On Conflicting Ideas

2024.09.22

LXV

Cats can be adorable, affectionate, and lethal predators, all at the same time.

Likewise, you can still champion you’re product while you’re far from perfecting it.

The Jabberwocky

Oftentimes in life, there are seemingly contradictory things that are actually both true. 

Cats are adorable. They also heartlessly smite lesser creatures for sport. Neither of these are truly conflicting, but we seem to put them on opposite ends of some spectrum and don’t think about them at the same time. 

Likewise, this weekend, Jack and I were on a call with a user that emphasized for me the conflict between knowing that the product will never be done and knowing that the only way to validate that it’s worth anything is by selling it. 

While it may seem contradictory on the surface (how can you sell something that’s not finished?), just as cats can be cuddly and violent, both can be true at the same time. 

Defining Sales

I view “sales” as the process of explaining how a product or service creates value for a user, whether by solving a problem or presenting an opportunity. “Closing” is the part of sales where you commit to exchanging the value your product or service creates for some other resource (preferably money). 

When building a product, your goal is to build something that “sells itself,” meaning the value created is so painfully obvious that all you have to do is be there to close. 

When selling something, your goal is to “sell it,” meaning you make the value that it creates so painfully obvious that the person wants to close. 

Because feedback from users is critical in both processes, it can get confusing when you are trying to build a product and sell it at the same time. Feedback from users when you’re in the product mindset should be used to improve the product–how can you make the product solve the user’s problem? Feedback from users in the sales mindset should be taken as an opportunity to improve your messaging–how can you explain to the user that by doing x, y, and z, the product already solves the problem?

If you’re doing both at the same time, you have to jointly know that your product is “not good enough” in the sense that it doesn’t yet sell itself while working to explain why it is “good enough” to actually address the users concerns. 

User Interviews

Jack and I were on a call with a user yesterday. For simplicity and ease of generalization, we’ll call him “User.” 

User had a lot of feedback. One piece of feedback User gave was that we should rank the prospects based on the data we’re finding about them. We've heard this a lot and it’s something we’re considering integrating.*

When I heard that from User yesterday, I was in “product” mode**, so to speak. I agreed with him, we should totally add that. 

I’m grateful Jack was on the call, too, because he was more in “sales” mode. He clarified that the product already should save User tons of time by surfacing only the accounts with relevant info. 

Interestingly enough, both things are true: we should add that feature to the product, and User should still get value without it.

*I mention that we’ve heard it from multiple users because evaluating the quality of feedback is hard, but hearing the same thing from multiple users seems to be one of the strongest indicators of its value.

**Perhaps sales and product modes are just subsets of founder mode.

Product Mode

Maybe because I’m spending so much time staring at code all day, I’m more in product mode. This, I’m sure, has been reflected in my writing over the past couple of months. 

All feedback is ordered towards building a better product. You know that the product is NOT good enough when you grade it against everything that it could be, and never will be. But that’s okay, because every day is about making it better.

Even Steve Jobs, the master of perfection, shipped the first iPhone… the first iPhone is “incomplete” and “imperfect” when graded against the iPhone 16. 

That is to say product mode is not building in a silo, it’s aggressively making and shipping improvements.

Of course, the only way to evaluate the improvements is to have a user try them out… which requires some sales mode.

Sales Mode

As a good balance to me, Jack is more in sales mode.

Feedback, while valuable, is oftentimes an objection to be overcome. After all, the best way to validate that you’re building something worth building is to get people to use it and then get them to pay for it. 

For clarification, this is certainly not “shill” mode or “sell something that doesn’t work” mode. Go back to my definition of sales and closing. While you want to “close” by trading the value your product or service creates for money, you can still “close” by trading for a user’s time or a testimonial.

In that sense, every time you book a first meeting or a follow up meeting, you’ve made a little close. Of course, if you’re never able to turn the learnings from your users time into revenue, it’s irrelevant. Still, getting their time to begin with is part of the process. 

And, since we’ve yet to transition from time to money, Jack has had the wisdom to raise the stakes of our sales mode with the simple step of formalizing our pilot program into a two week trial punctuated with a paid subscription and sharing this with new users on the first call.

Zen

If you’re not even able to close someone by trading the use of your product for their time using it, then you won’t have access to the feedback needed to improve the product. Likewise, if you’re unable to use the feedback to make the product more obviously valuable, you’ll have a much harder time selling it yourself. 

In a startup, the two notions depend on one another. You need to be doing both at the same time.

It’s easy to create a false deadlock when you know the product needs to be better and the product needs to be sold. The product can be incomplete and also sellable at the same time, it’s not either or. And if you’re still working on selling it for money, you at the least need to be selling it for a user’s time. 

Like a cat having sharp, retractable claws and a soothing purr, apparently antithetical ideas are more reconcilable than we might think. But, nuanced truth is itself hard to sell, especially in our short attention span information era.

For fun, I’ll leave you with a list of other false conflicts:

• “Work as much as possible”  & “Only do things that will move the needle”

• “Don’t waste time on social media” & “Use social media to market & sell”

• “Drake has questionable relationships with women” & “Pop Style goes hard”

• “Listen to users” & “People don't actually know what they want”

• “Be disciplined in all that you do” & “Know when to sacrifice habit to seize an opportunity”

In an effort to keep these posts more concise, I removed a whole section on cats.

The things we do in the name of improvement.

Live Deeply,