To make money, you have to make the money flow.
Flow directly to you by selling them a product.
Or make a huge amount of money flow between two parties so that you can get a cut of it. A cut you deserve because without you that amount of money would not have flowed.
For the first one, you might have to bother finding a product to sell. It might or might not have product-market fit, whatever.
But for the second one, you can just go for things which have traction and increase the intensity.
But whatever happens, money flows between two people. They might be hiding behind the veil of a company, but money exchanges hands between two people.
You might be selling something to someone or helping get something sold to someone.
Someone is always involved, and thus money is a people’s game.
If you are even more pragmatic about it, money is not about the product nor about if it is yours.
Money is about you and your relationship with people.
Are you someone from whom people would buy a product, or are you someone because of whom someone will buy someone else’s product?
If the answer is no, then it is a skill that we must master.
Well, the primary skill is finding and sourcing people to sell to them.
And I am a huge proponent of inbound. So, are you someone who is able to attract people – and the right people – who are eligible for whatever you are selling?
This awareness of who is going to buy from you is necessary. This is the foundation block without which there can be nothing.
And then you have to turn that awareness into relationships. “Hey, these are the people who will buy from me, and I must now convince them.”
And post that if you are able to convince them to buy what you are selling or helping to sell, you have made the money flow.
And for that, you shall get some money.
The process becomes:
- Awareness of their existence
- Contacting with them
- Converting them
If you’re running the shop solo, and you are not some corporation or investor-backed fund, the first part is where you might get stuck because, hey, it’s a people’s game, and if you don’t know the people, how are you going to make the thing work? I think if being a socialite helps here a lot. Government contracts flow to some specific people, some favored people . After all, it’s a people’s game. Thus, if you are someone who is good with people, who is good with networking, then you shall have no problem with this money game. Being someone who is good with people helps you form a network that might act as your kingmaker and grant you customers. If you’re not lucky enough to have that, at least you can reach out to someone inside your network. Thus, the wider and more powerful your network, the more ease you will have with business. In modern days, we see a substitute of it being able to just pay the advertisement companies like Meta and it will summon people in front of you. But then it becomes a game of capital. If you don’t have money to run on ads, then I don’t think you have a business if you’re going for that route. But if you are going for the traditional route of having to be good with people, then you need some type of social status and prestige.
The best business advice I have right now is:
Understand that business is about people, not the product. It is about people’s feelings, not their problems. People will blow up the last bit of savings they have on gambling, sometimes even skipping medications or ignoring their bills. It was never about rationality. And without rationality, the significance of problems in money-related decisions also diminishes, and feelings come as the triumphant force. To influence feelings, you need to have a person to influence. To earn money, you need to do it on a mass scale, so you need to figure out how to access people on a mass scale. Are you going to get to them one-by-one, or are you going to have a kingmaker? We will provide you access to hundreds of them at once. What is going to be your game plan to find these people or your kingmaker? Answering these questions is fundamental to your business success. You might have the best product in your palm, but still won’t be able to sell it because of this. The product might not even look like a product to you right now but can take the form of a product.
One example of this is I was talking a guy who approached me after watching my Reels said, “Hey, how do I make a SaaS?” He was telling me about his personal projects, and he told me that he created a compression algorithm for photographs that he created while working on a social media project. I said, “Hey, the social media project, you can try scaling that, but I think the compression algorithm might be of use to other people who are dealing with a lot of photos. You can sell it as an backend that provides photo compression on a mass scale.” This way you might have a lot of products in your hand that you are not looking at as a product because you haven’t thought of it yet. This product poverty is not a real thing. You can always find something to sell. You are a human with diverse experiences and actions which have had many fruits in the past and are going to happen in the future, which you can sell. So it’s not about products; it’s about people. That’s where the real poverty lies. I used to say that, “Hey, I am in product poverty,” but that’s not true. I am actually in people poverty.
One way I’m trying to address this is by collecting a bit of prestige points by going to a good university and having those high finance jobs. But another is to build my own inbound network by having a social media presence. But I need to step my game up. I need to have access to more inner circles, more exclusive connections. And I need to figure it out yesterday. Because if you don’t have people poverty, you have influential collections. You don’t even need to think about product, you can just connect these two people. You can be the middleman. Let’s say one is a construction tycoon and another one owns huge supply of raw materials. You can be the person who causes the deals. And that money flow results in you netting some amount. Product poverty is trivial. It is people poverty that is holding you back. Having good command over people can easily eliminate your product poverty, but having good command over product will not eliminate your people poverty.
