New YouTube channel: The same ideas from the newsletter, in short video form.
Watch on YouTubeJulie started out learning a new skill. She made herself a commitment: “practice until you’re good”. One day, she got the news. She had lost her job.
Phillip chose to part ways with the past. He made a list: from now on, less of these things I don’t like, more of these things that I like. There was a shuffle at his client’s organization and his main contact left.
When you’re tempted to go head-to-head with an existing product, consider creating a sliver of the product.
Consider that generally, a buyer wants progress on common pursuits: to be seen, to be promoted, to be protected, to be inspired, to be found, to be prosperous, to look good, to stay relevant, to reduce headache, to avoid disaster, to avoid shame.
If you’re trying to tell the truth in your marketing, if you’re trying to appeal to truthfulness with what you sell, it helps to know what you’re up against. It’s going to be a tough sell.
There’s a feeling that every conversation should be, in some sense, an opportunity to do marketing about your product.
You know that turning 100% of your conversations into a sales conversation is too much, and will definitely turn people off.
They say you should create a product for a very specific pain “point”.
But maybe you should create a product for various pains, instead.
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Here’s a simple formula for charting buying momentum, in a potential buyer:
Struggle + Attraction > Anxieties + Default Options.
Depend on a project to work at all costs, or treat it as a side-project.
Those are two ends of a work ethic regime, so let’s look at the consequences of this thinking. Let’s look at whether there’s merit to keeping a lighter touch on our work.
For those on board with doing things right…
For those struggling through a difficult time…
Here are a few elements of a strategy that I use. Things that will always be on the right side of being right, even when things get difficult.
You could build one product. A good one, helping a specific struggle, and helping your buyer progress to a better version of the future. Your buyer would be making a hop. Deciding that today, they’re going to jump on the opportunity to make the future better, with your product. They’ll be happy, and they’ll tell others.
“Embrace constraints”. It’s a principle that comes from the design world, and it says this:
Constraints are helpful. Constraints force to you get clear on what matters, to imagine your way out of your struggle, to get better ideas, to innovate.
“I’ve never done this before.”
There are ways to be good at starting something you’ve never done before, at being a beginner again, at facing that place of discomfort as an adult.
You could build a product that solves a problem. Charge a price, make it do the job, make it good.
But while you’re at it, you could consider making it a bit of a gift.
The antidote to an influencer is a group.
There’s a logic that goes something like this:
It’s better to be logical than to be fuzzy with feelings and intuition.
Because everyone online has a marketing angle, we must only side with hard proofs.
Surely there’s good reason to default to skepticism, to be empirical.
You’re faced with an impasse in your learning, and you’re up against a preference problem.
Others do learning a certain way, and you don’t learn the way they do.
So imagine there are a hundred ways to go about learning some material, whether by reading a book or by some other method.
A few years ago, the following hypothetical would have been a fantasy.
“What if you could take your job, and automate what you do so that most of the work is done ten times faster.”
Responding to a request for your involvement, you can say ‘yes’, you can say ‘no’.
To be professional, courteous and considerate, there’s a way to say ‘yes’, and there’s a way to say ‘no’.
You could find yourself out of a job by adding a ton of efficiency. If you automate everything, maybe you won’t be needed anymore. Maybe you won’t enjoy what’s left to do anyway.
Being in business has little to do with school. You need to learn the value of experimentation, to find answers that aren’t on the test, to work outside other people’s expectations. But you’re not completely ready, and you haven’t learned all those yet.
You can now build your ideas faster than ever.
You can do something that will get you a result quick.
You can automate and delegate and make the difficult disappear.
You can work on something responsible. Keep a promise you made, serve the moment that’s in front of you, do the work that needs to get done. That’s the professional thing to do.
Because advice stated in the negative is more robust than advice stated in the positive, here are five piece of inverse advice for navigating any large offshoring event, like the one we’re currently going through with AI-assisted work.
Unlike the act of building a tangible thing, the act of marketing is indirect.
Indirect feedback loops. You don’t see the result right away.
Indirect skills you need to learn. You can’t reduce to a single skill.
