The visionary problem
We aren't gods & we shouldn't be our industries' central planners
Hi all -
If there’s one thing that everyone in startupland seems to agree on, it’s that the visionary founder changes the world. Right? Look at Elon! Bezos! Zuck!
Visionaries, all of them. Ergo, all founders should be visionaries.
So all founders create their “Mission, Vision, Values” statements. We pitch our products like we’re literal gods. We risk everything to make our vision come to reality.
In this post, I’m going to share why vision is overrated, and what we should be doing instead of being visionaries.
The core problem with Vision: it is a supply-side concept.
Just like I wrote about the marketing funnel last week. It is something we just dream up; a way that we believe the world should work.
We the Visionaries envision a future where people behave as we believe they should. Where the world changes to fit our beliefs. Where industries behave as we tell them to. Where, in the splendor of our vision, customers buy and wait for our better world to come.
We are GODS! GODS, I tell you!
And then.
Prospects, customers, users, and competitors don’t behave the way we think they should. Sales are difficult, prospects ask, “So what does it actually DO for me?”. Users do the wrong things, get annoyed, and stop using it. Customers churn. Our marketing is falling on deaf ears. How could this be possible?
A pesky little thing called reality is getting in the way of our vision!
Which leads visionaries to double down:
“It’s just because we haven’t built all the features yet.”
“It’s just because we have to educate the market.”
“It’s just because we don’t have the right team, we need to hire more senior people.”
“We just need to put our heads down, work harder, and believe.”
Never question the Infallible Vision!
But here’s the unpleasant truth: The world doesn’t care about how you, me, or anyone else thinks it should work.
And… how does “enlightened people imposing their vision onto others” tend to work out?
So when you catch yourself thinking in terms of products, how things should work in your opinion, how people should behave… take a breather. And remember:
Opportunities exist independent of your vision
It is liberating to know that you don’t have to be a creative, turtleneck-wearing genius to create world-changing ideas. Because opportunities exist - you find them, you don’t create them. Explore and understand demand; create supply in response.
I recently went through a useful exercise with someone on my team to get him out of supply-side thinking. Instead of envisioning “things we could improve in our customers’ worlds” (which sounds kinda totalitarian and very nanny-state), we walked through these questions:
What’s changing in our customers’ worlds?
As a result of this, what’s not working for them? What’s breaking / no longer adequate?
Considering the alternatives they have, what is the opportunity for us?
So, what should we build?
The first three questions explore trends, demand, and the opportunity space. These things dictate what we should build. And once we know these things, we can come up with a fancy tagline about our “vision” that’s satisfying to whoever needs to be sold on a vision. (Not our customers; they just want our help solving today’s problems.)
Note that this does not mean we need to tackle small problems or create incremental solutions. Nor is it an indictment of evangelism for your product / point-of-view.
So: Distrust the visionaries if they can’t concretely answer these questions; if they don’t do the work to earn a vision statement. Even then, understand that visions are iterative. Visions emerge from the opportunity space, they don’t exist independently.