Why your product makes it hard to see demand ("The Demand Lens")

Hey Rob, welcome back. It's good to see you.

You too. You too.

You've been jet-setting recently.

Yeah, I was in San Francisco. You know, what's interesting is apparently a human can charge $7 for a coffee with a straight face. Did you know that? I thought at like $7 you would just start laughing. Yeah.

Or like some amount of shame would come back. Well, there's probably a bunch of regulation that's like dumped on that if they're out in California. Um, uh, but yeah, you were out there doing a, uh, as a teaser for next week's post, which is about cold outbound. You did, uh, a workshop or a presentation about cold outbound for, uh, a prominent startup accelerator, but we'll get into that next week. This week we're hitting, uh, this post is called The Demand Lens, the thing I've been trying to articulate for 5+ years. So if you've been waiting, audience member, for, for 5 years to finally arrive at the thing that Rob's been trying to get at, like, We made it. This can be the last episode that you listen to. Rob, today we're, I think it is a, we're talking about worldview, but not worldview in a hypothetical kind of like porcelain throne, like kind of a thing. It's what we're talking about it from a way of seeing the world that will change how you go to market. It'll change how you think about products. It'll change basically everything about how you think about approaching your business. Why don't you, Rob, give us a little bit of—

Can I just first say, I think you said porcelain throne instead of ivory tower, which might be the best Freudian slip ever.

It's intentional. It's the Texas version of the ivory tower. Oh God. Rob, why don't you give us the context on the demand lens and what's going into this one?

Yeah, so it's a thing that I've been struggling to— so if you understand demand, if you've been listening to this for a while, if you've read like literally anything I've ever wrote, you see me writing about demand as this independent thing that's out there. It's not wanting supply. It's this thing of somebody's struggling, trying to do something in their lives. And that exists before independent, like to a product existing, to your company existing. And so that's, and by the way, that force, that thing causes everything downstream to work. It shapes what your product needs to be. It shapes what your go-to-market needs to be. It is the upstream thing. And so if you've been here for a while, you're like, yeah, I've heard this before. You say this every single week. Well, What happens is it's a, it's a thing that is relatively straightforward to like get intellectually, but it is a hard thing to see consistently. And I felt this 'cause I've been like working on AI Rob and who knows, but, but what I struggled with was, okay, cool.

I'm—

what the heck is this thing? What is it? Who is it for? What does it do? How do we describe all these different pieces of it and what will cause it to take off or not? Well, when you, what I've found is if I look at the world assuming that AI Rob is a part of the world, then I don't see clearly at all. I can't see demand. For some reason, the presence of AI Rob in the world, the presence of supply in the world biases everything. And so I finally was able to see, and I can see this when I'm looking at other startups like sales calls, what I'm looking for, what I actually saw when it finally clicked for me was I just said, let's assume that AI Rob doesn't exist. Let's assume that I don't exist. Let's just Forget about those things as features of the world. And let's kind of like zoom out and just see the world as it is. And when I did that, I was able to actually see where are people today going about their lives, getting stuck and needing help, which was only possible when I removed myself and my product and my idea from that world.

Yeah, honestly, yesterday I had a similar working session with a partner for my little media company. And basically, like, after an hour, I was like, I am so focused on supply right now, it's ridiculous. And I was like, we just gotta like— it was a similar exercise that I went through. I was like, okay, assume my business does not exist. What are they trying to accomplish? And similar to you, it actually didn't lead to the breakthrough, but it at least led to something that was maybe less offensive, a more honest view of some of the things that I don't understand about demand that exists agnostic to whether my supply exists. Rob, let's hit a little bit more about the demand lens here, and then we'll jump into the supply lens. And then you've hinted at some of the ways to apply this, but we'll Circle back to that. And, you know, I think for listeners, like going through this, for me, reading this post, it was a good opportunity to kind of audit where in my thinking of the world am I taking a demand approach that assumes my product does not exist? And where am I basically just like dragging a bunch of dead weight behind me in the form of my product and trying to figure out how my product fits fits into the world rather than what is trying to be done in the world. You write a couple things that I'd love to get your reactions to, Rob. One is demand exists independent to supply. Well, you've hinted at that, but let's come back to that in a second. Second one is demand is the most upstream thing in startups that causes a startup's product to be relevant. And you continue, if you don't find demand, nothing else matters. You've said that, but I've like, I think there's— I just need to be reminded that constantly. The third is the pull framework is the best attempt to describe a specific kind of demand that leads someone to be weird not to buy a new product. And then fourth is demand describes, as someone recently said, what wants to happen. Your job is to find what wants to happen, but is currently blocked from happening, and then to simply enable that thing to happen. Rob, why don't we maybe choose a couple of these and dive deep into them? Are there ones that you think maybe are misunderstood or worth going deeper into?

