Incrementalism Will Kill Ya

The only way your business will be successful is if you make your first customers wildly, startlingly, shout-from-the-rooftops-and-throw-on-maria-maria level successful. Your product needs to be an inflection point in their life - there’s a clear “before you” and “after you” gap.

This might sound like an unrealistic bar. And, a departure from my normal “un-intimidating” approach to startups. I promise you it’s neither.

Your business will grow if and only if your first customers tell other customers about how you changed their life. Any sort of paid marketing will be too expensive and won’t work - your success hinges on organic growth. Which means the question to ask is - what do your customers talk to each other about?

The answer is products that create a “leap” - what we talk about at Tacklebox as a Delta 4 increase (h/t Kunal Shah).

If a customers solution to the problem before you is a 4/10, you need to build a product that improves that experience to an 8/10 to have a Delta 4 step-up in value. If you’re able to do that, and the problem you’re solving is one (or a few) of painful, frequent, urgent, expensive, or growing - your customers will shout about your product from the rooftops.

It’s tempting to try to help people make an incremental gain - to help them go from a 7/10 to a 9/10 - but success is a relative term not an absolute one. The value comes from the distance you help them travel.

The big insight here is to realize that building a 9/10 product is way less important than finding a 2/10 customer. If your customer has a 2/10 solution, you’ve just got to build them a 6/10 product to kickstart organic growth.

The way to find these 2/10 problems is to look for outliers - customers who are uniquely, disproportionately impacted by a problem because of their specific scarcity/constraints.

The equation usually looks like:

Outlier + constraint + urgency

Finding these anomalies is the hard part. Start by asking: who can't use the usual solution because of [money/time/technical skill/location]?

The ridiculously obvious startuppy example here that’ll actually drive the point home is Airbnb. Their initial product - sleeping on people’s couches - was objectively terrible. But, they targeted customers trying to go to festivals where all the other lodging options were sold out. So, the alternative was a 0/10. A site that listed strangers couches was, maybe, a 5/10. That’s a Delta 5, so everyone screamed about it from the rafters.

The lesson here, as always - build for the delta. The gap between current solution and new solution will drive growth. Incremental improvements aren’t interesting enough to talk about, so your business won’t grow.

Incrementalism will kill ya.