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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.