Sunday Scaries: The Cure for the Common Cold
In today’s AI-driven world, being useful isn’t enough. Your startup needs to be the cure, and prove it.
If you are a regular reader of the Sunday Scaries, you may think I have changed my mind as of late. It’s possible, since the world and business environments constantly are changing.
There is an old saying, “is your startup a vitamin or a painkiller?”
The idea was that you should be a painkiller. The long term benefit of a vitamin isn’t seen early enough for a customer to get excited. While a painkiller has an immediate effect. It turns out that this doesn’t even apply anymore. Take the common cold. There are so many medications to treat the symptoms but no cure.
So now the adage is “is your startup a vitamin, painkiller or the cure?”
This notion has been accelerated by AI. I don’t want a CRM that tracks my pipeline, I want a CRM that closes business for me. And pay the service provider a % of sales.
Here is how to think about it. Customers no longer want to be the steward of investing and hoping to get an ROI. They want the tech provider to be the steward of investing in the systems and are happy to share the upside. If you are the experts, then why would I own the ROI.
Your CRM should drive sales.
Your Construction Management tool should charge based on budget and schedule improvements (not construction volume).
Your accounting software should charge based on cash flow improvement.
Get the picture?
The point is that incumbent software companies can ride this out. If you are a startup, the bar has been raised. The good news, your TAM is massive. The bad news is that you have to raise more capital to meet the pure performance based objectives.
Let’s gooooo…
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