5 ms·

But what do you do with a company, even with good tech, when they’re not able to sell a product?

kragen 5y ago
Yeah, at some point you need to be good enough at communicating to sell a product. But, for example, Google was riding entirely on the actual reality of its products instead of its ability to tell stories to its users from its inception at Stanford (in 01997?) until at least the Gmail launch in 02004. And there are a significant number of companies that survive for many years with less than ten (big) customers. You'd be surprised how many companies will continue to buy a product that works in preference to a product that doesn't work but has a great story.
- nautilius 5y ago
  I don’t think I understand the point you’re trying to make. By that time, Google, with their undeniably charismatic founders, had pulled in north of $30Mio from investors, so they’re hardly a counterexample to the article. Clearly they knew how to sell their vision. Or are you arguing they did not need the money and would have succeeded ‘on the reality of their product’, whatever that means when you need to scale like that and have no income until figuring out Adsense in 2003?
  - nosianu 5y ago
    I think this is interpreting the story at that time two one-sidedly. At that time the dot com boom of the commercial Internet had just started. They also had very good credentials - I mean, two PhDs at Stanford still is a pretty good background for investors to take you seriously. It also was about an interesting problem, which in addition looked solvable with enough brains and brawns. The storytelling itself had a big mountain as a base to jump higher form there. You can't claim the height reached was due to the storytelling as a major factor. Everything else contributed much more, the right idea, people and external conditions at the right time. There were many companies at the time that had received investor money with horrible stories from today's point of view. Some of which I could see more closely because I accidentally applied for a job (I switched jobs in 1997), to see people with a huge ego, no idea what they were doing getting a few millions for ideas that made you scratch your head. We saw how it ended at the end of the dot com boom.
  - kragen 5y ago
    You asked, "But what do you do with a company, even with good tech, when they’re not able to sell a product?" My inference was that this was intended to be relevant to my comment, to which it was posted as a reply. To make it relevant, I needed to infer some sort of unstated premise; I guessed that your hidden premise was that, if a company is mediocre at storytelling, it won't be able to sell products, because storytelling is an essential part of the sales process. Did I misunderstand your unstated premise? I rebutted what I guessed to be your unstated premise by pointing at the example of Google, which, as I remember it, spent 7 years without telling its users almost anything at all about its products, much less engaging in the kind of masterful storytelling exemplified by the Chrome launch comic book. (They did have revenue before Adsense; Adwords was already in place in 02001.) They had no advertising campaigns of their own; they made almost no public statements at all. Yet they overwhelmingly dominated online search by 02004, having unseated well-known established incumbents. So I think it's possible to get wide adoption without engaging in storytelling to users about your product. I also think it's possible to be profitable without getting wide adoption. There are a lot of companies, mostly with fairly unique products or services, that sell to a small number of long-term customers, so their sales next year depend much more on the quality of their products this year than on the quality of their storytelling to their customers. That's actually where Google got revenue pre-Adwords: Yahoo outsourced search to them. I'm sure there was some storytelling involved in that sales process (I wasn't part of it) but I suspect that the more significant factor was that the people at Yahoo knew by experience that Google's search was really good, in fact, better than the crap Yahoo's portal was using at the time (maybe HotBot?). I definitely don't mean to deprecate Google's founders or imply that they were mediocre at storytelling to investors or didn't spend a lot of time on it. On the contrary, I was simply rebutting what I took to be the unstated premise behind your response: that if a company is mediocre at storytelling, it won't be able to sell products, because storytelling is an essential part of the sales process. In fact, storytelling is not an essential part of the sales process (although it certainly helps), and so companies that are mediocre at storytelling frequently do sell products. How much investment Google's founders had raised is completely irrelevant to that question. If that wasn't your unstated premise, then how was your comment, "But what do you do with a company, even with good tech, when they’re not able to sell a product?" relevant to my original comment? Because I'm evidently not smart enough to figure it out on my own.
  - Applejinx 5y ago
    Your reality becomes the story, when handled properly. This is pretty fundamental to marketing: see Guy Kawasaki. The danger is of course shown with Google: when the reality shifts or evolves, the story tends to stay put, and then you're building a trouble machine.