Here’s a list of moments when buyers create their own momentum for change. They start the process, they push away other concerns, they make change a priority.
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The agency owner just hired employee number five, and now communication becomes a challenge.
You agree, of course, that being generous is an essential part of life and business. You’re here because you want to extend your prosperity to others, by serving them and their progress.
“Look what we can now produce!”
“Finally, all our constraints have been removed!”
“Engineers have done it again.”
In the story of progress, there’s no denying it. Engineering made the difference. Applied theory, put to practice, maths and physics met imagination and possibility. Engineering Euphoria.
“Surely, now is the time to focus on efficiency.”
“Everyone is hurrying to take advantage of the new tools. I must catch up.”
“Since I’ve been getting more efficient, I’m making progress.”
Search engines gave us top web page results. For every key phrase, a top hit. No use going down the list, the answer’s surely in the first link.
World knowledge became compressed. All of a sudden, there is no doubt. The standard answer created a groove, and all similar answers tended to fall into the new groove. World Wide Standards.
What is demand, exactly? Let’s look at a couple possibilities.
You could imagine demand as being the presence of a pain point.
“This part of the process is a real annoyance.”
There comes a point when walls just start moving.
Here’s a story about personal progress:
We start off on a path, learning new skills, trying things out, making discoveries.
Then, we get some adversity, and things get messy.
We overcome this one trial, and then another one after that.
But then, we hit a wall. And the wall doesn’t budge.
The social animal that we are has benefited from mimicry. Over millennia, groups whose members imitated their peers formed stronger bonds and survived. We are the ones whose parents imitated others, and had kids.
Have you asked a question?
A mind stuck, unable to progress, might have a bunch of questions that need answered. Questions like “what are my options?” and “why is this happening right now?”. “What is wrong?”
Say you enter a crowded product space. All the existing products, they all have the features that buyers expect.
And say this type of product is meant to be bought by a manager, and used by a team.
Before an individual starts moving, they’ll get to a point where internally, they say “enough is enough”. They’re ready to make progress, to move away from a “from”, and toward a “to”, a point where things are different, in the distance.
When you think you’re just about out of ideas…
When you’re judging the result before you even start…
When we’re holding up our best work because we’re not sure it’ll be understood…
When the Western world discovered it could hire people in India for doing knowledge work, companies quickly wanted to copy the strategy.
In the name of efficiency. In the name of cost-savings. Work around the clock.
You came to software development for the immediate feedback. The tests pass, you’re done.
You came to the internet for the large village feel. Your people follow you, you post, and you get likes.
You spot a user on social media telling us they don’t like this piece of software they use.
Is there a product here?
You hear of another person making an effort to piece stuff together, trying to make something work, and then something comes to destabilize their plan. Their pieced-together options won’t cut it no more.
To some of you, who have more ideas than you can manage, it might feel like being on a runaway train.
And to some of you, who are yearning for just having some ideas to work on, it might feel like no train is worth taking.
Let’s say your luck is dependent on your circumstances. That’s all right, because you exercise trust, trusting that things will go in your favour.
Let’s say your luck benefits from your efforts in a specific new area of development. That might be all right, because surely you’ll get side benefits from applying effort. You never know what you’ll get.
If you have doubts, but you made a promise, you need to keep the promise regardless.
This is being professional.
If you have doubts, you haven’t made a promise yet, but you have decided you would do something scary, then you’re in luck.
The “good guy” is underrated.
It used to be that for you the stereotypes of employee and founder seemed polar. Employees are nice and deferential, founders are savvy and bold. But you no longer fall in either.
There’s a pattern that you find everywhere.
You find it in engineering.
You find it in design.
You find it in relationships.
You find it in personal development.
So you want to be creatively independent.
Before you can say you’ll have made it, you’ll have…
Found a way to earn a living from your preferred craft.
That’s the goal. But what do you need to do before you can say you’ll “made a living from your preferred craft”?
You could offer an hourly rate.
While you’re at it, you could offer a part-time week block instead, for a price.
While you’re at it, you could offer both, so they can choose.
A price of $50 is a shock to those who were expecting $25.
A price of $1,000 is a shock to those who were expecting $200.
