speaker-0 (00:05.646)
Welcome to the Hard Tech Podcast.

And everybody, welcome back to the Hard Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Deandre Hierakos with the usual suspect, Grant Chapman.

How's it going everybody? We have an in-person one this time.

That's right in person one. if you've been following the episodes at this point, you definitely seen a lot of the virtual ones we've been doing with folks all around the country. But today we are in person with Katie and Mike from Smari. Welcome to the show. Awesome. To get kicked off, I'd love to just hear intros from you guys themselves and what the company is all about.

Thank you for having us.

speaker-3 (00:34.296)
Yeah, Yeah, do it.

My name is Mike York. I've been at SMARI since 2014. Been in research one way or another. Last 16 years or so, 17 years, too many years now. Serve in a logistical operation standpoint at SMARI. Kind of the head of all that. Make sure that we function day to day and make money month to month.

Yeah.

speaker-2 (01:02.392)
to actually run the business versus do the thing. They took my CAD license away a year and a half ago and the company's never been better. So this is the thing that eventually you just have to run the business and not actually do the thing that your core business does.

good way to say it.

ago.

speaker-0 (01:16.675)
Yep.

So I'm Katie Ittenbach, by title CEO, but I would say I do the business. So I'm kind of more of the head of insights, chief researcher, do the actual market research, but been in the business since 2008. I've been at Smari the entire time and that brings us here.

No, that's awesome. And your dad started it, right? Yeah, he So this is a true family service business.

True family service, so we started it in 1983. I admittedly started in 2008 with no intention of staying in the business. I did not think market research was what I was going to do, as most people in market research start off not actually intending to be there. And it stuck, and I never ended up leaving. And 18 years later, here in York. I mean, I think we're okay. We're okay.

And now you're real good at it.

speaker-1 (02:03.118)
That's right.

speaker-2 (02:06.732)
Worst you convince your clients that you're real good at it. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. One of the favorite phrase here at Glass Board and when we're like trying to figure out what to do for this project and they're like, what are we trying to do here? If you don't know you say we're just trying to make them think that we're As long as you put that as the goal you'll figure out what you should actually be doing.

I

speaker-3 (02:20.558)
You can always figure it out.

One question I've got is the company started in 19, when? 1983. Fast forward to 2025. How has the company evolved in terms of how has market research changed? Obviously, it's changed significantly just from your guys' perspective being so deep in the industry.

A

83.

speaker-3 (02:36.846)
yeah, big changes. would say if we go back to 1983, mean research at that point was still mall intercepts. So people with a clipboard in the mall doing surveys and calling you up on your landline phone asking you to do a telephone interview assisted survey. know, computers tabulated reports. That didn't even exist at that point. So now we have email surveys and social media surveys and it's changed tremendously.

For listeners at home, market research, I'd an explanation, but this is similar to the Nelson. You get the $3 and crisp $1 bills in the mail to say what you like to watch on TV. Is that a form of what you guys do?

And basically it is. So at the root of market research, we use tools like the surveys, focus groups, and the whole purpose of that is to get into consumer mindset. So what do you think? What do you like, dislike? And how do we use that to help clients make better products and services?

No, that's awesome. So this really is like understanding the ICP when the client might not

Right, exactly.

speaker-0 (03:38.862)
And mall intercepts, it's such an interesting idea. They're still around, not as much, but they are still around, still a way to do research. And we've done some really interesting stuff with mall intercepts. Did some door closer research where there were commercial door openers and people got to walk through four different doors in this mall facility, very nondescript. Unless somebody approached you, you probably didn't even know it was there.

paid him a $10 bill, they walked through the four doors and decided which one gave the least amount of pressure, the most amount of pressure, which was the most comfortable to push. All the things. So all the way from that to the, the ball heritage collection, which we did with the canners in Kentucky. So it really ranges, but mall intercepts.

Yep, which one sounded the nicest?

speaker-0 (04:31.978)
Very antiquated and old school approach to research, but one that still exists still has a place.

People in person do differently than people on the internet, for sure. And people answering explicit questions give different answers than people just talking about their experience in something. Yes. Right. And this is what we've learned in trying to understand consumer behavior when we're trying to go A, test, or prototype. It's like how you present the options really changes how people respond. And you guys must be experts in interpreting that data and knowing what weight to put on what based on how you ask the question or didn't ask the question or where you're meeting them in their

in their day because we didn't and we're just guessing and we're like we forced them to touch this one so they probably really liked it whereas the other one like they had to opt in to get here so it's a true opinion kind of thing.

Yes, and that actually defines some of the, you know, there's a lot of research is DIY. There's a lot of great tools out there. You can do your own research, but there are different methodologies that work. There's different ways to set up a consumer to, you can easily bias them. I mean, you can really make research be, give you the answer that you want to give, not that that's the right answer. So knowing how to frame things up is kind of the magic.

Depending on what, if I really need the answer, if I need the answer to say a certain thing, I need to like wink and tell you guys which one these I want when I come to you. We can make the day to say whatever we want it to say.

speaker-0 (05:48.897)
Sometimes that happens.

