Necessity or Envy
Why do products grow?
Questions are tough when they’re vague, so let’s reframe this one:
Why do you buy anything new?
And, one more reframe to make it hyper-relevant to you building a startup:
Why do you overpay for something new?
This is important because that’s the only type of product you should ever build - one your customer is happily willing to overpay for.
In my Tacklebox experience, there are exactly two reasons people overpay for things:
It helps them break through an immediate, mandatory blocker that’s giving them a disproportionate amount of pain relative to their peers because they’ve got some funky quirk.
Because the Hot Girl In Class (which we’ll refer to from now on as “HGIC”) has it
Basically, necessity or envy.
As a founder, you’ve always got to start with necessity. You can’t jump straight to the HGIC because the HGIC isn’t interested in stuff before it’s proven. They know you’re using them for higher status, and they have no reason to help you out.
The HGIC in your industry could be Harvard or Apple or LeBron James, but it’s more likely to be the trendy coffee shop on the corner that’s always got a line, or the b2b accounting tool that all non-profits use, or the highly ranked private high school. Every customer segment has a status hierarchy because we’re humans and that’s what we do.
Since you can’t start with status, you start with necessity.
You find a customer that would be one of the higher status customers, except for this one thing they’ve got that holds them back.
Maybe the customer you target is a local contractor that’s being held back by new regulations that require it to report taxes differently because of a management quirk, or a software business that sells to hospitals but now has to deal with new HIPAA regulations.
Your job is to build something hyper specific to help them navigate that unique blocker. That’ll help them make a status jump - you’ll help them be obviously successful. And that’s when the envy kicks in.
All the other competitors - whether they have the same, specific blockers your first customer has or not - will see that first customer be successful and be envious of that success.
Sometimes it takes writing an entire article to understand the point I was trying to make in the first place but we’ve gotten there:
Your job, as an entrepreneur, is to help your first customer become the HGIC. You’ve got to She’s All That your first customer.
Find a customer that’s being held back by something unique (necessity), which will kick off the natural, organic growth that happens when one member of a customer segment shoots ahead (envy).