A short excerpt from a YouTube video in which the speaker (Nate Tilley) answers why his prior businesses failed. He attributes failure to selling products he personally liked rather than products the market was "absolutely starving for." The core lesson: identify urgent market pain (problems people lose sleep over) and position a compelling offer that directly solves that pain—offers beat arguments.
You said you ran a couple of businesses into the ground. Was there any particular reason why they failed? The number one sin that I committed is I wasn't selling something that the market was absolutely starving for. I learned that the hard way, like selling gizmos or gadgets or things that I thought were cool or that I enjoyed rather than going out and finding out what is the market absolutely starving for. What would they crawl across crushed glass to get where you know a compelling offer is 10 times more effective than a convincing argument? And in all of those businesses, I was trying to make a convincing argument, argument around selling those things. You know, I use those battle scars to never make that sin ever again and to make sure that I was selling something that people were up at night at 3am googling, not telling their partners about tossing and turning, unable to sleep at night because they had such a pressing problem that they absolutely, 100% unequivocally had to solve and then position my product to solve that bullseye of the market.
