Here's a conversation that I had every ~3 days when I set out to do a startup: > Me: I'm about to leave to start a company > Sage Person: Oh, that's awesome, about time! What's the company about > Me: It's like Superhuman, but for photos. [cue the pitch] > Sage Person: Oh! You know consumer is really hard, right? I guess that I *knew*, but I didn't *get* it. It's one of the things you learn by [[Hot stove moments|touching the stove]]. Four years later, this is a conversation I have with people > Bushy-Eyed Pre-founder: I'm about to leave to start a company > Me: Oh, that's awesome, about time! What's the company about > BEPF: It's like a Podcast listening app, but social! > Me: Oh! You know consumer is really hard, right? What's common between myself and pre-founder is that we were both product people in a big consumer company (FAANG). This is quite natural in FAANG, it's cooler and higher prestige to work in the consumer-facing parts of the company (both bc you can tell your friends what you're working on and write "impacted 1B users" on your performance reviews), so high-achievers are drawn to these role and then become founders. And we do love the craft of building products for consumers. I still believe that being a consumer product person gives you the best product instincts. Consumers are finicky. You get to use your metrics, and your intuition, and be an armchair behavioral psychologist. You know that [[Say-do gap|nothing that they say in a user interview is reliable]]. All the stuff you read from Kahneman and Ariely play out in front of your eyes. But most importantly, your friends eyes don't glaze over when you tell them that you're building a dashboard for data privacy protection on HIPAA compliant databases. It's cool. --- Armed with all your consumer product knowledge (and love), you finally want to do it for real. But fundamentally, building for consumers in the context of a big company with established product/market-fit and building it in a startup is **different**. Not just the company dynamics where everything is different, but the entire relationship with the user is different. --- Let's illustrate with an example. Imagine you're a PM at Google, building a "study along" tool for YouTube - it lets you annotate the videos as you watch them, and writes notes about it, either in a separate tool like NotebookLM, or directly within YouTube. Before launch, you write a blog post. You (or really, your comms counterpart) coordinate with press on the embargo date. On launch, you get some tens or hundreds of pick-ups, probably tens to hundreds of thousands of views of your product. This is what happened to me both for Google One and Dropbox Plus launches that I've led -- getting the word out there was like rolling a ball downhill. The users come rolling in. Maybe some features are not super intuitive. Maybe the value prop isn't super crisp. But they users might be somewhat forgiving and try a little extra, it's a Google product! And they will at least skim through the blog post. Some might still leave. But guess what, so long you've proven some value, you'll get another shot at them via a popup on youtube.com. At the end of the day, the feature or product you build gets some amount of consideration. The users start with a decent amount of [[Psych Points]] and you get "the time of day". --- Now imagine that you're building the same exact tool but outside of Google. You test it with some early testers who are your friends, you onboarded them manually, they kind of like it. Now you're looking to scale a little bit. By grace of God, by a carefully cajoled tech blogger, or by some dollars paid to your favorite Ad network, you acquire a new user (congrats!). This same user will have much lower tolerance for complexity coming from you. Fundamentally, they're trying to decide "is this worth my time?". This means all your communication throughout has to be crystal clear, from the creative that got them to click, to the landing page, to FTUE. And if you fail, you don't get another swing at the piñata. The CAC is gone down the drain. Due to [[Tesler’s Law]], it puts a cap on how much you can do. Your consumer app can't do anything that can't be explained in three seconds. --- None of this is new. Distribution is the incumbent advantage. But there is something different at play even at the *ongoing usage*. The amount of consideration that you have as an unknown company is lower than that of an established co with established product. # Graveyard So when you think of the product in a new company, you're actually thinking about GTM and marketing at the same time: The medium is the message -> the GTM is the product Let me count the ways: * Free PR * Free users * Higher consideration Insights: * B2C decays to simple bits (Marlization), B2B to all encompassing things * Mobile allows less value * Need to do bottle openers * You're in the bazaar * Tesler's Law * Low Psych points * Few painkillers in consumers - most people are looking to *spend* time A lot of noise + low intention * * GTM is the hardest thing * GTM is the product (medium is the message)