So I think the main thing I see is that people still today think that demand is for supply, which is basically like you think that there is such thing as demand for iPhones or demand For phones. If you think that, then what's going to happen is you're going to think, oh, so because I'm building a new thing, I have to go create demand for this thing.

Hmm.

That is the biggest mistake people— and then you do a bunch of things based on— you focus on building a product, you focus on convincing people they should have demand, you focus on the desirability, the ROI, All of these things of the product. And sometimes this works, but it works despite everything that you do. It often works like in a way that you don't anticipate because demand is not— demand is a standalone thing that results in the purchase of supply, but it is not tied to supply.

Yeah. This is, Incredibly hard in my experience, or maybe listeners are better at this than I am, but I find myself continually coming back to, or even when I try to take my product out of it, like for example, I'll talk about kids and family media. I make an error, which is frequently, you know, marketing agencies are looking for kids and family media that does this, which is actually like, I've inserted, even though it's not Coombray's supply, I've inserted supply into a statement about demand. which is like marketing agency would probably be like, what I want to do is activate parents around a brand that leads to more purchases and brand uplift. Like it's so much simpler, but it's, but it, you really have to kind of like fight against yourself, or at least I have to fight against myself to remove every semblance of supply from an articulation of demand.

Yeah. And I just, I just like, I really liked the graphics in this. I just had Nano Banana do them. And so I didn't actually look too deeply into them, but it, but Wait, what? I, I almost, did you ever play SimCity growing up or anything like that? Yeah, of course.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. So like you can just imagine SimCity and when you're looking at SimCity, you just see people like walking around, living their lives, doing things. Right. And most of the time they're just fine doing things by themselves. So your marketing agencies that you're reaching out to are like generally going to be fine doing what they're currently doing. They're okay. They're not, they don't. And, but like, and, and if I have this outside view of the world of just like this SimCity level view, I just watch, watch them and they like go along their merry path. And yeah, maybe they have, they, you know, they, they, you know, trip here and there, but like they get back up and they're fine. It's not a big deal. But sometimes in that world, they're trying to do something and they're stuck. There's a person in this graphic with, there are people coming out of a subway, but there's like a, A weird fence in between. So you can see they're like trying to get somewhere and there's like a fence blocking them. I don't know if that was like intentional or not, but, but, but okay, then so, so what you're looking for in this world is people are just doing their thing, are places where people are getting stuck.

Yeah.

They are trying to do something, but they can't do that thing, or they would try to do something if only they had a way, right? Like it's, It's that you're looking for these points where they're kind of exerting some sort of force, but it's not converting in the way they want it to convert. And that's what you're looking for. And that's the thing that has to exist just out there in the world that's going to— that if that is present, they will pull a product out of your hand, supply out of your hand that fits that moment, that fits that that way in which they are stuck. But if that thing isn't present, nothing else matters.

Yeah.

Because they're just fine going about their lives. They're just kind of, they're just following the path they want to follow. And it doesn't matter how much ROI you can promise, how much, you know, all the problems you can solve, how fancy your product is, the greatness of your sales and marketing. Like none of that matters unless you find the point on this SimCity map where people are getting stuck.

Yeah, it's a, you know, there's like an asymmetry there between a massive asymmetry between the entrepreneur and what they're spending their time focused on and the customer and what they're spending their time focused on. And just thinking about the SimCity example, it's like, yeah, you're going to show up and like unblock something that leads them to pull and they are going to continue spending almost all of their time not thinking about your product and you are going to continue spending most of your time obsessing over your product and like, you know, or about the demand situation around your product. You know, you write something else here, Rob, that you write demand is the most upstream thing in startups that causes a startup's product to be relevant. And, you know, this is one that I think kind of like slow burn has been finally seeping into my skull. And it's basically like the articulation of, it just seems obvious. It's like, oh yeah, duh, like demand is the thing that like pulls it in. But the moment that I'm exposed to, I read on LinkedIn yesterday, it was like a bunch of sales advice that had nothing to do with demand. Like demand shows up in zero places there. And these other things, you write about They might work and they probably did work at some point for something that was going on specific to a salesperson's or to a startup's go-to-market. But that doesn't mean that they caused it to work. And what you're really getting at is much more fundamental. You call it being upstream, but if you're right here, if you don't find demand, nothing else matters. Anything I just thought like that's worth revisiting. Anything you would add on the most upstream? thing in startups here.

Yeah, this is my just like constant, constant, constant frustration. And this is why, so some of our friends now who are like very demand build, they like can't talk to other founders because the second they start talking to other founders, they hear a bunch of nonsense. And I even had somebody tell me, I didn't tell you this, somebody is sending my book passive aggressively to founders who have not, who are just like thinking backwards and investors who are just like thinking backwards. thinking about things backwards, which is hilarious. But it's, but it, so this is the thing that I keep saying, and I think I'm just going to keep saying this until the day I die, which this was the pole theory of business. We did this in January. We did, we've done, we've talked about this a million times.

