Simplicity on the wrong side of complexity
This Week's Wisdom from the Trenches
Hi all,
This week I had more time to write, resulting in a shorter newsletter. This week’s has four things:
One thing I learned in the trenches
One thing all founders should read
One quote to remember
One company all founders should know about
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Wisdom From the Trenches
Your product’s value is in the eyes of your customers. Positioning is helping customers see what you want them to see.
This week, we realized we have two types of customers:
Customers who currently spend money on Indeed and other sources to get applicants
Customers who don’t spend money to get applicants
These two segments both need our product, but value different things about it. Which means we need to position our product differently. We sell different things.
For Group 1, we sell doubled ROI on existing applicant sources
For Group 2, we sell insights to improve employee retention (PLUS applicants)
It’s an identical product, sold two vastly different ways.
We’re still figuring this out: We’re making sure these are the correct groups. And that our positioning for each group make sense. We may learn that we should only focus on one group. We may learn that this segmentation makes no sense at all. We’ll see.
The overall lesson - value is in the eyes of customers, positioning helps them see correctly - is obvious, and I’d read about it before. Like all things, I only learned it in the trenches.
To Read: Simplicity on the Wrong Side of Complexity
Every startup’s value prop includes “simplicity.” Many founders explain their startups in clear, unambiguous, simple terms. And don’t even get me started on Twitter influencers who Tweet simple truths and bite-sized wisdom.
The problem with simplicity is that there is naïve simplicity and wise simplicity.
You get from naïve simplicity to wise simplicity by struggling through the depths of complexity.
You don’t get there from reading, pontificating, theorizing. You’ve got to experience the complexity and learn by doing.
Read the article linked above - you won’t regret it!
To Quote: Rory Sutherland, CEO of Ogilvy
In his book, Alchemy, Rory writes:
“We don’t value things; we value their meaning. What they are is determined by the laws of physics, but what they mean is determined by the laws of psychology.”
To Copy: Copy.ai
Copy.ai is a really interesting company I’ve started following. Enter a description of your company and their AI comes up with a ton of different messaging permutations that fit into advertising requirements for Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
Why I like them:
Small team of 2, up to $9k monthly recurring revenue in just a few weeks
Super cool product that’s a novel use of Open AI’s recent GPT-3 release
They’re building in public, I’m getting a ton of value from founder Paul Yacoubian’s Twitter account
What other cool GPT-3 business opportunities are out there?