Jake Knapp: evaluation

Transcript context

…Just to point people to justification for why differentiation is so important, there's a couple of episodes that I did that I'll point to in the show notes that just give you more context of why you need to differentiate. So I spoke of David Plastic who is this naming expert that we just had on the podcast. His whole thing is when he's coming up with a name for Sonos or Purcell or Windsor, it has to differentiate. And he talks about this in depth. So we'll point to that episode and this is just like if you're not convinced, why are we spending so much time in differentiation? Also, April Dunford who's like, I don't know, the god of positioning. She has differentiation is such a core part of her approach to positioning. And so there's just so much evidence to tell you that differentiation is a really important step and element of successful companies. One of the things that I've noticed about these topics that the basics we talked about already, differentiation, this notion of you need a foundation for your project. It's a bit more under the radar for people. I think it's a bit harder for people to immediately see like, oh, we need this. We see the people who react the strongest to this and have the strongest immediate affinity to this idea actually being start-up founders, people who are really sophisticated in this challenge. Product managers who are at... We were invited in to speak at open AI and anthropic about this, and we see the product people, they're being like, oh my god, this is really powerful. This is the kind of stuff we need. I think for a lot of folks though, it can sound like this is just elementary, differentiation. Of course we need to differentiate. The problem is that all of this stuff gets backgrounded. It's something we've thought about a bit. We assume we're on the same page, we assume we're going to deliver something, but then business as usual happens, we build a product, we get kind of more interested in the technology and delivering that, and we end up trying to sell it to customers at the end. We end up putting a coat of paint on it with a marketing page or sales deck. We haven't actually built from the beginning the thing that we know is going to matter to people. One of the most useful steps here that I haven't seen before is just a starting place for how to even start thinking about differentiation. Everyone's always probably thinking price and speed maybe. You guys have a really cool just starting list that you showed here. Anything more you can add here for helping people start to think about ways to differentiate beyond the obvious price and speed. And I don't know, a couple more.…

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