Note: This is Part 4 in a short series of essays on Understanding Customer Demand. Read Part 3 here.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://commoncog.com/the-heart-of-innovation-why-startups-fail
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://commoncog.com/the-heart-of-innovation-why-startups-fail
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If you’re a Commoncog member, you should go to this thread for continued discussion on the Heart of Innovation book, or this thread to download a case study written by the authors of the book.
As an aside, two readers have now pinged me privately to complain about the phrase ‘authentic demand’. I think it’s important to remember that the name was chosen to differentiate from the ‘fake demand’ that Furst and Chanoff experienced in their time with Damballa 
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Just a small nit “After the pandemic ended, the situation that created this not not reverted. Companies redirected spend back to in-person events, and all of these startups saw their authentic demand vanish.” I think it was more complex, virtual events started declining before the end of the pandemic due to virtual event fatigue, but in person events have not yet reverted to the previous state either (especially in US, Europe is a little better). Virtual events caused a rethink of what events were for, and made people re-evaluate spending and what was effective.
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Thanks for this! Yeah I think this more accurately captures what happened.
But we can ask one of the founders of Welcome if this fits his version of events: @tiger
I’ll be happy to correct the text.
I continue to be baffled by this
Furst told me that if nothing else, one thing you can put to practice immediately is to ask your prospective customers: “Hey, I’m thinking of making this thing. Would it be ok if I don’t make it? Would it be possible for you not to buy?” This is a big upgrade over “would you be willing to buy?”-type conversations. In practice, though, Furst warned me that most founders would not be able to ask this — what will come out of their mouths is “will you buy it?”
I did some of those interviews and while I agree that it was very easy to ask if they will buy, it just was straight up weird to ask the prescribed questions and then following up on their answer.
It just feels incredibly silly to ask “hey, this is a thing, I am not going to make it, okay?”, them saying “sure” or shrugging and then you ending the call because you got your data. I genuinely wish I could observe a call, that doesn’t go in the affirmative way.
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(Specifically, what Furst said to me was that he wished he had asked this very question to Schmidt, at eBay. But that also he probably wouldn’t have been able to do it.)
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A post was merged into an existing topic: Deliberate Innovation (Heart of Innovation) Case Studies
I don’t fully get why it has to be ‘not not’ rather than ‘must’.
The authors probably have a reason, but it seems clearer to just say that " Authentic demand exists for a solution when someone is put in a situation and they must buy (or use) the solution.
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I think I’ve already given one argument in the essay: that is, it’s incoherent and makes it that much harder for your brain to make up some story about demand. Seems like a small price to pay to save yourself from a decade’s worth of a dead end.
But I also like it because it focuses your attention on the default outcome. The default outcome to a new startup or product is indifference: the user ignores your solution. They do not use it. They do not buy it. So what you’re looking for is something that isn’t the default outcome. (Nonindifference).
The argument Merrick Furst gave me, that I didn’t really like, is that the not not formulation comes from intuitionistic or constructivist logic. In this form of logic, a not not is not a double negation that cancels out. Instead there are three states: you can construct something, you can stop the construction, and you can make it such that nothing can stop the construction. The not not is this third state.
I won’t pretend to understand this explanation. Furst is somewhat famous in computer science; I assume this is his maths and computer science background speaking! 
(Intuitionistic logic is used to construct proofs in computerised proof assistants)
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It also follows a Popperian style of ‘understanding’ that encourages falsification instead of verification. If you have an idea in your head that ‘Oh, a user that has X problem must buy our Y product,’ you need to search for specific cases where this idea is falsified.
I don’t know if this is the correct way to understand ‘not not,’ but so far I like this interpretation haha
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That makes sense — thank you for the clarification.
Another thing that came up for me in reading this is that I’m not sure if I’m convinced of this as the one true theory of demand (this might just be my interpretation after reading you critique the other accounts of demand).
To me, this ‘authentic demand’ might be too high a bar and preclude many (most?) businesses. In the case of Common Cog, or other publications I subscribe to — I can imagine being in the scenario of being very curious about eg the community or the paywalled posts, but being able to just not subscribe? Or if I think of most books that I buy — it feels like mostly I can just not buy them (so most books don’t satisfy authentic demand?).
I am likely misunderstanding authentic demand — it is something deeper and more intuitive than my simple parsing, but still, having read the post (and not the book), I do come away wondering whether we need an integrated theory of demand rather than several different theories that more or less work in different domains. What’s to say that the theory of demand for cosmetics has to be the same theory of demand for a cybersecurity startup?
