Desert the Valley of Death
Your odds of success are defined by the customer problem, not your solution.
Once Upon a Pitch Problem #21
“We are in Valley of Death,” said the entrepreneur. “How can I help?” I responded. For fifteen minutes that lasted ten months, I was bombarded with every detail of a super whiz bang invention, how only his company could create such technology, how the engineers worked 7/24 to make it, how many patents the invention produced, how “so and so” and “such and what” claimed the invention brilliant, and so on. Clearly, he was head over heels, out of his mind, gaga over the moon in love with the invention. I mean, buy the Tiffany ring, get on your knee to propose, tattoo it across your heart, going, going, gone in love with the idea. When he slowed down long enough to take a breath, I squeezed in, “Tell me about the customer.” The soliloquy started. The customers were too slow, incompetent, anti-innovation, status quo, and stupid to realize that the invention solved a problem they didn’t know they had. Also, the venture capitalists were idiots because they wouldn’t “give him money” and the government was staffed by decision makers that were “too young.” Luckily, he kept talking until our time was up.
Solutions
The Valley of Udûn. In this scenario, the Valley of Death is a fabricated notion that technical startups descend into a perilous valley with low cash for an expensive hardware build and only a mythical few come out of that valley with the funding needed to succeed. (This scenario excludes research and development companies that need tens to hundreds of millions in capital to even reach product-market match - that is a whole different problem.) A company in a healthy market with interested paying customers for validated product-market match will never enter this mythical Valley because value creation yields opportunities. For the other 75-94% of failed startups, depending on the research source, the “Economic Cliff of Resource Allocation” terminates non-commercial ideas with a resounding splat to stop the misuse of resources deployed to non-value creating endeavors. Simply put, the idea is a bust, you don’t have the needed customers that will pay you more than it costs you to make your solution, so wrap it up, and move on to the next economic activity. It’s a grave, not the Valley. Fundamentally, the size of the customer problem and how your solution solves that problem defines success potential and the path the enterprise will take to attack that opportunity. Spend your time in the Craggy Mountains of Customer Despair; without deep knowledge of the customer problem you are solving, you aren’t going anywhere.
“And every day . . ..” Rebranding startup failures to the Valley of Death shifts responsibility away from the entrepreneur to everyone else. Kvetching about the Valley of Death will never teach this entrepreneur the fundamental lesson that success is found in falling in love with the customer problem, not with the solution. The “every day” of your company story is the customer problem you are solving, it is not the solution. The customer problem is fixed and your solution only exists to solve it by being flexible and adaptive to address customer behavior, pricing, distribution models, OEM constraints, supply chains, etc. Falling in love with your solution is a short, uninteresting narrative where the customer problem prevails. Falling in love with the customer problem, though, is an epic journey requiring the hero to overcome obstacles and challenges and to use creativity and resources to iterate as many solutions as possible to vanquish the problem and reveal the next opportunity.
Startup sportsbook. At the Satellite Show in Washington DC, I look forward to walking through the ever growing Startup Pavilion to see all the new companies. Some booths are highly produced, others are two founders sitting on stools, all are eager to chat. When I approach a new booth and am asked, “Can I tell you what we make?” I respond, “I would love to hear about the customer problem you are solving.” Half the time, the response is a detailed and specific description of the agonizing bottleneck problem and how much money, time, personnel, and inefficiency is consumed by that problem. After listening, I, too, am now in pain and am rapt and anxious to hear the solution for this abysmal state of affairs. For the other half of the companies, my question hangs unanswered and instead, I am regaled with the pedigree of the founder who invented something very complicated to do some other thing even more difficult, no mention of a customer problem, no mention of a customer for that matter, and sometimes no mention of a problem at all. If Las Vegas had a betting line on which companies from the Startup Pavilion will survive and which will fade, I could make a killing. The customer problem is the heart of a commercial enterprise while an invention is a personal research calling. Both are winners, just of completely different games with unrelated goals; an enterprise is valued for solving the customer problem while a life purpose to invent is valued for the act of creating. Making a new invention, then looking around for a customer problem, while calling yourself a commercial enterprise, loses every game, every time.
What They Said
No one will do it for you. No one really wants to help you. Very few will inspire you. And even fewer will care about you. People care about themselves. Just like you do.
Salespeople (not you of course) tend to whine. Slow sales, unreturned calls, competition undercutting, the usual. The same things they’ve been whining about for a hundred years. If you want an insurance policy for success in the profession of selling, you better issue it to yourself, pay for it yourself, name yourself as the policy holder, and down at the bottom, name yourself the beneficiary. Then have the balls to sign the document, and make a commitment to yourself.
Don’t whine to me that your boss is a jerk. Get a new boss. Don’t whine to me that the customer won’t return your call. Study voicemail. Don’t whine to me that your company won’t give you a laptop. They sell them at the computer store. Go buy one.
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You have a responsibility to yourself to achieve. - Jeffrey Gitomer, Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness, How to Make Sales Forever, pages 34 - 35.
See You on the Track
Rafferty Jackson
Author The First Principles Pitch, startup storyteller, board member, advisor and investor. Once Upon a Pitch is a weekly newsletter looking at one business pitch problem and offering storytelling solutions to help solve that problem.