INVALIDATING ASSUMPTIONS by Trevor Owens

Smith was broke and couldn’t pay the $3,000 printing tab—so he told his neighbor that God ordered the neighbor to pay the bill. This neighbor was the one whose wife had freaked out about the original manuscript (she had since grown so exasperated that she had divorced him). Smith told the neighbor that God had threatened the neighbor with “misery,” including the “destruction of thyself and property” if the neighbor refused. The neighbor sold his farm and paid the bill.

Few copywriters share my appetite for research. The late and great Bill Bernbach, among many others, thought that it inhibited creativity. My experience has been the opposite. Research has often lead me to good ideas, such as the eyepatch in the Hathaway campaign.

I have seen ideas so wild that nobody in his senses would dare to use them - until research found that they worked. When I had the idea of writing headlines for French tourism in French, my partners told me I was nuts - until research revealed that French headlines were more effective than English headlines.

I want to make sure that I distinguish between net-promoter score and the ‘very disappointed’ number. I do think that they’re actually different. I would say, for example, that Virgin America probably has a pretty high net-promoter score but if you look at it, it’s not that differentiated from different airlines, so, in a sense, net-promoter score becomes more important in a relatively undifferentiated category. The question that I’m talking about, if you’re a brand new company coming into a category that exists and you’re not very differentiated, you don’t have a chance. Therefore, you have to start by being able to create a must-have product. It’s not that you don’t have a chance, because clearly Virgin America would be an example of a relatively new company that has been successful. To me, I wouldn’t put my money on companies being able to come in with a nice-to-have product and a high referral rate, a high recommendation rate, but on a nice-to-have product. I would always put it on the must-have product because of the sticking. The one thing that a high net-promoter score is that you’re a lot more vulnerable if you suddenly burn your relationship with users, that net-promoter score could drop overnight. One bad Puerto Rico move. Where, if you’re a must-have product, you can screw up many things on the relationship with the users, but if they don’t’ have a good alternative they’re going to stick with you. They’re going to hope an alternative comes out, so you should definitely maintain a good relationship with users. I just wanted to separate, I think having a good number on that does generally correlate to a good recommendation rate, so there’s some correlation, but I think for a start-
Up that net-promoter score is not as important n the early days. Fortunately, in the case of Eventbrite, they were really strong on both numbers. The ‘very disappointed’ number to me is something that is essentially a milestone for the business to basically say, ‘We’ve created something that is now a must-have and we can go from that super low-burn, super patient, conservative mode of just gathering feedback, where it may take us years to get there.’ To ‘All right. This is an inflection point in the business where our priorities have changed. We want to start growing this business as quickly as possible. There’s a few things we need to do first so that we can efficiently grow the business.’ That’s the part where I come in to essentially help them get through those parts quicker because I’ve done it multiple times.