So What Who Cares Why Me

8/3/2019 So What Who Cares Why Me

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So what? Who cares? Why me?

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Whether you are launching your own new startup company,

or a new product or service within a large organization, the

simple framework you will discover in this booklet will help

you dramatically increase your chance of success.

Written by an experienced entrepreneur who has launched

technology companies, coached startups and spoken at

conferences around the world.




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All contents copyright © 2011 by Aneace Haddad. All rights

reserved. No part of this document or the related files may be

reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means

(electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without

the prior written permission of the publisher.




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Whether you are launching your own new startup company,

or a new product or service within a large organization, thesimple framework you will discover in this booklet will help

you dramatically increase your chance of success. The

framework guides you in asking yourself a few challenging

questions. Once you provide compelling answers, your

success is almost guaranteed.

This work initially came out of my own frustrations growing

companies, and was refined through my “Art of

Entrepreneurship” workshop for MBA students. The

workshop explores failures in the payments industry, my

area of expertise, that have happened when basic questions

were not asked, and looks at successful products and services

in comparison.




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Take for example biometric payments, where customers pay

by touching their finger on a reader. The marketing promise

is that you can shop without your wallet. A Silicon Valley

company called Pay By Touch raised US$340 million, hired

800 employees, and promptly went out of business.

It’s as if nobody asked: “So what? How can I leave mywallet at home if most stores don’t use the service? Is it

really such a hassle to carry a wallet? Who cares? The

average shopper or a jogger who doesn’t carry a wallet yet

still wants to buy a coffee? Is that a big market? Do those

people care enough to adopt and pay for this service? Will

retailers pay for it? If not, who pays? And why?”

You get the picture.

Here are actual statements from business plans. Some arefrom startups, while others are from major companies

launching new products and services.




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“Our business model is based on increasing card usage and

taking market share away from cash.”

“Our business model is to get customers to pay $0.99 per

month for our iPhone app.”

“Our business strategy is to get our app into 20% of Internet

enabled mobile phones.”

“Our business model is to give a basic service away for free

and charge for a more complete version. We are looking for

funds to develop this new version.”

So what? Who cares? These declarations all fail at a very

basic level. None of them focus on a buyer’s needs. Instead,

they all seem to focus entirely on what the company wants

for itself.

Compare those company statements with the following.




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“We provide free financial planning to users, and earn

commissions when recommending products and services that

can save users money.” (Mint.com)

“We deliver fresh baked goods once a week to busy New-

Yorkers. Our food is produced in small batches and

delivered locally to pre-paying customers.” (Dulcinea)

“We connect buyers and sellers of locally grown food.”

(Local Dirt)

You don’t feel like asking so what, or who cares. You kind

of get it at a fundamental level. The statements all focus on

benefits and the customer’s needs. You get a good feel about

who cares, and can also get some feel for how the company

also benefits, but that is almost secondary at this stage.

Let’s look at Mint.com in more detail.

“We provide free financial planning to users, and earn

commissions when recommending products and services that

can save users money.”




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Mint.com is a free on-line service that provides essentially

the same financial planning capabilities as Intuit, a pricy

software package. The Mint.com website has no Google ads

and the company charges no subscription fees. So how do

they make money?

Once a user has entered their financial information,Mint.com is able to offer suggestions on credit cards,

insurance policies, mortgages, and other products that could

cost the user less money than what they are currently

spending. Mint.com earns a commission from the provider,

which could be $15 for an insurance policy, $60 for a credit

card or $200 to refinance a mortgage.

In less than two years, Mint.com reached a million users and

was bought by Intuit for $170 million.

Here is a simple tool to help you get clear on the value of

what you are selling, and to whom it is valuable. No matter

what kind of product or service you offer, no matter what

industry or market you are in, whatever you are selling must




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fall into one of three categories. You are either selling

vitamins, or you are selling painkiller, or, if you are really

lucky, your product or service is addictive like cocaine. With

vitamins, people pay for improvements in the future. They

think about ROI (return on investment) before buying. Most

products are in this category. With painkillers, buyers want

relief immediately and will pay more. With cocaine, people

just can't get enough. Think iPhones and social networking.

