Until recently, the only way to create a complex, innovative software product was to spend significant time in development mode. I’ve been lucky enough to work in companies that are pre-MVP, what we might nowadays call the stealth phase. Those months, sometimes years, in stealth are a bit like the time you spend in the gym. (Bear with me here.)
Depending on the kind of exercise you do in the gym, you could improve your cardiovascular health, or your muscle mass. Or, you could be losing fat. (Often, all these occur at the same time.) These effects are evidence of your time spent in the gym.
This evidence is adjacent to your objective from that gym time. You might want to become physically more powerful. You could seek to develop your endurance. Or, like so many of us, you might just want to have fun: after all, we derive pleasure and satisfaction from physical activity.
So we have an objective, and we have evidence that suggests we are making progress towards achieving that objective. I feel quite strongly that some combination of these factors (a clear goal or objective, and evidence that can document our decreasing distance from that goal) combine together to create pride.
The velocity at which you’re making progress towards your goal matters too, and up until recently, that progress was closely related to the effort you expend in service of the goal. But now, just as Ozempic means we can lose weight without pounding a treadmill for hours, AI is producing ever-better writing, and ever-better code, without the manual, mental problem-solving that’s always defined great writing and great code.
There are several valid reasons to beware using AI all the time, for everything, but the one I keep coming back to is this:
Buyers really do want to feel a kinship with your endeavours. They want to feel your pride, so that they may vicariously enjoy the fruits of your labours.
Rather than talk about whether AI is good or bad, I want to impress upon you that what matters in our communications is a tangible sense of pride and excitement, not just factual descriptions of what we’re building. When you're taking a new feature or product to market, you need to blend your rational arguments (data points, ROI estimates, and so on) with something more intimate, more irrational.
Winning £1 million playing the lottery would make me less proud than building a company worth £1 million, even if the latter takes much longer and is much harder. Scrap that – because it takes much longer, and is much harder.
You can always tell when companies are genuinely proud of what they’ve built. It comes through in everything from founder interviews, to case studies, to social posts. Tangible pride makes great marketing!
Without the effort, the friction, and the euphoria of a new idea fomenting and working, don’t you feel that something gets lost along the way? You still have an objective, yes, and you can still quantify your progress towards achieving that objective. But if progress is essentially decoupled from effort, it isn’t psychologically rewarding in the same way any more. And if it’s not psychologically rewarding for you, how on earth do you make potential customers sit up and pay attention?
I’m speaking from experience: marketers in companies that are building AI technologies are being encouraged, urged, to talk about evidence, over and over again. Submerge people in a flood of data, the thinking goes, and the case for your software will be irrefutable. Stick some more numbers in the deck: they’ll HAVE to buy it now!
Luckily, there are companies out there that recognise the importance of fostering emotional connections between customers and the product.
There is a fast-growing email AI assistant company called Fyxer AI. Fyxer’s marketing is unusual because it is deeply introspective, focusing on how the company is itself growing fast. Videos with high production values take us inside campaign launches, interrogating the strategic decision-making in the leadership team, and so on.
This sort of marketing risks seeming solipsistic and navel-gazing. But I think that Fyxer’s marketing strategy is working because it is an attempt to engender pride.
People who buy a startup’s product want to feel that they are part of a journey, with ownership and agency over the tools they choose to use. They’re happy to buy a product that’s still developing, that isn’t perfect, because they’re taking a chance: getting in on the ground floor and seeing a best-in-class enterprise product develop around them.
That’s an extremely seductive risk for someone to take. Buying from a startup is a dopamine hit that you don’t get upgrading to unlock another feature of the Google Workspace suite.
The Fyxer approach is called ‘building in public’ in the software sector. It often looks like a fairly rudimentary set of recurring growth metrics shared by a founder every week or month. Fyxer is building in public, but taking care to tell a story at the same time.
It appears to be quite effective thus far. (And I bet there’s real pride within the company when they see the fruits of their labours documented and celebrated.)
If you do want to build in public, don’t throw the same few data points on to LinkedIn and X every Friday afternoon. Celebrate the sweat, and cheer on your customers: remember that in buying from you, they’re taking a risk too. Making your buyer proud is a big part of paying back that risk, and your story matters just as much as your software when it comes to engendering pride.
