Why Build In Public Will Doom Your Startup To Failure
Chris Monk
I show businesses that are struggling to get enough paying customers how to get them using the most effective growth strategy in the world
The number one reason that 90% of all startups (indiehacker side projects & full time bootstrapped or funded) fail is because:
They don't find breakthrough growth
They never get to the point where growth comes easy and revenue and customers come flooding into the business.
Instead, they get forever stuck in this phase where growth is hard and slow and their startup doesn't make enough money to cover the founder(s) living & business costs.
Eventually, one of two things happens:
1. The founder runs out of money and is forced to shutdown
2. They give up thinking that the project won't work out
How Is This The Fault Of #buildinpublic?
Because it leads founders to make the two mistakes that stop 90% of them from finding breakthrough growth.
1. Spending too much time building and not enough time marketing
Although #buildinpublic makes founders **feel** like they are marketing, they really aren't. It's just an excuse that allows them to spend the vast majority of their time doing what they love (working on their project) and not enough time doing what they don't like but will actually grow their business (marketing).
This feeling is bolstered by the fact that they get likes, comments and retweets from other founders and friends that support them. This gives them a big jolt of dopamine but at the end of the day it doesn't bring in revenue and customers (or not nearly enough to support them).
2. Selling only their product
#Buildinpublic ensures that the only marketing that you do is based solely on your product.
In other words, with #buildinpublic, the only thing that your marketing sells is your product.
And selling your product is a VERY ineffective way to grow any business (its what bought Apple to the brink of bankruptcy in 1997 - not my opinion but Steve Job's).
Why?
Because less than 2% of your target market is actively looking to buy right now.
These people/businesses are the only ones who will a) pay attention to your marketing about your product and b) buy it.
The remaining 98% will ignore your message.
Because they aren't looking to buy your product right now, trying to sell your product to them upfront will trigger loss aversion in them (a cognitive bias that motivates us to avoid loss more than go after gains) and they will ignore your marketing message.
But Why Not Just Target The 2%?
You might think "but why not just target those actively looking to buy".
But this is a BAD strategy.
1. They are incredibly difficult to find (they aren't a static group)
2. They are expensive to reach - the only way to accurately find them is to advertise or do huge amounts of SEO to get on the front page for buying keywords
3. Even if you do find them,?you're competing with EVERYONE else in your market. It becomes a game of "oh pick me instead of them please". Your chances of getting the customer shrink with every new competitor that joins your market (and every category is exploding with competition).
4. Finally there just aren't enough of them to go round.?
To Find Breakthrough Growth You NEED To Sell To The 98%
1. They are easy to find (they are everyone in your target market).
2. They are cheap to reach (social media, direct cold outreach etc.)
3. Your competition is not targeting them (as they are too busy selling their products to the 2%).
4. There are plenty of them to go around (and growing by the day).
But how exactly do you capture the attention of those not looking to buy what you sell and convince them that they need to buy NOW?
Well, you use a marketing strategy that is extremely effective at doing just that.
It's the strategy that:
What's that strategy?
It's called The BLUNT Method.
The BLUNT Method
The BLUNT Method, is a marketing strategy that involves promoting a specific type of belief in marketing and sales messages - a BLUNT belief.
BLUNT is a mnemonic that describes a belief with five characteristics:
Why It's The Most Effective Way To Capture The Attention Of The 98% And Convince Them To Buy
1. How It Captures Attention
Firstly, the target audience doesn't need to buy the company's product to believe in and implement the belief (No product required).
As a result a BLUNT belief doesn't trigger loss aversion in the 98% not actively looking to buy and therefore doesn't get instantly ignored.
Secondly, the part of the human brain that filters out information and decides what to let into conscious attention and what to ignore is called the Reticular Activating System (RAS).
To get someone's attention, you need to get past their RAS. To do that you have to present it with new and surprising/controversial information.
Because of the characteristic of Brand new, BLUNT beliefs do this very well (CrossFit and Salesforce are great examples of this).
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2. How It Convinces Them To Buy
It's all very well capturing attention, but that attention is meaningless if it doesn't convert to paying customers.
BLUNT beliefs convert that attention very effectively into paying customers.
What's great about it (especially for indiehackers and other bootstrapped startups is that it doesn't require a ton of traffic to get results).
So how does it do this? In a two step process:
a) It convinces them to believe the BLUNT belief
b) It lets them convince themselves to buy the product
a) Convincing them to believe
A BLUNT belief introduces a brand-new belief about how to achieve a desirable outcome and typically contradicts what the target audience believes already.
So, how does it convince the target audience to adopt this new belief and drop their existing one?
Because it is tied to an element of unfamiliarity in the target audience's life (U in BLUNT). This can be (and often is) a change in the world (example - the internet for HubSpot or content saturation for Bullet Journal.
