I’m gonna be leading a little talk at MicroConf in April. We don’t do many public appearances anymore, so I am excited and mildly terrified to be taking the stage at the most important event in independent software. If you’re going to MicroConf, please come through and ask softball questions, thank you.

Preparing for this talk, I’ve thought a lot about where good creative ideas come from. For us, we research because we are actually extremely uncreative and hence need to punt to evidence to do some of the work for us. This has the added benefit of our coming up with ideas that actually work.

There is definitely the genre of human who comes up with something brilliant and never needs any sort of research to justify their decisions. These humans are very, very rare and if you’re reading this, you are absolutely not one of them. You are not one of them because you would be off creating the future, not reading a newsletter that is about generating better ideas.

So in the absence of people who research for a living and people who don’t miss when they guess, who’s left? Everyone else. You, probably. People trying to figure out how to make their businesses function well, and who largely fumble in the dark to do so.

There is a better way. Anyone can and should research. In fact, most of us do so without calling it “research” or creating a repeatable process for it. This is because the following things are true:

• You are not your customer, even if you happen to resemble your customer.

• Your customers are making purchasing decisons from an emotional place.

• We’re curious beings who want to know some form of the truth.

• Nobody tells you how to research in any way that is actual. In the absence of external guidance, we all make it up.

Fortunately, there’s a way to not make it up, and it’s by sitting down, admitting we don’t have all the answers, and trying to figure it out.