In the TV classic The Wire, senior officials refer to police officers with political connections as having "suction." I like this term - a visceral synonym for "pull."
I recently cleaned much of my family's home. Running an old vacuum cleaner reminded me about the power of suction. It's loud - there is no mistaking when it happens. It effectively pulls all those bits off the carpet when I could spend nontrivial time picking (some of) them out by hand (as I had to do in a confined space).
The difference after running a few minutes with this machine at my disposal vs. the hour-plus that required me to use my hands was remarkable. The suction-served swaths looked better. Sometimes it's helpful to be reminded of the power of machines. And machines are just harnessers of forces to your advantage. When I let the vacuum do its job, not only did it handle a large area, but the area ended cleaner! Results were not proportional to the effort - if anything, perhaps the trendline sloped down.
In my particular case, I had to go looking for the suction. The vacuum was in a basement locker. Getting to it took some doing. I had not thought about it at the time, but this is much like market discovery. One should look for where the pull is and then how to harness it. I hope fewer boxes fall on you in that process than on your humble servant in the storage room.
Finally, I took satisfaction in the change of the cleanliness of the space. The color and the way the room holds light are remarkably different now than before. Partially this was possible because we as a group allowed it to get a bit dirty.
With the parable of the dirty apartment out of the way, let's apply this to our startups.
First, I had to decide I needed to clean up. I had to feel this need deeply to rise to the occasion. Those of us building businesses need to find this need deep down - a change we want to make in the world. There are lots of potential motivations, and almost all of them are creditable. I think Eric Ries calls this the "bet the company" hypothesis. It's the truth you start with that guides the rest of the journey.
The key idea for the "bet the company" is to be willing to put in the time and effort but not seek to do a particular work. Laziness can be a grandmother of invention: find the easiest way to make progress toward the goal. If you ask that of yourself, you are also more likely to ask that of your customers. This permission to "play on easy" will later make it easier to grow as you offer your customers your discoveries of how to make their lives radically easier.
Second, I had to find the vacuum. While a Hoover or Eureka is a device for cleaning, here it is a metaphor for market demand. Within your chosen domain, you are looking for the pull which contributes to your "bet the company" mission above. Multiple potential market demand "pulls" exist, and focusing on the ones that support your mission is the right call. But one should not imagine the pull.
Last year I turned on a mechanical cleaner that made a lot of noise but did not pull anything up. I thought the machine must be working because I heard the noise, but alas, there was a break between the motor and the inlet: no pull. I spent time "cleaning" that room because I was sure I must be missing something, but I was wrong. When I switched to a different machine, the difference was noticeable. If you don't have demand, you don't have it.
Startup School at Y-Combinator suggests only two tasks for an early-stage startup: talk to customers and write code. Their weekly check-ins encourage talking to at least five customers per day. That seems like an excellent habit for rummaging around the storage locker to find that suction.
And we should hold off doing most of the product building until we find that suction. Without the vacuum, I would have spent a long time cleaning but ended with a still-dirty floor: much more work for much less result. There are plenty of uses for code-based work to generate experiments to observe customer/market behavior.
Third, we must commit to the work of cleaning the place. We use suction to make it easier. I find many entrepreneurs run out of energy early in the process. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this: we all have our limits. When we are experiencing such a powerful pull, we get to see our results as we go and are encouraged. The same work gets results at a multiple of the original work.
Find the strong pull of demand. With it, building a good business can be easy, and making a great one is possible. Without it, creating a good company is possible, but altogether too much work for my taste. Build a startup on easy by finding the suction first.
Photo by The Creative Exchange on Unsplash