A big thank you to the sponsors of this episode, Eleken and Unicorn Fuel.​

​Dagobert Renouf may be really good at posting funny memes on Twitter, but his journey building Logology with his wife has been a wild rollercoaster ride. A lot of emotional ups and down, moments of pure joy, and a lot of despair.

I've been thinking a lot about this conversation with Dago. Having built a business with my partner Danielle, I know how hard it is not to be able to go home and talk about your boss... because I was already home and Danielle was my boss!

Fortunately, both Danielle and I had been a couple for a few years before we went into business together. The fact that we had figured out a way to communicate earnestly with each other was a massive help when things got rough in the business.

And things get rough. Guaranteed.

It's funny how the topic of mental health has been such a prevalent theme of my last few weeks. From my talk at MicroConf to my podcast episode recapping the conference throughout my conversations on Twitter and with Dr. Sherry Walling, burnout, isolation, imposter syndrome and dealing with entrepreneurship-induced stress and anxiety has been everywhere. Yesterday, I recorded an hour-long conversation with Tyler Tringas on our show Arvid and Tyler Catch Up about ways to cope with the founder lifestyle when you don't have a supportive family or friend group.

I know these are hard topics to confront. And I wouldn't blame you if you reflexively moved on from this email. I've been there many times.

But maybe, just maybe, one of these conversations will give you a perspective on your own challenges that can inch you closer to dealing with them. And if you want to have a chat about that, just reply to this email, and I'll get back to you.

And now, let me introduce a concept to you that made my brain explode a little bit last week. And funnily enough, it is about our capacity to deal with brain-breaking information.

When AI researchers Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin tried to explain generative AI to journalists in early 2022 —when just a few hundred researchers and early adopters were toying with the new tech and long before it became mainstream— journalists would nod along while being shown how a prompt would generate a never-before-seen image. “Oh yeah, cool stuff. Images are being generated. That’s exciting!” And then, right after the demonstration, they would ask which image database that picture had been pulled from. They just couldn’t fathom that this was not a pre-existing image.

Their minds had snapped back to what they knew, even in the face of something spectacularly novel.

Or maybe it’s BECAUSE they were looking at something spectacularly novel. Raskin and Harris call this the Rubber Band Effect. At some point, our cognitive capacity to understand something entirely dissimilar to what we already know just implodes, and we return to the safe defaults.

Entrepreneurs face the same issue.

When you build something significantly different from someone’s lived experience, their capacity to truly understand how the thing works is surprisingly limited. They push the boundaries of their minds while you show them, and they might nod along, but they snap right back to where they were just a short time later.

The moment your product becomes “different enough,” people will have a hard time projecting its usefulness onto their own lives.

Here's something useful: let me thank the sponsor of this issue, Unicorn Fuel. Have you started using AI to generate logo designs, social content, web sites, prototypes, MVPs, and beyond? They say it's so easy, but if you've tried, you probably learned it's not that simple. ​Unicorn Fuel helps founders, builders and even experienced designers learn how to harness the power of AI + No Code + Design to launch faster. We help you figure out where to start, what the pitfalls are, and which tools are best for which tasks. Our one-of-kind newsletter goes further than a list of links and tools, offering a more in-depth look at which ones get the job done with the least friction—with a whole lot of yummy eye candy along the way. Suzanne and Kirk, two bootstrapped founders with 20 years in the digital design industry, will keep you plugged in — and draw your attention to the tools, techniques and tricks that can impact your bottom line, or bring your idea to market faster. Subscribe now

So your prospect didn't "get" your product. For a business owner, this means a lost customer—a customer who didn’t even try because they couldn’t find themselves in the future you envisioned.

Well then, how can you try to encourage them to use your product anyway?

Instead of focusing on the magical internal workings of your product, focus on the results. Show just how impactful your product can be. When John ‘Plini’ Eremic served his first customers in his business EndCrawl, he didn’t hype up the fact that his movie end credits rendering product was particularly well-coded (it wasn’t, there was only a massive Perl script running on top of a spreadsheet.) But he sold the magical consequence: instead of waiting for days to get a rendered cinematic video, it would now be done in hours. For much cheaper. John sold the results, and many AI-focused businesses of today have found this to work for them as well: they sell the speed and variety of content they produce, not the complexity of the technology that makes it happen.

And these businesses have understood something else that’s critically important: their products fit into the existing workflows of their customers. Plini’s cinematic end credits don’t come in some unique video format. These titles are delivered in industry standard sizes, ready to be thrown right into the rough cut for further processing. EndCrawl looks at the inputs, too: they provide a SaaS to input all kinds of names and job titles, and they offer a spreadsheet-based end credits template, too. They make it easy to get your data in and your movie out.

That’s what the product-workflow fit is trying to accomplish. Ideally, your customers don’t even want to risk pulling apart their mental rubber bands. They want a service rendered, a result for a specific set of inputs.

And when it comes to amazing services rendered, let me introduce Eleken, the sponsor of this issue! ​ ​Eleken agency makes SaaS product design easy: you get a dedicated full-time UI/UX designer for a monthly subscription fee. Start in hours, not weeks. Eleken always has 1-2 designers on bench, ready to get to work immediately. Benefit from team efforts. Hiring one professional, you get the expertise of Eleken's UI lead, UX lead and Head of Design, who will supervise the project. Communicate with your designer directly. Eleken doesn't put the project manager in the middle. It's like hiring your in-house designer, just faster, with no operational burden or setup fees. Get a free trial week with promo code "I’M FROM ARVID".

Your customers likely don’t operate in a vacuum: they have colleagues, peers, competitors, and a whole host of professionals in the industry they work in. Leverage that. Find people who are more adventurous —the early adopters and innovators— and use their interest in finding new and exciting things to eventually cross the chasm to your regular customers. When you listen to the people “who get it,” use their words to describe your product to those who still have snapping rubber bands. Figure out the jargon that makes sense to people in your field and deploy it in your marketing and sales pipeline. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. Or rather, talk to them in Latin. Or Italian, depending on just how modern your product is.

So, if you see your own prospects snapping back from your lengthy excursion about why your product is so revolutionary, refocus your positioning. Don’t go for novel; go for efficient. Show how much you care about making sure their workflow isn’t interrupted. Signal that you know exactly what job needs to be done and that your product —however magical it is— will do that and just that.

While I’m all for stretching that rubber band a little —in ourselves and in the lives of our customers who deserve better tools to do their jobs— let’s not forget that what we want is not the hammer, the nail, or even the picture on the wall: we want to feel good looking at our loved ones.

Make it easy for people to understand how your product gets them to where they want to be, and they won’t have to stretch their imaginations.

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Classifieds

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Let me introduce my friend Andreas Möller, a self-employed Software Engineer and Consultant from Berlin, Germany. With a focus on modernizing legacy PHP applications and teams, he can help your business become more profitable: by shipping software earlier, with fewer defects, and with a lower total cost of ownership. Schedule a call — Andreas is an awesome person.

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Finally, a big shoutout to my friends over at Acquire.com — they're not only responsible for allowing bootstrapped founders to have life-changing exits, they also sponsored my interview episodes with Dr. Sherry Walling AND Dagobert Renouf.

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