Watch me talk myself out of an idea

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Tom here. Today I found myself playing a game of psychological ping pong, and I bet you'll recognise exactly what I'm talking about.

I was thinking about how we frame what we sell at Crown & Reach.

I have a hunch that I sometimes get too deep in the philosophy of product and building. Some of our stuff feels like going to the gym – you know it'd be good to make time to do it properly, but there's urgent stuff to deal with first.

So I was wondering – what if we went back to basics and tried a trusty ol' marketing hook? A promise to get rid of a specific problem people are fed up with?

The hook I had in mind was "wanna stop building features your customers don't want?"

But that's when a little white ball in my brain started pinging and ponging.

It pinged. It ponged. (Oh boy did it pong.)

Here's the journey the ball went on, serenaded by the cacophony of teeny tiny wooden bats:

1. OK, I could put this hook out there on social media and invite people to join a waitlist. Make the strong pitch – badly – in the spirit of Hard Test Easy Life – and ask people if they want to hear more. Basically, is there any interest in something rough and unfinished? As we know, that's a good signal to invest further in the idea.
2. Hmm. I need to speak with people about this hook though. And reeeeally, maybe I should keep on having conversations with leaders where I test a range of spiky concepts like this in the form of Pitch Provocations.
3. But I feel the need for signals today, and booking calls with C-suite folks can take weeks ...
4. Oh, maybe we could test a few spiky angles in an email to our list ... "just hit the link to tell us which one you want to hear more about"?
5. Ah but the people who'd see this email, or any social post, have already seen my schtick. This hook will be "meh" to them.
6. Or maybe it won't? After all, sales and referrals on the back of a new hook will likely come from people who already know us.
7. Unless we do advertising. Which feels risky because it's spending money when I'm not sure this hook is promising the right thing.
8. And if we're going to advertise properly, we'd better properly lay out all the next steps in the process ... where they book, how we follow up, make a plan in detail ...
9. But that's against the spirit of Hard Test Easy Life! We should put the hook out now, confident that we can figure out the process later – once we know the hook actually works.
10. That's scary tho ...

I realised that every team I've ever worked with finds themselves stuck in this back and forth around uncomfortable tests.

The game of psychological ping pong that I had with myself seems like a mirror of the same psychological stresses that happen to in organisations. A little microcosm of the forces that make some ideas feel too dangerous to touch. It happens with new products, with new features, with operational changes, with entire year-long initiatives.

Does it resonate with you too?

If so, I want to know. Hit reply and tell me about it.

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