Who Owns The Risk?
Tacklebox founders are often trying to make their first sale or run an intent test to get someone to commit. This often means selling something that doesn’t exist, and always means selling something with little or no social proof. For reference, this happens after interviews and after you've picked a SOM (or two) — right when you’ve decided to test intent or possibly an early MVP.
There are two variables to nail to make this easier:
Trust
Risk
Trust: People don't make decisions rationally - they're made emotionally. Why will someone trust you? What have you done to earn that trust? Have you helped them with a smaller, wickedly hard foot-in-the-door problem already? Have you given them data or insight into a specific problem they have that they thought other people weren’t aware of? Or, have you nailed the second variable, which creates trust immediately…
Risk: In the absence of trust, you’ll need to offload all of the risk from your customer's plate to yours.When Amazon started, they claimed they had “1 million books” - but really, they had zero books. They had a handful of employees who were people willing to search local bookstore databases to find millions of books, then get the bookstore to ship you that book. They had no inventory.
But why would a local bookstore trust Amazon?
Because the first time they heard from Amazon, the call went like this:
“You’ve got a rare book, and you’re charging $25 for it. We’re going to send you a $30 check, plus a prepaid shipping label and an envelope. Put the book in the envelope and hand it to the postman next time you see him.”
Then, after that, the bookstore was more than happy to work with Amazon any time they sent a prepaid envelope and a check - no questions asked. There was zero risk. Each book sent built more trust.
How can you shift 100% of the early risk from your customer to you?
Some questions to ask during interviews to learn how to build that trust:
What new products have you bought in the past year?
Figure out how those folks offloaded the risk
What's the most frustrating, time consuming thing you do each day?
Risk + Trust.