Kitces & Carl Ep 161: How Valuable Is Getting Feedback About Your Original Business Ideas That Others May Not Get Anyway

***Editor's Note: Can't get enough of Kitces & Carl? Neither can we, which is why we've released it as a podcast as well! Check it out on all the usual podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts (iTunes), Spotify, and YouTube Music.

Show Notes:

• The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
• Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryū Suzuki
• Gathering Feedback That Counts: Crafting Client Surveys To Offer Services That Matter Most
• "Don't scar on the first cut" by Jason Fried

Kitces & Carl Transcript

Carl: Greetings, Michael, how are you?

Michael: I'm doing well, Carl, I'm doing well. We're just, I don't know, chugging along in the later stages of winter here, at least DC area, like February, March timeframe is the tail end of winter for us. I think it goes a little bit later for you in Utah.

Carl: Yeah, you start to feel...I was talking about this other day. I was like, man, in March, you start to feel a little hope, like you made it through, right? So anyway.

Michael: And then you get another foot of snow? Is that how it works there? Okay.

Carl: Yeah, yeah. And we have this experience every couple of years where I get to mow my lawn on my birthday, April 24th, I get to mow my lawn and then go ski. Right. Those days are really fascinating because we get snow up in the mountains that...anyway. Yeah, things are good.

How (And When) Should Advisors Solicit Feedback On Business Ideas? [00:59]

Carl: Let me ask you a question I think it'd be fun to talk a little bit about. I'm always interested in how we take and incorporate...okay, I've got a thing that people in the world are going to see. And by thing, it could be as simple as my business card. My business card, my website. Do we still call them like a marketing brochure?

Michael: Yeah, we still have some of those, might be a PDF, but you still email it to people.

Carl: Yeah. We could almost sort of move up the spectrum, right? Like a business card, a website, a marketing brochure, a white paper, a book, a podcast, social media.

Michael: Your stakes are getting elevated there on how many people see it. But I'm guessing that's kind of the point of the theme, right?

Carl: Yeah, yeah.

Michael: Only so many people see my business card and a lot of people will see my podcast, see me on social media.

Carl: Yeah. So as soon as you go to make a thing and it actually could even start earlier, like your logo, right? Or the name, the name of the...man, that's a good one. Any time you're naming something. The name of the firm, the name of a book. And you go to do it, and one of the things you do is you ask people for feedback. You ask them...I've stopped using the word...I typically don't use the word feedback anymore. I use the word ‘reaction', like, "I'm curious about your reaction", which was really actually quite helpful. But as soon as you do that, surprise, surprise. You get feedback. And particularly as it gets more public, something like a book or a post on social media or whatever, but even as fundamental as something like a logo, and you share it with three or four of your friends and inevitably somebody says something that you don't like or you didn't think. And the reason I'm thinking about this is I've got a new book coming out in October and I've worked on the cover design, the title on the cover design, and I've shared it with some people. And yesterday, one of my friends who I'll just call Aaron and he said, "Hey, before I say anything, I want you to know that opinions are like..." What do we...we can't exactly use the right language here, but opinions are like a certain anatomical part of our body. Everybody has them and they all stink, right? And then he shared some feedback and he was like, "I think the title is pretty boring." I was like, "Oh."

And I got two or three different...and I had two different versions of the book cover, and I sent it out and the feedback came back split. Like half the people loved, made strong arguments for one and half the people made really strong arguments for the other one. So I was feeling Tuesday, a couple days ago, I was feeling… a feeling I remember a lot ten years ago and then I sort of got over it. And then I felt it again, which was sort of this never mind or forget it or kind of tied up in knots or nobody likes my stuff. And this book cover is stupid and the title is dumb. What am I even thinking? And a little imposter syndrome. And I know now to go on a walk, go to bed early, get up the next day and everything's fine. But I'm curious how you handle, like when you go to do public work, first of all, how do you solicit feedback? Do you? How do you solicit feedback? And then what do you do with it? Because I'd love to sort of walk through some of the tips and tricks. We've both done lots of public work, and so I just thought this would be helpful for people to hear.

