For Starters #2: If Customers Didn’t Ask for It, It’s a Distraction to Be Minimized
Our days are filled with loads of distractions.
From small things in our personal life - advertisements, notification counts, an unending supply of streaming video - to larger things in our professional lives, where we may even be incentivized to be distracted [1]; meetings that could have been emails, commuting to an office, mandatory fun, reading some rando’s weekly email.
To create the space for anything new, we need to deliberately ignore all of that.
This past week was Twin Cities Startup Week ( https://info.tcstartupweek.com/tcsw2023 ) with a number of the sessions on how to raise funding, how to work with investors, how to think of your value proposition as an asset with an ROI. For so many of the startup founders in attendance, it was another distraction. Independent of how high the current cost of capital is and how long fundraising rounds are currently taking, few of them are in a position to raise. I know this because I talked with many of them afterwards. Very early days. Many are not yet able to articulate a specific, frustrating, persistent, problem they’re trying to solve ( https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-0-what-problem-is-someone-buying-this-to-solve ) - many are hand waving around a tar pit idea - ( https://youtu.be/GMIawSAygO4?si=c0R_j-puIziz38Cp ).
Additionally, many of them asked about how to respond “someone stealing my idea” or “a direct competitor” [2].
So much distraction.
The reality is, unless their target customers were in the audience or on the panel, the session was a distraction from helping their customers.
Admittedly, I was also there.
And you’re reading this.
So, let’s admit we’re both OK with some percentage of our deliberate efforts being at best indirectly connected to our customers’ success and at worst - waste, relative to what our customers are asking for help with.
The question is - how much is too much.
I regularly see 65-80% efficiency in my homebrewing system, this means I’m OK with missing between 20-35% of the available fermentable sugars (tbh, I'm not. The reason I use this example is that I'm actively trying to hone closer to 80%). Even commercial brewhouses miss 10% of the sugars. In both cases, there's tens (or tons) of pounds of spent grain containing some customer value (alcohol) we just couldn’t access. At the homebrew scale, it means spending couple dollars more of grain to compensate, at the commercial scale, every incremental percentage point of sugar extraction is a step closer to profitability. Taproom customers (nor my free beer loving neighbors) don't care about brewhouse loss - which is why we try to minimize it.
In a very early stage product, sometimes it’s tough to know what’s waste and what’s value - because the customer cohort may be too varied in their usage to see a pattern. Without paying customers it’s impossible to know for sure what’s a distraction.
It all could be!
What if it is?
A decade ago, a client (and now good friend) approached me to help develop their startup idea. They engaged a custom dev shop for the mobile app and asked me to build the web app and API. To minimize onboarding hiccups ahead of launch day, I pre-created a hundred user accounts for those expressing early interest. All they needed to do was click the link in the email and try it out.
A week after launch, we had no sign-ins, no bug reports, and no usage. Not even a “Wow, this is not what I expected.”
We overbuilt, over-invested, and the target audience didn't care.
Not even the people that said they might.
I still remember the lunch meeting where I broke the news to the client, which inspired a hard pivot before finally shutting down (He tells me this meeting is why we’re friends today).
The smallest intervention is rarely technical - especially at the earliest stages. There are more capital efficient ways to delight customers than developing custom software. One of the most talented and patient software engineers in the metro has been stung by this so much, he now regularly asks, “Can this app just be a poster?” (or maybe just to me and the crazy ideas I bring him).
Posters are way cheaper than software engineers, and posters have far lower runtime or maintenance costs as software. Posters are also easy to iterate on in the moment, and it’d be great if we could achieve the desired outcome so cost effectively.
If you can creatively solve the customer’s JobToBeDone for pennies - Just Do It. And keep doing it.
Like say, Free Ice Water!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Drug
No need to make it complicated, expensive, or otherwise enshittify it - https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ .
Not doing so seems like a disservice, and a distraction.
In my work with startups, I listen for this openness to this kind of creative problem identification and problem solving. Not every nascent team is open to it. Not every team is open to planting themselves on-site to experience frustration side-by-side their target customer. Some founders don't consider it a serious and sincere recommendation. Those that lean into this customer intimacy, they find a sustainable competitive advantage and that most valuable solutions can be very small and very simple. If it does present as software - it's not the software envisioned initially.
To me, that's the magic of the process of finding the non-obvious - https://garrickvanburen.com/only-finding-the-non-obvious-matters/
“Some people only make money once you’ve forgotten who you are” - Merlin Mann - Make Believe Help http://vimeo.com/7192517 NSFW (Jeebus Garrick, How many times are you going to reference this 14yr old Merlin Mann video?).
Lots of things look the same at the beginning. One of my startups benefited greatly from the significant marketing spend of a well-funded competitor.