SCRATCHING YOUR HEAD
INSTEAD OF SCRATCHING YOUR ITCH
Inspirational fluff, endless anecdotes, and SEO-c**p, alongside bulls**t instructions like "Now do some marketing". Not ignoring the sound-bites of successful founders blinkered by survivorship bias. They may as well recommend you use Midas's middle finger.
Great results have you got salivating. But you lack contextual appreciation so you'll blindly copy it without any innate understanding. When you do get the context, you realize similar results were never on the cards. But hey, you’re in their funnel. That’s a win-win in their book. Which you can purchase from their website.
No market need is only one reason, yet we have lop-sided product-based approaches. What about the other landmines such as how to find customers, sell to customers, market to customers? You’ll have to navigate past them as well.
You know you have to make something people want. But you also have to make people want something. Build and market have to go hand-in-hand, alongside a multitude of other things. Each hat is a career in its own right, but you’ll have to wear them all.
When the objective is to fail fast, you can do that very quickly indeed with any shot in the dark. Bumbling around tactic-to-tactic like Inspector Clouseau is not better than doing nothing. How about putting in the time and effort into something that has a fighting chance to pass instead of fail? And if you do fail, do it within a framework, that takes you a step closer to passing at a later date.
Validate with a landing page and Google Ads to drive traffic? So, you are attempting to validate market-demand, as well as the problem, the audience, the solution, the channel, the content on the channel, the targeting factors, taking into account buyer intent doesn’t exclusively mean early adopters, to name some of the things. Experiments are good, but leave the dubious experiments to Dr.Frankenstein.
Markets evolve, competitors multiply and audiences expect more. You can ship too early. Take into account the passage of time, and that minimum is a rising expectation we have to meet. An MVP in a mature or growing market where the market has moved onto the Early Majority, where the MVP doesn't provide a novel competitive edge will fail.
An open mind doesn’t mean an empty mind, otherwise, you won’t have the context nor level of knowledge to appreciate what you find. Some facts are undoubtedly outside the building, but you need to get to the right people, and probe in the right manner with a solid hypothesis.
Early Adopters are not interested in your better mousetrap, nor are they looking to only have their problem solved. They are looking for a novel innovation that propels them beyond their peers. Furthermore, in a market that has entered the mainstream, your better mousetrap means your early users are not the Early Adopters, but rather, the Early Majority.
Fantastic resources shared by brilliant minds that go deep, but are narrow in scope. So you’re putting a jigsaw puzzle together, not knowing if the parts contribute correctly to the targeted whole.
A lack of congruency between macro and micro-goals can result in doing tasks that don’t lead to the desired objective, or even lead you astray. Like tactics oblivious to strategy, and orphaned processes not housed in a system.
You’re meant to learn in this stage, but the application of what you learn is diminished, plagued by inefficiencies, and riddled with confusion. The maximum value from your data is not being obtained, if indeed you even know of the other places it can be used.