I should have paid attention when you said it that time.

I know, you've been like blacked out at half the time we've been talking. But it really, it like that moment. And this is what the demand lens helps with. It's that SimCity level view. You're looking for people who again are moving around on this map who are getting stuck trying to do something, but unable to do that thing. And that just is happening. You have no control over it. You have no influence over it, but you're looking for where they're getting stuck in the, the, there's tension between what they are trying to do and what they actually can do, and their existing options aren't good enough to get them to do that thing. That is the upstream thing that again, we have no control over and we have to use the demand lens to see this clearly because if we just, again, imagine this SimCity view, if we insert our product or our idea into that model, what happens is we don't see reality clearly for some reason. It's, it is, we see how we want people to behave versus how they, so we have to have this model, this lens, this way of seeing that is totally, it's just looking at the world as it is without us as a relevant feature in it.

Yeah. Let's, I think a useful way of appreciating the demand lens is to contrast it with the supply lens, which for whatever phenomenon of psychology is like almost the default for how we think about the world. And I'll run through a list of the things that you basically say are characteristics of a supply lens approach to viewing the world. The things that you spend your time thinking about sound, or they have more of a ring to these These bullets, all the people who could, who could buy our product, ways we could use our product, value we could provide to them, features we build, we could build for them, how their life would be so much better with our product, reasons they should buy our product, problems they solve with our product, ways we could make them aware of our product and ways we could position our product that they should like. And some of these are actually At heart, kind of good. Like, how do I make, how do I use our product to improve the world? It's like, it sounds in many ways, or, and it has like a ring to it of the right approach that's like customer-focused, but it's actually poisoned kind of more fundamentally at the root. But Rob, what would you add about the supply lens here?

Yeah, so I don't, this is, again, you're totally right. This is the default way we see the world. Which is where we or our idea or our product are a relevant feature of it. And I think, I mean, this is normal because throughout our entire lives, the way that we have seen the world is where we're a relevant, very relevant feature of our own worldview, right? We're very important to the way we see the world. But what happens is when you When I do this, when basically everybody does this, when we insert this into the world and we ask the kinds of questions or talk about the kinds of things, what are the use cases our product could enable? What are the ways that we could drive value with our product? All of these questions have the assumption that the product is relevant.

Hmm.

And that is what the demand lens Does not allow you to assume.

Hmm.

Assuming that our product is relevant, assuming that they are stuck, these questions all might make sense, but that assumption is the killer assumption. And you can't see when you start looking through the supply lens where your feature is assumed to be a relevant feature of this world. You don't see where people are getting stuck. You see where you would like them to be getting stuck. You see different pain points that you could target. You see all of these things that are not them actually getting stuck. It's, it's, you see a warped view of the world. And so that's why you have to develop this SimCity view where you are not a feature of it. Your idea does not exist in here. Your, Your product does not exist in this world.

And, and the order here, listening to you is, it's striking me like the order is super important. Yes. Eventually you do think about supply.

Yes, of course.

But that comes after, uh, kind of like this objective understanding through the demand lens of like the way of your customer's life, of the way that the world works, et cetera. Um, Rob, can you help me reconcile Um, or, you know, there's kind of like 2 questions on my mind. One is, when is it the right time to think about supply? And the second one is, what does this say, you know, like revealed preferences, for example, what you can observe is like, oh, a customer is using my product for something that is, I did not anticipate. Um, and so that's like, uh, you imagine like the following statement is my product could help customer do X. But what, how do we, how do we take a demand lens or, you know, what's the, what's the right sequencing? When do we think about supply? And then how do we, how do I reconcile this with, with revealed preferences from customers?

Yeah. So I don't think it actually matters when you think about supply necessarily. Like what I've seen is, so I've talked to a lot of people who've raised a ton of money recently because they have super big visions and super big, you know, like product ambitions and all these kinds of things. And that's Fine. It causes them to raise a lot of money and they have a theory about where the world is going. It's like, okay, cool. That theory may or may not be true.

Hmm.

But at some point, if you want actual traction, you have to see the world as it is right now and design your initial supply, whatever you're selling right now, to fit the demand that actually exists in the world right now.

Mm-hmm.

And so I would say like at some point in the process, I like thinking about it sooner rather than later because it is intoxicating to just think about the future of the world and da da, right? We talked about that last week. But at some point you have to eliminate your product, eliminate your idea, eliminate all of these things from the world and see where real people are getting stuck. Right now. Yeah.

And, um, now, now onto the like revealed, when you observe, how should you observe customers interacting with your product? Or like, what, what's the, what's the demand lens to take to something like that?