A price of $20k is a shock to those who were expecting $4k.
Before, you saw the current project with the eyes of possibility. “There will be so many options to choose from. We’ll make it work.”
Now, the project hit a wall, a boundary, and you see your options in the stark contrast of two options. To continue, or to leave. A binary, blocking your progress.
There’s a cost to being creative. Inside you, there’s an urge to think up an original thought, to invent a new thing, to express freely.
There’s a cost to creating a real thing too. Months of work, years maybe, and what will you get in return?
If a person pays you with money, for your product, then you know you’ve made a product that solves a problem. Money speaks. “This solves my problem.”
If a person pays you with money, and tells their friends about it, then you know you’ve made a product that solves two problems. Reputation speaks too. “By associating myself to this product, or by helping those who seek my recommendations, I spend my reputation, and I hope to expand it too.”
You have to produce a large amount of revenue by the end of the month, or else.
A client just sent back a large list of changes, just before the deadline.
An enormous bill came in from the cloud hosting company.
It would be a shame if you didn’t tell others about what you’re building.
It would also be a shame if you told others when it’s not the right time.
Let’s explore this idea that adding features helps you sell a product.
Pretend for a minute that you’re a buyer. You’re trying to move away from a situation you dislike, and you’re hoping in some way to land way over there, where you have this bigger aspiration. You’re open to making a purchase, to move away from a ‘from’, and toward a ‘to’.
There’s a word that just doesn’t work with goals. It makes the goal feel small, timid, like there’s a piece missing.
That word is “just”.
“I just want to grow my product.”
“I just want to make sure I have clients.”
When I was looking to make a move, earlier in my career, I had learned of a technique and a question.
The technique is to find someone within the organization you’re interested in joining and to call them. The purpose of the call is to find out what it’s like to work at this organization, the culture, the people, and most importantly, to find out the way to get in.
It’s not the right time to sell right now. Probably not.
It’s not the right time if the buyer is just starting to look into options.
It’s not the right time if the buyer is feeling the market for solutions.
Every marketing tactic is not built the same.
There are marketing approaches which will take up a lot of your time for little impact. Others will take up a lot of your money to be in front of just the right people. And other approaches are just not going to be something you’re comfortable pulling off.
The price of your product might be low, but it won’t sell.
The size of your product might be small, but that won’t make it any more appealing.
The impact of your product might be large, but even if the person isn’t ready yet, the timing isn’t right, you won’t even make that sale.
“Too much work” is like “too expensive”, and it’s like “too complicated”. It’s an objection in buying your offering (it will take too much work to implement what you’re offering), and you have three options.
The instinct to preserve isn’t the enemy, as if progress itself was a universal ill. No. Everyone wants progress. But there are good, legitimate reasons why people resist invitations to adopt a solution.
Maybe aim to spend more.
You’ve been running a lean operation, working diligently on your profit margin. You don’t charge too much, you don’t spend too much either, and so you’ve made it work.
For the sake of staying agile and fit (against the environment), you know that as a software writer working in a fast-evolving industry, you best reduce the size of your tech stack. Fewer dependencies, fewer components, fewer systems. You want to avoid being brittle, exposed, immobile.
When you were beginning, and you didn’t have a network of industry friends like the product people we know, you had ideas you couldn’t tell anyone about.
When you were beginning, and you didn’t know how to build what you could dream up, you had a list of features and apps and services you could build, if only you knew how.
When you’re an expert, you have confidence in your abilities, earned through practice and skill.
When you’re an expert, you don’t think twice to figure out the best way forward, you have an intuitive sense, at the very least about which models apply to the situation.
If you want to develop a muscle, you need to apply tension. Too much of it, and you will hurt yourself. Too little tension, and you won’t build the muscle at all.
When you’re doing something different than the rest of your peers, and you feel like you’re opposing.
When you’re sticking to an unconventional career, like freelancing, when so many others are seeking the comfort of certainty.
When you’re betting months on a losing proposition that you think will turn around.
“All I want, is to make you look good in your job.”
