We’re looking at useful mental models for startups, product and leadership.
Know Your Audience
This is a question from a previous post on Mental Models For Startups.
But in a generic product-driven world, customers too lack insights in their own segments and rather would love someone to come out with one cap fit all bottle mindset.
How to push them towards the customizing mindset?
Isn't it then becomes a marketing skill than a learning exercise?
Raghu
You're absolutely right that customers expect someone to come out with a perfect fit solution.
However, it's up to the founder to go through the journey of learning what the customer needs and wants, and make a choice of whether they would like to go with a generic one-size-fits-all product for everyone, or rather very deep and narrow, addressing a niche audience.
The choice of going broad vs deep depends on a hundred different variables, but the biggest factor is probably the target audience. The same product can be designed, positioned and framed completely differently, depending on who it is meant to be for.
Some people like what's popular and everyone else has, others — what's unique and only they can have.
And yes, a huge part of the success of any product is defined by marketing. Since different products require different kinds of marketing, finding out what kind of marketing activities to use also should be predicated on learning.
By "learning" I mean not just acquiring information, but rather in a scientific sense — coming up with experiments to find out what works.
The Shiny Object Syndrome
Most people who push the boundaries in the world have the ability to get very excited about an idea, to the level of re-arranging their whole life so that they are able to make the idea happen.
A good example may be quitting a highly promising career in finance in order to start an internet book store as Jeff Bezos did.
Or dropping out of Harvard to focus on writing software for early personal computers, what allowed Bill Gates to create one of the biggest software companies in the world.
It is important to note, that in both of these examples both companies got traction early on, and it was natural for them to keep going.
However, more than often, early success is not the case.
It may take many months or even years to iterate on the idea, get at least some sort of traction, and find something that starts working.
The problem is that many founders give up too early. Most of them give up not because they are not motivated enough or they lose interest in the idea, but rather because there is a new idea that's just much more exciting.
The thing is, the new idea is always going to be exciting just because it's new.
The current idea is always going to look old and tired because you've spent so much time on it, and you're just fed up with it already.
But, if you feel like you've been having progress with the current idea, and — given enough time — it can work out, do NOT drop it.
You have to stick to it as hard as you can.
It took James Dyson five years and about 5,127 prototypes, to launch his first revolutionary vacuum cleaner.
Think about it. Five years of one failed prototype after another.
You have an order of magnitude better chances of winning with the current idea because you have already figured out so much, rather than diving into a completely new ocean with new unknown dangers.
Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
— Thomas Edison
That said, if you have had zero or negative progress - don't become a hostage of the Sunk Cost fallacy — it is probably about time you move on.
Are you working on your best idea at the moment?
Your feedback means a lot.
Until next time 👋