Good inertia

Or, how to let the market and customers do the work for you

Hi all —

Growing your company is hard.

It’s hard to get potential buyers to talk with you. To consider your product. To change what they’re doing. To invest the time, energy, and effort needed to be successful.

Which is why thinking from the demand side is so helpful.

You have the market’s inertia and the customer’s inertia working with you, not against you.

Market inertia

Last week, I wrote about insights. An insight is a view into where the market is headed. The market’s direction creates inertia - a tidal wave that can propel your business forward or rip it apart.

If, for example, you observe the emergence of hundreds of niche job boards and staffing services for the tech sector, you might ask yourself: “What does hiring look like in a world with thousands of possible avenues to find employees and contractors?”

As long as the hiring world continues to fragment, more companies will need your service. That’s market inertia working for you.

The best insights about market direction are not widely held, but if true, will create a massive business opportunity.

Customer inertia

And still, even if the market is working in your favor, you save energy by leveraging customer inertia.

In other words: Figure out the sequence of events that cause your customers to need to change (and buy your software). Build your entire go-to-market motion around those events. Then make it easier and easier for someone who goes through this series of events - a person who has inertia - to buy from you.

An example: This week, a friend’s company was exploring cold email ideas. Over time, we’ve realized that there were three ways to describe what they did:

• “We give your team superpowers”

• “We deliver X results in Y weeks”

• “We take Z off your hands”

Their customer has to solve this problem, but doesn’t want to think about it or spend time on it.

So, they should go with option 3: Make it easy for customers to buy without thinking too hard.

At my company, we only talk with prospective customers about 1 of our 4 main features, and we never give demos. We’ve learned that if we describe EVERYTHING our product does in the sales process and show a bunch of screenshots, it’s more for customers to think about, and slows down the buying process.

So, we make it easy for them to buy.

Final thoughts

Your team is small, you don’t have much funding, and building a product ain’t easy.

That’s why thinking from the demand side, letting market inertia and customer inertia propel you, is so valuable.

Your small team can change the world, but not if you have to fight against the world’s and your customers’ inertia.