We Don’t Sell Saddles Here
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Back in 2013, Tiny Speck, the team behind Slack, had a positioning problem.
They’d built something useful.
A group chat tool called Slack.
But nobody was shopping for a “group chat tool.”
On 31 July 2013, Slack founder Stewart Butterfield wrote a memo to his team and drew a hard line.
Stewart is typing now:
What we are selling is not the software product — the set of all the features, in their specific implementation — because there are just not many buyers for this software product. (People buy “software” to address a need they already know they have or perform some specific task they need to perform…)
However, if we are selling “a reduction in the cost of communication” or “zero effort knowledge management” or“making better decisions, faster” or “all your team communication, instantly searchable, available wherever you go” or“75% less email” or some other valuable result of adopting Slack, we will find many more buyers. That’s why what we’re selling is organizational transformation…
We’re selling a reduction in information overload, relief from stress, and a new ability to extract the enormous value of hitherto useless corporate archives. We’re selling better organizations, better teams. That’s a good thing for people to buy and it is a much better thing for us to sell in the long run. We will be successful to the extent that we create better teams.
Picture this.
Your buyer walks in tired.
Her inbox is on fire.
Her patience is gone.
You pitch “software,” and you’re one more box on a shelf.
You pitch “less chaos,” and you steal the category and get noticed.
Think of features as nouns and outcomes as verbs.
Verbs move money.
With Slack, you cut communication drag.
Stop losing knowledge.
Decide faster.
Search everything.
Email less.
Work smoother.
Build a better team.
Stewart goes full saddle mode:
To see why, consider the hypothetical Acme Saddle Company. They could just sell saddles, and if so, they’d probably be selling on the basis of things like the quality of the leather they use or the fancy adornments their saddles include; they could be selling on the range of styles and sizes available, or on durability, or on price.
Or, they could sell horseback riding. Being successful at selling horseback riding means they grow the market for their product while giving the perfect context for talking about their saddles. It lets them position themselves as the leader and affords them different kinds of marketing and promotion opportunities (e.g., sponsoring school programs to promote riding to kids, working on land conservation or trail maps). It lets them think big and potentially be big…
It’s dead simple.
If you make saddles, you can talk specs.
Price.
Leather.
Stitching.
Comfort.
Fit.
Durability.
All fine, all forgettable.
Or you can sell horseback riding.
The rush, the bond, the wild bit.
The dust in your teeth and the grin you can’t hide.
The story you get to live in.
A new version of you in the mirror.
That’s how Harley-Davidson does it.
Not bikes.
Freedom.
Not engines.
Independence.
Maybe even badass, if badass is your thing.
They sell a vision of who the buyer gets to become.
Consider the now famous Harley Davidson executive line, “What we sell is the ability for a 43 year old accountant to dress in black leather, ride through small towns and have people be afraid of him.”
Butterfield saw the same move.
He didn’t sell the tool.
Back to Stewart for the punchline:
A few months ago, I read a fairly mediocre ebook called “Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?” …A central thesis is that all products are asking things of their customers: to do things in a certain way, to think of themselves in a certain way — and usually that means changing what one does or how one does it; it often means changing how one thinks of oneself.
We are asking a lot from our customers.
We are asking them to spend hours a day in a new and unfamiliar application, to give up on years or even decades of experience using email for work communication (and abandon all kinds of ad hoc workflows that have developed around their use of email). We are asking them to switch a model of communication which defaults to public; it is an almost impossibly large ask. Almost.
To get people to say yes to a request that large, we need to
(1) offer them a reward big enough to justify their effort and
(2) do an exceptional, near-perfect job of execution.
The best way to imagine the reward is thinking about who we want our customers to become:
We want them to become relaxed, productive workers who have the confidence that comes from knowing that any bit of information which might be valuable to them is only a search away.
We want them to become masters of their own information and not slaves*, overwhelmed by the never ending flow.
We want them to feel less frustrated by a lack of visibility into what is going on with their team.
We want them to become people who communicate purposively, knowing that each question they ask is actually building value for the whole team.
This is what we have to be able to offer them, and it is the aim and purpose of all the work we are doing. We need to make them understand what’s at the end of the rainbow if they go with Slack, and then we have to work our asses off in order toensure they get there.
Slack didn’t lead with what it was.
It led with what you become when it works.
It won by making a promise people could feel.
It sold escape from inbox hell, lost files and “who said what” politics.
The actual software was just the vehicle.
Don’t sell saddles.
Work your ass off and sell the ride.
Six years later, Salesforce bought Slack for $27bn.
PS. If you don’t know jewellery, know your jeweller. That’s Buffett’s rule. It’s the same with messaging. Smart ideas die in boring words. If you don’t know the game, find a partner who does, because your reputation is on the line. I help thinkers, rebels, and disruptors say what they mean and make it stick. Step up. Bring your message. I’ll bring the punch. You’ve got one shot to say it right. I’ll help you take it.