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Read this summary today. Will definitely also read the book, but to me it sort of seems like being a “not not” is sufficient, but not necessary to being a successful business. Like, is Pepsi a not not when Coke exists? Is commoncog a not not? I don’t necessarily think my products are, but I’d definitely say I have PMF.
Maybe sufficient but not necessary is OK/desirable if you’re early stage/trying to find PMF and you want to be as sure/fool proof as possible or don’t want to fall into the trap of wasting a bunch of time attached attached to a flawed idea, but otherwise I think it might be a tad restrictive.
Also this part:
Pain is not predictive because you and I have many pains that we don’t do anything about. We learn to cope. And so if we do not act on all our pains, then interviewing for pain is actually a crapshoot. There is no way to know, ex-ante, that a person or business’s pain point is something that you can build a product around.
Reminded me of this quote from The Mom Test re pains:
I was checking out an idea with a potential customer and they excitedly said, “Oh man, that happens all the time. I would definitely pay for something which solved that problem.”
That’s a future-promise statement without any commitment to back it up, so I needed to learn whether it was true or not. I asked, “When’s the last time this came up?” Turns out, it was pretty recent. That’s a great sign. To dig further, I asked, “Can you talk me through how you tried to fix it?” He looked at me blankly, so I nudged him further.
“Did you google around for any other ways to solve it?” He seemed a little bit like he’d been caught stealing from the cookie jar and said, “No… I didn’t really think to. It’s something I’m used to dealing with, you know?”
In the abstract, it’s something he would “definitely” pay to solve. Once we got specific, he didn’t even care enough to search for a solution (which do exist, incidentally).
It’s easy to get someone emotional about a problem if you lead them there. “Don’t you hate when your shoelaces come untied while you’re carrying groceries?” “Yeah, that’s the worst!” And then I go off and design my special never-come-untied laces without realising that if you actually cared, you would already be using a double-knot.
Rule of thumb: If they haven’t looked for ways of solving it already, they’re not going to look for (or buy) yours.
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Oh, 100% — I am not convinced this is a grand unified theory of demand. I merely think this is a new contribution that plugs some (all?) of the holes I’d noticed over the years, with other frameworks. I hope we get someone else who does the synthesis down the line. Like I’ve mentioned in the Deliberate Innovation Case Studies thread, it’s not clear to me that we should always use situations to talk about demand. Talking about pain feels a lot easier and a lot more intuitive for many situations (assuming it is applicable).
The go-to example in my head is … handbags. Is it necessary to use situations to talk about handbags? Or is it more useful / tractable to just use some existing theory of desire/demand? I’m still mulling over it.
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I won’t pretend I have an answer, but…
Ever since the Lord of the Rings movies came out, my husband and I have talked about something that we call the Gollum Principle:
The creators of the movie originally had used pure CGI to create the Gollum character, with voice over happening in post-production. Then they brought Andy Serkis in do the voice over, and his physical performance during the readings had a really visceral impact, and so Jackson reconsidered, and decided to do motion capture etc.
After they had tried it with motion capture, they couldn’t imagine going back to just pure CGI with voice over.
This, to me, captures the not not in this situation (though not generally). They originally either didn’t consider motion capture, or it just didn’t seem important. But then, having actually experienced it, their worldview changed. It had become non-negotiable.
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I thought about my recent changes in default behavior and realized somethnig.
Something that falls out of the “not-not” framework is that “can’t go back” is a feeling that yields a successful product This implies that a great product can be one which is hard to get people to try, but, once they do, they can’t go back. This is motivating because I suspect our current product is in this category – we’ve been having some trouble to get people to try it, but we believe it will produce a “can’t go back” feeling once they do. Fingers crossed that our work to make it easier to try will be successful.
An anecdote I heard about the pharmaceutical industry:
“We billions of dollars because the patent was misfiled and thus granted a year late”
“What? Don’t you get a 20 year monopoly either way? So why does it matter when that starts”
A drug company comes out with something expensive that you need to take 3 times a day.
20 years later, the cheap generic comes out.
So they try to make it so that, 1 year before that, they release another expensive version that you only need to take once a day.
Those on the cheap 3x/day generic might never switch to the expensive 1x/day version.
But those on the 1x/day version might also never switch to the generic!