By putting the target audience in an unfamiliar and changing situation, a BLUNT belief is able to leverage a cognitive bias called the action bias.
The action bias means that, when we find ourselves in changing circumstances, we have a bias toward taking action rather than doing nothing.
This is because it makes us feel like we are doing something positive to adapt to the new situation.
This bias is so powerful that it can overcome enormous social and financial incentives not to take action – studies have shown that, in the sport of soccer, the action bias will cause professional goalkeepers to jump left or right when defending a penalty kick rather than stay in the middle. They do this even though, statistically, staying in the middle gives them the highest percentage chance of saving the ball and stopping the opponent from scoring.
By tying into an element of unfamiliarity in the target audience’s lives, a BLUNT belief can use this cognitive bias to its advantage – getting the target audience to drop their existing belief & adopt the BLUNT belief in its place.
This is made even easier by the fact that the target audience does not need to buy the product (N in BLUNT) the company sells to believe in and implement the belief in their lives – thus the belief doesn’t trigger any loss aversion like selling a product does.
Take HubSpot for example.
At the time its target audience of small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) was living in a new and unfamiliar world because the internet was changing the way that people did everything.
HubSpot’s BLUNT belief of inbound marketing leveraged this unfamiliarity by telling them that the internet meant that the tactics that SMBs believed were the best way to generate more leads (advertising and other “interruption” tactics) were no longer valid and no longer worked because buyers would ignore them.
The only way to succeed in this new era, it said, was to create valuable & helpful content for one’s potential customers and let them come to you whereupon you capture their contact details and continue to nurture them with valuable content until they buy.
SMBs adopted this new belief in their droves because their action bias had been itching to take action to deal with these changing circumstances and HubSpot’s BLUNT belief had just given them something they could do.
What’s more, the fact that they didn’t need to buy anything from HubSpot (or any company for that matter) to believe in, and implement, inbound marketing made it even easier for them to adopt because this didn’t trigger any loss aversion.
b) Letting them convince themselves to buy the product
Once the target audience has adopted and implemented the belief in their lives, it’s only a matter of time before they seek out products that will help them further implement this belief.
But why?
If they don’t need to buy a product to implement the belief (No product required), why would they buy the company’s product?
Because of consumerism.
For better or for worse, we live in a consumerist society.
As a result, we all have a bias towards buying products to help us engage more effectively in the activities that we do as long as we feel like it’s our decision to buy them (and we aren’t being forced to).
Let’s say for example you’ve decided to take up trail running. This is an activity that can be done without much equipment. A pair of shorts, a t-shirt, and a pair of running shoes – all things you probably already have lying around the house.
In other words, you don’t need to buy any additional products to do and enjoy trail running.
Yet, invariably, as you continue to do trail running, you will end up buying new products for this hobby – new shoes, new trail running-specific clothing, maybe a CamelBak for water, a GPS watch, and more.
None of these are necessary to do or enjoy trail running, but are instead optional tools that will help you enjoy and engage in this activity more effectively.
The fact that they are optional makes it very likely we’ll convince ourselves that we need them because our loss aversion isn’t triggered.
As long as our loss aversion isn’t triggered, then our socially conditioned consumerism comes out.
And this is exactly what happens with a BLUNT belief.
As discussed, thanks to the fact that the target audience doesn’t need to buy the product to believe in or implement the belief, there is no loss aversion triggered. And so, believers convince themselves that they need a product to help them implement it – even when, originally, they were in the 98% that weren’t actively looking to buy the solution.
But they won't just buy from anyone - they'll buy from the company that sells the BLUNT belief
The characteristic of Leading (L in BLUNT) means that the belief leads back to what makes the company’s solution unique.
As a result, when believers look for a product to help them implement the BLUNT belief in their lives, they can only choose that company’s solution.
What’s more, because the product that the company sells has existing demand (Traction – T in BLUNT), they don’t need to be convinced further that they should buy the product – it’s something they already know has the approval and social proof of others.
How To Use The BLUNT Method For Your Own Startup?
This strategy is incredibly powerful but it has unfortunately been understood by most people, including even the companies that have used it like Apple & HubSpot.
It's why I've created thebluntmethod.com. Visit the website to:
About Chris
Chris has spent nearly two decades (and counting) marketing and selling products, services and software, both on and offline, in multiple countries around the world.
He has worked with businesses of all sizes – from startups to companies like Microsoft, Google, SAP, Oracle, Groupon and others, and has also created, marketed and ran multi-million dollar industry conferences in many different industries and countries around the world.
Chris is also, an accomplished writer, having written for numerous publications including The Times, one of the United Kingdom’s most well known newspapers.
Chris helps startups find breakthrough growth using?The BLUNT Method.?