Smart Startups
shouldn't fail for stupid reasons.
Too many good ideas fail.
My mom died too young of a cancer that my doctor friends say shouldn’t have killed her.
Ten years later I started working with a company that might have been able to save her life. But now I know she almost certainly would have ignored them if she’d come across them back then.
It’s not that my mom didn’t want to find people who could help her. It’s just that, like all of us, she was terrible about knowing what to notice and what to ignore. There’s just too much stuff out there.
And this is the fundamental problem for anyone offering anything new. Too many good ideas fail, not because they can’t create their new thing but because they can’t attract the attention of the people who can put their good idea to use, even if it would help them. Even if it might save their life.
This drives me crazy.
Since 2002 I’ve helped more than 60 companies and not-for-profits get the attention of the people who can put them to use. A lot of these make people’s lives better. Some have become big organizations. A few even save lives. When I can attract attention to worthwhile ideas, it feels to me like the reason why I’m on the planet.
Because smart startups shouldn’t fail for stupid reasons.
Mapping the unknown
Imagine you’re an entrepreneur. You just spent three years creating your new thing. It’s been at times exhausting, ultimately exhilarating. After all the trial and error of getting it to work, you have it. It’s ready.
This moment, as you’re about to bring your new thing into the world, is when you’re most likely to fail. And it comes as a cold shock.
After all the work of putting your thing together, you’ve done it. Here it is! The solution to the problem! And shockingly, no one cares. In fact, you can’t even get them to pay attention long enough to see what you have.
“But wait!” you want to say. “Just look at what this is, what it can do for you! If you would just take a minute to listen, you’ll see how this makes your life better! Just look!”
But they don’t. Why not? What’s wrong with them?
How to bring a new idea to market is the great challenge in introducing anything new, after the actual creation of the thing. Most companies fail within their first few years, and the #1 reason why is because they couldn’t find a market for what they do.
I know how to fix that.
Failure is the norm
The startup failure rate in 2019, the year before the pandemic, was 90%, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. Harvard Business School says that 75% of U.S. venture-backed businesses fail. 93% of the companies accepted by YCombinator fail, according to Paul Graham, the founder of YCombinator.
All these were companies that already had a product, that had managed to create what they set out to create. And they failed. Why?
While every founder of every startup understands the challenge of creating their new thing, most don’t appreciate that getting people to pause long enough to notice them is a completely separate, enormous task. And it requires a different mindset than the one they brought to the creation.
Engineer thinking vs brand thinking
Creating any new thing is a huge challenge, filled with obstacles. Anyone who’s ever done it knows how hard it is to make a new thing work, how many ways there are to get it wrong. So of course you put some effort into minimizing those risks.
The best way to make sure something works is to build it from things that worked before, and combine them in new ways.
“Creativity is just connecting things,” said Steve Jobs. “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it. They just saw something.”
Most innovation is seeing and building new combinations of things. As we combine things in new ways to make something new, it makes sense to begin with component parts that we can count on to work.
This is the engineer’s fundamental question:
Every new thing is built upon things that came before. And because every creator wants to minimize the risk of failure, they build upon a foundation of things that have been proven to work. The fewer unknown parts to contend with, the more likely the new thing will work.
This question — Will it work? — the question at the foundation of creating something new is the exact path to failure in attracting attention to your new thing.
Good engineer thinking — what makes it possible to make the new thing work — is the mindset that leads to failure in bringing your new thing to market.
Here’s how engineer thinking fails. When it comes time to take your new thing to market, it’s natural to apply the thinking that’s brought you this far, that led to the creation of your new thing.
You don’t even consider there might be a problem with this method. To many creators, it seems like the only logical way to think about anything.
You look around at other successful things, and then apply what seems to work. So as you bring your new thing to market, you obviously want to use what has worked for others: what kind of message, what design, what look and feel, what media to reach the customers you imagine.
And your new thing gets ignored.
Not evaluated and rejected. Just flat ignored. The people you’re thinking of as customers pay zero attention to your thing, for a simple reason: because that’s how people work.
We people, all of us, are hardwired to ignore what we’ve seen before.
The very thinking that guided you in creating your new thing — build upon what works — is exactly what guarantees people will ignore it now. It’s not that you’re doing it wrong. It’s that the kind of thinking that works so well to create your new thing is making it invisible to the people you want as customers.
