"From here" vs. "to there"

New business thinking

Hi all —

I’ve previously written about the difference between Supply vs Demand. This dichotomy is a foundational way of thinking about building new businesses:

• Demand is what’s actually happening OUT THERE in your customers’ worlds that creates the conditions for them to need to change

• Supply is what you build - your product, your marketing, your business

This week, I’ve found a way to articulate another foundational piece. I call it “From Here” vs. “To There” thinking. The framing came from the book, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned:

Contrary to popular belief, great inventors don’t peer into the distant future. A false visionary might try to look past the horizon, but a true innovator looks nearby for the next stepping stone. The successful inventor asks where can we get from here rather than how can we get there.

Everything in startupland is geared towards “to there” thinking

You’re expected to pitch a vision for a future world. To dream big, imagine a world without constraints 10 years out, and describe it in absolute clarity with utter certainty.

You’re supposed to have a plan for how your business is going to get TO THERE. To your imagined future. With a product roadmap and a plan to conquer industry-by-industry, progressing linearly to make it happen. With a top-down market sizing shouting “this is a $10B opportunity!”

This is High Wisdom, this is Fundable.

It’s also a way to increase the odds that your business fails, without increasing the odds of a Big Exit.

This kind of thinking blinds you to today’s reality, which is where you have to build a business. It ignores the opportunities created by today’s industry structure and customer needs, which you can leverage to build something interesting. It guarantees you look at the world from a Supply point of view and miss out on Demand.

“From here” thinking is liberating and a little terrifying

So far, I’ve launched two successful products. Both have been demand-side, “from here” products. Because I spent a ton of time building a firsthand understanding of the customer and market context, I had pretty strong conviction that the first step would be successful. But, critically, I genuinely didn’t know where the product would go from that first step.

At the time, I believed this was a personal failure - that I just didn’t have the mental horsepower to figure out where the product was headed. It’s scary to admit you have no product roadmap, but hope that you’ll be able to figure it out once the first version is out there.

Now I realize that being okay with not knowing two steps out is core to building something meaningful today.

We quickly launched these products, and because they were built demand-side and “from here”, they were easy to sell. And as customers used these products, it became clearer where the products needed to go.

Figuring out where the second step is once you have a successful first step is still difficult and stressful, but it’s much less difficult and stressful than guessing when you haven’t launched the first step.

— Rob