Why Volume Is Crucial For Good Feedback [05:03]

Michael: So there's a couple of things that are sort of running my through my head around this, I don't know, this overall theme around feedback and taking in feedback, so the micro-level, right? There's the feedback of, I asked a person, what do you think? What's your reaction? And you do a thing at some level of in public, right? You launch your new website and then you tell everyone about it. You do a thing on social media. You do something that tries to be bigger splash and a lot of people may see it.

So there's a saying that I have around what we do with our team internally at Kitces around feedback, because from a business perspective, I am like a table-pounding advocate of your business needs feedback loops. Anytime you do a thing, you need some way that you're going to get feedback from people about whether the thing was useful, valuable, helpful, on target, delivered well, right? We get different feedback in different ways, depending on what it is. So anything we launch has a survey attached to it, has some questions attached to it, usually a little bit that are "rate this on a one to ten scale kind of thing", and usually some that are a little bit more open-ended, especially if it's something new. Because when you're doing something new, sometimes you don't even know what questions to ask. You just need people to give you some unfiltered feedback. So we'll ask things like what's one thing we could change that would have made this better, and just like try to get one thing, one concrete something we could have done.

So on one hand, I love data and feedback. And on the flip side, one of the challenges that I found with a lot of our team, as I started to implement this, is we do a thing, it would go well. And someone had some pretty sharp criticism somewhere in that feedback, right?

Carl: Surprise.

Michael: Scored well, but one person wrote about how much it sucked because of this, that and the other thing. And then we all do what pretty much human beings do. You forget the 99 responses that said it was good and you fixate on the one person that just ripped you to shreds. And so one of the sayings I've kind of adopted around the business is once is an anecdote, twice is a coincidence, three times it's a trend. Once it's an anecdote, twice it's a coincidence, three times it's a trend, which basically means even if we're hearing some sharper feedback, you have to hear it multiple times, more than once or twice. Anybody can hate anything once because human beings are wonderfully varied in their views and experiences and frankly, will be having their own day and life happening. You don't know what journey someone's on at the moment that they happen to interact with you and give you some point of feedback that may or may not be a reflection of you or may or may not be a reflection of what's going on in their world.

So all of it just to say, the first thing to me, when I think about feedback is that I want multiple data points. I want to triangulate. Of course, you're grinning, of course I'll build this into a spreadsheet if I can, because it's got to come back to spreadsheets. But I'm very wary to put too much weight into any one point of feedback. Now there's sometimes I do that. Maybe I'll talk about that separately in a moment. But when I think of the general case, you're putting things out there, especially when you're putting things out there in public, right? We redesigned our website, we're updating our logo, we're doing this thing on social media or podcasts. You can't please all the people all the time, right? We all say that. And then anytime you do anything in any level of public, that hits home real fast. You can't please all the people all the time.

And so once I kind of accepted that reality, then logical, my brain me kicks in. I'm like, well, if I can't please all the people all the time, what is the acceptable percentage of people that I have not pleased before it's actually a problem? And so then I start going to, okay, well then I got to gather a broad level of feedback. So I can really say, "Look, if 80% or 90% of people like the thing, that's probably still pretty darn good in the grand scheme of things." A lot of stuff out there is very successful with way less than 80% of the people liking it. So if 80% like it, that's probably pretty good. And I'm going to have to let go of the fact that 20% of the people aren't going to like it, because 10– 20% of people aren't going to like anything because humans are humans and wonderfully varied. So my go-to on this is I need some volume because one-off feedback feels too one-off to me.

