Removing Pain > Creating Value

I taught some of our Tacklebox stuff at Columbia Business School this past week and my biggest takeaway was how counter-instinctual it is to center your product around removing something painful rather than creating something useful.

I talked about how removing pain is always prioritized over adding value. Of these two pitches:

“We’ll help you make an extra thousand dollars a week”

“We’ll remove the worst hour of your week”

The second wins 100% of the time.

Someone came up to me after, skeptical, and said “what about something like Rocket Money?” (For people who don’t know, this is a tool that finds all your subscriptions and helps you cancel them). “Their pitch is that it’ll pay for itself in subscription savings immediately, and that you’ll save, on average, something like $200 bucks a month. Isn’t that pitching the value? The money you’ll make back?”

A few students who caught the tail end of the Rocket Money conversation were walking over and I gave it a shot:

“Hi! Let me ask you all a question. Do you use Rocket Money?”

One of them did.

“Ok, great. Pitch it to me. Why should I use it?”

“Well, it’s great because it’s such a pain in the ass to cancel subscriptions - you have to go to a company’s website, answer a bunch of questions, and they’ll always offer some deal that you might take even if you don’t want to. And, every once in a while you actually have to call to cancel something. Rocket Money just does all that - you press “cancel” and your subscription is cancelled and you never think about it again.”

Bang.

It is definitely nice that Rocket Money saves you money. But the Delta 4 step up in value comes from the distance between “I used to have to go through hoops to cancel subscriptions myself” and “I basically have an assistant who handles all the legwork of cancelling subscriptions for me.”

This is most important for your very first customers. They won’t trust you to create value, but they will take a chance on you to remove pain.

So, the obvious question - what are you removing?