Yes.

You can't, we don't do it.

Yes, you should never do that, but you can do that.

And that's

speaker-3 (06:00.638)
That's the trap, right? That's the trap you can get into if you do your own research and you have too much internal bias. Even unknowingly, you can sway that data number to be what you want it to be. And that's where a third party comes in. That can help.

I think that third party perspective is probably the best way. mean, I think about like every startup founder or you're looking to create a new product like market research is something you do very quickly. Like now it's chat. You used to be Google. Look something up. Look at some numbers. Looks like people want this thing like told dress for market kind of thing. And then I just completely move on and assume that was correct.

start selling and if it doesn't sell you knew you were wrong.

And probably I would have learned in that process, like if I really did market research correctly, that I shouldn't even start it. So I'm curious from your guys' perspective, what are the top things people get wrong about market research?

themselves. Let's start there. Not what other firms do wrong, because we know you guys are the best, but we'll get to that later. But you know, what do you, as a, if I was a founder, what mistakes am I making traditionally that you uncover the moment you start talking to me as I'm onboarding as new client?

speaker-3 (07:07.234)
I think one of the biggest things I see and you feel free to jump in is assumptions, right? Especially a founder led company, right? You've gotten this point in your company and it's successful. You know your customers. There's this big assumption of, I know my customer. I know they want this. I know they think this way, but guess what? Customers evolve, products evolve, things change and that thought process shifted. So I think people have a lot of assumptions of what their consumer thinks, knows, likes.

and needs and that's not always right. And then they lead the company with that vision and that vision is misaligned with what they truly offer and why people buy. And that's where we see a lot of differences.

Yeah, I think from my perspective, it probably a lot of it tied. I literally just wrote an article about this last Friday. And I think the title of the article was you could guess or you could be right. And it's centered around people having a misconception that research should be expendable if budgets may get tied or you're having a bad quarter. Sometimes the first thing people look at and cut is

something on the periphery where they say, research, it'd be a nice to have. It's not a must have. Obviously we're biased and we say, well, research is a must have. But if you're not making data driven decisions and you're guessing at it, you're a step behind because most of your competitors, if not all of your competitors are all doing research.

Yeah, of some kind. There's a huge scale in spectra here. People that are experts and do all the right research, all third party, all unbiased to make choices on. And then some people are founders out there pitching their products and asking if people like it. And I think this is one of ways you can influence the outcome. If you're a founder led company, whether you think you're good at sales or not, you're really good if the company's not dead yet. And you're probably so good, you can convince someone to like your product, even if it's not a good fit for the market. Right? Like this is a trap that early

speaker-2 (09:08.016)
stage success founders fall into all the time. They're actually so good themselves at evangelizing pitching. You can convince anyone one-to-one that they should give you money for the thing that you're selling. The moment you have to build a sales team and a company that is, you are closing 2 % of the total sales by, you know, not just by number of transactions, right?

that doesn't hold water. That even doesn't hold water when you're only closing 20 % of the sales. All of sudden, you might be talking to 20 % of those people and the rest of the company is 80%. You might not sell them 5 to 1. You have a product problem. You have a market fit problem.

Yeah, and even, you know, when you hire a sales team, one of the first questions you ask, right, is, who's our target customer? What do they want? What do they need? What's our value proposition? What makes us different? And as a founder, you could be just so used to understanding what that is, but having that be something you can replicate to a sales team, people don't know that definition. And a founder may not know the definition, but one-to-one they can sell it, but have a whole team sell to a market, it's a different story.

And if you drill all the way down, the really complex things is for certain businesses that really are high value transactions, only the founder can sell to certain parts of the market and only the sales team can sell to others. And it's so interesting to see where those don't align. I think it's just fascinating to see the different methods and go to market, the different motions that work. What takes trust and rapport and like, you own this, I'll trust what you say versus, man, I just need a really good team to go out there and talk about what we're doing to these people. Because if it's the CEO to

we'll never have enough sales here because it takes so many conversations to find someone that needs it not to convince someone to buy it and it's all that you know area under the curve problem.

speaker-1 (10:46.286)
One of the things that came to mind in terms of market research, kind going back to finding that really good product market fit, I think about stories like Uber, for example. And the really innovative thing about Uber wasn't that you could just have a taxi that you could call from your phone. It was the Uber map. Basically, the human pattern that they solved was, I don't like calling a taxi, waiting on the taxi to come and not knowing how long it's going to be. And people were actually way more willing to wait. the taxi would have been there in 10 minutes, people were way more likely to wait 15

or 20 minutes but they knew when it was going to show up. Are those the kind of insights that you guys tend to find in market research that can kind of be unlocks for companies?