Ask For Feedback First, Or Create And Watch? [10:26]

Carl: Yeah, I love that. I want to try something just because I'm curious how you'll respond, because this is really interesting. So a couple of years ago, it was probably like eight years ago, a friend of mine, who's a tenured professor at a university, talked me into, he tried to talk me into getting into the PhD program and what he wanted me to study, because I guest lecture at a couple of different places. And what I often am talking about is the kind of creative, what it feels like to try to be who you really are and express that in the world. Because a lot of that's...I think of that as financial planning, right? I'm trying to help you find out what really matters to you and then do things. And so it was like...and a lot of what I love thinking and talking about is what does it feel like to make a thing, whatever the thing is, a business, a website, a podcast, and then say to the world, like Seth Godin says, "Here, I made this, I hope" – and that word so powerful – "I hope you like it."

And so as part of this consideration of getting into this PhD program, I went to the fall seminar and there was like...these are small groups at the PhD level. There's like eight people and the professor's teaching. And I got like three or four weeks in and there was just all this, a lot of what you were talking about. It's like what smart people do. Get a lot of feedback, have data, do surveys, do customer research. This is all in the...product market fit, all in the entrepreneurial startup world. But it felt so foreign to what I was thinking about, because what I was thinking about is like, I have a thing that I cannot...there's no way I could not put this in the world. I don't really "care" what anybody else thinks. And so I started thinking of it as like there's...and this is super over...this is oversimplifying it, there's these two versions of business. One is much closer to art and one is much closer to the widget factory. And analyzing competitive landscapes, doing customer research, doing surveys, getting feedback, getting data. And I think that's what smart, logical people do. And then there's this other end where you're like, no, I want to do this. And I have a friend who had a donut shop on Abbot Kinney in LA, so some of the most expensive real estate in the world, donut shop, right? And she could care less what your opinion of her donuts. Now this breaks down when you go to like, well, you mean you could care less? Well, if nobody buys your donuts, you're not going to...no longer have the shop. And she would say, "Then I'll close the shop." So it's interesting to me...

Michael: Which, to me, gets to someone was liking the donuts at a premium price.

Carl: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The lines are not even close to clear. They're probably exactly the same business. It's just a different version of getting data. So here's the thing I just want to, I'm interested in… because I've learned mostly, most of the time when I'm reaching out for feedback, like okay, I've got a book I'm going to put in the world. I've got a cover. I think it's important to be clear about when you're actually looking for reaction/feedback that might inform the decision versus when you're looking to put ground under your feet because you're scared. And I think whenever I'm looking to put ground under my feet because I'm scared, the feedback is not going to help. The feedback is probably going to make it worse actually. Go on a walk, do something else, go meditate, go do your yoga, whatever, meet with your counselor. Because I think that kind of space in the creative process...and by the way, creating an RIA firm is a creative act. I would also say even at some level, a financial plan is a creative act. That little slice of it that's the creative act is going to always feel groundless, because you're doing new and novel things. You're helping somebody craft a set of values and goals that are new to them, but then there's this rest of it that...so I think distinguishing between, hey, I actually want feedback...Because I remember Morgan Housel, Morgan Housel, when he decided to write this book that sold a few copies, millions and millions of copies, which puts it in 0.0001% of all business books. Morgan called and asked me what I thought of, I was among other people, I'm sure, what I thought of the title, The Psychology of Money. I told him, "That's a really bad title. Nobody will ever buy it," which is pretty funny. So call me for business...

Michael: You know what's sad? Think about how many more books he would have sold if he had taken your advice.

Carl: Yeah, that's a great idea. So a little while ago, when I was working on the title of my book, I texted Morgan, I was like, "Hey, can I run a title past you?" And he said, "Do it." And I was like, Oh, you mean I can run the title past you?" He's like, "No, name it whatever you're thinking of naming it." Right? Because everybody's going to have a million opinions and they're all going to be wrong. And he's nice enough that he didn't remind me, throw it back in my face. So it's really interesting to figure out when is the feedback valuable? When are those surveys valuable? And when are they just an effort to make you feel secure about a creative act? Good luck with that one. Put that in your spreadsheet.

