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? 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. Each hat is a career in its own right, but you’ll have to wear them all.
Attempting to validate 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. Then there is your landing page skills and copy-writing chops. Get those things right, then yes, you are attempting to validate market demand using a landing page and mock product.
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 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. Furthermore, customer discovery when attempting to validate a problem? What customers?
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.