A simple unfolding story
a strange thing happened on the way to PMF...
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The “unfolding” concept, I think, is the most important concept for understanding the mechanics of the 0-1 stage. (See my article here.)
But unfolding is bigger than this. Because if you don’t understand the mechanics of 0-1, I don’t think you can truly understand the mechanics of 1-100. Which means everyone needs to understand how unfolding works.
I thought I’d give a quick example of unfolding, as it happened to a PMF3 alum this week. This is about my new friend Jonas Bartsch, who is building Pliik out of Zurich, Switzerland.
Jonas has built a successful innovation agency over the past decade and is now building his first software company. With all the existential questions you’d expect:
Do we do PLG or sales?
Who do we serve?
What do they want?
So what exactly are we building?
Etc.
Of course, Jonas had hypotheses. But hypotheses don’t pay bills.
So Jonas started selling, scheduled 50+ sales meetings over the past couple of weeks. With a loosely defined target market of people he thought might be interested.
After meeting 27, he realized that most people were theoretically interested in what he was doing, but he experienced the sensation of real pull in three of his conversations.
He dug into this, and realized that there was something fundamentally different about these three people who *pulled* vs. the 24 others who didn’t. These three were trying to accomplish something big in their jobs. It was a source of pride, a career ambition, a personal mission. They looked at Pliik as a way to help them make real change in their organization.
Jonas could have stopped here and just said, “Ok, I’ll just target people like that with my product!” That would have been pretty effective, I imagine. But that wouldn’t have been a complete unfolding.
Instead, Jonas asked, “How would I redesign my pitch and product offering so that it is a 11/10 ‘hell yes’ for this kind of person in this kind of situation?”
This is the crux of unfolding: It’s not about business cliches like narrowing or focusing. It’s the fundamental process of totally reshaping your replicating case study (& therefore, your business) to deeply resonate with, and serve, the demand you find.
This will not be Pliik’s only unfolding. We’ll see what happens as Jonas leans into the new approach. We can theorize, but if we’re honest, we have no clue what the next unfolding trigger or shape will be.
This story, I believe, is a simple representation of most of the lessons at the core of unfolding. Thanks for letting me share it, Jonas!
So good!