Michael: There's still a piece of me that says it's both. I'm not even sure I distinguish those. I'm trying to find...yes, I'm trying to validate a creative act when we put those surveys out. But I want some volume of data because creative things are creative and hit different people differently, right? Donut shop woman knew that she was going to do her thing in a certain way and it was going to make a lot of people unhappy. So I don't know, if only one out of every ten people actually liked the way that she does donuts, she's got to ask a lot of people to make sure that she can actually get to, to find the 10% who like it. But the reality is if 10% of everybody in Beverly Hills comes to buy your donuts every day, you have a ridiculously successful shop because that's a lot of people, like 10. An advisory firm has 50 to a 100 ongoing clients per advisor. Cool. To be clear, if you make a thing that 99.999% of the population doesn't like, you'll have too many clients.

Because we can't even serve 0.001%. That would be way too many people. You need a volume of...again, that's my nerdy data-driven style to it. I need some volume of feedback. And I find particularly in this context, when we're trying to create, whether you're creating art, whether you're creating a business, to me, it all kind of falls in the same frame, right? I actually appreciated what you were commenting around entrepreneurs. The way entrepreneurship is often taught to young people is go out into the world, find people who have problems and then see if you can build a solution for their problems. And if you can solve their problems, you can charge them money for the service of the widget or whatever it is. And congratulations, you have a business, so you spend time searching for problems.

Those of us who create, tend not to quite approach it that way. We create something that we believe is a solution. It's at least a solution in our heads to something we've experienced personally, usually. We make a solution and then you have to go find whether enough people have that problem that you can actually sell it and make a business out of it. Donut shop lady was like, "This is how I make donuts. Now I have to find out whether there are enough people on this earth that are willing to buy my donuts in Beverly Hills to be able to afford my shop." Because the question for her is, I know what I want to create in this world. Now I just have to find out whether enough people out there who will buy it to create a financially viable business where again, I don't need everyone to like it. I need enough people to like it so that I can do this in a economically viable manner. And so when I start looking for feedback, I'm just trying to find out whether enough people find this useful. If I know who I'm supposed to serve, I'm going to mostly ask them and not random strangers on the street. But to me, the whole nature of feedback, particularly in a creative context is I'm trying to figure out whether I actually hit the mark. And I need a lot of people to give me feedback to figure out whether I really hit the mark, because any one person can love or hate pretty much anything.

Carl: Yeah, yeah, so interesting. It's interesting, there's an element and it's not either/or, it's both. And maybe a single person could actually be engaged in both, but I often do find, too, there are people who operate, just they operate differently. They're both right. Right? And one of them, I think, is an internal focus of like, "No, I'm really clear. This is the thing I want to do. I'm going to do it. And then I'm going to find out if there are enough people to...and if there aren't enough people, it's not like I'm going to change the thing. It just means it's not going to be a business. It will be a hobby. It'll be, whatever else." And then there's a more external, and a lot of the recent research around sort of demand side sales, really understanding where demand is coming from and why there's demand is this other side of, "Let's see what the problems are. And then let's build a solution." And you're pointing to, often what you do is this sort of scratch your own itch model of, look...and this is again, another thing that Morgan said, is he's writing for an audience of one: him. Yeah, I'm going to write the thing I want to read. And then I'm going to go out and find...and he just happens to be lucky that there's a lot of people that want to read the same thing.

Michael: And then you find out whether people...right, we create the advisory firm that we would want to be a client of.

Carl: That's right.

Michael: And then we go find out whether anybody else wants that as well. And again, to me, that's the creative process, that's creative nature for what we do when we're trying to create, right? I make a thing that I believe is a solution and I find out whether anybody actually wants to buy it as the solution to their problems and will pay me for it. But the reason why I start getting focused around feedback and volumes of feedback is because of those scripts that start running, right? If I've got doubt, I'm going to hyper focus on the one or two people who say something negative. Well, I wasn't really sure anyways. Oh, I'm like, "Bob didn't like it. Screw this."

