Sell painkillers, not vitamins, the classic business advice goes.

The vitamin seller aims to help you stay healthy in the long run— to help you avoid future pain and trial by keeping you clear of sickness.

However, the painkiller seller has some advantages. If you're experiencing pain right now, a painkiller offers immediate relief. The benefit is instant and tangible. Unlike the vague and uncertain nature of future illnesses, pain is immediate and unmistakable.

Knowing if a painkiller worked is easy, as the pain will disappear. It's hard to tell if a vitamin worked. If I don't get sick, was it the vitamins, my sleep, exercise, or, well, anything else that did it?

This dynamic can lead to unfortunate consequences. We may prioritise our current needs over future well-being, such as fixing a broken car when it breaks rather than maintaining it. We need help saving money for the future. We tackle the "urgent" and neglect the "important-not urgent."  We might overestimate the likelihood of making good choices in the future. In essence, it's easy to downplay future challenges compared to our current predicament.

implementing security measures vs. fixing bugs

looking after your car vs. fixing your car when it breaks down

doing daily exercises vs. going to the doctor when you're sick

shopping and preparing food vs. ordering takeaway now

making a product easier to use vs. making the product compliant

preparing fruit to eat later vs. grabbing a cookie now

insulating your house vs. putting the heating on now

Some see business as selling candy, vitamins, and painkillers. Candy is a treat, but it's easy to live without. Vitamins promise to make life better, but you can do without them. Painkillers are must-haves as they solve an immediate, tangible need.

Also see: present bias, tragedy of the commons, the dilution effect, the Shirky principle.

Painkillers and vitamins

A Pyrrhic victory is one where your own losses or damage make it nearly as costly as defeat.

Perhaps that business rival finally went out of business after you lowered prices so much that you can now barely get by. Maybe you managed to prove you were right at the cost of ruining a relationship. Or it could be that the kids did in fact get in the car and go out on that blasted walk only for everyone to have a miserable time, angry at each other for the rest of the day.

Or maybe, as King Pyrrhus of Epirus found in 279 BCE, you won several battles against the Romans while losing so many of your best warriors as to make you wonder at the worth of the whole campaign.

Pyrrhic victory

'Plan ahead' is also a nice example of a pleonasm.

And I've lost count of how many times I've found this technique useful to draw a bike.

This idea was shared with me from this Instagram account.

Plan ahead

Sexy Value is what you get when someone can launch something that is not only cheaper but also better. It’s a near irresistible proposition.

Most new things that are better don’t tend to also be cheaper—increased quality usually has a corresponding increase in cost. So Sexy Value is often made possible through a new technology or approach. It’s like when the first taxi apps started appearing. To me, the first experience was just so much better than what I was used to—no trying to catch a taxi in the rain, seeing when the cab would arrive and simple, non-awkward, no swinging by the ATM payments—and yet at the same time, it was also cheaper.

Sexy Value is not the only way to compete. If you make something better, people will pay for the value it provides them. But you’re on to a winner if you can also do it cheaper.

Sexy Value is a name, I believe, from Ogilvy and Mather.

You might also like another model of theirs: The Big Ideal.

Sexy value

This is military strategist John Boyd’s framework for combat operations that also turns out to apply quite well to businesses and learning in general. It’s really not that far from the ol’ test-learn cycle or a good design process.

There’s lots of nuance to his framework, but some of the application of it that I like includes:

The faster you can do this loop — at your startup or in a fight — the more stuff you will get to try and the faster you will learn

If you’re in competition with another entity then completing your OODA loop fast, and acting to change the environment for them, disrupts their loop and forces them back to observe before they can act. It slows them down and creates confusion

I learned about it from Reid Hoffman’s excellent Masters of Scale podcast.

OODA Loop

I love this diagram by Henrik Kniberg for determining what to release to your customers and when.

The idea is that a standard approach of having your grand plan of what you think people want at the start and then working on each bit at a time until finally, after months of work, you have something that works is not so smart. Each piece, in the car example, doesn’t help the customer at all until it’s all put together.

Instead, you can focus on providing the next piece of functionality that helps someone get their job done a little better than before. In the beginning, they’ll probably have to put up with a lot if they want to use it, but with each successive release, they find they can get their job done a little better than before and get value out of what you’re building. A side-effect is the feedback you get along the way will likely help you learn and build something that is better than what you had in mind at the beginning, and all along the way, the customer had some value instead of waiting for months.

Providing usable functionality at every step is not always easy, and it requires rework as you move from one step to the other. But it’s generally a price worth paying to give your customers value sooner and start learning as soon as you can.

This diagram is explained in the brilliant product management book User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton.

A release strategy for happier customers, sooner

A remarkably common pattern for the evolution of many things. You see it all the time in the evolution of technical things, but also many systems in general.

When you start to reach the top of the limits of what one system can do you’ll start to see a focus on efficiency, cost reduction and small improvements and optimisation. This is great because it forces a new creative solution to arise in order to make any real progress. An image search gives a few examples.

Also, see some related sketchplanations: The long nose of innovation, designing for adoption, understanding the chasm.

The S-curve.

Nifty water camouflage practised by dolphins, porpoises, some fish and other neat sea creatures. The simple strategy: look light like the sky for anyone below, and look dark like the sea for anyone above. 

Counter-shading

Cheat sheet for Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore

Get my new weekly sketch in your inbox

Category: strategy