A few years ago, my prior startup won a prestigious award in

Europe, called the ROI Of The Year Award, by The Banker

magazine. We were selling high-end payment solutions to

banks. I was very proud of winning that award. We had

complex spreadsheets demonstrating the ROI of our

solution, which the judges loved. We could show that a bank

could save millions of dollars on the cost of acquiring new

credit card customers, and could make additional revenue by

getting people to use their cards more and increase their

monthly credit balances. Now, in retrospect, I wish I never

had to win that award. I wish I never had to create complex




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spreadsheets and spend lots of energy finding complicated

ways to justify the cost of my solution. Because now I

realize that the reason we became so good at ROI

calculations is that we had to, simply because we were

selling vitamins. If you find yourself spending lots of time

on ROI, you too are selling vitamins.

Very often, the same product acts as vitamins for one

category of customers, and painkiller for another category.

Focus first on the painkiller category. Develop a complete

marketing plan based on providing your painkiller product to

those buyers. If you are thinking in terms of vitamins and

painkillers, this process will be straightforward.

Many companies fail when they get confused and price their

product as painkiller yet at the same time develop a business

plan based on reaching out to the much bigger category of

buyers that only see the product as vitamins. That can’t

work. Thinking in terms of vitamins, painkiller and cocaine

will help you avoid falling into that trap.




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And then there are the more complex business models like

Mint.com that involve multiple parties. Free financial

planning is a painkiller for users, since it makes it easier and

cheaper to manage one’s finances than other methods. But

the actual customers are the companies that pay commissions

to Mint.com for helping them sell their credit cards,

insurance policies and mortgages. For these businesses,

acquiring new customers is as addictive as cocaine.

“Why me?” What is your special story that makes this

venture specifically adapted to you? Companies with a very

personal story have a higher ability to stick with it and put in

the extra effort. Competitors without a compelling story are

less robust and will give up first.

As the company grows and develops a corporate culture,

“Why me?” becomes “Why us?”

Venture investors will tell you that the strength of the

management team is the most important factor in evaluating

a business plan. The conventional wisdom rates the size of




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the opportunity second and the product concept third.

Investors want to see a strong management team that has the

right story, a large market opportunity, and a sound product

that is unique and preferably protected in some way through

patents, trademarks, etc.

“Why me?” is the heart and soul of your venture. It is thestory that explains why the venture is so important to you,

and why you are the best person for the job. In terms of IP

protection, it is even more important than patents and

trademarks. And that comes from someone who has lost a

company due to patent lawsuits, and who has won patent

infringement suits against competitors.

You can have lots of capital, a fantastic team, and be

positioned in a highly lucrative market segment, yet still fail

if you don’t have a compelling answer to “Why me?” There

are lots of examples of this. At the same time, there are lots

of examples of companies that did not have adequate

funding, did not have a highly qualified team, yet succeeded




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brilliantly, simply because the team’s answer to “Why us?”

drove them to invest their blood and tears into the venture,

with tremendous passion and tenacity.

Samuel Pierpont Langley was an aviation pioneer who was

trying to get planes to fly at the same time as the Wright

brothers. He was highly educated, unlike the Wright brothers, a couple of high-school dropouts who ran a bicycle

shop. Langley received substantial funding from the War

Department. His position as Secretary of the Smithsonian

Institution gave him great credibility, as did his early success

with unmanned aircraft. Langley had more than adequate

funding, was surrounded by highly qualified collaborators,

and enjoyed excellent market conditions with buyers that

would pay lots of money for a viable invention. The Wright

brothers had none of this. And yet they succeeded and

Langley was all but forgotten. Why?

Langley was driven by fame and fortune, and was most

likely misled by his conventional qualifications. It is easy to




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imagine Langley starting each day thinking about glory, and

as time progressed, worrying more and more about

protecting his reputation and not appearing as a failure.

The Wright brothers on the other hand were not encumbered

with any of this. All they had was the passion to fly. A

passion that went back to when the boys were 7 and 11, playing with a rubber band driven helicopter toy until it

broke, then building a new one on their own. They later

pointed to the toy as the initial spark of their passion.

“Why us? Because we have been intensely passionate aboutflying machines since we were boys, and everything we have

done since then was a means to building up the knowledge

and experience to achieve our objective.”

Back to the payments industry and Square, a new venturelaunched by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Square makes

it easy for anyone to accept credit cards with an iPhone and

without needing a merchant agreement with a bank. Square’s

answer to “Why me?” is on their website:




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“In February 2009, Jim McKelvey wasn’t able to sell a piece

of his glass art because he couldn’t accept a credit card as

payment. Even though a majority of payments has moved to

plastic cards, accepting payments from cards is still difficult,

requiring long applications, expensive hardware, and an

overly complex experience. Square was born a few days later

right next to the old San Francisco US Mint.”

The questioning process is demanding and humbling.

