Frame of Reference in Product Adoption

Startups Get This Wrong All The Time

Intro

There’s an almost infamous saying among entrepreneurs.

First-time founders focus on the product, and second-time founders focus on distribution.

When building businesses, founders tend to have a vigorous bias toward creating value versus capturing it. A

s most founders are dynamo geniuses, their natural flow is to grasp the “what” of business, and as such they underestimate what it takes to comprehend how your users grasp your product offering.

P1: Working from the same “Frame of Reference”

When people see a product or better yet an offering, our mind creates a set of assumptions around that product/offering that is inextricably connected to what our mind has already seen, i.e making some sense of it, i.e find a label/box in our brain and place it there. When I say Boeing, you think “flying”. When I say “Nike”, you think “sports”. These brands

People look at their problems from an existing point of view and immediately compare it to whatever alternative way they’re solving the problem now. Your product offering should match exactly how users think about that problem. As a founder, your only job is to hold the vision of your company but tie it with your target market’s frame of reference. Your most imminent…