How I built successful political products

Some insights from the startup world.

Sep 27, 2022

Note: This is a long piece intended for those working to invent, market, or fund new political products. If you prefer my quick hits, skip this one. To those with careers in for-profit startups, the content here is likely familiar.

Introduction

Most startups fail. And usually “the real problem was that customers didn't want the product,” writes prominent startup figure Paul Graham.1 Even outside of startups, most product launches fail.

So making political change by creating a new product is risky; if people don’t use your product, it won’t make impact.

But when widely adopted, new political products can create big cost-effective impact. Over the last five years I’ve been a co-founder of (mostly successful) organizations doing that work. Throughout that time, I’ve benefited from the following insights from the startup world, and I hope they help you as well.

Insights to invent and market new products

Insight #1: Start with wells, not indentations

Paul Graham writes:

When a startup launches, there have to be at least some users who really need what they're making — not just people who could see themselves using it one day, but who want it urgently. …
You can either build something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a small number of people want a large amount. Choose the latter. …
Imagine a graph whose x axis represents all the people who might want what you're making and whose y axis represents how much they want it. If you invert the scale on the y axis, you can envision companies as holes. Google is an immense crater: hundreds of millions of people use it, and they need it a lot.

You can’t get there on Day 1, Graham continues:

A startup just starting out can't expect to excavate that much volume. So you have two choices about the shape of hole you start with. You can either dig a hole that's broad but shallow, or one that's narrow and deep, like a well. … Nearly all good startup ideas are of the second type.

To find a deep well, it’s usually best to start off focusing on a narrow set of users. Collective Impact found a “deep well” serving celebrities with roughly 250k to 1 million followers. Outside of that range, our well wasn’t as deep. We didn’t have the resources to “excavate” further, but that was ok; we were successful focusing mostly on that niche.

Frank Slootman2 summarizes his formula: “Narrow the focus. Up the quality. Increase the speed.” And speaking of speed…

Insight #2: Learn quickly by marketing before building

You can’t learn what people want by asking them questions. Here’s Graham on a better way:

In a startup, your initial plans are almost certain to be wrong in some way, and your first priority should be to figure out where. The only way to do that is to try implementing them. […]
The only way to make something customers want is to get a prototype in front of them and refine it based on their reactions.

You should do this before spending time and money building the product.

One term for this is a “painted door test;” imagine painting a storefront that sells X, and then counting how many people try to enter. That's much quicker and cheaper than actually creating the store. To put it graphically, the left is what I used to think was required, and the right is how the world usually works.3

DoorDash, now worth $23 billion, started with a quick and costless experiment. Here’s the story as told by co-founder Stanley Tang:

We decided to create a simple experiment with restaurant delivery. We spent about an afternoon just putting together a quick landing page. When I went on the Internet, I found some PDF menus of restaurants in Palo Alto. We stuck it up there and added a phone number at the bottom, which was actually our personal cell phone number. And that was it. We put up the landing page and called it PaloAltoDelivery.com. … What we wanted to see was just would we receive phone calls, and if we got enough phone calls, then maybe this delivery idea was worth pursuing.
So we put it up there; we weren't really expecting anything, and all of a sudden we got a phone call. Someone called! They wanted to order Thai food. And we're like, “This is a real order; we're going to have to do something about it.” So we're in our cars and we're like, "We're not doing anything right now, might as well swing by, pick up some pad thai, and let's try to see how this whole delivery thing works." And we did.

The experiment’s success made Tang and his friends more confident that they were on the right track. In politics, successful experiments like this can help persuade partners and funders to support your work.

If local delivery hadn’t been a viable business, think of how much time and money Tang would have saved via this simple test.

Insight #3: Understand your users

To make something people want, you need to understand what people want. The only way to deeply understand your users’ goals and challenges is to talk to them — a lot. Talking to users is so important that accelerator Y Combinator advises early-stage companies to do nothing besides talk to users and build product.

Just a few key insights can be all you need:

Doing another startup has retaught me the lesson that once you know precisely what users care about (answering more complex questions, better battery life, etc.), that continuous, relentless focus on attacking the problem can get you further than you or others initially imagined. - Suhail Doshi4

To understand your users, it helps if you’re one of them. Some of the best political entrepreneurs have worked in the movement (even briefly), saw unfilled needs, and created products to fill those gaps. Graham talks about how helpful it is to build something that you need yourself:

As in science, the hard part is not answering questions but asking them: the hard part is seeing something new that users lack. The better you understand them the better the odds of doing that. That's why so many successful startups make something the founders needed.

