ATTN Entrepreneurs: Customers Won’t Wait

Everyone has a rich and busy life, and each day we all have a lot on our minds, including persistent frustrations.

Over time, we either resolve the frustration through some sufficiently satisfactory solutions or we simply accept it as a “that’s just how it is.” Suddenly, a solution is no longer required.

Entrepreneurs are racing against time to make their new solution wildly successful – before customers either find another solution to their pain or simply accept it. As both of those outcomes eliminate the appetite for even trying something new.

This law of entropy of disinterest is one of many reasons I advise entrepreneurs to find creative ways of helping customers today, tomorrow, next week, well before their product is ready to be ‘launched’.

Don’t wait to provide something. Customers won’t wait, their pain and frustration is today, they’ll continue looking for solutions while you’re off building The Perfect Thing, and the longer it takes, the more likely they’ll find something else.

Instead, be the reason a customer stops looking for a solution. Be the reason they’re relieved and delighted as they pay you.



Making Time

(or On the Founder-Idea Obsession)

There have been a handful of times, less than 20 across my entire life, where I’ve been obsessed with an idea. Yes, unhealthily obsessed. So obsessed I have temporarily neglected other obligations including my own health. Obsessed where I steal every possible moment to slip into the obsession. I’ve regularly postponed client work to practice my kubb game and regularly stayed up until 2am debugging handwritten XML for a new podcast episode. I’m never shy about them. To a great degree this blog is a timeline of so many of these obsessions. It’s highly likely if you’ve known me for any amount of time – you could accurately list off a handful of those 20.

At the beginning, all business founders have one foot in the new world of unknown promise and one foot in the old world (e.g. day job). It’s an uncomfortable, unsustainable tension.

The pull of the known and the comfortable in the old world is persistent. The fear of doing a poor job and disappointing those around you may even begin to haunt you.

The new thing, surprisingly doesn’t care if you work on it or not. No one else is there to hold you accountable for making progress. Nor should they, it’s not their job.

Now, factor in The Resistance and the easiest answer is to just not work on the new thing.

And so many potential founders don’t.

This is why, in my work with startup founders, I listen for obsession. I listen for how obsessed they are with their idea, how obsessed they are with their new world, how uncontainable their enthusiasm for it is. I listen for how they’ve stolen moments throughout the day to make just one tiny bit of progress.

And I compare that against how many times they say, “I couldn’t find the time.”

Founders and early stage business ideas are not a fungible combination.

On day zero, the founder is implicitly making a decade-long commitment (if the business is wildly successful). To persist through this commitment, progress needs to come from deep inside their bones, needs to illuminate them from the inside. This light needs to seep through every crack of their being and their calendar.

Or our work together will be helping them find a different idea.

Or they remain in the old world.

Are They a Customer?

In my work with entrepreneurs, it’s not unusual to spend a substantial amount of time discussing who the customer for the product in question. 

Yes, spending so much time on such a foundational question may seem a bit silly. 

It’s only an indication of how limited our day-to-day transaction experience is relative to the richness of niche business models in existence. 

It’s worth being explicit about who is and, more importantly, who is not a customer. 

Who is not a Customer?

  • Likes are not customers
  • Follows are not customers
  • Users are not customers
  • Stars are not customers
  • Personas are not customers
  • Downloads are not customers
  • Awards are not customers
  • AI are not customers
  • Algorithms are not customers
  • Best of Lists are not customers
  • Conferences are not customers
  • Suppliers are not customers
  • Demographics are not customers
  • Psychographics are not customers 
  • If they say, “I would buy it if…” they are not a customer (thx to CG for this one)
  • Stakeholders are not customers (thx to Matt Bjornson for this one)

Who is a Customer?

  • The individual person paying you to help them

Media Tetrad: Generative AI

While generative AI (ChatGPT, etc) is red hot right now, and I’ve been rather cool on it. All of my experiments with it have resulted in rather ‘meh’, uninteresting, completely predictable outcomes.

Maybe I’m missing something.

Which takes me to one of my favorite tools for thinking through effects and consequences comprehensively, McLuhan’s Tetrad. While McLuhan developed the Tetrad tool to think through how media changes us, I’ve found it works for anything phenomenon impacting society at large.

The Tetrad asks four questions;

  • What does it enhance/amplify/intensify?
  • What does it make obsolete?
  • What does it retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
  • What does it flip into when pushed to extremes?

(Note: this list will likely be continually updated as my understanding evolves)

What does Generative AI enhance?

  • Distribution of conventional wisdom (including all the implicit biases therein)
  • Near real-time machine-generated translation, especially English-to-English translations like BoringReport.org
  • In-the-moment individualized learning of well understood concepts, including both programming like GitHub CoPilot or asking ChatGPT to replace Dr. Google in a telehealth context
  • Automated customer service / support / repair
  • Quality of interactions with Siri/Alexa/Google
  • Output velocity of fan fiction authors, self-publishers, vanity publishers, spam farms, content farms, junk texts.
  • the minimum level of writing quality expected by the general population
  • Out of office replies
  • Role playing games with or without the AI as the DM
  • Writing that is distinctly, unquestionably human
  • the value of fact checkers
  • the quality of NPCs
  • It raises the minimum quality of acceptable communication.