So they can and I always like to have a clear definition of this because if we expect the consumer to give us an idea like Uber, we're putting way too much pressure on the consumer. So I always use this quote and you'll probably laugh because of this because you know, if Henry Ford asked people what they wanted, they'd say faster horses, right? They wouldn't say cars. So don't rely on the consumer to say, you know, make a car or invent Uber, but they will tell you their pain points. And that's the difference between a good research team and still the

you the responsibility of the client themselves to bring strategy to the table of here's the pain points, here's the gaps in the market, here's what we call white space. This is what's missing. And then we go to the board and strategize what can we do to solve this pain? And that's the creativity. But it's not the consumer's responsibility to bring that creativity to the table. It's our job to mine for the pain that can feed that idea.

Sure, so basically what you're saying is that in that scenario we just mentioned, you guys aren't discovering that the Uber map was the way to go. You're discovering that they don't like to not know when the taxi is going to show up. And then you create solutions according to that. Exactly. Very interesting.

speaker-2 (12:32.398)
And in that this is really interesting so is it easier or no that's wrong word Is it better if a client brings you guys a bunch of what I'm gonna call storyboards hey, I've got product ideas one through ten I have enough budget to chase five of them I need you guys to help me figure out which ones the market actually resonates with or Hey, I'm in the tractor industry I'm building tractors for for agricultural use and here are all my competitors And here's where I'm at go find what I should do next that sounds

to open-ended like how do you handle that open-ended question like help me understand this thing I don't even know where to start throwing darts the board or I thrown ten darts tell me which ones are bullseyes and which ones are you know off the page well I

I think with us, it's easy for us to put together a research plan if you have either an objective, a hypothesis, if you have something that we can start with, that's the hardest part. So if you've already got that, we can build a plan that centers around what that idea is or what you want to learn.

Got it.

Yeah, and think we can, like we actually worked in all situations where there's, hey, we have a product and we don't know what the pain, what it can solve, go find it for us. Here's 10 ideas, which five stick, we can deal with that. If it's the tractor scenario, you know, then it's just looking at where, where can we poke holes at competition of where's the pain in competition and is that happened to be something that we can do better? Can we solve for that and do something that's just creating a differentiator?

speaker-2 (14:02.744)
Got it. Or maybe highlighting, hey, cost consciousness is the number one thing on all of the consumer's minds in today's agricultural market because interest rates are high. feature set used to be 10 years ago, the last we ran the study, it was all about who had the latest GPS in the tractor, could auto pay more. Maybe they all have that. And today it's all about do you sell financing that can beat market financing rates for your clients? You'll help uncover what's different.

Yeah, and I think for us...

Most of the time what we do is not considered sexy in terms of consumers b2b stuff like that. It's not the it's not the marketing piece. It's really that data and One thing we've kind of harnessed is complexity into clarity So taking hard ideas hard truths putting them into something that's digestible For whether it's a c-suite or a marketing team or a product team whoever that is

they can learn from what we're giving them and run with that data. So we're giving them the strategy behind it. We're giving them recommendations. It's not just here's a bunch of numbers in a graph. It's more than that.

And so that.

speaker-2 (15:12.462)
We'll have to go there first. So that's too fast. I have a whole question lined up to dig into. Cowboys kids have no shoes. I want to hear who your ICP is, who's actually showing up at the door and who are you trying to sell to? Just got curious who needs the service. dig into that. So you guys, I'm going to and this is probably a question more for you from the very beginning. You probably started out as a very narrowly focused market research company. And as we say at Glassboard, we snowballed into doing a little bit of everything for our clients because they always need it. And we're just here to solve problems. Right.

way outside of the engineering bounds to go help them capital formation, raise rounds, build pitch decks, do more logo colorways, like weird stuff that isn't core product development. hey, we have team members that are creative enough to come up with solution and we're more creative than our clients. Guess whose idea gets put forward? It's ours.

Is that what happens to you guys where you guys are sitting there on the whiteboard after you've done some market research and then like, what does this data mean? What are potential actions that our clients could take in their presenting those or how, where do these wraparound sources meet and where am I over indexing on hearing the stories?

So I think, well, and interestingly, we actually did start off more broad-based. back in 1983, our founder, actually founded the company because he wanted to be a consultant and he liked to tell people what to do. But people listen when you have data. that's literally how he got into market research is, me go get the data so that way you'll listen to what I have to say. And then it became a very broad consulting. But I think that gets kind of to your question.

question of we have been, we're just problem solvers, right? And research is a very good way to help solve problems, but it does snowball into other things. So when you have a deep relationship with a client, you know, do a research project, but then you also help solve for, you know, your database issues and CRM issues. And how do you start doing other things and it branches out? Cause you know, if you just see issues and you want to solve them, you end up becoming that extension.

speaker-2 (17:13.24)
Yep.

No, and that's what gets into selling people, which is what we both sell colloquially, right? We hire really smart people and we give them a salary and then we rent them out by the day, the month, however our fractional rent is to our clients and we day trade people's wages. But we can only do that if our people know how to solve problems, know how to communicate that with the client and not just communicate the answer. Ask the questions. We joke when we're doing discovery phase. It's the clown with the handkerchief that keeps coming out, but we're pulling it out of their pockets and we're showing them all the

user needs they didn't think about what the product should have to do for a user to want to use this thing. I'm sure you guys play that game all the time. They come with a research study that's about this wide and you guys are like, what about these other eight questions that eclipse the three you're trying to ask and importance of the overall, like, do you want to sell more product? How do I grow my company? What are the questions they're trying to answer?

