Demand is *invisible*
...which has weird implications
Demand ONLY exists in our buyers’ brains. There is a to-do list there. We can’t see it, we just try to understand it based on how they behave.
In other words - demand is invisible.
But if demand is invisible, what are we looking at?
What’s visible =/= what matters
When we look at any fast-growing startup we can see their website, their media coverage, maybe their product. We might even see some of their growth tactics. Or we may get some insider’s account of their processes, procedures, and culture.
We see, in other words, what’s visible. The visible stuff is what fills business books and creates “best practices.”
Yet when we try to copy what’s visible, it almost never works. Why? Because we’re missing what actually matters!
What’s visible isn’t what matters. Demand - this invisible force in customers’ brains - explains why (some of) the visible things work for that particular company.
So then, what are we looking at when we look at a company’s website, media coverage, product, GTM? We’re looking at the company’s attempt to respond to demand. Some of these things are good responses. Others are very stupid and bad. If we don’t understand their customers’ demand, we have NO way to tell which is which.
We are in the bad-idea-doom-loop
Here’s why we are foie-grassed with bad ideas:
Some company succeeds
We use what’s visible to explain WHY they succeeded
We turn those explanations into complicated “best practices” and “playbooks”
Everyone wants to follow the “best practices”, because why wouldn’t they?
It doesn’t work… so we look to another company that’s successful & repeat
The point is not to ignore every other fast-growing startup. It’s to try to understand why they are fast-growing from the demand-side, based on what’s NOT visible… and using THAT to make sense of the things that are visible.
So we can avoid this:
PS:
Demand is invisible INDEED! This article is great and it dovetails with my concept of Searching for People in Pain, detailed here: https://www.nascentstartups.com/p/1-an-introduction-to-the-nascent tl;dr Demand comes from customers. Every customer begins as a Person in Pain. I advise founders with an idea and no customers to search for People in Pain and to quantify the pain.