“Why you?”

“Because my partner wanted to sell a piece of artwork and

couldn’t.”

“OK, interesting. But, so what? Why you?”

“I was co-founder of Twitter. I’ve got lots of clout andvisibility. I know everything about social media.”




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“OK. This is about payments. So why you? Also, what was

that bit about the San Francisco US Mint? What’s that got to

do with anything?"

If Square had a clear and compelling grounding in social

media, this could all make sense.

Apple has consistently innovated, year after year, with

fantastic products that the market loves. All because of their

answer to “Why me?”

Here is how Apple’s COO laid it out in 2009:

“We believe that we're on the face of the earth to make great

products and that's not changing. We're constantly focusing

on innovating. We believe in the simple, not the complex.

“We believe we need to own and control the primarytechnologies behind the products that we make and

participate only in markets where we can make a significant

contribution.




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“We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we

can focus on the few that are meaningful to us. We believe in

deep collaboration and cross pollination in order to innovate

in a way others cannot.

“We don't settle for anything other than excellence in any

group in the company, and we have the self-honesty to admitwhen we're wrong and the courage to change.

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple_coo_tim_co

ok_lays_out_apple_manifesto_with_or_without_steve_jobs/

What if you are in a mature, traditional business? How does

the framework apply?

Mexico has thousands of green taxis, all VW bugs, all the

same shade of green. A new service was launched, with pink

taxis driven exclusively by women and stopping only for

women. In crime-ridden cities, the service could be

irresistible. The concept is now being tested as far away as

Russia, Lebanon and India. Who cares? Women who need to




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take taxis, and the families of those women. Why me? Now

there’s the opportunity. The founder or senior manager with

the best “Why me?” story will attract the most dedicated

drivers and build the most successful pink taxi company.

What if your business already exists? Does the process only

work when you are creating the company, before things become mature? The process is iterative. It will be useful at

every point in the life of a company. You can use it to help

get clarity on a mature business. You can use it to explore

new markets and new features.

My colleagues and I use it after every meeting with a

prospect or client. When we step out of a meeting, the first

thing we ask each other is, “So? Vitamins, painkiller or

cocaine?” Where did we hit? Are we talking to the right

people? This is a simple way to avoid spending lots of

energy on people for whom your product is merely vitamin.

Find someone else in the organization or find a different way

to use your product, or simply move on.




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Once you have clear answers to so what, who cares, why me,

you can prepare a powerful declaration or mission statement.

Simon Sinek, author of “Start With Why”, describes how

most companies describe first what they do, then how they

do it. They sometimes describe why they are doing it, as an

afterthought. He shows how inspiring leaders work in

exactly the opposite direction. They describe first why they

do what they do, then how they do it, and finally what they

do.

Take Apple as an example. If Apple were a company like

most others, their sales pitch would sound something like

this:

“We make great computers (what we do). They’re

beautifully designed, simple to use, and user friendly (how

we do it). Want to buy one?”

Not very inspiring.

Instead, what Apple actually says is this:




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“Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo;

we believe in thinking differently (why we do what we do).

The way we challenge the status quo is by making our

products beautifully designed, simple to use, and user

friendly (how we do it). We just happen to make great

computers (what we do). Want to buy one?”




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In conclusion, prepare a worksheet with the following steps

and answer the questions at each step. This is an iterative

process. Work through the whole sheet until you feel

comfortable with how everything fits together.

Step 1 – Discover the pains that you address.

The pains that my business will address are …

(Focus on “So what?” and “Vitamins, Painkiller or

Cocaine?”)

Step 2 – Discover your market.

People or companies that have these pains are ...

(Focus on “Who cares? Who really REALLY cares?”)

Step 3 – Discover your unique talents and history.

This business needs special skills, background, history or

experience that I have and which few other people have.

These are ...




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(Focus on “Why me? What is MY special, unique story?”)

Step 4 – Discover your mission statement.

a – The reason I do what I do is …

b – The thing that is unique about how I do it is …

c – What I do is …

Then prepare a succinct mission statement that combines a, b

and c in that order.

Participants in my workshop are organized into groups of 5or 6 students that work together on a business idea of their

choice. They prepare answers to the questions on the

worksheet, and then send one person up at the end to present

their project to everyone. The class grades each project based

on how compelling the answers are. Major weaknesses are

immediately apparent and can be focused on for

improvement. In one or two hours, most people are able to




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get a good grasp of the tools that will help them define the

heart and soul of any venture they would like to pursue.

Documents

So What Who Cares Why Me