Yeah, and for us, sometimes it's as simple as...

really cut and dry just saying qualitatively and quantitatively. Initially a client may say, hey, I just know we have to do a survey. We got to talk to a couple hundred people. We got to learn what they say. Well, sometimes that's not just the recipe. That's their idea. But we can turn that into a smarter study. So maybe that's inclusive of doing in-depth interviews or online focus groups or in-person focus groups.

speaker-0 (18:33.144)
but there's a qualitative component that can really give them sort of that 360 degree vantage point of whatever they're trying to learn or prove or disprove.

And in that, to qualitative quantitative, which one do you like to do first? I'm sure one guide tell you build the study for the other. What's the right order of operations or is it dependent on the scenario? I'm there's always exceptions to rule, but is there one way that rules them all?

There's no rule of thumb necessarily, I think for us, and I'll let her speak to it, because she really moderates. I've always had a face built for radio, so it's better for her to be in front of people and on camera and all that. So she really heads up the moderating side of things. And we've got some other moderators on staff. But generally, we start with qualitative and let that feed quantitative. So let discussion build your survey.

Yeah, and that's exactly I mean, so qualitative, I always say it's all about the depth. It's a human conversation. It's the depth. It's one on one conversations of truly understanding what is it that drives you. But then that information can feed into a survey. So, you know, garbage in garbage out a survey is only as good as, you know, the options that you present someone to be able to select from a survey. So if you get that wrong, then your whole survey is wrong. Your data is not valid. But qualitative is kind of like your double check to make sure you're putting in all the right stuff.

That's awesome.

speaker-0 (19:55.458)
As long as you're doing research, some research is better than no research. I'll harken back to an old school tale you may or may not know about Netflix and Blockbuster. Long ago, when Blockbuster was thriving, Netflix was still doing the male movies, they were struggling. So they went to Blockbuster and they said, hey, we're ready to sell. Will you buy us? Gave them a price.

L-A-V-E-D.

speaker-0 (20:20.952)
Blockbuster said, you're out of your mind. We don't think you have a market for this. Absolutely not. Did no research. The CEO took his gut instinct, convinced the board that they were not going to buy. Fast forward 25 years later, Blockbuster no longer exists. Netflix business is booming. So some research is better than no research. Don't just trust your gut.

That's fun. That's really cool. So back to you guys. Who is your ICP? But I'm gonna get two questions. Who is your ICP? Who do you guys like to work with the most? What is the best for you guys? And then who usually do you see looking for your services the most often?

So we do work in all industries, but I would say our ideal customer profile is kind of a, it's a personality profile. I would say we work best with those that I always say the game changers, the visionaries, those that are trying to move the needle, challenge status quo. And really that comes down to is it someone that's ready for change, looking for change. know, people don't do research or actually they do, but they don't use research unless they're willing to make a change. So that's what we always ask in a kind of a kickoff call.

of are you ready to change? Because if not, then you're wasting your dollars. Because we can give you data, but if you don't want to do anything with it, then don't even do it. But those that are in the middle of change, have a vision, challenge, that's kind of our ideal.

Job titles vary. Couldn't be, could be somebody in marketing, could be somebody in product, could be a category manager. be executives. Could be anyone. Job titles vary.

speaker-1 (21:54.444)
So it's much less about the size of organization and more about just that individual specifically looking to use the service.

And we do work with Indiana nonprofits, places like that, that don't necessarily have dollars to stretch a long way, but we'll do what we can to make sure that they've gotten something valuable, useful, and able to take the field and really utilize on their end.

No, that's awesome. So who do you think should be using you guys more and at what stage? This is like I have this problem in hardware development that we have a lot of people that come to us either far too early or far too late. They're either like literally at napkin sketch and have no capital, no nothing. I'm like, you need to go like get ready to go do a real company. You should have raised some money before we get here. Now, again, we can help you raise money. So if you're just trying to get a discovery phase in and get a plan so you can go raise money from, that's fantastic.

but it is sometimes too early. And then we have a bunch of other clients are way too late. They're like, hey, we think we got it all engineered. We had like two of our internal team get us the finish line, we just need you to move us, you know, to manufacturing and I like

Well, we're at step one. And it's like, I wish we would have talked at the very beginning so you could know when was the right time to tag us in because user testing our prototypes is really useful for us. I shouldn't be involved. If you have a tech team, like two co-founders from Purdue that are kids, go build a 3D printed prototype with Arduino inside and go do market research or user studies and like find out what you really want to build, then come to me. I can then take that at light speed into a custom circuit board, custom injection molded plastics, build you a supply chain and get you to market and your investors will tap dance all the way to the bank to write you a check.

speaker-2 (23:35.426)
But if you come to me after you've spent their money trying to do it internally for two years, I'm at square one already.