What does Generative AI make obsolete?

  • Generative AI
  • text-based news outlets, blogs, and social media
  • essay writing
  • CliffNotes
  • Instruction manuels
  • Test prep books
  • Paying human writers by the word
  • Lorem ipsum and other placeholder text
  • search engine optimization
  • Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
  • Press releases
  • CorpSpeak
  • Memes

What does Generative AI retrieve?

  • Handwriting
  • Paper towns, canary traps
  • ELIZA
  • Clippy
  • Ask Jeeves
  • text-based video games
  • oral traditions
  • pamphleteering
  • Pop Art
  • Luddites
  • Secretaries / administrative assistants
  • The dead (or at least those that have left a sufficient volume of writings behind)
  • The unpolished, clunky, sincere, and completely human, amateur web

What does Generative AI flip into when taken to the extremes?

After compiling all these, it still seems neutral to net negative. Maybe a net positive on the customer service side. I can see the technology providing a richer experience to those things that currently have an ‘algorithm’ or any kind of robust template, but current applications seems like a way to generate low quality, filler content even faster than we can today.

To that point, for comparison, for full disclosure, and for the smug superiority that the human generated one above is much more satisfying, here’s ChatGPT’s Generative AI media tetrad:

What does it enhance or amplify?
Generative AI enhances our ability to create new and original content using machine learning algorithms. It can generate everything from music to art to text.

What does it obsolesce or push aside?
Generative AI may obsolesce the need for human creativity in some areas, as machines become better and better at creating content that is indistinguishable from that produced by humans. It may also push aside traditional methods of content creation, such as manual design or composition.

What does it retrieve that was previously obsolesced?
Generative AI retrieves the ability to create and innovate at scale, something that was previously limited by the time and resources required for manual content creation. It also retrieves the ability to work with vast amounts of data and patterns that are difficult for humans to perceive.
What does it reverse into if pushed too far?

If generative AI is pushed too far, it may reverse into a situation where human creativity and innovation are devalued, and machines become the sole creators of content. This could have negative implications for society, such as job displacement and loss of cultural diversity. It may also lead to a loss of control over the content produced by these machines, as their decisions become increasingly opaque to humans.

Elsewhere:

A Frustrated Sentence

After working with a variety of tools purporting to help define and develop new products, I can tell you I’m frustrated.

I’m frustrated by how difficult they are;

  • to use. Both ‘in the lab’ and ‘in the field’
  • to iterate on
  • to write from the customers’ perspective.

Even something as basic as the underlying need, whether articulated as a ‘customer pain’ or a ‘painkiller’ or a ‘need’ (vs. a ‘nice to have’) the final articulation is often too abstract and overarching to be understood by anyone other than the team that wrote it.

What’s needed is a clear, single sentence that can be memorized and repeated whenever anyone asks, “What are you working on?” or “What do you do?”.

Here is that sentence:

“I help [customer segment] frustrated by how difficult it is to [specific activity].”

What’s great about this sentence – it works equally well whether you have an actual product or not. This means it’s well suite to the initial customer discovery process, incrementally getting more specific on both the customer segment and the specific activity as you become expert in the market.

Like so many of these tools, one way to test out their effectiveness is to try them out with known products. Here’s a couple off the top of my head, maybe you can guess who I’m referring to:

“I help parents with young children frustrated by how difficult it is to know their kids are watching age-appropriate content during discretionary screen time.“

“I help small business owners frustrated by how difficult it is to integrate credit card processing into their online offerings.”

“I help software executives frustrated by how difficult it is to make products their customers will actually pay for.”

TikTok-ify your Projects

My preferred definition of ‘project’ is from David Allen (of GTD fame):

Projects = Your outcomes that require more than one action step.

We don’t often think in how small these action steps are, but as of late I’ve been more aware of it. For example, my younger son needed a dojo patch sewn on his new gi.

It’s a small, out of the ordinary, project so there’s inherently some inertia to overcome to begin with, and I was having a tough time to find an uninterrupted hour, so I decided to take it one step at a time. Just complete one step. Then walk away. Provided the entire project is complete by Saturday morning – all is good.

So, here’s all the steps I took over 3 days for this one project:

  1. Put the new gi (no patch) and the old gi (patch) on the coffee table and walk away.
  2. Find the sewing box, put it atop the gis, and walk away.
  3. Open the sewing box and find something to rip the thread of the existing patch, set it atop the sewing box and walk away
  4. Remove the current patch and walk away
  5. Find pins in the sewing box, pin the patch on the new gi, and walk away
  6. Find a needle and appropriate colored thread in the sewing box, set them atop the box and walk away
  7. Sew on the new patch and put all the supplies away.

A seven step project and finished two days ahead of deadline because it was chunked into the smallest, most discreet next action.

