🚦 3-2-1 Traction — your idea sucks (and that’s fantastic)
Also in this issue — how deeply should you know your customer; how do you find your early adopters; how to create community; why project management apps suck; and challenging assumptions.
Hey friend 👋
We’re two weeks away from the end of 2023. How will you spend it?
If you need inspo, here you go! 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.
Let’s go 👇
3 ideas from me
one: your idea sucks.
It's a mistake to view entrepreneurship as trying to make an idea work.
It’s not about making it work. It’s about finding what works.
two: you don’t know your customer.
At least not nearly as well as you think you do.
Take a moment and list out everything you know about them. You’ll get a list like this:
Affluent men
Born in 1949
In Greater London
Who love dogs
And vacation in the Alps
Sounds awfully specific — good for you! The problem?
That list describes both Ozzy Osbourne and King Charles.
Whoopsie-doodle!
To market to everyone is to market to no one. When developing personas, the rule is to get as specific as you can.
How specific? Get so specific that it makes you uncomfortable, that you feel you’re leaving too many sales on the table and targeting too small of initial market.
And then get two clicks more specific.
three: the early adopter pyramid.
Originally from Steve Blank, it’s the ladder you climb to the customer you should serve first:
It’s a process of increasing segmentation:
What is the universe of people who have the problem? We don’t care about those we can’t help.
Of those, who already knows they have the problem? We don’t care about those we who don’t know they need help.
Of those, who is actively looking for a solution? We don’t care about those who don’t prioritise solving it.
Of those, who is so desperate that they hacked something together out of spare parts? We don’t care about those who aren’t eager.
Of those, who has the budget to buy? We don’t care about those who can’t pay.
As you climb the ladder, you’ll hit dead ends. Just rewind, re-segment, and try again.
Keep calm and segment on.
2 ideas from others
Yasmine Khosrowshahi, distilling 4 years of marketing lessons into simple pictures:
Selling to everybody creates no community. Selling to one avatar creates a strong community
Matt Alston in Wired on why project management tools never deliver on their promise:
PM software sells itself a jack of all systems and master of all too.
But under the hood, what are these programs actually doing? In a video game engine, a world is modeled—gravity pulls stuff to the ground, projectiles behave a certain way, your character can hold so many items before they have to drop one. PM software promises robust systems for solving complex problems, but its solutions are usually a superficial UI dropped atop relational (linked) databases.
…to sell and retain subscriptions, these companies have to continually add individual features to address any use case that pops up.
You can’t be everything to everyone.
1 question for you
What’s an assumption you’re making in your startup that you’re not challenging? How can you test it this week?
As always, thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next Monday!
—jdm
PS: If you're enjoying 3-2-1 Traction, why not take a few seconds and share it with a friend? This newsletter is a lot of work, and it would really help me get the word out. Thanks!