Yep. would say that we're probably similar in that it's a lot of times too late. And I would say it's kind of on a maturity level. So a lot of startups, a lot of companies are successful despite them. know, founder led, you know, they've been able to sell, they know their product, people buy from them, they know their customer up to a certain extent. And then it's when it's time to grow or replicate or move to the next level where you have to start getting a sales team on board and really understanding how you

differentiate or the market changes and you really have no research to date on what you know someone comes say why do people buy? I don't I would I really don't have data on that I have anecdotal information that's when it's too late you have no foundation you don't know why you've gotten to where you've gotten to so far so it's hard to change at that point and that's where we see a lot of you know starting to backstep and really mature as a company because you really do need a foundation of research.

I mean, even sitting right here, I'm thinking of all the areas where it could be helpful to have a little bit of research. mean, so much of what we do from a go-to-market perspective in sales is typically anecdotal. then you go out and you kind of do market research by selling. Like, did they say yes? Did they not say yes? Let me change my pitch. Did they say yes? Did they not say yes? of thing. But there's areas where if I really sat back and said, how many assumptions are we really making in our sales process and our go-to-market?

process probably a lot and it were like we're kind of bending and things like that would there be like if we were to kind of package those together and say like is there basically research that can be done to solve most problems from that perspective like if you're looking to get some non qualitative to like or not anecdotal to concrete is there really like any sort of scenario you can apply this to

speaker-0 (25:35.724)
Nothing's absolute, as you guys know. Yeah, yeah. But most of the time, yes. I think most of the time, you never want to be reactive. And generally, if you are, then your competitors have already passed you by. But would you rather spend a little bit of money to research your idea and make sure it was right, or go to market and lose millions?

by true service firm leader.

speaker-0 (26:01.23)
Which one's a cheaper alternative, right? So some research better than no research I'll just I'll be a broken wheel and keep saying that but it's still the way to go is having some research

That's fun. So I'm now sitting here like figuring out how much I should go write a check for you guys go fit go test ready to go to market But I came up with a friction point that I'm intuiting When you'd say you go out and you do market research, how do you find the right people to talk to and let me expand the problem Then make me the problem child

The number of humans that can buy my service are insanely low. The amount of people in product development that build physical goods that would use an outside firm is like one in 50,000, 100,000 people. How do you talk to the right people? Because there's a 0 % chance you go to the mall and you're on a 100 % survey, you talk to someone who would ever have good data for me. How do you guys structure that part? This is now fascinating.

Yeah, so you and especially because I was actually thinking about that earlier because you guys are not neeks unique niche space B2B research is very different than B2C research So I think that's a really big distinction if you're working with Decision-makers that just you can't go with just fine. I call it in the wild, right? You're just not gonna go find them There's a different approach to that and it's not necessarily about the quantities, you know, we're doing consumer research It's not you do a thousand surveys, right? You just segment and there's a lot of people out there

You on the B2B side, it's more valuable to have that quality of insight, the depth, the why. So, you know, it's not as difficult to start because you can even start just in your own customer base. You know, these are, I call them strategically led, moderated, in-depth interviews because it's not just a one-on, like Q &A. It's not everybody gets the same question because every decision maker is unique. So it's a very specifically moderated of why did you make this choice? Let's reverse that.

speaker-3 (27:59.254)
party part of it is the value because if you ask your customer that they're gonna have you know I work with you there's a relationship there you know we have we get that veil of whatever we say is confidential you know no matter how much you pay me I will not tell you the name of who said this

The negative thing about it.

We'll never like that's just that's just market research, you one on one. So you get that confidentiality and they really open up and we can talk to loss prospects. So the people that came to you and we didn't make the sale, you know, they have a lot of information on what was the friction, what was where'd you go instead? And you can find it's amazing how much information you can get from 10 interviews, 20 interviews. And we've actually done a lot of research in that of just helping people see, you know, our sales have dropped and we don't know why because the value

proposition's evolving and they don't, they aren't sure because people that don't buy aren't honest. You're like, it's price, it's never price, it's value. It's a value problem, not a price problem. So let's figure out where the value's not aligned.

Mm-hmm

speaker-2 (29:00.974)
So.

That is cool. mean, I'm just thinking through how many sales organizations could really leverage that. We have some assumptions here at Glassboard that there's some signals in which folks would be more likely than not to look for our to be in the market. by and large, for firm like Glassboard, anywhere from 3 to 10 % of the market any given time in the entire country is actually looking for our service. So really, it's about identifying of that 3 to

be in the market.

speaker-1 (29:31.056)
10 % also completely made up percentage. You guys should probably tell me if that's true or not. I just did some anecdotal research, and based off the hiring standards I think are true. So that's even another opportunity. But nonetheless, to actually validate those assumptions, and then again, having in-depth conversations for those who are listening, even a sales perspective, to increase sale, think you can obviously see direct ROI there, too. Very interesting.

And so when you're doing these in-depth moderated interviews, are you more often looking for the empty space, the things everyone's not saying? Or is it more apparent when they're saying the same thing? Because I could also see like you write down some things you would assume they'd be saying if no one's saying it like you're highlighting a problem.