Each of these actions took about as along watching a TikTok (or three), which would have been just as easy to do – but far, far less beneficial. TikTok (and so much of our online activity) is fitting in between larger commitments. Same idea, rather than burning off your cognitive surplus like an oil driller with excess natural gas, break your more beneficial, overwhelming projects into TikTok-sized next actions that you can cleanly walkaway from and prepare you for the next step when you return.

Years ago, I wrote about scheduling in 30, 60, or 90 minutes, TikTok-ifying is thinking even smaller, it’s for when even committing to 30 continuous minutes seems overwhelming,

Earthed

I’ve always enjoyed the environment message within ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’ it’s like a kid-friendly version of Harrison Ford is the Ocean.

Nature can reclaim the earth. The world will continue on without us.

It’s happened before:

  • Singapore, Michigan (swallowed up by sand dunes)
  • Casabre, Bolivia (swallowed up by the Amazon rainforest)
  • Zaiku, Iraq (swallowed up by the Tigris river)
  • Doggerland (swallowed up by the North Sea) this is my personal favorite as I’m continually delighted imagining walking from England to Norway.

Is This a Good Idea?

7 Questions to Determine if You’re onto Something Big
After decades of working with entrepreneurs, product executives, and creating a few of my own products (a few modestly successful and many absolute duds), I’ve developed a short checklist for whether an idea is worth the significant time and effort to develop into a product. Far too often these questions are left unanswered and the founding team plows forward continuing to build (hell, I’ve done that myself) but the questions don’t go away just because you’ve build around them. They get more problematic. The earlier they’re answered, the easier the next steps are.

0. Why do we care if its a Good Idea?

  • Our time here is finite, so we need to prioritize;
  • Solving meaningful problems is fun. 
  • Helping more people is better than fewer.
  • Making money is fun.
  1. What frustration are we eliminating, and for whom?

State it in a one-sentence MadLib, e.g.

“It’s for [hyper-specific customer segment] frustrated by [an acute, persistent problem]. “

As the adage states, “if it ain’t broke – don’t fix it.”

If we’re going to have any measure of success, we need to identify an it that’s broke. It can be very difficult for anyone – even those directly experiencing the problem to fully, clearly, and accurately, articulate the broke it – they can more easily articulate their frustrations, demonstrate when these frustrations occur, and describe the outcome they’re struggling to achieve. It’s that frustration we want to articulate in a single sentence.

Consider this an initial hypothesis. Personally, in early stages of idea development, I like to have 3 of these sentences – each with a distinct potential customer. This helps to ensure you’re casting a wide-enough net an thinking creatively about all the ways your idea can help people

2. Why will the number of people with this frustration exponentially grow over the next 3 years?
There are a number of trends flowing right now – some mega, others not. Knowing which emerging trends amplify the idea will suggest how big and how fast the customer base will grow.

Exponential growth over the next 3-5 years is needed to support a growing and maturing company. If the frustrated customer base isn’t predicted to grow in scale, the idea can’t support a company. Then, we should act like the frustration has already been solved, and move on to what comes next.

3. Are we (the founding team) currently experts in this frustration?

Signs of our expertise include;

  • We have this frustration currently and have already tried multiple ways to eliminate it – including spending money, and we’re currently using this solution.
  • 20 other people/organizations have told us they have this frustration currently and they’ve tried multiple ways to eliminate it – including spending money.
  • We know 10 different ways to eliminate this frustration and all the (non-obvious) reasons they don’t actually work.
  • We can make a logical argument on why more exponentially people will have this frustration in 5 years.
  • We could give a TED Talk, start a YouTube channel, etc on this frustration.
  • We can identify the precedent (the player, in any market, validating our highest risk)

4. What’s our unique insight that everyone else has missed?
Here we’re looking for the characteristic that sets us and our solution apart from the other available solutions.

Some examples:

  • We’ve eliminated something everyone thinks is mandatory (this is my personal favorite)
  • We have exclusive access to a technology, material, process, expertise, or customer segment

5. Can we demonstrate the idea right now?

I don’t care how rudimentary the demonstration is, I want to see the frustration solved leveraging our unique insight. This demonstration means the idea is real, tangible, and usable – verses simply theoretical.

6. What does this look like at >$10K/transaction?
All businesses have a price floor below which it’s not worth the time and effort to pay the invoice. In my experience, that floor is $10,000/transaction. Founding teams either don’t think about price early or price far too low ($<10). Imagining how the idea could support a >$10K price tag is helpful when trying to imaging all the different customers the idea could help at scale. Yes, B2B customers enthusiastically paying >$10K are all that matter as they’re the fastest way to profitability.

7. Where’s the opportunity for network effects & zero marginal costs?
Two of the biggest costs a young company has are; the costs to get the next customer (customer acquisition costs) and the cost of producing the next item (marginal costs). Finding ways to leverage network effects – where the value of the product increases as more customers use it – is one way to structurally counter those headwinds and position the product for zero marginal costs. This also compliments the earlier question about exponential growth in the customer base.

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