The Smaller Bang

You’ve been brewing a change. Something, soon, will have to be different, because this time, it’s too much.

If you take a snapshot of your emotional state at this moment, it’s likely you’re feeling annoyed, some anxiety, or maybe you’re energized to take a leap. You might do nothing now, but if the problem persists, you’ll be thinking: “I need to take a bigger leap”.

Take note. Take note of that feeling, because your customers, they go through the same story arc, and your job with them, as it is your job with yourself, is to guide both to take a decisive step forward.

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The “Big Bang”, a concept borrowed from astrophysics, is used in change management. It’s the opposite of a gradual transition away from the old ways. Its appeal is that you get to make a clean cut. But most change initiatives, in big firms and an in small firms, can’t pull off the Big Bang. It’s risky, but it’s also mostly improbable.

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Say your struggle is with the nature of freelancing. You’d rather work on a product, but freelancing gets you stuck with multiple clients, multiple commitments, multiple deadlines.

“I should just go all in on my product”.

The thing is that that might not work. You’d like to go all in, you think your options with freelancing are running out, that you just can’t make freelancing work. Now you’re stuck in either/or thinking: either I get a job, or I make this product idea work. Or else.

That’s Big Bang thinking.

The good news is that your customers, well they have struggles where they think Big Bang thoughts just like that one.

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The alternative is to recognize that you’re in a special moment of transition. Your big ideas and your either/or thinking and your insistence on breaking from the past, those are all information. Your customer, who has big feelings from time to time too, will come to your product’s or your service’s home page with those feelings. And they’ll be surprised if you mirror back those feelings to them.

Your landing page can go something like this:

“You’ve been having this thought for the past few weeks: enough with this old piece of software. It’s been causing you to lose time, waste your team’s efforts, and you’re thinking of going for the big upgrade project you’ve been putting off. But that’ll be costly too, and it’ll take you so much time. Time that you and your team don’t have.”

See what we’re doing here? Your own brewing for change has given you empathy. Words, examples, anecdotes, a relatable story. You can write a teaser like that one, from memory, because you’ve been there.

If you do it well, you can create just the right-sized product or service to help people like that customer’s situation that you just described. And you can help them make a smaller, more effective jump forward, away from the old, toward the new. You’re going to help them make progress, because you’ll catch them wanting a big impossible bang, and you’ll be there suggesting a smaller bang. And it’s probably going to be a productized freelancing package, to which your customer will be ecstatic to learn about, wishing you had been there sooner.

A struggle is an awful thing to waste.