There’s a rather good expression in English: ‘To put the cart in front of the horse.’ It’s such a useful expression that I’m sure it must exist in a similar form in most cultures. Another version is a situation where: ‘The tail wags the dog.’ In other words, both of these phrases describe how things are sometimes done in the wrong order, or for the wrong reasons.
The cart is often put in front of the horse with ICOs. It’s quite understandable that the development team are focused on their amazing solution, but hey guys, pause a moment and tell us what the problem is! That way the solution horse will pull your problem cart all the way to the success of your ICO. That way the dog will wag its tail!
We all know how tempting it is to go straight into solution-focused marketing, because we automatically assume that everyone shares our knowledge and will then jump to the conclusion that our new product or service is going to provide the silver bullet – the perfect problem-killer. But that’s not how it works in reality, because you have no way of assessing how up to speed your audience is. This is so much the case that I have even looked at ICOs lately where I’m left wondering, “OK, but what is the problem here?”
This is especially so when it comes to the more abstract areas of financial service offerings, where it seems that you have to be an international banker to even begin to appreciate the point of the token sale. Yes, it looks great, the arguments are made logically and it seems that someone knows what it’s all about. Just not me.
There could be two reasons for this lack of understanding:
1. Basically I’m just a dumbass.
2. It’s all solution, no problem.
Paint me a problem scenario and I’ll likely buy your solution. Without the problem I’ve got no measureable means of knowing whether your offering is going to rock my world, or anyone else’s.
Let’s take as an example the clockwork radio invented by Trevor Baylis. It seems like a vaguely interesting, novelty idea, but a bit “So what?” We all have electricity in our homes, we can all pop out to the convenience store for batteries…
Except ‘we’ can’t all do that.
Baylis saw a very real problem, which is that back in the 1990s people across Africa were dying of AIDS, and had no access to vital public health announcements and advice. These were being broadcast, but in rural populations radios were rare, electricity was unreliable at best, and batteries were difficult and expensive to get. His solution of a cheap, easy to manufacture, free to operate communications tool helped solve a massive problem.
Now if ICOs had been around then, would the Inventor have lead with the story of his clockwork radio (the solution)… or the lack of access to information about the AIDS epidemic (the problem)? It would be nice to imagine that his ‘whitepaper’ began by describing the terrible problem, followed by the amazing solution: The cart behind the horse, the dog wagging its tail.
The cart is often put in front of the horse with ICOs. It’s quite understandable that the development team are focused on their amazing solution, but hey guys, pause a moment and tell us what the problem is! That way the solution horse will pull your problem cart all the way to the success of your ICO. That way the dog will wag its tail!
The problem with assuming
We all know how tempting it is to go straight into solution-focused marketing, because we automatically assume that everyone shares our knowledge and will then jump to the conclusion that our new product or service is going to provide the silver bullet – the perfect problem-killer. But that’s not how it works in reality, because you have no way of assessing how up to speed your audience is. This is so much the case that I have even looked at ICOs lately where I’m left wondering, “OK, but what is the problem here?”
This is especially so when it comes to the more abstract areas of financial service offerings, where it seems that you have to be an international banker to even begin to appreciate the point of the token sale. Yes, it looks great, the arguments are made logically and it seems that someone knows what it’s all about. Just not me.
There could be two reasons for this lack of understanding:
1. Basically I’m just a dumbass.
2. It’s all solution, no problem.
Paint me a problem scenario and I’ll likely buy your solution. Without the problem I’ve got no measureable means of knowing whether your offering is going to rock my world, or anyone else’s.
A perfect example
Let’s take as an example the clockwork radio invented by Trevor Baylis. It seems like a vaguely interesting, novelty idea, but a bit “So what?” We all have electricity in our homes, we can all pop out to the convenience store for batteries…
Except ‘we’ can’t all do that.
Baylis saw a very real problem, which is that back in the 1990s people across Africa were dying of AIDS, and had no access to vital public health announcements and advice. These were being broadcast, but in rural populations radios were rare, electricity was unreliable at best, and batteries were difficult and expensive to get. His solution of a cheap, easy to manufacture, free to operate communications tool helped solve a massive problem.
Now if ICOs had been around then, would the Inventor have lead with the story of his clockwork radio (the solution)… or the lack of access to information about the AIDS epidemic (the problem)? It would be nice to imagine that his ‘whitepaper’ began by describing the terrible problem, followed by the amazing solution: The cart behind the horse, the dog wagging its tail.