What's the choice we're forcing?
Super Questions Part II
In Part I of this 3 part series I suggested that as there are super foods for humans, so, too, are there super questions for entrepreneurs and builders. Super question 1, “What are we trying to prove,” was inspired by Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s interview with Whoop Founder Will Ahmed.
During the interview Ahmed says, “the first thing we needed to prove, starting summer of 2012, was that we could measure heart rate variability accurately from the wrist, non-invasively…I think a lot of building a company from scratch is figuring out what you need to prove at what stage.”
In this post, I’m referencing another Patrick O’Shaughnessy interview, this time with Mike Maples, who offers up another super question for company builders.
During their conversation, Maples lays out the following argument:
Two types of companies animate the economy: 1) scalable corporations (e.g. Apple); and 2) scalable startups (e.g. Shopify).
The startups that end up becoming scalable have often done a few very important things well in their early days, which have enabled them to grow from a back of the napkin idea to an economy animating enterprise.
First, they identify an insight about the future & they correctly map that insight to inflections that will accelerate that future.
With insight & inflections understood by the startup’s founders, they then begin designing a movement to pull the market toward their vision of the future.
To design the movement, they identify a small number of prospective customers, maybe ~50, who could move the market in their direction if they were to choose the startup’s product.
After identifying those market moving prospects, the founders must pitch, and the pitch has to prove that it can supersede the prospect’s natural tendency to resist change. Maples refers to this step as forging product market fit.
To forge product market fit, the founders engage the identified prospects in a conversation that forces the prospect to accept a specific choice.
What choice are we forcing the market to accept?
Maples uses a simple analogy to highlight the idea of forcing choice.
A market with a group of merchants selling only apples isn’t materially changed by another apple merchant. That group of merchants selling only apples is meaningfully & rapidly changed by the merchant who begins selling oranges or bananas.
The implication is that scalable startups achieve their scale by forcing the market to consider and accept a different choice. If the choice the startup is offering the market overcomes the market’s natural inertia, then animating the economy has begun.
What choice are we forcing the market to accept is a super question for a couple of reasons:
It forces clarity of value, which is deeply useful for both customers and entrepreneurs.
For customers, this question enables them to more rapidly make a decision.
For entrepreneurs, this question mitigates the most important risk up front by prioritizing the biggest assumption first — that the choice you’re offering the market is one it is willing to accept.
It establishes clarity of mission by producing principle, which is deeply useful for early stage culture.
For founders, knowing the choice you’re asking the market to accept establishes a principle which guides difficult decisions & hard debates (e.g. will this decision reinforce the choice we’re asking the market to accept?).
For the first employees who join the founders, knowing the choice the company is asking the market to accept allows them to enter a principled environment, which greases the gears of good decision making conditions (e.g. shared context, trust, and shared goals).
Maples Lessons & Other Useful Questions
The O’Shaughnessy interview with Maples is valuable beyond the idea of forcing choice.
When I listened to their conversation for the first time in September 2021, I found the content so clarifying for people starting and building companies that I typed out this table while listening.
Underlying each of these lessons are a dozen or so more questions that are powerful in their capacity to create clarity, deepen shared context, improve thinking, and optimize odds of building organizations that have the moonshot potential of animating the economy and the much higher probability of enriching the lives of employees and customers.
What is not true today, which if true, would be transformational for X customer?
What changes in the world will serve as tailwinds or headwinds for this idea to become a reality?
Who is likely to believe what we believe… so much so that they’d be willing to pay for it?
If they accept the choice we’re offering, what are they giving up and what are they gaining?
How does the market prefer to purchase our product?
Are we ready to deploy years of our lives and millions of other people’s dollars into this venture?
Have we instrumented our business effectively, so that we can increase our iteration speed?
Are we making an asymmetric or incremental bet?
Super questions & Super foods
What must we prove?” is a super question for company builders. So, too, is “what’s the choice we’re forcing the market to accept?” They’re not the only ones.
In Part III, I’ll explore one final question that can be force multiplying for founders, businesses, and teams.