You're Advertising, Right Now. What?

Open Source Consulting. Might as well make poker games where people pay to play and don't win any money, right? Or start a paid online course about getting rich quick? God Bless the Internet? No. We shall unfold what Open Source Consulting is as we go. Right now, let's talk about What we're advertising and how (as businesses, and as workers) we're probably not doing it enough.

"… Now, if I want to talk about communication, one of the funny things that occurs to me straight off is that the subject of communication is really the same subject as life! Life is communication. But let's take the subject of advertising: life is advertising because the moment — what is advertising doing? Advertising is trying to promote somebody's game, somebody's existence, somebody's biological reality, because he's maintaining himself by selling something and he advertises it so as to sell it. So one could say that all life is advertising. Everybody advertises themselves in some way or other."

— Alan Watts, who I believe would recognize other pronouns with great intrigue. (Source — minute 14 of ~68.)

The Tragedy of Advertising

If Alan's point percolates clearly, we are in a situation we must participate in selling ourselves — ideally authentically, whether we like it or not — and that is the Nature of Tragedy, following the Law of Tragedy: you want something and strive for it, and then you have it, and have to manage the privilege of its acquisition.

We hate adverts and yet, in our actions, our participation or non-participation are sending signals to the world. It shouldn't scare you. If you have the time to read or listen to the whole lecture, this chef of Eastern & Western philosophies methodically, in the mid 20th century, covers The Future of Communication — predicting this global unescapable digital intertwining and the spread-thin feeling we experience entangled with our devices. Eastern philosophy aside, on a daily basis, we cover our naked bodies and adjust our exposure to others based on the communication we want to indulge and evade. We have built a feeling towards adverts. But alas, we are, consciously or not, bound by this law. As most advertising creative rooms of old, intention and how we want perception of us is not an option, but an experience that we create for others.

If this is an "I was today years old" condensing realization for you, you're not unlike me before I learned about the UX Research role. It was 2019 when this forward-thinking Y2K engineer coder — to mean I was the full (soon to be called Business Consulting & Product Requirements) team — thought this role was taking the division of technology labour too far.

UX Research, a sibling of Human Centered Design, has a simple premise: if you're building for everyone on every device in every geography, you're either doing it terribly wrong or terrifyingly well. So unless you're being meta, it's about What? intelligence about your customer's world makes you super valuable but not creepy. You should find yourself toeing this line — that's what UX Research is for; alternatives being boards, government sandboxes, and the chastising cancel culture of our future generations. Speaking of…

The Tragedy of The Field Team

"Field teams are dispensable."

— Every CEO who is prompting AI on how to replace you with AI

Internal "Lowest Common Denominator" Advertising. I'm profoundly lucky to have co-founded one of my larger business efforts with a middle-school teacher. She taught me that "behaviour modeling recognition" is magnitudes more powerful than material incentives, at any level. This is someone who handled 12-year-olds on a daily basis — they didn't have time for culture to eat their strategy for breakfast.

To be verbose, I am saying that you can easily build good Culture, and a field-first culture is the lowest hanging fruit. What does this look like?

Recommendation #1: Get Fancy Living Leaderboards

You want a real-time, good-looking, mobile-friendly, super-public leaderboards platform tied to each field member, squad, branch, etc. List Top 20, different categories (hide the rest — we're modeling the best culture here). Rank the metrics that matter to the business AFTER the leaderboards for the metrics that matter to the ground sales & delivery teams. This is where you need the UX Researcher — they know what really matters to soldiers in the frontlines.

So no material stuff? Well, not nicotine, or other weird ideas Kevin would conjure up. You should probably fire Kevin. Talk to your UX Researcher and you should get a healthy set of fresh, trendy prize recommendations that fit the budget and don't create too much mystery nor politics.

Recommendation #2: Everyone should be in the Field at Some Point — earlier is better than later, no exception for "Techies"

If there were a global leaderboard right now, VC partners doing due diligence road shows would probably be at the top when it comes to meeting customers in-field for many companies. Every middle manager and up should start making calls in the customer support centre. If you don't have an active call/ticketing centre with swift escalations for those tricky customers, and you have a Technology team, may I happily pre-recommend that you list their personal phone numbers on your website as customer support — if there's a single nugget to hide in all this riff-raff, it's this: having an accredited (is nerd cancelled?) "engineer" face a customer in person for a complaint, or even worse, a demo, solves 110% of your problems (they'll throw in that extra 11% not to have to get on the phone again). Someone I admire did this to me many times. Set me up for life.

