The odds aren’t stacked against you
A founder at a conference dinner, a $2M product, and the one thing no marketing fix could touch
I told a founder at a conference dinner that none of his problems would go away if he didn't change his attitude.
"It sounds like the odds are stacked against you and that nothing you do is going to help," I said.
Fred (his name isn't really Fred, I changed it for the newsletter. Enjoy your story about Fred) pulled back and then he went quiet.
Here's the story:
A two-person company doing $2M a year
We’d sat down next to each other, traded the usual introductions, and then I asked why he was at the conference at all. His company was doing great, and it was just him and one other person. To which he replied "marketing is still a problem."
A softball invitation to a designer and marketer, naturally I started poking around.
His product is an email deliverability API. Developers drop it into their app so receipts and password resets land in the inbox and not the spam folder, and once it’s in, it disappears. That’s the best possible outcome for the tool and a strange problem for the business, because nobody thinks they need it until they need it. Somebody runs a quick search, finds it, integrates it, and it works. There are plenty of competitors doing something similar, so the real edge is that people like his.
And they do. Developers love it.
The problem is that developer isn’t the one who buys it.
Your lures are in the wrong water
The person with the credit card sits upstream. They don’t care how painful it is to integrate into a stack, and they couldn’t tell you what a deliverability API is. What they care about is what flows down from the tool to the P&L: why a business does this at all, and why his version is cheaper, more capable, and faster to set up than the other ones.
The developer’s problem is tactical: I need email deliverability handled.
The buyer’s problem is economic: I need the bottom line to go up.
He’s been throwing every lure downstream, where the small fish are, while the fish he actually wants are sitting upstream. You have to get other people to make the decision for you, and to play in that water you have to talk to the people above the person doing the work, even if the person doing the work is your biggest champion.
Worse, developers aren’t a renewable source of demand. Once one integrates the tool, they stop looking for it. They only come back if they switch jobs and have to set the same thing up somewhere new.
So I told him what I’d tell any company at that size: at $2M a year, you’re not a startup anymore. The move toward the non-technical side of the business is going to happen. The only question is whether you drive it.
“No one reads that”
Then I started asking who his customers actually were. What kinds of businesses, and was there a kind he liked or admired?
He didn’t have an answer. He mentioned a hobbyist running a newsletter for a bowling league and a couple of small nonprofits, and dismissed them in the same breath. Not enough of them, and he didn’t enjoy working with them.
Fine. So every time I floated a change to the website or the messaging, I got a version of the same response: no one reads that.
New headline for the buyer upstream? No one reads that.
A page for the finance side? No one reads that.
Every idea was shot down on its downside before anybody tested it, and I don’t think he heard himself doing it until I threw down the gloves and called out his pessimism.
It wasn’t the messaging. It wasn’t the product, and it wasn’t even the positioning, which I’d just spent twenty minutes taking apart. It was that he only ever looked at what could go wrong with an idea, and never once at what would happen if it worked.
You can’t run an experiment you’ve already decided will fail.
The diagnosis was never the bottleneck
I’ve thought about that dinner a lot since. I handed him what I believe was the right diagnosis, and it still didn’t matter, because the diagnosis had to get past a guy whose default setting was negativity.
Most founders stuck in a marketing rut aren’t short on strategy or ideas. Somebody has told them what to try, probably several somebodies. They’re just running every idea through a filter that only lets the downside through.
In short, nothing changes if... nothing changes.
— Zach
