The Friendship Reality Distortion Bubble

For the past year or so, I’ve been working full-time on launching my own thing. Through multiple prototypes and countless iterations — all attempts to answer the tough age-old question of “What exactly should I build?” — I’ve learned one really important lesson:

Don’t ask your friends what they think.

Friendship is a funny thing. It’s absolutely true that we need our friends, especially when attempting this freaky thing called Striking Out On Our Own. Friends are there to cheer us up when we feel down. They reassure us of our relevance and worth when we no longer have a salaried position to tell us that we are valued. They’re there through the worst moments to tell us that we’re brave, that we’re capable, and that we’re admired for pursuing our dreams when, in reality, we have no fucking clue what it is that we’re actually doing. Not gonna lie: friends are awesome.

And yet, that very same love and desire to help can really throw you for a loop. Because when you’re building products, you really just need to know one thing: “Does this idea have legs?”

Friends don’t help you answer this question. I know because I’ve tried. And I discovered that, as much as friends want you to succeed, they will unintentionally scuttle your efforts to get at the truth.

What I’ve learned is that if you ask your friends, they will all enthusiastically say yes. Yes! Yes I will sign up. I will use it. I will help you beta test, point out all the flaws, lavish my attention on it, care about its progress. I will give you a sense of security that this thing is worth your time, that it is what the market wants.

What they’re really saying is: I love and support you. I don’t want you to give up. I want to see you to smile, because you’ve been so down lately, you’ve been so worried about all your product not succeeding, and I just want to let you know, you should be happy. As your friend, I want you to be happy.

If you’ve ever visited the Trough of Despair (lovely beaches, if a bit desolate), then you know that it can be very tempting to believe what they’re saying — to give yourself a bit of much-needed hope. To convince yourself that your product really is great, because your friends say it’s great. They may even be using it daily. What better indicator of promise?

And who knows? They could be right. You could be onto something, and sometimes great products do come out of answering to the needs of your immediate circle. But the reality of it is:

They’re not speaking as your users.
They’re speaking as your friends.

This is the dreaded Friendship Reality Distortion Bubble.

Friends, good friends especially, generate a very safe and comforting halo of attention, responsiveness, and heightened usage statistics. They give us that great feeling of early success that we so badly need. And we cling to that feeling because we’re afraid to ponder the alternatives — failure, shame, counter-productive stress eating of various ice creams. So we reassure ourselves: Everything will be all right. Building a product won’t be as hard or as painful as I thought. In the worst cases, we might even kid ourselves that we can skip out on hard work of actually selling the product to the masses. We think: Maybe this thing will just grow organically. Just look at this group of people who already love it!

I know because I’ve thought all these thoughts. And oh boy, have they hindered more than helped.

To make progress, I have had to train myself to resist these thoughts. Resist them like a cat resists a hard shampooing. Like an 8 year old resists a plate of mushy cabbage. Like a tablespoon of olive oil resists mixing with a water-based liquid such as lemon juice or vinegar, without the presence of emulsifying agents such as egg. Anyway, I was saying…

So how do you get out of the Friendship Reality Distortion Bubble? Instead of asking friends, I found ways to ask strangers. I found them on the Internet —where, fortunately, they lurk in droves. They hang out on Reddit, fan forums, blogs, public mailing lists. They’re there, bobbing at the edge of my social circles, just one retweet away. They might even already be my users, but I’ve been ignoring them because they take a bit of work, a bit of coaxing to speak to.

And yes, it has been scary and awkward asking strangers. They can be hard to reach. They can be apathetic. You constantly fear you are infringing upon their Sacred Right to Remain Unbothered. But I have discovered that, if I can get them to speak, they’ll always tell me the truth about my product — whether it’s good or bad, useful or not, solves their problems or doesn’t. They can afford to do that because they aren’t burdened by the social contract of friendship. And that’s a good thing. That’s an honest view into How My Product Actually Performs.

Work your ass off to get outside the Friendship Reality Distortion Bubble. Yes, strangers are mad scary. Yes, they don’t give a damn about your feelings. And yes, finding that out firsthand hurts. But when you do finally connect with those two, ten, one hundred users that care, that truly want to use your product not because they feel obligated but because it is what they need in their lives — then you know, really know, you’re onto something good.

Tina is the founder of Scratch House, a site that teaches you how to cook from scratch, one mission at a time. Follow her misadventures on the Scratch House blog, where she is trying her best to be honest about how crazy confusing this whole product-building thing is. Or you can get the up-close, play-by-play account via her weekly Tinyletter.