Carl: "Forget it."

Michael: "I got to throw in the towel." Or we come the other direction. The reality is like, I'm so convinced it's right for me. Other people must want this. And I found one other human being who said it was a great idea. So I'm going to keep sticking with it, even though everyone else is saying, "We don't want it, we don't like it, it's not going to work." And you can get in trouble the other way as well, which is I found one person to validate me, which feels really good because I was so passionate about my idea. And then I spend months or years trying to make money in my passion that's not actually economically or business viable, right, if we're talking advisory firm context because I'm clinging to the one or two people who say yes. I'm not actually looking at the volume of feedback, which is people just aren't buying this. It's not showing up the way that it needs to, to be valuable for them, which, again, is why I so quickly come back to, I really want to look at some volume of data because it's so easy to get swayed by one or two people who love it or one or two people who hate it, depending on whatever mindset you're coming to the thing with in the first place, that if you want to get a clearer picture, you need a higher quantity of responses. I'm really only a fan of one response, but it's a really expert-oriented situation where someone can really give me expert feedback, then maybe I will narrow in a little bit. But otherwise, feedback has to have some volume behind it because otherwise our human brains just, we see what we want to see, what is it, the confirmation bias kicks in whichever direction that we want and you'll grab whatever one or two data points prove the thing that your brain is trying to prove.

Dealing With Feedback By Focusing On The Right People [24:44]

Carl: Yeah, I agree. Let me propose something. I want to just make one other claim and then let's do two or three rapid fire. How do you deal with feedback? Right? What's your best way of dealing with feedback? I'll give one or two, you give one or two. But one thing I just want to sort of, as we tie up the philosophical discussion around it, I think all the stuff you just said, it makes perfect sense. And I think it's really smart. And I think it's probably the way people should do it. Dot, dot, dot. And it's not the way I operate best.

Michael: Okay. So how do you operate? It won't be a surprise to anyone that you might not take the high volume spreadsheet approach that I do, so.

Carl: And again, I want to be clear.

Michael: Yeah, that's fine.

Carl: That's actually the smart way. I think the way I do it is wrong. Here's an interesting quote I was playing around with the other day. And this is from a book called, "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind." So it's a little bit of sort of zen thought. It's quite usual for us to gather pieces of information from various sources, thinking in this way, we are increasing our knowledge. And I think you could replace that with saying, "Thinking in this way, we're increasing our confidence about the thing." And then the next line is, "Actually following this way, we end up not knowing anything at all."

Michael: Wait, wait, say that whole thing again.

Carl: "It's quite usual for us to gather pieces of information from various sources, thinking that this is the way to increase our knowledge." And again, coming from zen, right? "Actually, following this way, we end up not knowing anything at all." And I think an analogy you could make real quickly is like, if you go to shop for new running shoes, and we've all had this experience, pick anything you want, and you go read the reviews. And if I go read the reviews on Amazon, on the running shoes, I leave more confused than when I started. I know there's lots of ways for this to fall apart and it's actually not what you're saying. The data thing is really smart. But this quote sort of points to like, one of the things I'm trying to do lately is...and I realized this again, Tuesday night, when I reached out for a bunch of feedback, I was like, wait, I don't want the...I am just going to make a thing, and then I'm going to shelter myself, protect myself from feedback. I don't want to go on Reddit and read what people think about the Society of Advice, because people think it's so...I'm just going to make a thing that I care deeply about. And I think we could spend a whole 'nother hour talking about that. It's not right or wrong. So that's one of my core operating principles now is like, attend...we talked about this quote months ago, the Confucius quote, "Attend the way in isolation." Really focus on the quality of the work, the thing that you really love. Make sure it has the craft, make sure it feels good, and then say to the world, "I hope you like this," and then hide.

Michael: I don't disagree with...

Carl: So that was just, one more thought and then let's do some rapid fire tactics.

