customers and your week and nobody is there when the translation goes wrong.

Imagine reading three chapters on asking about the past and then freezing at the first sentence of a real interview. The knowledge was there. The answer to "what do I say now, to this person, about this purchase?" was not.

That was the last gap: not information, but someone who answers you, patiently, about your own situation. The next post is about how that gap closed.

What it changes for a team

If the knowledge is free, knowing about interviews no longer sets a team apart and a reading list is not a plan. What is left is what no book can do for you and that is the subject of the posts after the next one.

You can practise this against an AI customer in the app (opens in a new tab), where nobody real is at risk, or grade a recording (opens in a new tab) of an interview you already did. The first practice round is free and so is grading a recording.

References

1. Buringh, E. and van Zanden, J. L. (2009). Charting the "Rise of the West": Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, a Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries. The Journal of Economic History, 69(2), 409-445. https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/jechis/v69y2009i02p409-445_00.html (opens in a new tab)
2. AI Impacts. Historic trends in book production (a summary of the price decline). https://aiimpacts.org/historic-trends-in-book-production/ (opens in a new tab)
3. Wikipedia. Paperback. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperback (opens in a new tab)
4. Wikipedia. Public library. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_library (opens in a new tab)
5. Wikipedia. Blog. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog (opens in a new tab)
6. Wikipedia. YouTube. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube (opens in a new tab)
7. Wikipedia. Podcast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast (opens in a new tab)