So that's where, so in the beginning, before we start that type of project, it would be a conversation with the client themselves of what do you think's going on? And there's a lot of intuition. I would say 80 % of what you know is right. And you wouldn't be in the job you are in if you were completely wrong. But there's 20 % that's off and that's the friction that you're feeling. So we have all these wonderful hypotheses in front of us when we have these conversations and we can see they're not saying what they thought they were gonna say or they are saying something.

different. So we get to kind of have this scientific comparison that helps us through that conversation.

That's awesome. I think that finding data in both the black and the white space on the page is the magic of what you guys do. Because as an inside firm, it's really hard for me to go see the blank space. Because I'm so focused on what's written on the page. And you guys talk across all industries and you've got intuition and this is back to selling expertise, what you guys do. That is what your value prop is.

speaker-0 (31:10.114)
And you can learn a lot from your internal stakeholders. So the people within your own company, what they derive as real and perception, maybe what you say may be very different than what he says. Behind closed doors. Now, to each other, probably the same thing. But to us, where we're going to build that candid rapport, we're not telling anybody else about what you're telling us, we're reporting it in aggregate.

We're gonna learn some things that you couldn't learn from one another. That's just, that's part of the art of moderating.

And so this is a little bit like best places to work, right? Like if you're familiar with that group. Yep, we go over here, we're on the list.

We've been on the list.

Yes, it's great to go get called a good place to work. But in reality, it's internal research. How's the team doing? What policies this year did you change? Ruffled feathers. Which ones made everyone happier? Like what is the core of how the team is doing? Because you and I both sell expertise and what most people don't realize is that is actually the thing we work on the most. Yes, sales is important and yes, doing the thing is important. But for us, it's all about making sure our team is happy, healthy and set up to do the thing.

speaker-2 (32:20.56)
is the expertise that we're selling. So what is the biggest challenge for you guys in attracting and keeping and training the right talent? Like what is the number one there? Because I can tell you, with us it's really obvious. Finding good senior level, when I say senior I just mean like six years or more of experience in engineering, is really hard to find that still have the technical chops because most of them are now in management.

So growing them is easy, but takes six years. Finding them is really hard. That's our biggest struggle.

I think in Indiana, it's really difficult to find the right people to do custom research work because they just don't grow on trees. There are certain cities and metros where they're known as hotbeds for research. They have larger corporations or multiple organizations who do research so people grow up knowing about it. Indiana is a little bit different. We do have, we would call, great talent at SMARI.

but they're harder to find. And I won't go into the pandemic talk too much, but the pandemic did allow us to, when we went remote to look at a larger magnifying glass to find talent. So we were able to locate some people all the way across the country. Smurry is small, but we're now a multinational company. We've got people in the UK and India. So it did allow us.

the opportunity to find people that we wouldn't have otherwise considered or thought about. But it is difficult to kind of harness that talent state side or even, you know, county side. Because we are a hybrid team for the most part. So we're in office a couple of days a week. But we've been fortunate to have who we have now. And we're always on the lookout for more talent. Never turn down conversations because you never want to turn away talent.

speaker-2 (34:22.678)
And who is talent? Like what are the degrees, what are the things the person has recently been doing, whether in school or in their career, that make it a good fit, that have the right Venn diagram of weird personal skills, math skills, know, intuition skills.

So that's interesting because there is a degree, you can get degrees in market research. I don't know, I don't think we've ever had one.

Yeah, are they any good at it?

speaker-0 (34:45.806)
So before she goes in I should say it with a precursor for market research most people that land in market research don't Immediately know that they're going to land in market and some people say I knew I always want maybe That those people exist. It's a subset those people exist most of the people I know in the industry did not grow up, you know with a market research

Idea as their board. Yeah, that was that wasn't it and that wasn't it for me Or her or a lot of the people we have doesn't mean we're not great at our jobs It just means that that wasn't the initial man. I know I want to do product development I know I want to do hard tech. I know that that's what I'm we rarely see people like that. It happens just not much

Well, and we might be similar to you. mean, you're looking for a specific, I mean, you have engineers, right? But it's probably also a specific type of person that wants to think a certain way or work on certain projects and it's finding the right thought process. And we're similar to that. So it might not be a market research degree, but the people that have been really successful at Smari, and I would say the team that we have now, they are curious. They want to solve problems, you know, that they internalize the problem that the client has and they get

really curious about why is that happening, consumer behavior, why do people behave the way they do? And it's just, it's a different type of thought process. I think we call abstract reasoning, know, being able to connect the dots. Not everybody has that thought process, it's not a linear, it's like the forest and the trees, you can see both. And that's the mindset that we look for.