Yeah. So, uh, like an example of this. So at some point you can, you can insert your product into the, to this world. But you still want to take the like objective view of not, not what I want to see happening, but like, here's what I am actually observing in this, in this world. And so an example of this, I'm sorry for the, for this, but Steve Jobs like watched people in Apple stores or like watched people trying to decide which Mac to purchase when he first When he came back and he observed that there were way too many choices, people were struggling. He like, he just watched a family friend, I think, like try to buy a Mac and it was just like, the person was just struggling there. And so he was able to view it in this kind of like objective third, right? Like third person view from outside and just seeing, oh, okay, this person is trying to use it for X, but getting stuck here. And so once you have supply, you still, and, and so like, there's another case here where people are using our product for a weird reason. It's like, okay, cool. That's interesting. Now let's take the demand lens and look about, look and look at their stories just before they knew we existed to try to figure out what was the, where were they getting stuck? What were they, what was their pull before they knew we existed? And therefore, what should we do?

Yeah, that's fascinating. It's all back up in time, like pre-supply almost, and to understand the root cause of the demand. Rob, why don't we wrap up with something practical? But I also liked the way that you wrapped up at the end of the supply lens section. You wrote, because if we don't first establish reality through the demand, lens, anything we create through the supply lens is destined to fail. By default, we're focusing on people who aren't stuck and therefore don't want or need our help. Can you just, uh, why, why is that? Like, what, what were you thinking about when you said anything, you know, if we're not taking the demand lens, anything we create through the supply lens is destined to fail. Like, that has very profound implications, but why, why is that the case?

Yeah. So again, imagine people walking around this SimCity world. They're going where they want to go just fine. If they are not stuck, then you're just inserting yourself into that world and shouting at them. And guess what that's going to do? Like, they're just going to like, what are you doing? And keep going along their own path.

Hmm.

It's, it's, it's that simple. If they are, if they are just fine going along the path they're going on, nothing, like you're not going to change that. It's going to be, it's going to be basically impossible to change that. And so when you insert your product into it, when you look through the supply lens at this kind of world where you're assuming your product is a relevant feature, we're like creating 2 kinds of realities. There's the reality you want to exist where like, yeah, they're walking around, but they see this magical product. And so they change direction and they're like, oh my gosh, this is the greatest thing I've ever seen. It's going to add so much value, so much ROI. That's the world that exists in your mind. That's the supply lines. It's a fantasy. The real world is you're standing there naked shouting at them like about some irrelevant stuff and they're like, what are you doing? I don't know why you're naked in that.

Yeah. Oh man. You know, there's, there's, One last reflection before we get into takeaways. I made the mistake thinking about the way when I was just trying to like break out of the supply way of thinking yesterday, which was I was applying actually some of, I think, the right rules and principles to apply when thinking about supply. I was thinking about how do we, you know, what is causing friction? How do I remove that? What is the most basic thing that addresses demand? But I was doing it in the wrong order and it's like I hadn't answered the demand, the primary question about demand. And so it didn't matter. And reflecting on it did not matter the lens that I took to supply unless I accidentally got demand right. Like it, designing the perfect supply wasn't going to work. But Rob, what would you say, how should founder think about applying this? Like, what do you, how do you help founders break out of a, out of a supply lens view in the world? What should they do as a result of this?

So the common thing that I see is that in the beginning of a sales call, a customer will explain what's going on in their world and what way they are stuck, what's causing them to reach out, what's, what are they trying to do? And, um, and then they often just get waterboarded by the founder who's trying to sell whatever they want to sell, their, their view of the world. Um, but that's a place to find it. Like it's there or it's in the story of the customer who bought fast and figuring out what the heck was going on in their world. And so that's what you are looking for. And if you don't have customers yet, or like everything has been slow and awful, there's like, okay, cool. Use this demand lens to go out and see in the world where people are actually getting stuck.

Hmm. Yeah. Interesting. I find myself walking around in like daily life, not just when thinking about my product, thinking about, okay, what's the demand that's going on here? Um, all right. Uh, and anything, Rob, we want to leave before we, we end today?

Uh, no, I think that's it.

All right, cool. We'll leave the, the links if, if this, um, you know, if you'd like to work with Rob, we also, we've got, uh, the Go-To-Market Accelerator. I probably should have put this at the start.

Yeah.

This is what makes me a great co-host, Rob. That's why you keep me around. Um, the Go-To-Market Accelerator, which is the artist formerly known as PMF Camp, uh, have one of those coming up here in less than a month or First week in September, second week in September. It's about a month away. Um, have some slots that are open, so check the show notes if you'd like to do that, or if you want to work one-on-one with Rob. Um, and if nothing else, we'll catch everybody next week. See ya.