Yeah, at some point you need to be good enough at communicating to sell a product. But, for example, Google was riding entirely on the actual reality of its products instead of its ability to tell stories to its users from its inception at Stanford (in 01997?) until at least the Gmail launch in 02004. And there are a significant number of companies that survive for many years with less than ten (big) customers. You'd be surprised how many companies will continue to buy a product that works in preference to a product that doesn't work but has a great story.

nautilius 5y ago
I don’t think I understand the point you’re trying to make. By that time, Google, with their undeniably charismatic founders, had pulled in north of $30Mio from investors, so they’re hardly a counterexample to the article. Clearly they knew how to sell their vision. Or are you arguing they did not need the money and would have succeeded ‘on the reality of their product’, whatever that means when you need to scale like that and have no income until figuring out Adsense in 2003?
- nosianu 5y ago
  I think this is interpreting the story at that time two one-sidedly. At that time the dot com boom of the commercial Internet had just started. They also had very good credentials - I mean, two PhDs at Stanford still is a pretty good background for investors to take you seriously. It also was about an interesting problem, which in addition looked solvable with enough brains and brawns. The storytelling itself had a big mountain as a base to jump higher form there. You can't claim the height reached was due to the storytelling as a major factor. Everything else contributed much more, the right idea, people and external conditions at the right time. There were many companies at the time that had received investor money with horrible stories from today's point of view. Some of which I could see more closely because I accidentally applied for a job (I switched jobs in 1997), to see people with a huge ego, no idea what they were doing getting a few millions for ideas that made you scratch your head. We saw how it ended at the end of the dot com boom.
- kragen 5y ago
  You asked, "But what do you do with a company, even with good tech, when they’re not able to sell a product?" My inference was that this was intended to be relevant to my comment, to which it was posted as a reply. To make it relevant, I needed to infer some sort of unstated premise; I guessed that your hidden premise was that, if a company is mediocre at storytelling, it won't be able to sell products, because storytelling is an essential part of the sales process. Did I misunderstand your unstated premise? I rebutted what I guessed to be your unstated premise by pointing at the example of Google, which, as I remember it, spent 7 years without telling its users almost anything at all about its products, much less engaging in the kind of masterful storytelling exemplified by the Chrome launch comic book. (They did have revenue before Adsense; Adwords was already in place in 02001.) They had no advertising campaigns of their own; they made almost no public statements at all. Yet they overwhelmingly dominated online search by 02004, having unseated well-known established incumbents. So I think it's possible to get wide adoption without engaging in storytelling to users about your product. I also think it's possible to be profitable without getting wide adoption. There are a lot of companies, mostly with fairly unique products or services, that sell to a small number of long-term customers, so their sales next year depend much more on the quality of their products this year than on the quality of their storytelling to their customers. That's actually where Google got revenue pre-Adwords: Yahoo outsourced search to them. I'm sure there was some storytelling involved in that sales process (I wasn't part of it) but I suspect that the more significant factor was that the people at Yahoo knew by experience that Google's search was really good, in fact, better than the crap Yahoo's portal was using at the time (maybe HotBot?). I definitely don't mean to deprecate Google's founders or imply that they were mediocre at storytelling to investors or didn't spend a lot of time on it. On the contrary, I was simply rebutting what I took to be the unstated premise behind your response: that if a company is mediocre at storytelling, it won't be able to sell products, because storytelling is an essential part of the sales process. In fact, storytelling is not an essential part of the sales process (although it certainly helps), and so companies that are mediocre at storytelling frequently do sell products. How much investment Google's founders had raised is completely irrelevant to that question. If that wasn't your unstated premise, then how was your comment, "But what do you do with a company, even with good tech, when they’re not able to sell a product?" relevant to my original comment? Because I'm evidently not smart enough to figure it out on my own.
- Applejinx 5y ago
  Your reality becomes the story, when handled properly. This is pretty fundamental to marketing: see Guy Kawasaki. The danger is of course shown with Google: when the reality shifts or evolves, the story tends to stay put, and then you're building a trouble machine.