I have done a fair number of consulting projects for EDA startups and a lot of them start out with what I like to call “City Slickers marketing”, named after the movie City Slickers. For those of you who have not seen it, there is an old cowboy, Curly (played by Jack Palance) and a young advertising account manager Mitch (played by Billy Crystal). The marketing is named for the following conversation:
Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is? [holds up one finger] This.
Mitch: Your finger?
Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don’t mean shit.
Mitch: But, what is the “one thing?”
Curly: [smiles] That’s what you have to find out.
When I arrive at startups where the CEO is the key technologist, or even just an engineer by background, I tend to have a conversation like this:
“What’s the one reason people should buy your product?” I ask.
“One reason, I can give you twenty,” the CEO replies.
Technical people (and I am one, so this is a lesson I had to learn the hard way too) tend to overvalue technical features in a product and assume that if the technology is good then the product will sell itself. And if one feature is a good reason to buy, then lots of features are even more of a reason.
But the world doesn’t work that way.
A colleague recently reminded me about a store in San Jose that sold “Fine art and bicycles”. Presumably a fine art dealer who also was a keen cyclist. This is an extreme example of how multiple features are not necessarily additive and how you have to take account of the way the customers look at the world. There simply isn’t a “fine art and bicycle” market that you can be the leader of. In fact, even if you are the best art shop in the area, selling bicycles too isn’t a plus, it detracts from your message.
A lot of early marketing in a startup is working out what the single compelling reason is for a customer to engage with you. And it has to be just one (or maybe a couple if you can segment the market a bit). The early stage of engaging with customers is sometimes referred to as throwing mud against the wall and seeing what sticks. You can’t find the single compelling reason as an intellectual exercise, you have to get out and engage with customers and work out where your technology solves problems the customer cares about.
When I arrived at Ambit, I learned that our value was that we produced faster circuits than Synopsys. And we had better time-budgeting. And we could run top-down. And we ran faster. And our pricing was bundled. And physical synthesis was in development. And…and…and.
It was once we realized that we could handle large million gate designs in one gulp that we really started to get traction. The other things were all true, but none of them was compelling enough to get a company to engage with a startup. But if you had a million gate design and you couldn’t get it through Design Compiler, then you were calling us to take your money.
This is different from the elevator pitch for investment purposes. Ambit was “Design Compiler only better” but that isn’t focused enough for marketing a product or driving a detailed development roadmap. You have to find out the one thing.