The #1 shortcut to exponential scale and impact
TLDR: There’s no difference in the psychology of founders, employees or customers. We’re all human – we all buy stuff and we all work. This insight can help you shortcut product/market fit and accelerate growth while developing strong cultures.??
Relevant to startup founders, incubators, accelerators and investors.
I’m a big fan of shortcuts. My quirky ADHD brain gets bored easily, so I want to get to the heart of the matter fast. Why take the long way unless it's a stunningly scenic weekend road trip??
In business and life, there’s just too much complexity and too much to do. We need ways to help us work more efficiently without sacrificing effectiveness.?
Games can teach us a lot about shortcuts. In bowling or dominos, you don’t try to hit every single pin; that would take forever. Instead, you only need to knock over the first one (the “lead pin”) and the rest will tumble down.?
Give me a lever
There are bad shortcuts, like spending tons of money on bandaids that do nothing to address the root cause. That's not the kind of shortcut I'm talking about.
No, this is more like acupuncture. Or Archimedes' famous line — 'Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world."
At the end of the day, business problems are people problems. Get the WHO part right – internally with leadership, culture and team alignment, and externally by attracting customers and partners by offering real value – and you’ve got a winner on your hands.?
Yet it seems that there’s a stubborn focus on What, not Who.?
No wonder businesses are drowning in complexity. Too often, business strategy is treated like a bunch of bowling pins to be knocked over one at a time, or puzzle pieces with no end-result image to guide the process.
It’s time to Start with Who.?
How can an entrepreneur simplify their business, and also get the people dimension right, without applying direct control? Here’s the biggest shortcut you can take in your business:?
Use Founder/Team/Customer fit (Who) to help solve for product/market fit (What). When you create value-based alignment with the most essential humans in your system, the rest will naturally fall into place. #StartwithWho is usually a shared psychographic profile that provides the singular human context for all those individual what-based variables.
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There’s no difference between the psychology of buyers, employees or leaders. We are all customers, and we all work.?
Think of psychographics this way – on the spectrum of “everyone’s the same” vs. “everyone’s unique”, the reality is somewhere in the middle. Psychographics, or what we call PsIdentity, defines not only what makes you, you, but also how you’re similar or different to other people.?
Bill Gates once told Steve Jobs that Apple would never be successful because it was focused on a niche market consisting of creative people (just like Jobs) who crave aesthetic pleasure and seamless control over technology. Yet this “think different” niche is an elegant shortcut, unifying nearly every demographic variable on the planet who are all hungry to buy any product Apple releases. Is it any wonder Apple was the first company ever to hit $1T in valuation?
Apple’s not unique; every high-growth company is anchored on a single psychographic profile, with knowledge of the hidden emotional motivators that move people to action. It’s this deeply shared human understanding of self and others that enables mavericks to mobilize movements and magnetize global ecosystems.
How do you identify this segment??
“Start with who” starts with you, the founder. Do you know your own psychographic profile and what motivates you? If not, how can you ever hope to know others?
According to a recent large-scale study, only 10-15% of leaders actually know themselves; yet self-awareness is the basis for:
Food for thought:
The goal is a singular, emotionally resonant theme – the lead pin, or the picture on the puzzle box – that enables you to reverse-engineer people, products, processes and technologies to create this human-value-based outcome.?
This theme simplifies decisions on where to place your bets and what to take off the table. It improves both efficiency and effectiveness of all your investments. And it enables both focus and flexibility in how that outcome is accomplished.?
Want a shortcut? I’ve got the cheat codes.
Identifying your perfect-fit segment is easier than you think. After 30 years of human-centric strategy, I’ve led and/or accessed hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of research into why customers and employees love and recommend brands. Across sectors, B2C or B2B, the same patterns consistently emerge.?
You don’t need 6-figure research and strategy budgets; you just need to know how you’re wired in order to understand others. The cheat codes can give you a shortcut.?