No one cares about your startup

We started this company a little over a year ago. I remember feeling aimless during the first few days. We had fairly strong opinions, but we didn’t have customers, we didn’t have a product, and we didn’t have any money. We didn’t even have a company name. We didn’t really know what to do.

Since then, we’ve learned a lot – mostly the hard way. I’d like this post to articulate perhaps the lesson I was most reluctant to accept: that no one cares about our startup.

Customers just have other things going on

Those of us who sell for a living tend to lose sight of our customers as people. We’re too eager to imagine them as prospects, just names listed in a CRM. But people are complicated. Every name in the CRM has a different story.

Your customer’s job might not even top their list of priorities. That VP of Operations you’re emailing might receive your email while idling in a kindergarten pickup line. The CRO might have an ailing parent to care for. Maybe that engineering manager just moved to a new city. You’ll never know about any of this.

If we isolate our focus to customers’ work priorities, we’re usually still looking at a jumbled mess. Most people mostly worry about people problems at work – they’re focused on the underperforming employee or the overbearing boss. Most people are just trying to meet their quarterly numbers, maybe even earn a promotion.

And even if you get your customer’s attention, even if you get the customer to agree yeah I have that problem, and yeah you can probably solve it, that’s not good enough. Because that’s not the same thing as feeling the motivation to solve the problem with you at that moment.

From your customer’s perspective, you’re just another random stranger knocking on their door. Anyone with an email sequencing tool gets the opportunity to blast your customers with incessant, extravagant claims. And it’s exhausting to be on the receiving end. None of us has the time to assess earnestly every pitch that we receive. I personally can’t remember every pitch that I get. There’s just too much noise. It’s overwhelming.

In all likelihood, you’re just not that important. It doesn’t really matter how good you are. No one cares enough about you.

What you can’t do

We often talk about our choices in a way that hints at cold rationality. That’s just not a priority, we might say. And sometimes, that’s valid. But more often than not, we’re really masking an emotional state of abject indifference or mild frustration. Please leave me alone, as the cold emails roll in. Jesus christ, another one?

You just can’t convince a prospect to care – at least not with a rational argument – because no one really reasons their way into indifference. Even listening passively to your pitch requires effort from your prospect. For the prospect to change their mind requires more activation energy than you can ever expect to demand. Your prospect needs an initial spark of motivation.

I made this mistake countless times. For a long time, I tried to build rigorous business cases. Look, I’d say, doing [this thing you don’t want to do] will have a positive ROI! Who doesn’t want positive ROI? I’d have a slick Powerpoint and accompanying financial model. But I didn’t do anything to help my customer care.

I wasn’t doing anything to earn my prospects’ time, much less their trust.

What you can do instead

Find people that do care. Some subset of the world requires little convincing. These are people looking for exactly what you make, and you can try to find them. However, this does not strictly imply that they care about your startup, and from personal experience, these people will be much more scarce than you’d have anticipated. It’s much easier to help these people find you.

Repeat yourself over and over. If you assume that people aren’t really listening, it becomes clear that your job demands ceaseless repetition. I’ll repeat the same message over and over. I’ll make lame, cringey LinkedIn posts. With sufficiently many reminders of our existence, some number of people will hear our pitch. To quote Jeff Weiner of LinkedIn, when you’re tired of saying it, they’re only just starting to hear it.

Prove that you care. Sometimes we wrap this up in the do things that don’t scale ethos, but I find this a special case that warrants its own mention. We’re all social creatures, and giving a damn is contagious. I’ll write handwritten letters to customers, send gift baskets to their offices, and give out our personal cell phone numbers. I’ll try to meet people in person. We may not always – or even often – win business this way, but we’ll at minimum earn the right to pitch.

Earn customers’ interest first. In lieu of convincing people to care, we can meet some alternative need. Most prospective customers often feel bored. Many of them feel motivated by their curiosity. In these cases, we simply need to capture their wandering interest. We’re intent on making ourselves ubiquitous. From the pool of prospective customers aware of our existence, some subset will eventually hand-raise with a demonstrative interest in using our service.

Be a little weird and transparent. It’s okay to be kind of weird. Paradoxically, to be a little weird is actually normal; real people are weird. It’s disarming and authentic. It’s also just different from the competition. You can’t do that much harm to yourself anyway – because no one’s really paying attention. The worst thing you can be is boring and opaque. Imagine you’re the customer. Do you want to read tedious magic quadrant whitepapers – yuck – or vague, inflated claims about the data platform for enterprise? Probably not, unless you’re already deep into an evaluation that your boss foisted on you.

A broader thought on B2B marketing

B2B markets – especially B2B SaaS – have experienced a pretty violent contraction in demand over the last few years. Competition feels more intense, and dollars ever more scarce.

In response, many companies have focused efforts on proving ROI with business cases tailored to the office of the CFO. Others have tried to economize cold outbound with the AI SDR. Some companies have their sellers cold-calling prospects’ cell phones. It’s less personal, more rational.

I often wonder whether this approach works. Maybe it does … if you have a solid brand already.

But it doesn’t seem especially considerate of the buyer’s experience. After all, the buyer has likely experienced some measure of the same contraction, and every competitor has started experimenting with more aggressive tactics. I personally don’t want to spend time deciphering enterprise-speak or sitting through discovery calls. So I wouldn’t subject my customers to that experience.

I often think that B2B companies have excessively pursued quantifiable metrics, e.g. qualified leads, and have simultaneously committed insufficient resources to brand. I think we can learn a bit from consumer categories. It’s our job first to earn customers’ attention, then earn their trust, and only then compete for their business.