This post is one part of a 7 part bootstrapping guide from Amy and Alex. This is part 3 of 7. Want to get the rest of them? Get the guide here!

Now, on to part 3 – why flight attendants are to blame for one of your worst selling habits.

Editor’s Note:

Today, let’s talk about earplugs, parking lot sellers, flight attendants, “validation,” and all the shitty selling habits they teach us from practically toddlerhood.

A while back, Amy and a few of our friends went to a monster truck rally for the first time.

Sidenote: these friends immigrated from Siberia, and in their first year, they really took on the task of “Doing America.” Better than most of us lifers. Hence the monster trucks!

While they were walking through the parking lot, Amy heard someone yelling:

“EARPLUGS! EARPLUGS for ONE DOLLAR”

As if he were selling popcorn or peanuts or ice cold water at a baseball game.

Amy didn’t buy earplugs. In fact, she thought the earplug guy was weird. Who buys earplugs in a parking lot? Smart People In The Know, apparently, because it turns out that monster truck shows are REEEALLY LOUD.

So, let’s review:

Earplug guy missed out on Amy’s money 2. Amy’s ears were ringing for two days Who wins in this situation? Nobody.

What went wrong?

Well, traditional startup advice says: Maybe Earplug Guy didn’t validate.

What if, instead of shouting “EARPLUGS, EARPLUGS ONE DOLLAR”, that guy was validated his idea by talking to people about his product:

“The best feature of my product is…” “It’s just like AirBnB, but for…” “My product allows you to…” “It’s the best…”

Maybe he should’ve run some Google Ads and funneled people to those phrases on a web page, and analyzed the click-through rates. Maybe he should’ve said, “These earplugs will protect your ears.”

Would that have made a difference? Nope.

Earplug Guy made the same mistake that we’ve all been hard-wired to make:

His “pitch” left ALL the intellectual work to the reader/listener.

Amy isn’t a hermit. She knows what earplugs are for. She also values her hearing. But Amy doesn’t live in the Nascar Belt — so she had no idea that Monster Trucks = Deafening. She didn’t know she had a problem. She wasn’t looking for a solution.

So no matter how many ways Earplug Guy might talk about the features and benefits of his earplugs, Amy never would have bought them. In her reality, parking lot earplugs made no sense at all… so she just kept walking.

Even though she would have benefited from those earplugs.

That’s why the word — and the process — “validation” is horseshit.

According to the startup “gurus,” here’s how you’re supposed to go about it:

Write a sales pitch like the above — “Earplugs, $1! The best earplugs! Blocks more sound than our top competitors! Nice soft foam! Molds to your ear!” Put it on a page. Drive traffic with ads. Talk about it to people. Hold “customer interviews.” Wait for… sales? And when they don’t come… Give up. Failed experiment. The problem: when you pitch this way — whether you set up a page and write about your product this way or “get out of the building” and conduct “customer interviews” (customer interviews, by the way, aren’t an effective way to do research. More on that in an upcoming email.) — you’re not “validating” a damn thing because you’re not communicating a damn thing.

You’re just shouting “Earplugs, earplugs, really nice earplugs, better earplugs, the best earplugs, they really block sound, One Dollar!” into the crowd.

Nobody’s going to pause, reflect, and think: “Wait. He’s selling earplugs. Does that mean something? Do I need to think about earplugs?”

Sadly, this pathetically ineffective pitch is what comes naturally.

Because that’s how 99% of the world ‘communicates’ with us:

“We apologize for any inconvenience…” and “Your call is important to us…please stay on the line for our next available representative…” and “Please use caution when opening the overhead bins, as heavy articles may have shifted around during the flight…”

Every time I’m on a plane, I hear the words that the flight attendant says. But do they make me think, “Gosh, I was going to reach for heavy articles with impunity but now I will be careful because they may have shifted”?

Nope.

Real humans don’t talk to each other this way, because humans don’t listen to each other this way. So it’s no surprise that startups who business-speke and jargon their way through “idea validation” fail. Over and over and over. And then they claim that they learned something about the product, or the market, when all they really learned is that nobody’s listening.

They’re not testing what the audience needs & wants.

If you want your customers to cry, “Shut up and take my money!”…

…you’re going to need to unlearn this terrible habit. You want to pitch so that people will listen, and respond, and most importantly you want them take action with their wallets.

Forget features. Forget benefits. Forget talking about your product.

In our next email, you’re to learn how to write a persuasive, effective, human pitch, 30×500 style.

And you really don’t want to miss that!

-Alex

PS — If you want to sneak a peek ahead in the process and get a little practice, take a few minutes to study these pitch pages (both created by 30×500 alumni): Sketching with CSS, Egghead

What do these two pages have in common?