Also, field doesn't have to mean a 1.5-hour Uber. Find the closest customer to your business and adopt the hell out of them and give them VIP service. The field might come to you.

Recommendation #3: Scrappy Together > Perfect From Outside

How to explain this field-first philosophy, or the technology spend, to the board? Engineering for the expendables? Fortunately or unfortunately, this is one of the bets you have to make as the head honcho. No pressure, but you also don't get many chances at appraisals with people. There's no Undo button on an incentive that blew it. You'll churn good people, or worse, be unable to get rid of the folks who've gamed the system — the exact opposite of the goal.

So where to start? Which metrics? Which leaderboard is hot enough but doesn't burn? Should have started here. Ha. Your implementation philosophy has to feel like working in the field too. Ditch the pride. Talk to the teams. Get that UX Research. Understand their tech habits, their grapevine and their lifestyles. If you care, you'll be consistent, you can't act around it.

Your field team is your brand. If they look great, work with confidence and recognition, it's just a matter of time before the middle-level managers, stars or sloths, start asking for hard data, for a rank, for healthy competition. Competition sets the culture, and then the ideas that flow up to "the top" for decisions are real — you just hired a whole UX Research team. Congratulations.

Technology Investment

Software. Building these tools must follow the same principles — don't throw engineering money at the problem either! Don't subscribe to a BI system for 500 drivers. We're open source fans here. Metabase — a free ($0/user/mo) DIY reporting platform on a $60/mo VM — could do leaderboards for thousands easily, before AI was writing SQL.

Hardware & Connectivity. This part is probably where I sympathize with CEOs who "dislike" field teams so much. It's easy to get trapped into buying everyone a device they won't treat like their own, and spending internet airtime on them that they'll burn on YouTube/TikTok, multiple times a day. Now you're an airtime-monitoring, hardware-management business, charging them for damage or recording their screens like Big Brother (and your managers never check), draining their batteries and always trying to "catch" them. Even worse: offline/online sync — I won't even touch that topic. Telecoms will sell you a megabyte (1M characters) at 1/8th the price of a text message (100 characters). Work with them to reverse-bill only your apps' data to you. Your apps are just "always online." Watch the cost of field technology upkeep drop from $4,000/mo (not counting the fancy dashboard subscription) plummet to under $500/mo for all your field teams' upkeep — if your devs are up to the task of optimizing requests to/from the server.

If internet.org can approve your app traffic, you're probably doing too much, and now you have them browsing free Meta MOOCs on there instead of working. Point: build and poke the system together.

The Tragedy of Pay-Later Fintech

Somebody told fintech companies that growth means getting as many loans as they can out the door. Before Somebody shared this feedback, there was probably a very disciplined approach to finding users in need of financing, working with them on their goals as an individual or a business, and ensuring the financing offered helped them generate more "positive advertising" for more success in their office or their business.

Somebody should be aware that the VC drought, especially in Africa, shifted the focus from growth-at-all-costs to "Can you sustain your business?" CEOs in fintech markets have to balance 15% period-on-period with a near-perfect loan book — and that's where the conflict emerges. The obvious indicator: the Collection Rate.

So what can a buy-later team do? They can't stop growth, and they can't force customers to pay once the bill comes due. But they can build a relationship with their customers. Paying debt back is not a function of cashflow (for most people); it is a prioritized list of creditors who get paid based on multiple factors, the most pressing ones being the services that support income generation, and then the relationship with the lender — a.k.a. the User Experience.

It's worth noting that finance is about attaching statistical probability to customers, but is that all that can be done?

Recommendation #0: Get a Core Banking System — your business is risk, not ledgers, not reinventing Google Sheets

"You're making this complicated. It's just a table with debits on the left and credits on the right."

— CEOs who default to bell curves for answers to Product Management questions

The same CEO would probably put you on watch if you asked that the company needed its own version of Google Sheets. Same CEO will blame you when Airtable and AppSheet are slowing down. And even then it's not like they're serving millions of customers, but "prepare our tech for massive expansion and scale" is something they imagine is good banter with investors.

Product development is iterative. In many cases, adding more $$$ to Airtable and AppSheet to move faster is the best approach. Half a decade ago it would be a no-brainer to raise a round on the 50-million-transactions-per- second micro-service architecture you have designed, but from my experience, the rebuild is the death of the startup. When I'm hiring CTOs, or asking CEOs on their biggest tech barriers, the "rebuild" or "we've gotta get rid of this system" signals sound progressive but easily let me know how customer-centric a business is.

