Finding answers by substracting non-answers.
Stripping bad habits.
Choosing what you don’t want more in your life.
A mental model “via negativa” is a way to set a strategy, find solutions and improve ones life. It can be used as a business tool to define the strategy as well as tool for personal life.
A mental model via negativa means improving by removing —a ‘negative’ way of improving one’s life. Instead of concentrating on what you do, the focus turns to what you don’t do.
This path has two main thrusts:
1) stripping bad habits and situations out of your life
2) avoiding bad habits/situations in the first place.
Source of wisdom: Adding to Your Life by Subtracting
My own experience
“We recognize when things go right, but fail to notice when something bad did not happen.” Brett & Kate McKay
I’m running a start-up providing fully automated expense management software.
Over 2 years we did not decide on which target group we were not going after which from perspective was a significant flaw. We were selling our service:
1) directly to private users in App Store and Google Play
2) to businesses
3) to accounting bureaus who distribute the service to their clients.
We didn’t dare/want to eliminate any of those target groups because we wanted to leave all options open and see which target group gets most traction. The strategy was “we’ll see”.
Hypotheses #1
We differentiate our service from competitors by outstanding user experience and automation — therefore our primary target group is a full-time business traveler who feel the pain of reporting expenses manually. They will download app from App Store, become super users and thereafter they will become ambassadors to sell our service internally in their company.
Reality:
Business travelers did not have power over their accountants. Even though business traveler’s salary was 4x bigger than accountants salary, the equation “save $10 000 for your business by automating expensing time for your most expensive employees” did not have enough influence. Accountants did not get any benefit by using our service, so they said no. Game over.
Hypotheses #2
We contact businesses directly, go all in and land on our first 100 clients. Those companies will create a wave of positive feedback and momentum which makes acquiring new clients easier and cheaper. We’ll hire badass seller and go all in. Meaning we call to CEOs that we have some kind of connection to and sell them the solution.
Reality:
We didn’t think through to whom specifically we will be selling our product. Is it CEO, CFO or accountant? In addition to finding out that our new hire had some rusty sales skills — he was expecting to manage sales people which he was planning to hire — it was also challenging to juggle between many decision-makers in one company. Automation of different business functions involves several decision makers in one company depending on what exactly will be automated. We did not expect that it was so complex and it led us to very time consuming and unsuccessful efforts in acquiring new business clients.
Hypotheses #3
Distribution is the key. Accountant is the king. Product must be sold as one package together with other accounting solutions. It is an accounting bureau that handles its clients and will distribute our solution.
Reality:
So far so good. But it took us 2 years and some million kroner to come here.