And that's blend of technical skill and creativity that is what we look for as well. Like you guys are looking for, I have to be able to follow this process, make sure I'm not biasing my market set, make sure I'm interviewing my client correctly, not leading them to give me the wrong data. So they have to have enough diligence to do that, and that's the linear part. They have to have the people skills on both sides of the equation, both working with clients and with the end people you're trying to get data from. And then they have to be creative. That's the same thing we look for. Yes, I need the core technical linear skill of being an engineer.

speaker-2 (36:54.704)
You have to be able to do some amount of math and the computer does almost all of it now But you need to be able to manipulate math for you You need to be able to lay out a circuit board if you're double-e or work on a you know CAD design if you're a mechanical engineer or vice versa But you also have to be able look a client in eye and tell them that their baby's ugly Like that dream you brought us this half we can make you money with that that right half either physics doesn't allow it to work or We should go do market research because I don't want to be the one to tell you how ugly that thing is Yeah, but this is this is a real thing we look for and it's that so tough blind

to find the creative linear thinker. Right. Yeah, if you get young enough, but...

Well, you can teach them what you do here, but the creativity and the abstract reasoning, that stuff, you can't really teach. That's something you've got or you don't.

And I think it's just generally consulting in general whether it's market research engineering software development all across the board Yeah, you have to want to solve problems and you have to want to be wrong all of the time Yeah, is that a thing your team has to deal with as well? Like my engineers are wrong nine times in a row before the tenth time they solved that day's problem And they have to be okay that my experiment failed my device blew up into a bad thing happen here until client Yeah, Tuesday was rough. There was a big fire, but like I think next week will figure it out

Yeah.

speaker-3 (38:04.334)
Well, that's, mean, I think I use grit, even though it's like, it's hard to really define what that is. But I say people do better when they're just kind of gritty. Um, and I've also said, you know, when we get projects, I data is humbling. I will, I, I have like, Oh, I can probably tell the client what the answer is. And then I get the research. I'm like, well, I was wrong and I'm wrong again. And data it's always, cause things are always changing and it's humbling and we're wrong all the time. But that's what, why we have data to fall back on.

That always helps.

It's just like how why we run experiments. Yeah, right like we think this is how we're gonna solve your problem and you've toured the lab here outside of these four walls and like there's lots of things that we buy with the intent of blowing them up, breaking them, making them fail, making users have a bad experience because if you get that data it shows you what not to design next, what not to innovate on next.

Yeah, but you literally get to blow stuff up, but we don't they look down upon that where we're at so we don't

We just see a data point that's not very fun. It's like, oh, well, we'll try and find another one. Your mistakes sound more fun than ours. Yeah.

speaker-2 (39:02.939)
The graph went the wrong way.

One of the last questions I thought we could have here is how Smari and Glassboard would work together with a client example.

You know, like a fun thought experiment.

Yeah, fun thought experiment. So one we can think of is a company called Hoop Tech. So friend of the podcast, Hoop Tech, shout out to Hoop Tech. It's effectively a basketball shooting machine that fits in a backpack. And you can take it to your local park and instead of paying for a three to $10,000 shooting machine, you can just hang this thing up and then get better at shooting basketball. And it's like the first time it's been in the form factor of a backpack.

That's a ball return for all of you

speaker-0 (39:42.702)
Yeah.

That's right. It's going to shoot you back to basketball.

Even if you miss. It's a big net that funnels it down. And yeah, I would hope to get in that net, not the actual net. That's my goal is trying to get in the ball.

So it'd be really good for me.

speaker-1 (39:58.496)
Yep. so that's the company that it's targeting, you know, younger kids. It's more of a kid product. How would you guys envision Glassboard and Samara working together on that?

Yeah, what level so he's got I'll tell you where he's at. And is he too late or too early? He's got some videos out on socials that he's come up with some of it is CGI. Some of it is literally like a backpack that he prototyped together and taking the camera to local basketball court. And he's got great social responses going viral on some TikTok videos.

half million views kind of

Yep, and he's starting development, right? So he's just about to close the round that allows engineering to come in and really make the product There's a lot of features that may or may not exist in the end product, right? How small do I have to make it? How much smarts do I have to put into it? Does it need to record my shots counts or does it just need to return the ball? And how do we figure out what's a what should we develop now and what should we not develop now?

Okay. So I don't think he's too late, but I think, you know, going into the next step. So you just said kind of a keyword of like, this is a kid product. Are you sure? Like, are you sure that this is the profile of the person? Can it be broader than that? Is there ways to be beyond just a kid product? Who is it after? And is it solving for an actual pain? How often do they want and want to bring something with them? Is it for a certain duration of time? Is there a park versus a gym? I mean, there's just questions of what, what's the use case?

speaker-3 (41:24.196)
total dressable market, is it really that narrow of a product or is there potential to be wider? And I'm thinking in the kind of back of my mind, a pitch deck, if you're creating an investor deck, they usually want to see what's your total dressable market, who you after, what's the potential, do we have expansion opportunities, what pain is it solving? And these are types of questions that you can answer with research.

on what features will people pay for.

