TLDR : being a practitioner gives you unique insights and authority that helps you build trust and lower CAC.
In my last article, I was talking about trust. How CAC is just a way to manufacture trust in a person so that they believe that we can satisfy their “what’s in it for me.” And without this trust, there is no commercial activity that takes place. And you can only so much to one person, and thus you will have to find more customers. That means you will keep facing CAC. Thus, a high CAC can make your business unsustainable, even if it has been successful as of now, or if it doesn’t even exist as of now. CAC is the linchpin that holds the whole machine together. CAC rises as trust evaporates. You can see the CAC rising whenever a business has a scandal going on. Or CAC collapsing as trust rises as they get positive word of mouth. Trust is everything.
Trust is manufactured either via:
- Us being an authority
- Us stirring up strings when it comes to the person’s emotions, thinking, or the social environment around them
Informational asymmetry cannot come from theory, it is symmetric and generalized.
Thus we have to turn to doing. You gotta ‘do’
Doing something is the best source of information, shit ton of emotional, environmental and social inputs. A lot of information that you will not find in any theory.
Wanna teach how to sell or tool that helps you sell? Go sell. Same for products related to coding, drawing or anything
Doing something makes you a practitioner, and that also makes you an authority as people respect practitioners. They want to hear what the practitioner has to say about the work they are doing so that they could know about the best practices or what the norms of industry are.
Thus, the act of doing makes you an authority and also gives you information symmetry. If you document the process of doing, you also get content.
Either way, if you want to induce trust by invoking emotions or thoughts in people by exploiting Information asymmetry, or by being an authority… doing is an efficient way of going about it.
Thats why you should try things and be an outsider trying to do things. That way you more likely to complain and voice the unsaid but felt things. An industry insider will accept high excel formula inspection time but outsider will make arixcel or macabacus. Your emotions felt will be 10x of normal but also helps you be aware of them and express them
Be tourist of workflows
Enter domains as doer and executioner
Be the authority and the asymmetric info holderYou hold information asymmetrically when it comes to yourself. Not a single unique experience meme shows you can sell anything. If you feel it, 10000s others too. Thus you have enough surface to monetise. You can target it better because you know:
- The emotions you feel
- The social context around you
- The things you care about
You have a better idea about the WIIFMs you care about and in which order.
Nowhere does it say that you have to go after information asymmetry that is non-first-person. You can solve your own itch. And now that you know your own itch is not very unique and there are thousands like you, thus there is a market. Since you have so much context about yourself, you have an unfair advantage when it comes to targeting it.The only legitimate competitor to you can be someone else like you who is also monetizing himself, which is a really rare combination. And at that point, that guy should just be your co-founder, not competitor.
I would agree that monetizing this can be hard. You might be someone in the trenches grinding really hard to get up, and that’s a really hard demographic to monetize. But you will be UPPPPP someday. And then you can target the demographic that was once down but are now up. But fortunately for me, I am someone who is at a good position? I am from a prestigious university. I have landed a really good job. I am going to be living in a Tier 1 city. I am ambitious, and I am taking business risk, so the surface that I can monetize is really good.