The Fatal Mistake Startups Keep Selling
As many of my fellow tech founders, I am obsessed with technology and its unrelenting impact on our collective future. This is a common sentiment that I notice leads to a dire mistake in actualizing our company missions and seeing our visions fully realized — commercially that is.
The mistake is this: we get stuck selling the “how” instead of the “why.”
It’s analogous to a novice [or ignorant] gift giver — or simply one whose “love language” doesn’t rank gift giving at the top of the list. We all know the person I’m referencing: giving others gifts they want or love instead of a gift tailored to the recipient. I’ll go ahead and be the first to confess; once I gave my whole family google cardboards for Xmas the year they came out, and I still can’t resist stockpiling Japanese or Korean skincare products every time I go to Asia to hand out to all my friends — always insistent they are the best for everyone.
Selling Transmute in the first year of infancy was no different. To put it simply, I kept trying to sell the tech I was in love with. Blockchain this. Decentralization and data privacy that. Open source code? We’ve got it. Dev tools and frameworks? Check. Demos? Look at how active our Github repos are. We are so effing proud of our tech…and to be clear, I am extremely proud of the level of technical acumen and rigor we have secured within our team at Transmute. And sound technology, especially rational approaches to stuff on the bleeding edge rife with only the sexiest buzzwords, like blockchain, almost always gets you in the door. But it never closes deals.
I’ve found this sentiment to be particularly pervasive in emerging areas like blockchain where we all dove down the rabbit hole precisely because of the limitless possibilities of the tech; we all intuited this powerful hammer and began the search for nails. Once I became aware of this pervasive bad habit, I intentionally took time to dig into why we do it and how to fix it.
To further contextualize, I’ll share one of my cringiest moments to date as a start-up CEO — the day I realized we fell prey to the habit of pitching the “how” instead of the “why.” It was towards the end of our first year in business [during our Techstars program], and I’d secured a live pitch to exactly the right decision makers at Exxon Mobil’s headquarters in Houston, TX. Orie [my Co-Founder and Transmute’s CTO] and I strategized all week on which parts of the tech to show them and which parts to demo live versus build into a deck; we even naively outlined the limitless options for how the technology might be applied in their business.
And Exxon was relatively impressed and forthcoming with their prior work in the space. But because of our heavy focus on showing off our technology, we didn’t have crisp answers to the most important questions: what can this technology do to solve their specific business problems and why should they buy it?
We didn’t realize this error immediately, but fortunately, Techstars is a safe space for pinpointing mistakes like this one. After committing a few more similar sales pitch mistakes and hearing crickets for follow up from these enterprises, we sensed a problem. We were both voicing the issue to mentors, advisors and each other. The discovery: we needed to focus first on customer pain points and priorities [the “why”] as a foundation for the product we were selling.
For the purposes of this post, I’ll spare you the details on finding a product manager to lead the definition of the “what” and a process for pinpointing the “why” as the common denominator across our customer funnel. [Look out for future posts from our product team breaking down this process in granularity!]
But indeed, we did just that, and I am proud to share the results summarized in this graphic:
You can see the “why” stated clearly across the top. Businesses should care about user-centric identity because maximum ecosystem visibility and full integration [securely and compliantly] is paramount to:
a) providing the most value and best experience to your users.
b) remaining relevant and competitive in your market.
c) surviving the transition to more open network business models.
Below this, you can see the core features of our product: the “what.”
And finally, given the least amount of space, is the “how,” which simply comprehends the technologies we use to power a product that solves real business problems.
Forcing ourselves to switch both the storytelling and product decision framework from “how — what — why” (leading with a solution) to “why — what — how” (leading with value) has significantly improved our sales process as well as our product roadmap. It holds us accountable for creating real value for our customers.
I hope this framework helps your team avoid this sneaky bad habit our technology obsession drives us towards, and instead, relieves you to focus on what matters: solving your customers’ problems.
