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My boyfriend never ceases to be amazed by the fact that I’m willing to ship something 76% good. He doesn’t understand why I’m not a perfectionist. He’ll say, “But how is that possible? You’re selling to large companies and people who’ve been in their job for 20 years. Aren’t you nervous about sending something out with a bug, or trying a new slide on a demo without practicing first on others?”
The answer is a flat-out no. Bugs happen in the most seasoned of software. People on the other end of the phone are still just that: people.
Most people are fearful. I have been fearful. We think, what’s the worst that could happen? The worst that happens is we lose a customer, or we lose the opportunity to convert someone to becoming a customer.
But what about the BEST thing that could happen? We get a new customer! Or, we get some feedback which makes us uncomfortable but helps us grow as a company. Or we test positioning that is AMAZING and helps us communicate even better on the next round and increase our probability of success.
As an aside, why don’t we as humans reach for the Light? Why is the Dark so attractive? It’s because the status quo is comfortable. We know it. We know its boundaries. We know its shape. Light is hard. It’s new. It’s fresh. It’s unknown. It’s boundless. It’s terrifying.
At my last company, one of my co-founders taught me a big lesson. We had been bickering for weeks about whether or not to offer a free trial; two of us were against it, and our CMO was not. We woke up and he had changed the button on the website from “email us” to “start your free trial.” We went from a demo a month to a free trial a day, overnight. Me and our CTO were stuck in the Dark; our co-founder chose the Light. He had a gut instinct that our buyer, DevOps, didn’t want to talk to sales. They wanted to try it out for themselves and then reach out with questions and help. He was right. And the worst that could have happened was that we lost a week of folks signing up for demos, so that would have been, what 25% of one demo at the rate we were going?
Since then, I’ve realized that our job as founders is to ship ship ship. Try try try. Coach our team into doing the same. We have no idea at the beginning if our gut is right and that’s okay. It’s our job to start somewhere and then figure out where to go. We typically do that by talking to potential customers. That’s what VCs invest in: our ability to figure out where we are going, not where we are today. They don’t care where we end up provided it’s a big company. The job is trying to find the Light. Darkness is the incumbent we’re trying to replace.
Going back to the incredulousness of my boyfriend, I find it amusing that he asks me the question of perfection. He’s a tennis pro; his career has been spent practicing different strokes, different ways to put spin on a ball, different serves, so that he has his arsenal at the ready when he encounters a foe that doesn’t respond to his initial strategy. He practices to become fluent at change. That’s exactly what I do too! I practice throwing things out, every single day, in an effort to find The Positioning that works the best for that particular company, that particular person on the other side of the call. Our job is to win. It doesn’t matter what stroke we hit to do it, just that we get the results.