When you’re an employee in an organization, you might not be able to get to win-win agreements. You won’t be able to negotiate service offerings or sell products to your co-workers or up the hierarchy. But you can help others make progress.
A sales call you’re going to make in a few minutes.
A tough conversation with a teammate.
An interview you’ll be making for a podcast.
The launch of a new thing.
There’s a special category of buyers that you can avoid.
The defender comes under many personas. The manager that’s incentivized to only preserve. The high-status, well-known individual, trying to avoid scandal. The struggling person that’s stuck in limiting beliefs. The leader with a scarcity mindset.
The consequence of a changing market is that people are in motion, and some are ready to buy. People who want progress.
We’re looking to spot their energy, their momentum, away from a situation that can no longer work. To spot their “enough is enough” moment. “I’m ready for something else now”.
You’ve heard the idea of being goal-oriented. It helps to have a goal, because it focuses your intentions, and removes your natural barriers to progress.
So let’s explore that a bit.
They say that people buy things rationally, but that’s only half true.
They say that reason alone can help you make good decisions, but that’s only half true too.
The hustler has been stealing the show.
When times are good, and there’s plenty of work to go around, you’ll be tempted to not ask too many questions of new leads, and certainly not to ask questions about your current clients. When times are good, it’s time to work.
Precision, truth, and honesty might make it hard for you to recommend a product, or a person, to someone else.
Some people hesitate to recommend because there’s a risk that it will tarnish their own reputation, as if a recommendation is a promise you make, personally, for the performance of someone else.
The entrepreneur you follow online is killing it.
The content creator you watch has been killing it too.
One of your former clients has been killing it.
And maybe you want to be killing it too.
Selling is about convincing, and convincing is dishonest.
Selling is about deception.
Selling requires ignoring the truth about the product.
Selling is about adding appeal to something that’s not necessarily a good match.
Randomness has been part of biology since, well, the beginning. Our senses became sharper from the risk of startling predators. Muscles need to be torn to be built. Bones need variations in stressors to remain strong. A tree without wind doesn’t develop its stress fibres. A bit of variability will beat steady repetition during recovery.
“Maybe I can find a dev that’ll be open to reducing their fees just for us.”
“I’ll be able to reassurance the team if I can stabilize the workload and the turnover for a bit.”
“The CEO is asking me about deadlines, and I want to set expectations.”
If you pay careful attention to your personal systems, you’ll notice that your intentions start as wishes, until you make promises, and then until you start keeping them, and then, you look at your personal systems a little differently.
You could make your product be the straight-forward product that it is. A piece of software, a physical product, an online course.
While you’re at it, you can make three other products, one further in the direction of the product, and two more in the direction of the buyer. You’d do that, of course, to help your main product sell.
You know when they say you should take pause, take stock of your accomplishments, and appreciate where life has taken you?
The entrepreneur culture is so driven to be… driven. More exertion, more effort, an obsession with focus and harshness. It’s an option.
Most of us have the wrong relationship with our doubts.
When you see your doubt as a defect to be removed…
When you see someone who is confident and you wallow in comparison…
When you see your intuition as flawed and inadequate…
From this point on, would you do something just for the money?
Say you’re now doing your best work, and someone gave you an opportunity to do something that pays well, but you’re not sure where it’s going to go from there.
As the person marketing your project, you might be comparing your approach to others who talk like this:
“This is the best thing in the world. Trust me, you’ll love it.”
“Are you kidding me? This stuff is made in-house, the best of the best.”
“You won’t believe it when I tell you how good it is.”
We’ve got some work to do with our relationships. A relation, an association with two sides, yours and the other party’s, can be in need of an upgrade.
You can upgrade it, the other person can upgrade it.
You hesitate to announce a discount on your product. You’re debating this when it’s discount season, you’re debating this when sales are low.
You hesitate because a discount cheapens the perception of your brand. It attracts the wrong kind of customer. It might seem desperate.
Too few words, and you sound transactional.
Too many words, and you sound distracted.
If the words are too big, you lose attention.
If the words aren’t big enough, you sound like sound bites.
When you’re giving your guarantee, there are downsides, but many more upsides.
