The Unanswerable Question
How to prove yourself and your product
In the startup world, there’s never a shortage of questions to answer in conversation. But sitting across from a potential investor or teammate, you basically need to answer just five, whether they ask them or not:
- Is there a big problem that needs to be solved?
- Are there a lot of people that have that problem?
- Is there a good way to solve it?
- By solving it, is there money to be made?
- Are you capable of creating that solution and a healthy business that makes money?
If you’ve ever pitched an idea to investors, you know the anguish spent on crafting those four answers into a surgically-precise deck and running it over, and over, and over again. There have even been a lot of amazing changes lately with the first four, with everything like Lean Startup, Effectuation, Design Thinking, etc. But no matter how silver-tongued you are, there’s always that one question that neither you nor they can answer: Can you do it?
Of course you have your answer. You wouldn’t be pitching if you didn’t, but you are the first person you sold that answer to and your only hope is that you aren’t the last. Is there a better way than selling snake oil? Prove it.
That’s what most savvy investors require. There’s no reason to roll the dice on a dream. Prove that this is important, prove that people care, and prove that you can do it. And this is where we shift.
Show ’em what you’re made of
The natural way to respond to this demand is to make something, no matter how much it sucks. Make a real product at a minimal cost of time and money, and show that it’s viable. Unfortunately, what actually happens almost every time is that you prove that you can make something that kind of works but is mostly an ugly baby that only a founder could love. It’s a mess of bad design, buggy functionality, and lots of verbal asterisks about what it will do (that is, if you convince someone to help you). It’s also something that if you do get the chance to make what you’ve really promised, you’ll (hopefully) throw it away.
The reason for a shift and why this just doesn’t work is because of the nature of the question it’s trying to answer. “Can you do it” is an emotional question, not a rational one like the first four. It’s one of fear and risk-aversion, because the road ahead is by definition unknown, and the uncertainty looming ahead is changing whether we know it or not.
What we used to be most unsure of was the herculean task of writing complex code from scratch to get a computer to do something, anything really. But as time has gone on, some coding has started to look more like assembling Legos rather than inventing them.
So what has changed, what are we scared of now? Whether we know it or not, it’s the question “can we make something that people love?” We live in noisy times, and our only hope to cut through is by showing people what we can do for them, not just what we did.
Like giving a great gift
The shift? Prove first that you know how to create something that people love, not just something that doesn’t break as long as no one touches it.
The best answer we’ve found is design. Remember, this final question that we’re answering is emotional and requires an emotional answer. To not just selfishly create out of the outpouring of your own creativity and actually design something to be cherished by an audience, you have to build massive amounts of empathy for your recipient before the job is done.
The creative process also has one other trick up its sleeve. As a process built on rough drafts and sketches, we don’t have to stop at minimally viable design, but can chase the best damn design we can muster. If you’re not a designer, find someone who can shock you, not just follow your lead. It’s worth it, it works.
At the end of your pitch when you have to answer that fifth question, you also get to ask your own to anyone who’s support you’re trying to muster. But it’s a question that the “proof” you choose to show begs the answer to. You’ll either ask:
Do you want to make this suck less?
or
Do you want to bring this to life?
Worth a clap? We hope so, but if not let us know why below in the comments
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