March 29th, 2020
I got a really nice email from a reader, which I'd love to show, as well as my own response.
For anyone reading this, I invite you to email me your thoughts about anything I write, anytime. My email is patrickswalls@gmail.com:
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(excerpt)
In “Ask and you shall receive”, you expanded on a buffet of feelings so many of us have felt in this software/entrepenuer/whatever you want to call it space. I had a few thoughts on how you are positioning your business to yourself that I hope you’ll consider.
For anyone reading this, I invite you to email me your thoughts about anything I write, anytime. My email is patrickswalls@gmail.com:
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(excerpt)
In “Ask and you shall receive”, you expanded on a buffet of feelings so many of us have felt in this software/entrepenuer/whatever you want to call it space. I had a few thoughts on how you are positioning your business to yourself that I hope you’ll consider.
- Identifying your desire to not feel guilty when charging your customers money, is awesome. You’re way ahead of most people in knowing you need your customers to buy in to continue to enable you providing value to them!
- Invite yourself to feel guilty when you don’t charge people for value, because when you don’t sustain your business and furthermore yourself you deprive your most loyal fans of you and your business’ service.
- Value is subjective. You customers aren’t paying you what your service is worth, they are paying what you your asking price because what you provide is worth more than the money they have. I’m reminded of a Jerry Seinfeld interview where Jerry was asked if he had a favorite joke. He responded to the interviewer that it was a silly question because comedy for him is like breathing and therefore his favorite joke was the joke that would get him to the next joke. The haunting reality of it all, is that this isn’t true just for Jerry Seinfeld and his jokes, but for each and every one of us along with the craft we choose to pursue. Your most valuable product or service is the one that enables you to sell the next one, and so on. What seems like snake oil to you may well be holy water for someone else. And fortunately, we live in a time and place where we get to choose what will be our holy water and what will see as snake oil.
To a community of people, you have a holy water for them. But remember, even Jesus, with a billion followers and churches from Chile to Cechnya, has more haters than followers. It should remind us that there will be more people who either hate us or are indifferent to our efforts but remember we don’t work for them. We work for the few who get value from what we bring to the table.
Starter Story to enough people is life-changing encouragement; value your holy water accordingly.
In “Silver Lining”, you gifted all of us a candid look into your life. In fact, I enjoy that we are seeing more of this from creators on the internet in the times we are in. But your blog post stopped me in my tracks for a moment. I leaned back and thought, you know what, what if all the other stuff was silver lining stripped away, and the things we are actually enjoying now is the real gold of life. You said it succinctly yourself in your fourth bullet:
Things will be fine
In fact, it is possible with less driving alone, our countries average of 40,000 vehicular deaths a year may lower this year, off setting the loss of life we are so attentive to with this virus threat. Not that any loss of life is not cause for contemplation, but it seems in this moment we have all considered what’s most important and realized maybe in our time before all this, we were mining for silver when we were already sitting on gold.
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My response (excerpt):
On the first points, you're right - value is subjective - it's crazy to think about. What seemed valuable to me years ago is no longer all that valuable to me, but I can't let my own perspective get in the way. For example, content on "how to start a business" is not worth much to me anymore but it may be worth $5,000 to someone just starting out where it does actually change their life. I need to be more cognizant of that. It helps when I hear from people that Starter Story changed their life or just get thank you emails and that kind of thing.
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My response (excerpt):
On the first points, you're right - value is subjective - it's crazy to think about. What seemed valuable to me years ago is no longer all that valuable to me, but I can't let my own perspective get in the way. For example, content on "how to start a business" is not worth much to me anymore but it may be worth $5,000 to someone just starting out where it does actually change their life. I need to be more cognizant of that. It helps when I hear from people that Starter Story changed their life or just get thank you emails and that kind of thing.
But even selling SaaS software, because I know how to code and automate things, I take things like that for granted. What seems dead simple to me may be a breakthrough for someone else. This goes back to even some of my corporate days when I would teach clients things, but I would assume "they knew what I knew" and then they would get confused because I skipped a step. Then I would see someone else explain XYZ in more simpler terms and then the clients had the "aha" moment and everything clicked.
I think as engineer-types we make this mistake a lot - and I'm trying to find better ways to prevent this before it happens, I guess asking more of the right questions and listening more... Maybe you have some ideas to get better at this?
As far as having haters, you are 100% right on that. I think about this a lot. We don't realize it now, but the ones with haters have the biggest impact.
Trump, Kanye, Elon Musk, Oprah, Mark Zuckerberg, etc (just examples) - personally I don't pay much attention to their policies/opinions or what they did last week - but I'm constantly enamored with their ability to "not back down" from criticism or shame or public embarrassment. They are unbreakable - nothing can affect them. Even "scandals" of the biggest proportions barely affects them in the grand scheme.
As for coronavirus - yes - once the dust settles people will look at their bank statements during this time period and realize that they got by just fine spending nothing, and hopefully will also realize they were happier during this time. I'm excited for this to be over and see what people say about it and how it changes our generation....