When you’re requiring a guarantee, however, then there are mostly downsides and only few upsides.
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When you’re self-employed, you offer guarantees, and you stake your reputation on honouring them. There are overall few guarantees in your line of work, except the ones you offer and honour. But, honour them often and without fail, and pretty soon, you’ll get to new heights.
Maybe you launched an online course, and it hasn’t sold that much.
Maybe you tried freelancing for a bit, and it hasn’t been easy getting clients.
Maybe the SaaS you’re building isn’t going to grow organically either.
Anybody can draw. That was the claim of the book Drawing with the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. The part about the brain’s left side being more categorical, and the right more artistic, that part’s probably a myth. But the book still had a point: learning how to draw is less about learning how to draw specific shapes, and it’s more about drawing the shapes (and the shades, and the colors) that you see. Drawing is about seeing.
Imagine trying a marketing tactic that you haven’t seen people use.
Imagine offering a new client something different than what they asked for, risking getting rejected, because you think you’ve read their deeper motivation.
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”.
There are a bunch of approaches to avoid when launching a new project. You don’t want to be silent, you don’t want to be insecure, you certainly don’t want to beg.
When you’re really good at your craft, you “have an edge”.
When you’ve achieved mastery and all your tools are at the edge of your fingers.
When you’re well-steeped in a problem, you understand all of the edge cases.
If you talk to a buyer when they’re ending a run, you’re too late, they’re just about done.
If you talk to a buyer when they’re in the middle of a run, you’re too late, they’re in the thick of their work.
Previously, you have been tolerant of your own difficulties with sales, but intolerant of your chops with coding.
Tolerant of being on the side of employment, but intolerant of not having interesting challenges in what you’re building.
Here’s a story of someone wanting progress.
A freelance designer feels like their craft is changing too fast. All of a sudden, the crowd is moving to use new tools, and new practices.
Somebody might give you a compliment, which is free, but if your self-image isn’t great, you won’t receive the compliment. But working on your self-image is not free, it bears a huge cost. A compliment, for some, is far from free.
Every new year, I can expect a slow period in my freelancing work. January and February end up being a great time for personal projects. Usually, the slowdown is short. Nothing to be feared.
“If it doesn’t make money, it’s not a product, it’s a project.”
“You have to be ready for some gruelling months with a slow climb.”
“Build it and they will come, that doesn’t work. You have to dedicate half your time, maybe more, to marketing.”
There’s a way to prepare for a scary sales conversation that resembles the world of user interface (UI) design.
Before UI designers can know whether a screen will work for their preferred users, they’ll navigate their choices, they’ll create prototypes, and then they’ll iterate.
It seems that without conviction, nothing would ever get done.
With conviction, though, you might overdo, underdo, or do the wrong thing entirely.
“I’m convinced that with more efforts, I’ll get more sales.” Maybe. Maybe you should not depend on those sales and put your effort somewhere else. The sales will be a side-effect.
When a person starts following you online, it might not be a good time to try to sell your product.
When a person asks you a question on your online forum, it might not be a good time to try to sell your product.
There are plenty of generalist software devs on the market. And we’re told, that’s not such a great idea.
“You should specialize. You should clarify your positioning.”
And so these software devs start to specialize. “I specialize in domain modelling.”
The culture of business comes with some strong, polarizing beliefs.
“You must maximize your revenue, any way you can.”
“It’s a game, there are winners and there are losers.”
“Attention spans are at the lowest they’ve ever been.”
“It’s a cut-throat market.”
“You should specialize.”
“No. You should generalize.”
You can sell a $59 product, but if you depend on it for your livelihood, you’ll need to sell a lot of them each month.
You can sell a $5,999 product or service package, and maybe you can sell one or two per month and you meet your minimums.
There’s a common belief that many people have about learning. It might be common, but still, it’s invisible.
It goes like this: “To learn is to pile on more learning on top of the old learning.” Put differently: “Learning is an additive process.”
To visualize what happens when someone buys a product for the first time, it helps to think of someone making a hop.
There was a before, the “before” side of the hop. And there was an after, the “after” side of the hop.
