Your “WHY” Sucks. And Why Everything Starts with your “WHY”

As I wrote before about the 7 Things We Got Right Before Winding Down My Startup our WHY was one of them that deserves more attention. The below is verbatim what I pitched at one of our All Company meetings to get alignment on why we are all here. If you follow the bread crumbs of building a solid company it goes something like this; WHY - BHAG - VISION - CULTURE - OBJECTIVES - KRs - KPIs - RESULTS.?

“I will start with a simple question… “WHY?”

Why are YOU here?

Why are WE here?

Why is Meenta here?

?I ask because I suspect none of us have thought about this very deeply. We are too busy running to check things off on our to do lists.

So, how can we tell our customers why THEY should be here if we don’t know ourselves???

If you look at what GREAT companies do they all answer this one fundamental question in everything they do, say and everything they create.

The WHY is the beating heart of a great company. It is at the CENTER of every single thing they do. It’s in their DNA.

What most companies do is look at things from the outside in. They talk about the WHAT the company does or makes. Followed by HOW they think they are different or better than the competition.? Then a call to action.?

Right now we are like those companies because we say things like;

We make an easy to access marketplace for tests and scientific equipment. Want to try it?

The attempt here is to convince someone of a superior value…

Vs.

Now here is what this would sound like for Meenta starting with the WHY;

Everything we do we believe in changing how diagnostics works and to help find answers to the most difficult scientific questions.? We believe in giving ACCESS to every patient, healthcare provider & scientist. The way we give access is by making our marketplace easy to use and safe. We just happen to have tests and equipment on the site. Wanna try it?

There is no trickery on pricing and discounts which are temporary lors… purpose and belief! The things we sell are not the reason people buy. They are just tangible proof of our cause!

People don’t buy what you do they buy why you do it

Customer loyalty does NOT come from the product we build!

We need to communicate first our why and then use the what (our products) as proof of what we believe.

Everything we say everything we do has to prove what we believe

The Y is just a belief.

Hows are the actions we take against those beliefs. Hows or the actions we take to realize those beliefs.

And the whats are the results of those actions. The whats are the tangible proof of the Y.

But we need authenticity to get to the why. Authenticity happens at the what level. We can’t ask others like our customers to know what it means to be authentic or what they want to hear for us to look authentic?

Authenticity means that everything we do everything we say we actually believe. When we believe in what we are doing authenticity comes naturally and customers see it here it and feel it

This is like the Anheuser-Busch distributor in Tampa I met that told me that they didn’t sell beer that they sold memories! Memories, not beer! WOW!

Anheuser-Busch distributor in Tampa I met that told me that they didn’t sell beer. They sold memories!

So at Meenta; We are the champion for the common healthcare provider and the common scientist. Because you shouldn’t have to be at Yale or Harvard to access the best diagnostic tests and the best research tools.

The message should be; “You are now free to practice medicine. You are now free to make discoveries.”

Without a clear sense of why we are just gonna be another reference lab like LabCorp or quest and we will have no loyalty…and be forced to the what (price, discounts etc).

The how and the what are just simply not enough we need the Y to truly differentiates us.

I’ve talked before about creating a heuristic so that customers can make easy emotional decisions without spending a lot of glucose on thinking. But heuristics really depends on the Y mostly because we make heuristic decisions from the limbic system the emotional part of the brain

Let’s take a classic example of sales being like a date;

"Brad" goes on a dinner date. Brad says; “Nice to meet you!? You know I have a great job that pays me a lot of money. I have a huge house in the best neighborhood and know so many rich and famous people…etc”

Depending on how badly you want to close “the deal” with your date you can throw in other things on the table to manipulate them into maybe a second or third date.

So let’s go on a date again with Brad and let’s start with the Y;

Do you know what I love about my life? I get to wake up every single day to try to figure out how to provide better tools to healthcare providers and to help scientists make discoveries that could change lives. What’s exciting is that every single day there’s a new challenge of how we can figure out how to do that. And believe it or not it’s been successful I have a good salary have a nice house nice car I get to travel a lot to Europe.

Likely the chance for a second and third date just went through the roof!

So, let’s not position Meenta as a bad date as we talk to customers!

Let’s always be connecting the why, what and hows!

So in closing…?

At Meenta we believe in changing how diagnosis are made and to help find answers to the most difficult scientific questions.? We believe in giving ACCESS to every healthcare provider & scientist. Because you shouldn’t have to be at an Ivy league institution to access the best diagnostic and research tools.

With the Meenta marketplace; “You are now free to practice medicine and free to make discoveries.”

For more context on this thinking please see Simon Sinek's book “Start With WHY”