Michael: I don't disagree with that in the creative process. Again, I don't act...well, I'm kind of iterative in everything that I do. But if I'm creating a thing, I'm creating a thing in my head. I have to get it out. There comes a point where once I put it out in the world, first of all, people will vote with their feet or their dollars about whether this is a thing that you want to buy and pay for, right? I tend to come at this from a very business perspective. If I created a thing that's a viable business, that people will pay for the service or the offering or whatever it is. And so, I'm not really a fan of creating with feedback. It's like trying to craft art by committee. It just ends out being boring and not pleasant. But once you create the thing, I guess in the purest sense, art, once you make it, it's made and out in the world. Business, to me, is more iterative. I can make a thing and take feedback and then make it even better. And version 2.0 can be better than 1 and version 3.0 can be better at 2.0. So, I assume there's room for iteration. That's when I want the feedback.

Carl: Fascinating. Yeah. I think what this points to is maybe it's just, you agree on the principle. It's a function of where's the line on the creative act.

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. At what stage does it come? Because I'm very much not a feedback in the drafting phase...

Carl: Fascinating.

Michael: ...at all.

Carl: I like that.

Michael: Because I've got a...there's a thing in my head of what it's supposed to be. Right? We got a vision and usually it's some version of this is what I would want if I was consuming it. But then eventually again, this is the business context, but if you want to get paid for this, at some point you have to find out what the rest of the world thinks about it. And you don't have to solve...you don't have to please all the people all the time, but you do at least need to find some segment of people who like this, right? So even in a context like our platform, look, huge swaths of people thinks it's redonkulously too long, will never touch one of our articles or podcasts with a 10-foot pole because it's exhaustingly long and they hate it. But then there's another segment of people that say, "I love this stuff because everybody else doesn't go deep enough. And this finally goes as deep as I want." So if I ask everyone, lots of people will dislike it. Lots of people do. We get that feedback regularly. And I don't care...

Carl: About everyone.

Michael: ...about everyone. I care that there's enough people to like it, that I can get paid for it. And once there's enough people that like it, that get paid for it, the only people whose opinion and feedback I care about are the people who consume it and like it in the first place, but could still help us get better and do it better. Right? So I don't care about the fact that some people just don't like long-form content because I'm not here to serve them. There are people who do like long-form content. Now with people who like long-form content, I really don't want to know what their feedback is. How can I make this even better for you? But I'm not going to ask everyone because then I'm going to ask a bunch of people who just think anything long is dumb and takes too long. And they're not going to give me helpful feedback, which I guess is an indirect way of saying careful who you're asking for feedback...

Carl: Yeah. Love that.

Michael: ...particularly if you're going to iterate based on their feedback, like make sure you're asking feedback from people who at least like to be in the neighborhood in the first place.

Car: Yeah, I love that.

Using Behavioral Data As The True Indicator Of The Viability Of A Business Idea [31:47]

Carl: And it's so interesting because that really helps because if we were drawing this on a continuum, I just see the business as an art project. Right? And so, you see the business a little bit more like a business. I see the business a little bit more like an art project. Both of those are perfectly awesome. Right? And then, it's just a fine-tuning of how...my one tip for, for seeking feedback, my one tip is try to design experiments around getting feedback where you get revealed preferences instead of stated preferences.

Michael: Correct.

Carl: So instead of maybe asking somebody, just send the thing and see what the reaction is. And even instead of even asking them for a reaction, just literally send the thing, as an example.

Michael: Right. Like even our platform, we don't ask advisors what topics they want to hear more of. We put some topics out and then we look at what actually gets engagement...

Carl: That's a perfect example.

Michael: ...and we do more of what they actually respond to.

Carl: That's a perfect example. We just did this for the society topics. Somebody said, "Have you ever thought of asking everybody what the topics are?" And we were like, "We actually do, we just do it in a much more sophisticated way. We actually watch what you respond to. We see click rates. We pay attention to the words you use." Yeah.

