Shovels Not Grails

Let's Get Digging

This week, a good friend and better business associate may complete a quest.

It's taken years of his life and tens of thousands of hours of work, but he's attracted great partners, and the business is nearly complete on a life changing round of funding. Soon after that, we may witness the spread of this tech for marketing and advertising professionals.

Exciting times! (And yes, I'm hoping to work with him on it, mostly because he inspires me to do good work, and you really want to spend your time with people like that.)

Why is his tech life changing? Because he's made something that other people will use to solve a problem and chase their dreams. More importantly, he's done it with a solution that is completely self serve, easy to use, and (this is critical) limited in scope. Instead of threatening the current way of doing things for people in the space, it's just a supremely cool thing that they will use to be more effective. Without a ramp-up period, a forced breaking of silos, or a lockout of current partners.

You can explain his solution in a sentence. Without leaving out stuff that some clients will value, while others ignore.

In other words, he's not selling the Holy Grail.

He's selling the shovel that you need to find it.

(Much better business than Grails, honestly. Also, he's not going to use the shovel for you.)

Part of this echoes what many of the start ups that I've worked for in the past two decades have looked to do. But while it's easy to state your vision, the details of what's involved (primarily account management and customer success) usually destroys those intentions. Clients want to know what you know, have you do things for them that they would rather not, or expand the use of your tool into areas that it might not support to the same level of expertise.

Your customers aren't wrong to want these things, of course. Their concern about your business model probably doesn't go beyond polite interest, and at the end of the day, everyone just wants to solve their own problems, not yours.

With your solution or someone else's, with the usual mix of great, cheap and fast (pick two!) impacting their business decision.

More about this soon, I hope. (And yeah, I'm under NDA, which explains all of the vagueness.)