A sourcing rule for user research: avoid grounding product decisions in atypical, highly-online, early-adopter users — webinar attendees, Silicon Valley focus groups, conference audiences — because their preferences don't represent the median customer.
Biddle's fix is geographic: send researchers to a deliberately unglamorous, representative market (he cites Providence, Rhode Island) instead of San Francisco, on the theory that a market saturated with tech workers and early adopters produces skewed signal. This guards against the same failure mode Customer Shadowing as a Product-Sense Technique can fall into if the shadowed customers are themselves unrepresentative, and echoes the general caution in Stated Preference vs. Revealed Behavior about trusting an unrepresentative sample's stated preferences.
Biddle distrusts research drawn from Silicon Valley/San Francisco residents or from a webinar's own attendees, on the grounds that "we are not normal people... we are freaks" — self-selected, atypical populations. His recommendation: run focus groups somewhere like Providence, Rhode Island, to get a read from a more representative population.