I chatted with a friend of a friend of the program yesterday about her idea.

She’s working on a business to help people find skilled tradespeople. The high-level idea is that we have groups of people we trust (family, a close circle of friends, possibly coworkers) but don’t fully leverage.

So, the use case is if I move to a new house and want to find a plumber or a painter or landscaper or someone to put in a water softener, I could look at the tradespeople my trusted group had used. I could also ping the group for specific suggestions. Over time, this trusted network would expand, offering a more personalized and reliable alternative to platforms like Yelp.

I asked how traction was going and she said it was tough. Everyone was interested and said they loved it, but traction didn’t equal the praise people were giving her.

And now we get to the job of your first customer, and Delta 4.

Your first customer is unlike any other customer you’ll ever have. They won’t be influenced by anything but you. Which is tricky, since people make 99% of their decisions based on envy - you look at someone you admire and make the decisions they’ve already made.

For this customer to take a flier on you, you need two things to be true.

1) Their current options for solving the problem have to SUCK.

The options can’t be mediocre or likely even “pretty bad.” They have to be a 2, 3, or 4 out of 10.