So the goal is to get everyone on the 3x/day version (esp. the doctors who form prescribing habits) before the generic comes out.
Mistiming can be deadly.
I’m reminded of my experience switching to Superhuman.
It took me a few months to actually get started. It did not support my workflow of just leaving unprocessed messages unread for years. When I first tried it, I tried to use the same workflow, which it was not friendly to.
Support convinced me to try marking done (i.e.: archiving) all my processed E-mails, as is the Superhuman way. But I never used that feature in GMail, so I had 20 years worth of messages, and their tool did not work well.
But eventually, when it got started, I came to appreciate all the pains it solved with GMail.
E.g.: I used Boomerang, but it does not work on my phone. So if there was a message I wanted to bounce, I had to wait till I got to my computer to process it.
E.g.: I wanted to have read receipts, and had gone looking a few times, but existing things I tried were clunky, didn’t tell you if they opened multiple times, and other problems.
Superhuman just had everything. And it was faster.
Now I hate having to open GMail.
Which I still have to do sometimes. Superhuman’s Android app makes it clunky to attach many photos, and I’ve had some trouble with its calendar integration.
But yeah. It was first pitched to me in maybe 2023; I felt the pains with GMail, but balked at the price of Superhuman. Cofounder gifted me a free month in 2024, and it took me a few months to try it, in part because trying it initially didn’t work. Now, continuing to pay the price would be a no-brainer. If they doubled the price, I would not hesitate to keep paying (but don’t tell them that please).
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That’s a fun application of the theory. Perhaps the “not not” is something like “Peter Jackson could NOT NOT use the most realistic version possible of Gollum given how central he is to the story”. This would distinguish it from an imagined situation of using motion capture to get “the most realistic war elephant possible” .
While walking the dog the other day, I was chatting with ChatGPT about real world examples of “Authentic Demand” (as one does). It brought up the idea that “once you see it, you can’t go back” in reference to Figma’s rise.
I’ve been pondering that, and it seems to me that (some?) of Figma’s “not nots” were:
- Software teams could NOT NOT use a graphical interface to design UI.
- Software teams could NOT NOT collaborate around that tool. At the very least, the graphical design had to be handed to a developer for implementation, and in practice there might be many stakeholders involved.
Those were non-negotiable requirements, and are different from other software production processes like coding. What’s interesting to me is that there were (and still are) viable alternatives to using Figma. You could still email files, or markup screenshots, or add feedback in Google Docs or what have you. Sketch apparently had a cloud saving option that launched the same year as Figma did. However, Figma’s innovation (zero-install, multi-player web editor) was apparently superior enough to those alternatives to achieve a leading position in the design tool market.
Per the article,
The closing of this gap generates a ‘not not’.
but I’m not sure whether to think of Figma’s solution to the requirements as a “NOT NOT” given that there were viable (but worse) solutions to close the gaps. I’m not even sure that my Figma NOT NOTs listed above fully fit in the HOI framework, given they are solution agnostic. I briefly tried to think of this in a situation diagram and it seemed really hard. I suppose that this is what makes it difficult to apply the framework before you see the hockey stick growth curve.
As an aside, the “NOT NOT” framing strikes me as similar to Garry Klein’s pre-mortem: a rhetorical technique used to short circuit a cognitive bias. “The user MUST do X” sounds too close to “MUST… buy my product, right?” for our optimistic brains.
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I think there’s a specific type of situation / demand where people are managing “just fine” with their existing tools, and if you suggest a new solution they’ll just be kind of nonplussed. Why would I need that? And then the tool is actually transformative in some important way, and you only really get how transformative it is once you’ve tried it.
Gollum and Figma and Superhuman all seem to fall into this category.
In the Heart of Innovation there is a section where they talk about a small (hypothetical, maybe? I can’t remember) society that is built on the banks of a river. People cross the river just fine with boats and rafts. Then someone built a bridge, which completely transformed the situation. People who never bothered with boats or whatnot start being able to access the other side of the river. People who had managed just fine with boats and couldn’t see themselves needing a bridge (Why would they? They have a boat!) started using the bridge as well, and couldn’t imagine going back.
It’s so easy to stick with the status quo when that’s what’s familiar. Also it’s hard to imagine the impact of something so people underestimate how transformative it can be. And if you’ve already invested in your existing workarounds and tools, it might seem completely unnecessary to invest in a big change (whether that’s money-wise or just the mental capacity it takes to switch tools).
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