The Story of Your Successful Startup

Before I started Tacklebox I assumed there were thousands of ways to get a business off the ground. After working with hundreds and hundreds of startups, it’s become clear there’s really only one way.

If your business is successful, this will be how.

You’ll notice a customer with a problem they aren’t able to solve. The problem will likely have been solved for other, similar-ish customers, but this specific customer will have a unique set of constraints that makes those existing solutions useless.

It’s likely this customers will also be disproportionately impacted by the problem – it’ll be uniquely urgent, frequent, expensive, growing, or painful for them. They’ll be oddballs. They’ll have some strange constraint or get a weird amount of value from a normal problem being solved.

Solving this problem will be the customer’s top priority (you can’t bank on anyone solving anything but their top priority), and they’ll have tried everything on the market to do so.

You’ll develop a relationship with this customer, and I don’t mean “customer” in the “customer segment” sense – you’ll literally develop a relationship with a single person (within a company, if you’re selling to businesses). They’ll be happy to work with you because you’ll be the first person to take their problem seriously (we’ll call them your Design Partner).

To make sure there are other customers like them, you’ll run some customer acquisition tests to see if you can acquire more people with those same oddball constraints. Simply describing those constraints will attract more customers.

You’ll work closely with your Design Partner, literally watching over their shoulder as they solve the problem (ethnographic research). 

From this experience, you’ll develop a concierge-style solution. When the customer encounters the problem, they’ll ping you and you’ll solve it for them.

The solution, no matter how objectively unpolished, will be magical to your customer. You’ll take a thing they hate off their hands and they’ll overpay you for doing it.

Since magical products are rare, they’ll tell everyone they know about it. This is how you’ll get your first wave of customers.

You’ll then help those customers be successful, and using the margin you make from selling them your first product (they’ll overpay, too), you’ll flesh out the product and make it a bit more scalable and applicable to adjacent customers.

This first wave of customers will be successful, and it’ll attract the next wave.  

People make decisions based on envy, not greed, and the success of your earliest customers will create a bunch of jealousy that’ll lead to growth.

And that’s how you grow.

What jumps out at me from the story is Wild Success. The whole thing falls apart if you aren’t able to create something unbelievably useful for the first handful of customers.

The key here is not making an objectively good product - all that matters is the gap between their current solution and the new one. “Magic” is relative to what the alternative was.

So, Wild Success only comes when you find a customer in an absolutely terrible situation. And that is the niche.