Solve for people poverty and then money will flow easily. It’s like the highest degree of leverage in this world.
You might have heard the phrase “it is easier to sell a $10,000 product than a $10 product” because at higher levels, people just have different mindset. And that’s how it is with some set of people also. In FMCG, those might be the hyper-consumerists who will buy anything you show to them. In the case of the tech market, it might be some innovative company that tries out every tool they can find to increase their output. Thus, there are pockets of people who are way easier to sell to. It is way better to establish these money flows with them. Thus, if you are optimizing for a problem, you might miss out on obvious markets like these where all is needed is distribution, and there might not even be a parent problem to even solve. But of course, it will be difficult to reach these people. And yeah, optimizing for people instead of for problems can be a better path. I have been saying this without realizing this whole context: “Help winners win.” The phrase might not even be “Help winners win.” It might be just “Find winners and sell to them.”
Another Jibe I want to make at Product-Market fit is their own inability to have good distribution. They are not able to find people for their product at a good price. So they think if they solve a problem so big that people will stick around with them till they can recover their cost to acquire a customer. Or, in their fancy terms, “Solve a problem big enough” so that people don’t churn out till you recover your CAC. It’s like they took a decision based on the wrong mental model, and now to compensate for that mistake, they have to keep making judgment errors down the stream in the same mental model. The world is fragile and fickle. Many successful businesses might even have a life cycle of just 5-6 years. This assumption of going principle and wanting that things should be long-term has stopped us from making many commercial ventures. This current mind virus of solving something sticky so that you can have low churn, so that you can have good ARR, so that you can multiply it with some valuation multiple so that you can have a great exit, how fucking greedy and irrational. They want to cling to the going concern so bad because they don’t make money via their revenue, they make it via their exit. And for their exit to be safe, they have to think in this way that hey can’t have churn, can’t solve small problems because without it I won’t be able to project my revenues indefinitely. It’s like a mind virus that is forcing us to think in a certain way because we want that specific outcome instead of just saying that I want cash flow and I’m out. Because cash flow is good, and exit is not always the goal. Stock value is not always the goal. “Can’t solve temporal problems because I need to project till eternity to get that terminal value” GTFO.
Plus the shade thrown on distribution is unreal. Why do you think distribution is not solving a real problem? People are buying because the promise we made to them that they will feel good if they buy this. That promise is everything. Regardless of whether you are solving a problem or not, that promise is what they are opening their purse for. You will feel good, and that’s what you are paying for. It’s the whole premise. No one is paying thousands of dollars for luxury products for their utility. Why is the people’s need to feel good not respected enough? Why is it not thought of as a serious need to solve for? Why are feelings not considered as serious as a problem that a product is solving?
People are currently sitting on opportunities that could generate $50k-500k in the next 12-24 months, but they won’t execute because “It’s not scalable” or “What’s the long term vision?” Why is “I need accounting software to track expenses” treated as more legitimate than “I need to feel like the kind of person who uses premium products”?Both are driving purchasing decisions. Both are needs. Infact, some of these feelings are going to stick around for far more greater time than what are problems these PMF guys are solving. The Promise IS the Product.
The decision flow is not evaluation of utility, rationalizing price, and then thinking about how you might feel about the purchase. No. In fact, it is a feeling is invoked about that product, a decision is made and then you rationalize it.The rationalizations are not the first thing. The Genesis is from the feelings. That’s why even if many products are useful and they are out there in the market and they’re approaching you, if they don’t make you feel, if they don’t resonate with you, you are not going to buy them no matter what their utility is.
Plus I am someone who is born to be a competitor. I am someone who wants to play by reducing time to value and effort to value in things so that I can provide something like instant gratification to my customers. That means observing what currently exists and improving upon it. The utility differences are going to be marginal. I don’t think there is going to be any genius moment where I just completely change everything. That’s a wild goose chase. The difference between me and my competitors is going to be mostly of feelings, not utility. This is it is natural for me to justify all these things I have said and to optimize for feelings.
Alright, then I said all these things that hey, product-market fit doesn’t matter. Solve for feelings. Go find people. How can one turn this into actionable steps?