The thing about a brain paralyzed by thoughts is that it is stuck in beliefs. And one belief surely stands out among others:
“I am my thoughts.”
The thing about a belief like that, is that it is completely invisible to you. It lies below the surface. It’s like a lens that colours your vision, like a pink-coloured lens or a green-coloured lens, and you don’t know that your perception is changed by that belief. That is, until you shed light on the lens, and you take it out or swap it for a better one.
The white sticky tape doesn’t look like the drill bit.
The massage oil doesn’t look like the bottle of wine.
The expensive pen doesn’t look like the metal watch band.
Starting something new, for me, has always meant being comfortable with the number zero.
Zero new subscribers to the mailing list.
Zero new followers.
Zero retweets.
Zero sales.
The first zero you get is expected. The second zero feels wrong. And the tenth you get is bad news. You will get a zero that you categorize as “the worst”.
When putting together a freelancing service, or a consulting offering, you can offer different options, and each option can be a package of value. Let’s define a few of the ways your clients might define value.
Say you’re launching a new piece of software. You’re thinking of all the quality variables you can optimize for.
You optimize for the quality of the visuals, the edge cases, the robustness to a variety of uses. It should be like this, it should do that. It has to accommodate users like these. It has to have more features.
The other day on Twitter, a guy mentioned that he had trouble with overthink, that his mind was often on overdrive.
I replied. I said that often you think you should think less, but instead I think we should focus on thinking better.
Today’s attention spans are short.
Shortest they’ve ever been.
So you better make your point.
Better keep it short.
A little like these paragraphs.
These short paragraphs don’t feel too good, don’t they? Something feels off. Is it that they’re too short? Curious, because when we read poetry, we’re used to shorter lines. But those lines don’t rhyme, that must be it. Maybe. How about this: those lines feel manufactured, trying to make a point, and your mind is distracted by that effort. Whatever the reason, your mind noticed the flaw. You should keep things short, but not like this.
You can be uncertain about a project. You can be uncertain on the details of the future of a product’s success. You can be uncertain about the side-effects of your business decisions.
If you want to build a software product like everyone else, make a landing page, show features, show the benefits, maybe highlight the outcome.
But if you want to go beyond, you can go in these two directions:
Being a beginner at anything feels about the same: you feel like you don’t master any of the important aspects, you feel like you’re out of your depth, you feel like somebody has the truth, surely not you.
A home owner bought something completely unexpected, something they weren’t thinking about buying even a week ago. While they had been spending weeks looking at the market for bigger houses, they bought two pairs of high-quality headphones to watch TV late at night.
This article contains spoilers.
BBC’s modern re-telling of Sherlock Holmes had me hooked. Here we had Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Watson (Martin Freeman) meeting in the smartphone era. Instead of sending telegrams from Baker Street, Sherlock flung texts from London Black Cabs. He used social media to sway cases to his advantage, the Internet to do his research.
The car salesman. The type of salesman I told myself I’d never turn into. The type that uses pressure and misdirection to make every sale. Aggressive. Determined. Sleazy. The hustler.
A friend of mine, a software engineer, took a bit of a detour from his career path. After making a good buck from a stint at a large tech company, he decided he’d take up acting for a bit. Completely different mind exercise, and that was the point. He needed to explore new parts of himself.
We’re spoiled that we can learn from some top-notch productivity principles.
Here’s a list.
Getting Things Done by David Allen taught me about always identifying, in a project, the immediate next step.
“$99 a month! Whoa that’s expensive.”
“You find? But you’re going to make a few hundred more per month just by using this tool.”
“Yeah, maybe, but still, I’m going to have to pay this amount every month.”
To beat doubt, there’s little point in trying to create confidence.
That’s because you could say that doubt and confidence are two sides of the same coin. The coin of “results”. They both grow from prior conditions—you can manufacture neither.
If you’re creating something for others, there’s going to be a strong pull to publish only the best you can make.
That’s a bit of a mistake.
That’s because the best products are awful at many things. They’re awful at all the things they’re not meant to do. And they might only be good enough for the thing they’re built to do. And yet, they’re bought, and they’re used, and they’re raved about by the buyers who tell others.
