“Most startups don’t fail outright, they fail to gain meaningful traction,” says Brendan on this solo episode of Billion Dollar Tech. He gets more specific with five reasons that contribute to the failure. The first reason is one that he has discussed many times, which is that companies go too wide at the start, and fail to specifically define their service and why it’s necessary to their target audience.
Companies need to know what you can do for them within the specific context of their business. Do they see your solution as crucial to their tasks? Equally important is clarity of message and Brendan offers the minimum criteria for achieving it.
He defines anchoring bias and why getting ahead of it is so crucial, and why you’re doing social media wrong.
Quotes:
“You have to build the thing, or position the thing in such a way that it solves for a core pain and that their life is more meaningfully worse without your solution in place.” ([4:52]-[5:07] | Brendan)
“So here’s a super common scenario: somebody builds an MVP, a minimum viable product, or they raise a little bit of money. And then what do they do, which is natural and should happen, they go out, and they start to talk to everyone they know. Now, I’m not discouraging you from networking. I’m not discouraging you from posting on social media to people. But what you’re not doing in that process is generating broad based awareness around what it is you do, how you help and why it’s different than everyone else.” ([7:03]-[7:38] | Brendan)
“Are you aligning your team around just getting as many blinking lights to show up as possible?” ([10:20]-[10:24] | Brendan)
Connect with Brendan Dell:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendandell/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendanDell
Instagram: @thebrendandell
TikTok: @brendandell39
Buy a copy of Brendan’s Book, The 12 Immutable Laws of High-Impact Messaging: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780578210926
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About the Author
Brendan Dell
Brendan Dell is an author and the founder of The Daily Creative. As a freelancer he's worked with clients like Expedia, Cvent, Panasonic, Brother, Windstream and 100+ more to build unignorable tech brands. At The Daily Creative, he shares advice and lessons to help freelancers level up.
