The lifter’s price

Lifting others every day, because this ain't no dress rehearsal

I told a consultant we’re working with that the work with her doesn’t feel like getting put through a process. She wrote back something I’ve been noodling on:

When she moved from founder to advisory, she made herself a promise. To only work with companies she believed could actually deliver value to their customers. Even if that meant a slimmer pipeline for her.

There’s an enthusiasm in how she works. It’s nice to be around.

There’s a risk in getting too wrapped up in that enthusiasm, but honestly, I just appreciate it. Because if you want to take others to a higher level, you have to have that kind of enthusiasm for the work you do with them. You can’t lift anyone you’re not excited to be standing next to.

The narrative I keep having to put down

Building in tech, there’s always a story running in the background: build to go as big as possible. Unicorn status. Generational impact. People saying your name in 100 years.

We’ve all met people building with that intent. They’ve had real success and they want the astronomical version of it. It’s admirable. I love it for them.

It’s not for me. But it’s easy to get swept up in. Build fast, burn fast, rocket ship to Mars, exit with squillions in the bank, plant your flag at the top of the mountain and call that the pinnacle of life.

And then every day I work too much, every week I’m away from my family and the things that actually matter to me, doing what I feel I have to do instead of what I want to do, the top of the mountain doesn’t feel like something worth shooting for.

“Slimmer pipeline” is a story about scarcity

The slim pipeline thinking is finite game thinking. Only so many resources, only so many people, everyone fighting over the same slice.

I don’t buy it.

With most things, if you can find your tribe, you can make a good living doing the work, and have fun doing it. There are far more of those people out there than you’d think. Jordan Peterson said something like this once (agree with him or not, it’s beside the point here): until he started putting his thinking out into the world, he assumed he was basically alone in it. He wasn’t.

So there’s something to sticking to your guns. Putting yourself out there. Letting people know how you think and how you feel. More of them open up, make themselves known, or get pulled in by your enthusiasm and your willingness to lift them up than the scarcity story ever lets you believe.

It’s true for people and for product.

The little thing: help first

We’re building a business and doing founder-led sales. Some days it feels like a grind. The framing that’s saved me is looking for ways to help people first. Yes, there’s constant pressure to be selling, to be closing deals, but those come on the back of being genuinely helpful.

It’s nothing new. It’s Gary Vee’s jab, jab, jab, right hook. At some point you do have to ask for the money. But the thing I come back to every single day, every time I send an email, is one question: is this actually helpful? Is there an insight in here that someone can take, learn from, implement, and benefit from, whether or not they ever buy from me?

Do I get it right every time? Heck no. But the ratio of helpful:selling is getting better.

All the way down

Does this run into what we’re actually building? I think it does. That’s the whole idea. How do we make our users the heroes of their day? The heroes of their team? How do we make them feel like they pulled off something good?

It doesn’t have to be world-changing, just good. How do we give them back more time for the work they actually want to be doing, the work they know they need to be doing so they feel valuable and worthwhile?

I know how sappy that sounds, and that’s probably leaning too far into it. But yes, it goes all the way into the product. Can we lift people up with the tools we build? Can we lift them out of the day-to-day grind of whatever they’re stuck in right now?

One honest thing, and the ask

At Accoil, we’ve held strong opinions, very tightly, and I think that hasn’t always served us well. Sometimes we heard our customers, but we didn’t listen to them. They’d tell us what they needed and we’d say, “nah, you don’t need that.” We had a very firm view of what was useful and what wasn’t. Maybe it was a bit arrogant.

I believe that we all buy tools that have strong opinions. But those strong opinions can be loosely held to flex and form to real customer needs. Anyway…

There’s been a shift lately. Now when we look at the product, the question is different: are we making this useful in a way that helps people do good, meaningful work?

So, before doing the next thing, the email, the feature, the support ticket:

Is this helping? Will this lift someone up today?

TTFN,

Peter