Inertia and Your First Product

Once our founders get to the “product part” of Tacklebox — after they’re comfortable with a customer — our focus needs to shift a bit towards that customer’s inertia.

To get us all on the same page, here’s an example.

Let’s say an entrepreneur was going through Tacklebox with this hypothesis: lots of people in their 30s want to switch careers but don’t know how.

Customer interviews led to a potential SOM — someone in finance who’d already decided they wanted to change careers to something more creative but were trying to navigate the logistics of that — everything from picking that new career to the change in income to the conversations with family about the shift.

As an entrepreneur, you can either mush all of those problems together and solve them as an unscalable consultant, or, you can grab one specific moment in that process and own it in a way that can scale.

Let’s say the entrepreneur chose the “lifestyle change” problem — how can you realistically downgrade from a high salary to a low one?

The product form factor they chose is a short, targeted book that teaches a Marie Kondo-like approach to cutting expenses. The book itself leveraged the entrepreneurs unique skills/network/knowledge — writing, connections with publishers, an obsession with cutting and managing household costs — and the form factor of a book would be a natural trust builder and foot in the door for this customer. Also, the entrepreneur realized that ads for books on podcasts and newsletters convert at a high rate — and these channels could get targeted for their SOM.

Great.

Now, the question is — what does a useful book look like?

More importantly, how, exactly, does this customer buy, read, get value from and share books now?

Your product needs to be designed to never break the customer’s existing inertia. It’s a reaction to how your customer currently acts.

This screws up SaaS tools all the time. If your customer lives in excel, and you build a tool that’ll require them to leave excel, they won’t use it. For our purposes, inertia is unbreakable. We need to work with it.

So, for the book, what’s this look like?

I asked a good friend who’d be a potential customer (he wants to switch careers) about the exact process for the last business book they bought:

“I saw the book highlighted in a newsletter I subscribe to and it seemed like it could be helpful. So, I downloaded a sample to my kindle. I do this a lot — I download samples, read through them, and if I get immediate value, I purchase. I love highlighting and taking notes, and you can’t take notes on a sample, so, if there’s something I want to remember, I usually click buy.”

Awesome.

So, inertia looks like this.

Find book in a trusted place → download sample → see something so valuable it needs to be highlighted/remembered later → buy

This is helpful for us. We know we need to build enormous trust in the first three pages of the book. We need a takeaway that needs to be highlighted.

So, that’s how we start testing our writing. The first three pages need to make a promise the customer desperately wants us to keep. If you want to develop a story or write a long intro about yourself to start the book — or, if you have a long forward or something else that isn’t giving value - your book won’t grow.

Every product will have an analog to this. A natural process your customer goes through for finding, evaluating, buying, using, and sharing a product.

You need to know this intimately, and build a product in reaction to it.