Quick note: It’s not always obvious who your users are or should be, so be openminded and flexible about this.5

Insight #4: The only two responses

When offering your prototype to users, there are only two real responses:

“I want it now”
Everything else (aka polite interest)

Polite interest is dangerous, because it can trick you into making a product that people don’t actually want. Graham describes a probably-bad startup idea; a social network for pet owners.

It doesn't sound obviously mistaken. Millions of people have pets. Often they care a lot about their pets and spend a lot of money on them. …
The danger of an idea like this is that when you run it by your friends with pets, they don't say "I would never use this." They say "Yeah, maybe I could see using something like that." Even when the startup launches, it will sound plausible to a lot of people. They don't want to use it themselves, at least not right now, but they could imagine other people wanting it. Sum that reaction across the entire population, and you have zero users.

Some responses that are not “I want it now:” “Let me know once it’s ready,” or “I’d be interested to try it out.” Instead, here are two personal examples of what “I want it now” should look like:

Following up a pitch by emailing colleagues, “NEW APP IS THE ANSWER TO OUR PRAYERS!!" (And signing up soon thereafter.)
Being moved to tears by what your product achieves (as one celebrity was after Collective Impact empowered him as a relational organizer).

Other examples can include “getting literal love letters from customers” (Elad Gil) or reactions like “Where have you been all of my life?” (Steve Blank)

If you’re not getting “I want it now,” keep refining the product and/or pitch. The longer you go without “I want it now,” the bigger the changes you should contemplate.

Insight #5: Sell the brownie, not the recipe

You may recognize that line from messaging expert Anat Shenker-Osorio; this is advice where startup and movement insights overlap. Nonetheless, it’s surprisingly hard to execute.

Here’s a fun example (be sure to read all the slide text):

In other words, you don’t market a fire flower by talking about its green leaves, or even that it makes your overalls white. Through enough listening to your users, you’ll find the right message, which here would be something like, “Survive a hit and kill enemies from far away.”

The only way I’ve ever found the right message is through lots of conversations with users. Eventually, one says things in a way that makes everything click.

An essay on applying this advice is titled, “Your product demo sucks because it’s focused on your product.” Instead, start by learning about your audience’s needs, then tailor your presentation accordingly. This has the dual benefits of (a) increasing your knowledge about users, and (b) improving the odds of a successful pitch.

Quick note: In politics, the “brownie” is usually producing votes, donations, or volunteers. If you don’t have a credible link to driving one of those, think hard about how to express your product’s contribution.

Insight #6: Focus on traction

It’s in your interest to focus on traction. You want to make impact, and that only happens if people use your product. Traction is evidence that people are using your product, which means it’s also evidence that you’re not wasting your time.

Traction is a broad word that includes many things, including when people:

Pay money for your product
Use your product
Adopt your product into their work (e.g. using your technique to reach voters)
Share your product with their networks

Unlike the for-profit world, it’s not fatal if people can’t or won’t pay money for what you’re making. However, this raises the bar for demonstrating your project’s impact; I write more about this challenge here.

The longer you go without traction, the greater the risk of wasting your time by making something few people want. Lack of traction can be a red flag that something big needs to change in your marketing, your product, or both.

Quick note: Choosing which metrics to focus on is usually challenging. Here’s a piece with some advice.

Insight #7: The goal is product-market fit

There’s no single definition of product-market fit (PMF), but here’s a representative one:

If it’s not glaringly obvious your company has product-market fit yet, with customers pulling the product from you, it very likely doesn’t. - Sarah Guo6

Put another way, PMF is people wanting to use your product, which is a requirement for it to make impact. Therefore, “the only thing that matters is getting to product-market fit." That's Marc Andreessen7 talking about for-profit products, but the same holds in politics.

Most new companies never reach this stage; “Every startup requires lucky miracles to get product-market fit,” writes Garry Tan.8

This article describes some other ways to identify PMF, including:

Before the product exists
1. Visible excitement
2. People are willing to pay for it
After the product exists
1. Retention: Users stick around
2. Surveys: Users say they’d be very disappointed if your product went away
3. Exponential organic growth
4. Customers clamor for your product
5. People are using it even when it’s broken or rough/unfinished

Ramping up distribution before finding PMF is usually a mistake; without PMF, newly acquired users will drift away. Relatedly, novice entrepreneurs are often tempted to try a shortcut: “We’d grow so fast if we could get Large Organization X to get its members to use our product!” This sounds logical but is usually wrong and actually dangerous.9

Conclusion

I wish you great success in finding PMF for your political products. Please reach out to david@bluem.ventures if you need advice on that journey.

Thank you to everyone who provided helpful comments on earlier drafts, including Matt Singer, Ted Suzman, Colin Van Ostern, Matt Hodges, Zack Rosen, Nathan Woodhull, and Shai Sachs.

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