Blind Faith in New Technology Is a
Startup Trap. Customers Still Want the Same 4 Things
Buyers
want to know what your product or service is going to do for them, plain and
simple. The further you move away from that simple desire, the less likely it
is to succeed.
EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING
PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN
Aug 10,
2026
We’ve all come to be such rabid believers in the power and
ability of all kinds of new technologies that we think that blindly relying on
the strength of our tech alone will be sufficient to get us over the goal line.
Sadly, this has never been the case. It’s a necessary element to be sure, but
never sufficient standing alone to get the job done and acting otherwise is
just another trip down Memory Lane to the Field of Dreams where people swear
that “if you build it, they will come.” Whom the “they” are is never that clear
at the outset and unfortunately, it’s just as likely in some cases to be creditors
rather than customers showing up at your doorstep if you’re not careful.
Interestingly enough,
this attitude seems to be present even in new business ventures where the
driving components for success have little or nothing to do with the underlying
operating systems. And I’m not merely talking about the fact that every new
investment deck I see these days describes business processes that are
always AI-infused and
enabled—need it or not. There is so much conversation and excitement about the
connectivity that the web now enables—from rapid scaling to customer
acquisition to engagement at little cost—that even the entrepreneurs pitching
the programs lose sight of the other gating factors and the relatively
substantial hurdles that their prospective businesses need to surmount.
Whatever else may have
changed out there in the real world, it’s still demonstrably the case that my
old formulation still holds. I’m just not that interested in any business which
can’t show me in minutes one of the following:
·
How it’s going to save
me time
·
How it’s going to save
me money
·
How it’s going to make
me more productive
·
How it’s going to help
me make better decisions
An essential part of the
foregoing is the “me” in the heart of it. Buyers want to know what your product
or service is going to do for them – plain and simple – and the further your
plan or idea moves away from that simple and selfish desire, the less likely it
is to succeed.
This is why I was
initially intrigued to see a recent PowerPoint deck that was sent to me in
reaction to my recent column about venal and shameless matchmakers that
describes yet another alternative solution to the failures and other
shortcomings of the current online dating models. To be clear, there’s a big,
ugly problem here waiting to be solved and a huge audience looking for a better
solution than what’s currently on offer. Sixty million Americans still use
dating apps, but they’re burning out at a frightening rate with three quarters
of them quitting the services within a month. This doesn’t really bode
especially well for any dating business pro forma because you lose the losers
(who give up) and you lose the winners (who get dates) over relatively short
time frames.
The approach that Kindred has come up with is basically to let your community
play cupid and find you the right match. It’s all about who you know and who
knows you and all those helpful Good Samaritans are gonna drop whatever they’ve
been doing and volunteer to help find you a date and/or a spouse. I wish the
founder well, as a lot of her proposal is drawn from her own background and
painful experiences, but I took this proposal as almost a textbook case of how
easy it is to miss some of the most basic selling propositions (what’s in it
for me) and how hard it is to motivate relatively uninvolved and lazy people
(who will always talk a good game) to actually assist you in building your
business when they’re noy even the primary beneficiaries of the service you’re
offering and they’re not getting paid.
The basic premise is
that you’re building a system of middlemen and women (called here “validators”)
and these folks (without consideration) are going to attempt to connect willing
daters on the one side with theoretically interested daters on the other side
by doing the homework, scouting around for prospects, building out profiles for
other people, making intros and “vouching” for their candidates as they are
tendered (no pun intended) to the interested daters. Many of those most in need
of assistance are the least likely to admit and acknowledge that they need a
well-meaning but intrusive third party’s help. Even the neighborhood spinster
doesn’t want to be the specimen in someone’s solicitous science project.
Even forgetting about
the necessity of reaching almost immediate critical mass on all three sides of
this equation, you’re building a business on the premise that people who know
likely prospects in their communities are going to undertake this entire new
behavior—being a bride and groom broker—in the vague hopes that there’s an
acceptable and attractive match out there somewhere for them to connect their
friend, neighbor, relative or whatever with. And they’re also willing to assume
and bear all the bad news associated with busted dates, bad behaviors,
no-shows, and worse and the emotional and pointed repercussions. All for free.
As if. The truth is that
nobody today is looking for more work and another time-consuming and tedious
job which has all the hallmarks of being thankless as well. Eventually the hope
is that the daters will eventually pay the freight for this service and presumably
that the validators will have the heartwarming satisfaction of doing good deeds
and helping love to blossom. In the early days, ads and events are expected to
provide revenues before there are paying customers.
In addition, there is
the nasty notion of plenty of existing cost-free alternatives all over the
place that already seem to work fairly well for folks. It’s easy as pie to
check out a prospect on social media these days and say yea or nay to a fix-up
without ever incurring any risk, cost, exposure, discomfort or embarrassment. A
good entrepreneur’s job is to find a real pain, make sure that a wide
population of potential customers accepts and acknowledges the
pain and is ready and willing to pay for the solution, and then
to develop an offering that brings all of the interested parties together
cost-efficiently and relatively painlessly.
The bottom line is
pretty simple – people don’t change when they see the light, they change, if at
all, when they feel the heat and this business feels like well-intentioned cold
potatoes and not a hot meal.