Question
Selling before the evidence is settled
How to make an honest claim about something that is still being studied, and still get people to try it.
Nobody has the playbook. Some people are building anyway.
Conversations with people who create and run organizations at the frontiers of current knowledge: how they sell it, staff it and pay for it.
View the questionsThe problems ordinary startup advice does not cover
Question
Qualifying without credentials
Who gets to teach, and who gets hired, in a field too young to have a qualification.
Question
Growing without cheapening the work
What these organizations refuse to do in order to grow, and what that refusal costs them.
Every organization gets the same six questions
Asking the same things each time makes the answers comparable. After enough conversations, the patterns show.
Questions
What I ask
How do you describe what you do to someone who has never felt it?
What do you claim, what do you refuse to claim, and where did you get that wrong early on?
Who is qualified to do this work, and how do you tell?
How do you hire and train for a job that had no title five years ago?
How does the money actually work here?
What was the first thing anyone paid you for? What pays for everything else? What did you stop selling, and why?
What have you refused to do in order to grow?
Where is the line between reaching more people and watering the work down?
What happens to the work when you are not in the room?
Which parts of it can be taught to someone else, and which parts have you failed to hand over so far?
What would convince you that this does not work?
What do you measure, and what have you changed your mind about since you started?
Unwritten is a work in progress. No conversations are published yet.
What each conversation leaves behind
A field without a playbook does not need more rules. Each conversation ends with something to try and a picture of how the organization pays for itself.
Sample experiment
Say the price out loud
For one week, tell three people what you want to make and what it will cost, before you build any of it.
Write down what each of them said, and what you felt in the second before they answered.
Sample diagram
How the money moves
- Free material
- Paid course
- Work with teams
The organization
- Teachers
- Research
- Scholarships
An illustration of the format, not a real organization. The same drawing for every guest, in shapes instead of figures.
Who I talk to
- No category, credential or playbook existed when they began.
- Something real is running: customers, revenue, a team.
- They run the organization. They are not commenting on it from outside.
About
Everyone I know is quietly asking the same thing: what is worth doing now? I don't know. So I'm asking the people who placed their bet early.
I'm Kevin Barrera-Joubert. I build products and tell the stories of early teams. Unwritten is where I compare notes with people a few years further along.
kevinbarrera.com