Just recently I was speaking to and about three ventures of very different fields. One wants to sell a service to developers, the other one wants to be a specialist agency for a niche industry and the last one wants to build a tool they can sell as a service for websites that monetize through advertising.

All of them come from a techie background and all of them have a communication problem.

As a techie myself I was interested in all their ideas and they started to explain in great detail what their are doing and how it would work.

With a strong focus on the how.

I wonder how can you sell anything and make it successful when you’re all about the technology?

From a customer perspective all I want to know is what I will get. What are you offering to me?

Sure there are many tech startups that have created amazing products and are highly successful. But look at them. Even the ones that started out with a techie fan base did an amazing job at communicating the what instead of the how.

Take dropbox for example. They make it so easy to understand what you’re getting and how you will benefit from it. They do not tell you about the technology behind it all. Because in the end users don’t care and don’t want to know.

As a user I don’t care about if you’re using a fancy programming language like haskell or erlang, or if you use bit torrent for communication or what CMS you’re using or if you use solar powered devices to build it.

Tell me what I get and why I would want to have it.

If you want to make money from it. Make double sure you address the right person and tell them about the benefit they will be buying into.

Dropbox

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