A Core Banking system doesn't solve your loan book, new or old. New is better — you have a chance to set things up for the audit that comes when your years of building your company fly by like a week. If you're migrating transactions, a mix of approaches needs to be taken. A new Core Banking System in itself isn't a hail mary. Unless you have a Robot for an accountant, migrating an existing book to your core banking system follows two approaches.

Can they make our mistakes go away?

You could treat your new core provider like a private investigator — investigating you. The rationale here is that if they find the rot under the rug, they're smart enough to hack your previous mistakes into their compliant system. Time is wasted in investigation. And time is wasted putting square shapes into circular holes.

Don't delegate the cleanup to the contractor. Encourage deep and open collaboration between your accountants and the provider, and make hard decisions quickly — your transparency might find an investor that admires integrity over "everything's great."

Let's accept that bad and iterate fast

Your core provider has batches of the problematic stuff, the unknown stuff, and the stuff that's working well. They help you create the digital environments where you can get running on the system as soon as possible, while older data can be pulled into a reporting platform or a separate instance of the banking system so your accountant has a defined cadence for managing your books.

With these components set up, migration is a month's problem, and your tech team can ensure no business continuity loss with CRM, Reporting, Credit scoring engines and other value that doesn't make it to meetings.

Recommendation #1: There's a Mission behind your Business — sell it

Whether you're giving furniture or phones or school loans, the customer is taking a gamble on credit because they're a different individual from the rest. Respectively, these customers care about design, personal image, and innovative learning approaches.

With the right UX research, it doesn't take away from the chaos of dishing and collecting funds to invest in content (through the customer lifecycle) that speaks to their ambitions:

• Furniture customers care about interior design
• Office assistants paying for iPhone 13s care about tech waste while showing tech prowess
• School leaders buying screens for classrooms are unsatisfied with the status quo in EdTech

I imagine the missions of the companies making such loans care about the same things too. Don't just sell your vision before the loan (because at that time the customer just wants the product); there is an opportunity — daily, weekly, monthly — in between collection cycles to remind the customer why this partnership should work.

Recommendation #2: Segment your champions and pain-in-the-butts

For the high-intent, high-capacity payer: they are a potential advertising agent given the right platform to publish and reinforce the mission for those who are near convincing. Engaging them with publicly published opportunities to tell their stories (and show they're the best payers) gives them a personal stake in the process — better strategy than asking subjectively who their most respected family member is in case you want to tell on them.

For the high-intent, low-capacity payer: lenders want their payments on time, but these folks have good reasons to not be able to pay on time. Building in "promises to pay" — future dates they can commit their high-intent to settling the debt — doesn't help the loan book health, but provides great data for the collections team to have structured conversations against these promises vs. haphazard calls that are unlikely to make customers feel disappointed in their enjoyment of the product.

For low-intent (high- or low-capacity) payers: these are the ones we rushed through the IC process and felt they pulled one over us. Aside from painful work for the collection teams, we have the privilege to break down their profiles and add their traits to counter-questions one has to answer during the prospecting process. These traits can easily be converted to questionnaires with AI-based tools, and once we are able to identify them, hard questions during the prospecting process should be asked — short of asking for security or threatening to add them to a shame list.

Recommendation #3: Support services enhance the User Experience

Crucial services avoid customers keeping secrets regarding what you sold them. Do not abandon your customers to figure things out on their own — they are not experts, and hard accidents or misalignments happen.

Connect your enterprises with manufacturer support — that you supervise — to help them integrate and tell positive stories about the fancy technology they just bought for their institution. Collect feedback about the manufacturer's involvement so they know you're monitoring the customer experience.

For the phone purchasers: they're on Instagram photographing their ideal world. Share & advertise these. You can do this on a separate platform that separates your brand while building community.

For the less obvious products — like furniture or working capital — send a pre-filled survey constantly where they can talk about how their life has improved. Bonus tip: if they lie, their consciousness and adversity to people digging deeper should get your payments in earlier.

And then there's insurance & warranties. We all break things. Customers should know upfront that you are a partner when help when life happens. Add it to your FAQs, add it to your onboarding, and should you be able to offer comprehensive insurance, substitute your customers' product while you assist to fix their broken ones.

Technology Stack

Software.

These tools have a massive effect on lending & collection modules but only slightly interact with them.

A simple Loan ("What's my worth") Calculator that tells you how much you qualify for removes the hesitance to answer a 50-question follow-up form. The customers could lie about their income, but you get all the data you need to make a good investment committee decision, especially where some questions can subtly help you contradict answers to other questions in the questionnaire. Other barriers removed are sharing KYC, selfies, statements, contacts, and other crucial information that if you asked upfront would be perceived negatively.

