An Extra Circle
An extra circle is the answer to most startup questions.
An example:
For my pod, I’m interviewing folks that have chronic pain. My assumption is that chronic pain is curable, not just something you need to “manage” for the rest of your life.
I’ve put out a bunch of signals in a bunch of channels to see what types of people with chronic pain will be willing to hop on the phone. It’s taken some experimentation, but I’ve found a few somewhat generic channels that work decently well. Not great by any stretch, but I’m getting some calls scheduled. For folks in the interview stage, I’m probably getting calls from 10% of folks I contact directly ~20 calls, ~200 direct emails/LinkedIn/DM etc. For each channel push — for example, a post on a Reddit thread, I'll get a response or two. As always, this is a numbers game until you find a secret (another circle) — more on that soon.
Most of these calls are the same. People first focus on what chronic pain has taken away — they used to be athletic, they can't hold their kids, etc. Next, they focus on what they're tried to get that version of themselves back - doctor, PT, injections, more PT, acupuncture, chiropractor, diet, etc.
Your best customers will likely follow the same flow. Something was taken away, or they dug themselves a hole, and your job is to get them to the version of themselves they envisioned. All products give people back their perceived identity.
During these calls, one thing kept jumping out. Half of the people who reached out would caveat the call by saying “I'm not like most people with chronic pain — I’ve got scoliosis." This was... unexpected.
I dug in a bit and it turns out people who have/had scoliosis tend to suffer from chronic pain later in live because the curvature of their spine compresses the nerves.
This is what I mean by “adding a circle.”
Previously, my outreach was based on people in the intersection of two generic circles:
But, the scoliosis insight — that people with scoliosis don’t see themselves in the regular bucket of people trying to get better from chronic pain — adds a circle.
The smaller the intersection of customers, the more trust you'll build. Most business are a circle away - circles act as force multipliers for everything else you do.
The second I changed my outreach to looking for people with chronic pain looking to actively get better who have scoliosis, inbound tripled, and the customer segment got tighter.
A startup is about trust — it’ll be successful or unsuccessful based solely on whether you can build trust quickly or not. If you find people who say "I'm not like most people, so what you're doing likely won't work," you have an opportunity for trust. Because you can say "you're exactly who I'm looking for because what most people do won't work for you."
I’ve used the example before, but I’d never buy a shirt I saw once in an Instagram ad… except for the one time I did, when the shirt was for “tall people with ridiculously long arms.” I know most shirts won’t fit me because I have comically long arms. The specificity from the brand built immediate trust — ”Hey, you know this thing about me that makes the products for most people not for me.”
So, the question becomes: what are your circles now?
And... what circle could you add that mattered? It's easy to add fake circles. I could say "people who have chronic pain and live in NYC.” But that's not building any additional trust, and unless there's something specific about NYC — like people walk a lot more so they need a certain type of care (obviously not true) — then your circle did nothing. What’s the circle you can add that’s a genuine secret? The “long arms” thing that most people don’t know about a chunk of your customers but you do? This is an easy one to test. Come up with some circles and let’s get them out there and see if they resonate.
The other side of the argument is, of course, that you need to be able to solve that specific customer's problem. Ideally you know the secret before you start and have an answer to that. But it doesn’t always work that way. And since such a huge part of startups are getting people’s attention, making sure a circle checks that box first is useful. Then, you can focus on it.
I’m now focused on the scoliosis angle. Which means I have direction for a solution — I'm leaning into experts who deal with pain from scoliosis, and I’ve already found a few with unique approaches. Find some circles and test ‘em out.