Your customers don’t think about you

Your product is amazing.

You’ve been working on it for over a year.  You’ve thought about every feature, every button.  You’ve had interminable meetings with spreadsheets discussing every little nuance of the feature set, product roadmap, marking strategy, and brand alignment.   You’ve stayed late in the office to work on it.  You lie awake at night thinking about it.

Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, what is your customer thinking about?

I hate to be the one to break this to you but…  There is only one way to say this…

Your customer isn’t thinking about you.

You want to know what they are thinking about?  They are thinking about their own job because they have their own set of interminable meetings to deal with.  They are thinking about their spouse and their kids and the fact that they have to coach little league next weekend and that they really ought to check out that noise their car has been making all week.

On any given day, this is what your customer’s brain looks like.

Notice that your product isn’t in there.

So when you are sitting in one of your interminable meetings and you find yourself saying: “Yes, maybe it’s a little confusing at first, but once they’ve used it a couple of times they will get used to it.”  Remember:

No.  They won’t get used to it because they don’t think about you.

When you find yourself saying: “We’ll just provide some explanatory text to describe what they need to do”.  Remember:

Nope.  They don’t want to read your explanatory text.  They don’t want to think about you.

When you find yourself saying: “We don’t want to provide that functionality because we will cannibalize our existing product lines.”  Remember:

Your customer doesn’t care about your existing product lines.  They care about their own jobs and their own lives.  Unless you are helping them with those things, they won’t care about you.

So rather than like awake at night thinking about your product, I have a suggestion for a more productive use of your insomnia.  Try thinking about what your customer is thinking about.  Because knowing that is the trick to getting them to think about you.