How to be Recommendable
No one recommends anything average.
If you’re visiting NYC and you ask me for a bagel rec, I’m not sending you somewhere average. I’m giving you the best I’ve got after asking your location, and you’re probably ending up at Black Seed or Russ and Daughters.
This is important to remember as founders. You’ll only grow through word of mouth early on — every other channel will be too expensive — which means you’ve got to be recommendable. You need to be the best in a specific category. And, that category has to be asked about a lot. Or, the problem has to come up a lot.
The key to getting recommendations, as always, is narrowing the profile of the customer and the problem you’re solving for them.
Here’s what I mean.
I remember when The Infatuation launched in NYC around 2009. This slogan (or a variant of it) has been around since then:
They started as an email-based newsletter, and the title for each email was always comically specific.
The reason I remember when they launched is I remember the first time someone forwarded me one of their emails. I’d just asked the guy who sat next to me at work if he had any restaurant recommendations for when my parents came to the city that weekend. He nearly jumped out of his chair, yelping “oh oh oh I just saw this!” before forwarding me an email titled something like: “Where to eat in Murray Hill when your parents are picking up the tab.” I lived in Murray Hill at the time.
The article had a bunch of silly and specific criteria like “enough room that your Dad doesn’t make comments about how close the tables are” and “loud enough that no one else can hear your conversation but not so loud that your mom tells the waiter to turn down the music.”
I immediately picked one of the restaurants they suggested and made a reservation and subscribed to the newsletter. I’ve gotten the weekly emails since, and gone to dozens of restaurants they’ve recommended over the years.
Recommendations are the engine of your startup, and recommendations are about problem language and problem specificity. If you say that you’ll help people “monetize their audience” or “increase revenue,” their brain will ignore it. If you say “you’ve got 4,000 rabid newsletter subscribers and you know you should be able to monetize that but you can’t find sponsors,” it’s more words but those words are way more memorable.
And, when your customer says to their friend, “I have around 4-5k newsletter subscribers and my life would be so much easier if I could turn that into $2,500 a month in ad revenue,” they’ll remember the last example of problem language above and recommend it. They’ll never say, “I saw this company that said they’d help you increase revenue — maybe that’ll help?”
The person who sat next to me and forwarded me the Infatuation article didn’t live in Murray Hill and his parents hadn’t come to the city in years. But, his brain remembered the problem language of the article.
So, recommendations come down to problem language and specificity. Who’s the customer you’re solving a problem for, what’s that problem, and how can you add more parameters to make it painfully specific? Which makes it painfully shareable?
This, as always, should be painful. It should feel like you’re leaving people out. Just like, I’m sure, The Infatuation writer thought when they went to hit publish on an article about taking your parents to dinner in Murray Hill. What about everyone not going out with their parents that weekend? What about the people who lived…anywhere else?
Problem language is even better for them. Because they know who the article is for — it’s not for them, so they won’t read it. But, when they meet someone it is for, they’ll recommend it.
Specificity and problem language travel.