Contrasty Worldviews

Recently I talked to two entrepreneurs, both roughly the same age, with roughly the same experience in their respective fields of work. One runs a software consultancy; another a marketing agency. So naturally, one’s grounded in technology and the other is heavy on selling things. What I observed (and found funny) was the stark contrast between their worldviews.

When I explained my app idea, the first one said that making the product is child’s play. Market is full of engineers; anyone can code; and it’s pretty cheap. Selling, selling is the real hassle. Marketing it, reaching out to the customers, that’s where you struggle.

The second one, he said that anything and everything sells. Selling is so easy these days — you can run ads on the internet for a few thousand rupees; you can create these chatbots who would talk to people on your behalf; you can create email templates to automate consumer retention for months at end.

One advised me to hire an engineer for as low as 25k a month and he’d build my product. The other advised that I can create crappy ebooks claiming to teach 5 lessons that’d change your life and give them away for free in exchange for user info. Spend 30k on ads and I will have data from 3,000 people, ready to exploit.

Now what’s interesting is that they’ve earned these ideas through lived experiences. They’re not making it up, it’s actually something that worked out for them. So even though both of them have lived in different universes, they are both truthful in their idea of the world.

So should I think that I can borrow the good parts from both? Is it safe to think that it’s easy to write software and easy to sell it as well?

Umm not exactly. They’re both right, yes, but their words serve little value for me. Cause it’s not about what they speak, it’s about who they are. Experiencing a very specific reality, they’ve become a very specific person. If I’m not that person, their surface level advice won’t do me any good. If anything, it’ll stop me from experiencing my personal reality.

What’s my reality? Well I believe that making the product is easy only as long as you care about surface level features. The moment you dig deeper and start thinking about the feel and experience of the product, the value it creates, things get hard. No, you can’t hire a random coder to create that for you. You have to think, you have to give it shape, nobody else can do that for you.

About marketing, I’m as alien to the domain as the monks in Himalayas. But I’d at least try to refrain from selling empty content with fake promises. Sure some people might grab anything you throw at them. But would I want to create for those people? I guess not.

This is how I see things now. Naive, inexperienced, overconfident 24yo, sitting in a small town. Does that make me wrong? Can’t be sure of that. Does it mean that I’m right? No, not that either.

All it means is that this is how I think the world should be, and I’ve given myself the permission to accept what comes my way naturally. Transformation can only happen through lived experiences, not through someone else’s words.

Okay gotta go, bye!
Aachman