The brander’s question
Getting people to pay attention to your new thing takes a different mindset, because you’re actually solving a different problem. Where the engineer’s question is “Will it work?”, the brander’s question is entirely different:
The solutions to these two questions are almost exact opposites. For the engineer, making it work is building upon what worked before. Others made something work, and their success is a good foundation for yours.
For the brander, getting anyone to care about your thing means distinguishing it from what else is out there. Where the engineer is happy to make it similar to what worked before, the goal of the brander is to make it different.
To succeed, you need to transition from engineer thinking to brand thinking.
Before we go further with this, let’s define that word “brand”, which has been randomly applied almost the point of uselessness.
“Brand” is the space you own inside people’s minds.
When I say “brand” here, I’m talking about something specific: brand is whatever people are thinking about your thing. Whatever is inside people’s heads that’s attached to your thing, that’s your brand. It’s not tangible, and it’s not what your thing actually does.
Your brand isn’t your logo or your name or your colors or anything about how it looks or sounds or smells, although all those can help build out the space inside people’s heads and give you a stronger hold in there.
Your brand is whatever people think about what you’ve got there.
So, if people think your thing is durable, that’s part of your brand. If they say your thing is smart, that’s part of your brand. If they have no thoughts, no opinion about your thing, then, no matter what you think about it or what you want others to think, you don’t have a brand.
The first step toward building your brand in the minds of your (future) customers is not “What do I want my brand to be?” The first step is getting them to notice it in the first place.
After creating your new thing, your biggest challenge is attracting attention to it.
As soon as we hear it, we know this is true, based upon our own experience. We are bombarded by messages from other brands trying to get our attention. Before the internet happened it was estimated there were something like 3,000 messages per day aimed at each one of us. Now the estimate is 30,000. That’s messages, per day, aimed at you, me, and everyone we know with a screen.
How many new brand messages do you remember from today? Any? Of course we all walk around with deflector shields on at all times, because we are just not wired to take in that much new information.
The challenge for those of us who bring new ideas to the world is that the same hard truth applies to our brand, even for the people we think of as our obvious customers. Even if it could save their lives.
Why is it so hard?
It’s not that they’re trying to be rude. When we’re honest with ourselves, it’s not difficult to imagine why everyone is ignoring us.
They are all doing something else. Whatever the problem you can solve for them, exactly none of them are doing nothing about it now. Everyone has some (maybe inadequate) solution, and they’re not interested in hearing other ideas.
They’re buried by 30,000 other messages.
They’ve got other things to do. Everyone has a life. They’ve got planes to catch and bills to pay, kids to pick up, reports to write, a thousand things.
They assume you’re lying. This is the sad, dark truth of trying to get anyone to pay attention to your thing. You’re now one of 30,000 people trying to get people to notice them. The overwhelming majority of those 30,000 are a waste of time. What makes you any different?
The good news is that this is a solvable problem.
There is a system to attracting attention. I know it works, because I’ve been refining it over more than 20 years of working with startups, and have used it to help get more than 60 startups off the ground so far, create new divisions of successful companies, and even to resurrect dying brands.
Good ideas shouldn’t fail for dumb reasons.
It’s hard to create something new. The overwhelming majority of inventors and innovators fail before they succeed. Pretty much everything in our lives is the result of trial and error and ultimately, something that works. (If you’re interested in the history of new ideas, How Innovation Works by Matt Ridley is a terrific compilation of innovators’ stories).
Failing to create a workable new thing is a good reason to fail. Failing to attract the attention of people who can put that worthwhile new thing to use is a terrible reason to fail.
I’ve seen too many good ideas disappear because the creator wasn’t able to get people to try it. Often, they couldn’t even get people to look at it. And that is sheer misery. To succeed in the creation and then be ignored by potential users is a gross injustice, unfair to the creator and also unfair to the world, to the people who could put the idea to use.
I’d like for that to never happen again.
1. No one eagerly awaits your message.
2. Answer the question they’re already asking.
3. You’ve got a better message than ‘How It Works’.
5. Think of your product as the tangible expression of a deeper value.
6. Good design is a force multiplier.
7. Companies don’t make decisions. People do.
8. Customers move toward you step-by-step.