What emotions do your business contribute to?
Do you feel for what you're building and contributing to?
What emotions do your business contribute to?
What emotions and feelings do your products generate for your customers?
Are these emotions also what you want to be associated with?
Peter Askew, the “I sell onions on the internet” guy, talked about these attributes in his post about why he loved what he do:
In 2009 I bought domain DudeRanch․com & built a dude ranch vacation marketplace directory. I found I deeply enjoyed serving that industry. but I was curious to understand why I enjoyed it. “just cause I do” didn’t cut it for me. I couldn’t come up with an answer (outside of lay-ups like ‘vacations’ etc). a few years later, I was watching a YouTube vid with Brian Sharples (then CEO of HomeAway; acq by VRBO). he apparently asked himself the same question, and discovered two attributes that struck a nerve with him. I heard them both & they instantly resonated:
Memories & Happiness
He enjoyed the close association with those two emotions, and felt his business contributed to each. Dude ranches do the same thing. 2x in my opinion. Offline, unplugged. Endless views. Quiet. Stars. Calm. Activities. Kids playing in the creek (or ‘crick’ as ranchers say). All meals provided. Bonfires. Sing-alongs. Skits. Adult-only weeks. Memories & happiness. When I began visiting, I could see these emotions on visitor’s faces. Different from a beach vacation. Different from Disney. Often, when I consider a new project, I try my best to determine if it generates any inkling of M&H. If not, I typically avoid. I like being associated with those emotions. I like contributing to them…
Just as someone else’s words resonated for him, now his words resonated for me. I love it. I think that’s also why I’m drawn to following his journey.
Because I want something similar too.
Not necessarily about “memories” and “happiness” per se, but in the meta mode of finding and knowing what are the emotions I like contributing to via my products. Maybe that’s the key to the long game. If you don’t enjoy the game in some deep, fundamental, visceral way, you won’t last very long in the game.
So what emotions do my products contribute to? What emotions and feeling do my products generate for my users/customers? Here’s my attempt:
Lists Kit: Freedom and calm.
What I love about turning my back to what’s new and shiny in the dev world, back to what’s basic and boring, is the calmness and tranquility from it. I’ll just do my thing, quietly, peacefully. No surprises nor gotchas. I don’t have to learn new things unless I choose to, instead of being forced down my throat by framework updates that’s reworked from ground-up. That’s freedom. Free from endless security updates, dependency hell. Free from merchants of complexity. Free from ‘busy’ work that doesn’t move the needle. I prefer to focus on growing my business, not on managing pointless complexity.Lifelog: Clarity and memories, gratitude and familial closeness.
Writing out my thoughts and feelings make me feel a sense of inner clarity. Rereading old posts brings nostalgia and an appreciation, a thankfulness for the past. Being able to journey alongside each other here through the written word makes me feel not alone, a sense of brotherhood/sisterhood closeness.Jason’s Plugins For Carrd: The “created my first website” or “earning my first dollar” feeling of excitement, novelty, inspiration, renewal.
For many people using Carrd, it’s probably the very first time they made a website, a digital product, or could be the first thing to help them earn their first dollar from the internet. That’s why I love helping nocode, non-technical folks get started. It’s like the first step towards a new career, a new side to themselves, a new self, or even a new life. And I love being associated and contributing to that. Because I myself is seeking those same feelings of transformation through indie hacking.Outsprint: Empathy, hope and optimism. Making a difference to our world. Outsprint works with government and non-profits only to create more social impact in their work. Empathy is a core tenet of human-centered design, so a lot of the work here is about making people feel a sense of connection and understanding to others. And for sure, you can’t try to change the world if you didn’t feel at least some hope and optimism that it can get better.
So… what are the emotions your business contribute to? Are these the emotions you want to be associated with?