Right, where is the value prop and does that align with the bill of materials or development cost of that particular feature? So that was the obvious one of the bill of materials versus feature cost versus Calls to Goods What I want to know because you just said something fascinating that your research isn't just talking to people You guys will also just correlate data for founders like total addressable market defining that market

This is more of what I'm gonna call the consultancy of what you guys do. Can we onion into that one? Because I think we've really focused on what you guys do in like, send out surveys, getting people's feedback. What does research mean to you guys and what will you offer your clients? That's true, like I just want answers to questions even if I don't need a person to answer it. How big is this market? How many basketball hoops exist in America? You know, is that also stuff you guys solve?

Yeah, so that would be what we call kind of secondary research, right? So there's the primary research is getting actual surveys and answers from consumers directly. then, right, it's new data. It's owned by the client because, you know, we just developed it for them. And then there's secondary research, which is kind of just farming all existing sources and putting together what logically makes sense to start measuring feasibility. So that plays into it. And it's not just, know, here's a data point, here's

speaker-3 (43:02.404)
your solution, it's putting all this together. That's where the abstract reasoning and problem solving comes in of how do we connect these different data points to say what is really the opportunity here and where should we go. There's strategy involved in that.

I think there's an opportunity. So you take a company like Hooptek, right? And he's coming into a market where there's absolutely larger players. So you have Dr. Dish and different things like that. I would imagine that a question he's getting in these investor pitches is, what about your solution, though it's smaller, is actually differentiated? And why do customers actually want it? It just makes a lot of sense that he would use what you guys do, right? So then it's not just saying, I think this is the reason why they will.

from this research we actually had done, this is actually what they want. I think that just from that perspective, this entire podcast has been super enlightening on this, really the value of what you guys are bringing to the table for your clients too, so it's been really cool.

Yeah, we appreciate you thinking to have us on. you know, we're such a small niche player in Indiana for so many people, but feel like what we do is so unique and widely necessary, whether it's Hooptek, whether it's a Fortune 100, doesn't matter. think that having more to go on than just your gut is, now it's not a nice to have, it's a must have.

No, and I think the the magic that I'm unpacking here is there's no question too small that you guys couldn't help with and the only barrier someone figuring out if that's a good fit or not talking to you guys and understanding hey how many dollars is this question to take to answer well and you know where where do I get to ROI that's with you guys as a team and we'll leave that off the podcast for you guys to go do your own you know negotiation sale to clients but is do you guys have small enough packages for what I'll call an early stage startup founder that might have a four figure check

speaker-2 (44:59.248)
they're able to write for a service, a kickoff or discovery where you guys at least map out what you do if you have more capital, right, to make a plan for them to raise against to unlock more data, unlock the x-rays.

Yep, and we say it's always just start with the com- I mean we're transparent. If we can't help, we'll find a way. There are DOI tools. You can be educated and we can offer assistance in helping out on kind of shoestring budgets. There's always ways. Like you said, some research is better than no research. But yeah, there's research for all budgets.

Well, I think it's a good thing and a bad thing. We're a team of consultants. Good in that we're always willing to help and lend an ear, whether it's just a conversation, say, probably not a fit for us, but you could definitely DIY this for cheaper and this might be how. Bad because we're potentially giving people an alternative. nonetheless, if it's helping someone, it's getting a new product that could be a game changer later on, why not?

That's awesome again. It's the same mentality We have a glassboard has always talked to us worst thing we're saying you're not ready for us Or you should have called us six months ago. Those are the two worst outcomes, right? Yeah But really even if I'm not the right fit because we actually just met with someone yesterday that like we talked to and I'm the wrong fit It has Adams in it. It feels like it should be in glassboards wheelhouse on the outside But it's industrial robotics automation, which is all off-the-shelf bolting together very little like what I'm gonna custom development and there are firms that are way more specifically experienced at that and

Shout out to Matt Handy, one of the former partners of Glassboard. He does that explicitly. You should just go use that. Literally take your money. Don't put in my pocket. Put it someone else's pocket. That's going get you that referral or that Hoosier mentality of Hoosier Hospitality is how we all got here.

speaker-0 (46:35.406)
it.

speaker-0 (46:41.24)
That's right. And that doesn't mean that it's not a fit later, maybe a fit for somebody else right now and us later. So I think it's a relationship build as much as anything else. And we'd rather see someone succeed than fail anyway.

That's the fun part about the size of company we get to run and where we get to run it here in Indiana and the ecosystem we run with them. We all help anybody in any industry. We'll find a way to get involved. And if it's not us, we'll find them the right partner. And somehow that's when our phones ring because someone we helped three years ago do something different than what we could help them with became next year's best client.

What goes around does come around. Everybody, this is the Hard Tech Podcast. I'm your host Deandre Hierakis with my co-host, Greg Chapman. Mike and Katie, thank you so much for being on the show. If you guys are interested in learning more about Smari, the link will be in the description. And for those of you guys tuning into the Hard Tech Podcast, the Hard Tech Podcast is a part of the Hive, the hard tech innovator and venture ecosystem. If you guys are interested in learning more about that, the link will also be in the description. Thank you so much for tuning in to the show.

Thanks for listening, everyone. Thanks, you guys, for coming in first.

speaker-2 (47:43.598)
care.

Thank you.