Thirty Five

A couple of weeks ago I was on a call with a founder who’s building software for rental businesses in tourist towns.

She got into it because she owns one (golf carts, in a Florida beach town).

The software she’d been licensing for years could book a reservation, but not much else. It couldn't tell her which carts were earning and which ones sat in the lot all week. It couldn't tell her what she was spending to get a new customer in the door.

She tracked all of that by hand with spreadsheets, so she decided to build her own software instead.

Her own company has been running on it for a few weeks now, and the second biggest operator in her area is about to start using it. Which means she’s moving from an idea to a business, so she’s in pitch mode.

And everyone she talks to agrees with her when she pitches. She shows them what their old software can't do. She shows them what hers does. They tell her she's right. They nod their heads.

Then they stay exactly where they are and don’t sign up.

At one point she asked, "Should I just be running ads? If more folks knew about this, I'm convinced they'd want it."

That's the first escape hatch for a lot of us in these moments.

My wife and daughter were at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday for Harry Styles. A birthday present for my mother-in-law, who turned 80 this summer…as you do.

Twenty thousand people in a room, all going nuts, having a great time. That's what a hit looks like, right?

But nobody in that building showed up by accident. Every one of them bought a ticket because they already loved Harry.

He didn't talk them into it. They were out there in the world first, and his show found them.

You won't find too many Napalm Death fans in that room either. One of the biggest pop acts on earth is still playing for a specific group of people. The group is just very large.

I've seen this from another side too. A streaming music service has every song ever recorded sitting on the shelf, and the customer is still not “everyone who likes music.”

Plenty of people love music and want nothing to do with an app. Plenty already have one they like. Having everything doesn't make you for everyone.

The woman I met with, her market is a few hundred rental operators in coastal Florida, and she'd been treating them as one audience with one answer. They're not.

Some of those operators think of themselves as the ones who go first. They like telling themselves, and their customers, they found something before anybody else did.

Those are the people who can say yes to new software this year.

The rest aren't saying no. They aren't shopping at all. More proof won't help, because proof isn't what's stopping them. They just want the regular kind. The kind everyone else is using.

The kind that means they can avoid telling their boss or the others about something new.

By the end of our call, listening to her talk about her margins, her team, and the kind of lifestyle she wants as a founder, a number started to show up.

A very good year for her is about thirty-five clients. Back of the napkin math, but that’s the number.

Thirty-five. That's her hit. A number that fits her business and the life she wants around it.

Thirty-five people who already think of themselves as the kind of company that goes first.

That's all a hit has ever been. A specific number of specific people who were already out there.

You and your work have a number like that. Everyone does.

Nobody ever asks how few people it would take.

~ Jaime
Co-host, Slackers podcast
Connect on LinkedIn

P.S. But what do you think? Hit reply, let me know.

And thanks as always for being on the other end, I’m glad you’re here.

Want to share this issue? Just copy and paste this link: https://jmedia.beehiiv.com/p/thirty-five