Michael: Same thing and just in the...I did the same thing in the client context when I was more client-facing. What reports are they grabbing? What parts of the plan presentation are they engaging with and which parts of their eyes glazing over and the parts their eyes are glazing over, they're just literally not engaging with that. So we should probably either make that part a lot better or just get rid of that part, or break it up or find some other way to do it. Right? The clients give so much body language in how they're engaging in planning meetings. You can do it right down to the meeting level. What do you bring to the meeting? How do you engage with them? It's all a version of revealed preferences.

Carl: Love that. Love that.

Carl: And then, my last suggestion is, it's very close to your everyone versus the specific person idea. But I think, as you're getting feedback...well, one is I love your idea of the data. Jason Fried at Basecamp says, "Don't scar on the first cut." It's always surprising to me. We'll get one bit of feedback and suddenly we could be off rebuilding everything. And then somebody will go, "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. How many times? Oh, we've only heard that once." So I love that.

Michael: Which is why I do the once is an anecdote, twice is a coincidence...

Carl: Perfect.

Michael: ...at least three times for a trend.

Carl: Love that. And then the last thing I'll say is, I think the access on which I'm evaluating whether I'm going to take feedback is thoughtfulness. So if it's unthoughtful, meaning like, I can't tell you how many people I've gotten feedback around my books that it's very, very clear from the feedback that they didn't read the book. Well, that's unthoughtful. Delete. I don't even have to...full permission to delete without a second thought. Thoughtful. Now I'm on a spectrum of is it critical or is it positive or negative? Both of those. In fact, if it's thoughtful and negative, that's gold. Right? If somebody took the time to be thoughtful in feedback and they just didn't like the thing, I'm super curious. Now it probably won't change the thing, but it will probably help point out areas where I could have been distracted...I could have gotten it a little wrong. Oh shoot, you're right. How did that person, what was it about the thing I did that result...how was I complicit in that experience they had? Is there something I could change just a little bit, like, oh, that color, you're right, or that word, you're right. Or that example of...why did I have to put a gender example in that article about remodeling the kitchen? The gender...I get this long email about gender and you're like, "Oh, you're totally right. You, Reader, have missed the point, but it's because I confused you by having that gender thing in there. The gender was not the point. I'll pull the gender thing out. Now you get the point about the remodel." You know what I mean? That kind of loop.

Michael: Yeah. Again, a lot of it comes down to who are you getting feedback from? Are you getting feedback from the people you actually wanted to be reaching and serving who had a reasonable chance of liking the thing or buying the service or engaging the firm or getting the point or appreciating the art in the first place? If it's someone that I wanted to reach, I really care about your feedback about how I can do it better. If you're one of those people who just doesn't like the kind of thing that I'm doing, that's totally cool. You be you, I'm going to be me, but I'm not really looking for your feedback because you're just not into what I do in the first place.

Carl: This was maybe one of the most important things. Seth Godin's taught me a lot of things. This was one of the most important things he ever taught me, which was just a simple line. It's not for you. Right? That group, you can feel completely full permission to either say or at least think, "Oh, that's okay. Thanks. That feedback was really thoughtful. Thank you. And it turns out this thing's not for you." Right? I love that. So let me...

Michael: That's okay. Maybe it's not for you.

Carl: Yeah. Yeah. Let me just mention one thing, this is kind of crazy, based on what we've talked about. But when you hear this, I will probably have the final book cover. I would love people's reaction to it. So if you would like to send me a reaction to the book cover, send me an email. [email protected]. I will send you the cover and we can have a little chat. That would actually be helpful.

Michael: And then in the future, we'll do another episode and see what the feedback is that you got.

Carl: Exactly right. And I don't know if I could change it because it might be final, but it would be really useful. And this will be probably a couple of weeks from here anyway. So that was super fun, Michael. I think that's really helpful.

Michael: Awesome. Thank you, Carl.

Carl: Yep. Cheers.