Well its about time, finally after 2 years of AI we have a new common problem that it seems everyone is falling into.
I call it chasing the wrong goose.
What on earth does that mean? Let me give you some examples.
“We want to use AI to help us write better Google Adwords”
“We want to use AI to help us with a better churn model to predict when customers will leave”
“We want to use AI to help personalise our marketing.”
“We want to use AI to help us with customer support.”
“We want to use AI to automate our Powerpoint decks”
These are all the wrong goose. AI has made these jobs easier to do.
Automating Google Adwords is a google example.
I just Googled “architects in Auckland" and clicked the top link.
So the common mistake here is focusing on the adwords text and getting AI to help you. AI is good at writing language you say, so naturally this will be a great AI project.
Let’s ignore the crazy amount of capital letters in the above ad for a moment and click on the website.
As soon as you do, you get hit with 2 popups.
Plus the site doesn’t really answer the key questions that I as a reader have.
Chasing the wrong Goose is focusing on that tiny Ad and the copy when you should be matching the readers intent more closely and not having popups.
The better goose to chase is to make a better landing page.
Then once you have made that better there is another better goose to chase, its to figure out a better customer journey.
Here is an example
This page by Semrush is about how AI search works
Its long and probably optimised well.
HubSpot has chased a better goose though. Instead of all that waffle they have a page, “AI Search Grader.”
You enter in the brand you want to analyze and you get back some information.
It’s turned a boring page into an interesting one. They chased the right goose.
The bike shed effect
Chasing the wrong goose is an extension of the bike shed effect. When making nuclear reactors people will spend way too long on making a great bike shed. It’s easier to solve a trivial problem than the harder problem.
But to chase the right goose, you have to look in the mirror and look at your whole business. You have to look into your core and be like, “do I actually suck?” The answer most times in big corporates is “yes, you suck badly” and that might be a harder question to deal with but that is the right goose to chase. The first step to getting better is recognising that you suck.
Ironically the companies that I work with that tell me that they suck the most are actually the best companies. The companies that brag to me about how great they are, suck the most.
Here is Sam Altman.
He releases ChatGPT to the world, one of the greatest products in the history of time and talks about how annoying it is in a tweet. This is because he is a good goose chaser. This because the quest for doing great things is really hard.
A good goose chaser in New Zealand is Sharesies.
They build what customers want. You can now buy stocks/insurance/earn interest on your money and a whole bunch of other things from one app.
Other companies in the industry wonder why customers are going to Sharesies. They spend all this time talking and having meetings and doing research. What they never do is talk to their customers and figure out what they want. They keep chasing the wrong goose. They never look in the mirror and say “hey we suck, lets just make our product really good and focus on our customers.”
How good does your product have to be?
Sam Altman says the job is making a product so good that people spontaneously tell their friends. That is a high bar.
About four years ago, I had to do a pitch for a new job. On the pitch I had to list customer references. I realised that I had been doing a lot of work but that none of the customers would actually be a reference for us. They were spending money but they weren’t delighted, they wouldn’t spontaneously tell their friends and they wouldn’t be a reference.
I had been chasing the wrong goose.
I made an effort to follow what Sam Altman said, to just build things people loved so much and be great to work for so that people spontaneously told their friends. I started to chase the harder goose.
It didn’t happen overnight, but slowly we got better, we worked harder, we looked in the mirror and wrote down a bunch of reasons of why we sucked.
We still aren’t perfect and we still do a bunch of things wrong but at least we now get some people introducing us to their friends. Each year we try to suck a bit less.
But what if I’ve been tasked to chase the wrong goose and upper management doesn’t care?
Fair, you see this in larger companies that would take a while to fix everything and PIVOT as Ross from friends would say.
The main thing here is managing your manager and helping them to repeat a narrative that they will tell to their peers.
Basically its as a simple as: “Look we can optimise the Adwords” but our landing page scores aren’t good, until we fix those we aren’t going to get good results.
A key trick with managing managers is to treat them like they have ADHD. Don’t waffle any longer than you need to and then be like a politician, just repeat that sentence again and again.
“We can work on customer support with AI but until we fix our customer journey its not going to change.”
Goose Test Questions
What are we trying to achieve?
Where is the biggest failure point?
What happens immediately before and after it?
Are we fixing the biggest problem or the easiest one?
What does the customer actually want?
What are we avoiding because it is hard?
What products do we tell our friends about? Does anyone tell their friends about us?
Book Club
This book goes into the marketing deals and the origin story of Formula 1. It also covers the commercial side which I found really interesting. One of the quotes I liked was “we race for 2 hours a week, for the rest of the time we are business partners”.
Even if you aren’t a massive Formula 1 fan it is still really interesting and its written well and its not too long.
View the book on Amazon here.
I’m an Amazon affiliate, I make a small commission if you make a purchase.
Other articles I wrote this week
