Deploy Empathy
Deploy Empathy will help you learn the skill of talking to your customers-learning to truly listen to them-so that you can pull out their hidden needs, desires, and processes. Empathy is a skill that anyone can learn. Armed with the tactics you'll learn in this book and the toolbox of scripts and phrases, you'll be able to sell more of your existing product, build the right features that will delight your customers, and stop churn in its tracks. By the end of this book, you'll be able to interview customers and potential customers with confidence.
Stats for nerds
5recommend
9mentions
7people
2021–2025years
78% recommend22% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- - The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
- Deploy Empathy by Michele Hansen
- Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra
- Best for what?
- Validating early ideas: The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
- Very early sales (not a book, but): https://stripe.com/en-us/guides/atlas/starting-sales
- Interviewing potential and current customers: Deploy Empathy by Michele Hansen
- Marketing ideas: Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
- Deeper marketing ideas: Forget the funnel by Claire Suellentrop and Georgiana Laudi
- I've mainly been learning by doing (and failing), though I've read these books which helped solve problems I had at the time:
- Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra
- Obviously Awesome by April Dunford
- The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
- Every book Seth Godin has written, particularly This is Marketing
- Deploy Empathy by Michele Hansen
- Forget the Funnel by Claire Suellentrop and Georgiana Laudi
- Sounds like The Mom Test could be a good read (although targeted mainly toward start ups) and Deploy Empathy by Michelle Hansen for conducting user interviews.
And yes, speak to everyone and always ask them for a referral to one (ideally two) other people if it went well with them.
- Most posts offer the obvious suggestions (The Mom Test, High Growth Handbook, The Personal MBA, The Power Law, Hard Thing about Hard Thing, Will It Fly, etc), so I'll focus on some non-obvious suggestions.
For tactical advice, I find talks/podcasts and mastermind groups more useful than books. My favorite podcast (by far) is Rob Walling's Startups for the Rest of Us, which is oriented towards building a capital-efficient bootstrapped business. The archive is full of extremely valuable tactical advice.
The books I've found most helpful on my entrepreneurship journey are about mental health, emotional intelligence, and relationships of all kinds. Sharing a few that have had a profound impact, since they helped me metabolize and understand what drove me to become a founder in the first place.
1. The Self-Compassion Skills Workbook by Tim Desmond
2. Path of Compassion by Thich Nhat Hanh
3. The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read, Philippa Perry
4. Burnout, Emily Nagoski
5. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, Lindsay C. Gibson
6. Self-Compassion, Dr. Kristin Neff
7. How to Keep House While Drowning, KC Davis
8. Deploy Empathy, Michele Hansen
9. The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel A. Van der Kolk
10. Atlas of the Heart, Brene Brown
11. What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing by Bruce D. Perry and Oprah Winfrey
- Deploy Empathy is another great book on this. Think of it as the 102 course to The Mom Test's 101.
