🚦 3-2-1 Traction — the conversation in the customer’s head
Selling is directly tied to your ability to participate in this conversation. Also: defining the right MVP; how NOT to design value props; running a "pre-mortem"; and the goal of customer development.
Hey friend 👋
This is 3-2-1 Traction — 3 ideas from me, 2 quotes from others, and 1 question to help you focus in your startup journey.
Applications due Monday! I’m facilitating a new Founder Mastermind. It’s a 3-month intensive program for seed-stage startups led by some of the Sacramento region’s leading experts in startup growth and fundraising. The cohort size will be no more than ten highly dedicated startup founders. Intimate, action-focused, in-person. 💥
3 ideas from me
one: you can only solve one problem.
The key marker of an unfocused startup is an unfocused value proposition.
Founders say they are solving five different problems for the same audience, which in aggregate creates a compelling offer. When pressed by investors, they say that removing any of these weakens the value prop to where it is no longer compelling enough to pursue.
But… if you’re not solving a problem worth solving, you can’t make it up in volume.
Startups can only solve one problem well at any given time anyway. So make it a good one.
two: go for the “Pareto MVP”.
There are lots of ways to think about designing minimum viable products:
Golden paths
Magic moments
Feature bucketing
etc
But they’re all capturing the same idea: we can get 80% of the learnings for only 20% of the effort, and we get decreasing returns beyond it.
This is the familiar 80/20 rule — also known as the Pareto Principle.
In thinking about what you need to learn from your MVP — i.e. just one next turn of the build-measure-learn loop — what is the 20% of your product from which 80% of the learnings will come?
Then, drop almost everything else.
three: the convo in the customer’s head.
When evaluating your value prop, there’s an entire conversation happening in the customer’s head:
Is this related to the problem I have?
Would it solve it amazingly?
But what about these fears I have?
Your ability to sell is directly tied to your ability to participate in this conversation.
In fact, all of value proposition design requires understanding the conversations your customers are having in their own heads, and then meeting them where they are: use their own language to talk about the problem and to reveal the solution, as well as to affirm and overcome their objections to buying.
Smart founders know finding this language is the hidden purpose of customer discovery.
2 ideas from others
Alex Brogan on sucking less at decision-making:
[A pre-mortem] involves assuming that your decision has failed and working backwards to determine what the potential causes were.
This process has multiple benefits:
Removes overconfidence and irrational optimism
Reveals blind spots
Simplifies thinking
Steve Blank, in The Startup Owner's Manual, on setting the target:
In Customer Development the goal is to have a single-paragraph feature list that can be sold to thousands of customers.
1 question for you
How would your customer describe you to a friend? Are you sure?