Positive affirmations making an appearance again, but not in a leaderboard form. If your customer is one of your ten best payers, let them know. Ask if they'd be willing to be highlighted in your app while they're working well. Model and celebrate best behaviour. Pre-empt the conversation. In-App, on TypeForm, or other collection tools.

"Hey Sally, you're among our best payers and we want to appreciate you for that. Why do you prioritize us, and tell us more about what we can do better?" → 20-question customer feedback easily completed (including how they'd like to be pedestaled, and why other payers might not be as awesome as they are).

Hardware & Connectivity.

The best things to finance are things you can track in real-time.

Phones are a great candidate, even though the customer got an extra phone to pay you when their phone's locked. (Sob.)

It's a bit creepy to attach a SIM card to furniture, so this doesn't always apply. For institutions — sell products that send usage metrics in real time.

I've been made fun of, without fail, for saying the best product for schools is CCTV — but that's because everyone lives in "hiding from Big Brother" mode. When you think about it as a UX research tool, few initiatives can offer better data:

• How can I optimize traffic in my school?
• When was Kago last seen before he went missing?
• Who stole Sheila's bag?

One observation I've made in the learning space is that there's a proliferation of content tablets, projectors, extra-curricular programmes, but somehow no internet offerings — even with a massive list of partners trying to sell yet another tool to the school. Although it is not an open source option, a good Safaricom 4G for Home router is perfect for small learning institutions. It caps the speed of the internet so your bundles don't burn out, and it's extremely easy to configure for safe browsing and child-friendliness.

The Tragedy of Customer-Centric UX Research

All the great CEOs I've worked with deeply want to know their customers — whether for their business, a fancy LinkedIn post, or to choose whom to close the due diligence investor. But with constant pressure to push the business at full speed, many deprioritize it heavily. Like they do field teams, like they do due diligence through growth phases.

Recommendation #1: UX Research is fundamental, but needs lengthy incubation — like a good ad

Why so long?

First, sending a Google Form to customers who are running their business all day. If you incentivize the responses, they're going to take a few minutes to tell you what they think you want to hear.

Secondly, understanding the environment of your customers helps you understand how they sell, who they buy from, and companies that have already cracked that code. There's no way around it. Charles Ojei, during his executive role at P&G, moved to rural West Africa to observe the rural sales space even though he could have chosen a corner office. The result: 0 to 30% of revenue from these communities.

Thirdly, the best place to learn about the customer is from inside the space. My Ed cofounder created follow-me-homes where we learned that on day 1, parents & students will sit nicely with the phone together, as if studying together. Day 5: Mercy has to do her chores before she can sit with the phone, whether you're there or not.

Recommendation #2: Make your key Personas available to the Builders

After much advocacy, Product Managers and Engineers who were getting random inspired product requests from management started asking for that "Bible". They were ducking random "smart" product feature suggestions from the higher-ups, and they'd flash the document to them quickly and ask:

"Is this feature for Driver Jeff, or Shop Owner Jeff, Wholesaler Alice or Customer Osborn?"

Product Managers and Engineers were understanding the human on the other side of the screen.

Engineer: "Why do batch recon at 6pm if the earliest shops close at 10pm?"

Product Manager: "Is this a feature for the shop owner or the person manning the shop?"

Before long, building products became more about inquiring about the personas to validate and solve for the current roadmap. Product Managers, Engineers and Executives wanted to fill in the gaps in the "Bible". The teams wanted opportunities where they had the full attention of the customer; in-app surveys became zeitgeist; we started collecting birthdays on apps.

Most importantly, office staff — either out of curiosity or their own motivations — would visit more customers and know what questions to ask than "What's our best feature?"

Technology Stack

Software.

Start with a Simple Google Doc (or Notion, etc). You might find that AI tools may have some of the "personal" attributes about such customers from first-world markets that have matured pay-later services.

Feedback should be as close to the user as possible, and reflect your knowledge of them. Great times to collect feedback are after very positive or very negative experiences. A call from customer care, an SMS admission / celebration of an event with a link for the customer to share their thoughts — great tools to avoid rumination, and show customer empathy.

Hardware & Connectivity.

I'll categorize the UX Researcher here. Most machines are expected to be installed & implemented in months, but people should have answers immediately.

Phones, recording tools — good UX Researchers (the kind that get themselves into an internship position for your customers) can tell stories, help make marketing materials for the business, implement processes & tools and truly focus on the business like it was their own. This is enough to motivate and give the customer an advantage on their street.

Incentives like providing phones for these study customers can be used at the end of a UX Research study, because we're optimizing for the average device & processes in the market.