More on Moore’s Law

A couple of months ago, I set my mind on getting lean, or dare I say athletic.

I tried calorie counting, but after 2 months I didn’t really see any improvement (I didn’t measure though, so perhaps it was so gradual that I didn’t notice). Now I have a personal coach at the local gym to try something different. I found his advice to be insightful:

• Decrease calorie density – vegetables are great for this. Be careful not to let yourself be hungry though.
• Stop salting foods – salt makes the body greedy and tricks it into eating more of the salted food.
• Don’t vary foods – not sure how reliable this is, but the hypothesis is that less variety leads to less consumption.
• Eat raw – the pot is a second stomach, by eating raw you spend more energy digesting and take longer to grow hunger again.
• Mind food sequence – components of a meal should be a sorted list, sorted by increasing calorie density.

If the product you sell is based on saving the customer money, then the amount you can charge is capped at the savings you pass on. And in reality, you can only gain a tenth of that, to make it worthwhile for the customer to engage with you.

If it is based on headaches you relieve, or opportunities you make possible, then there’s almost no limit to what you can charge.

For my company Scalr, this means that we talk about the performance degradation from having higher traffic than capacity, and the resulting loss in user experience, rather than the cost savings from always having the right capacity for the traffic.

You realize that he’s a partner at Sequoia Capital, the world’s most renowned Venture Capital firm. You have less than 30 seconds in the elevator to pitch your company to him, and get enough interest to schedule a meeting.

Take too long, lack coherence, get lost in details, and the opportunity is gone: you missed your chance. Worse, you might make a bad impression, setting you back!

SCIPA is a framework I learned from a friend, a framework for engaging then persuading prospects, minus all verbosity. With it, you can boil your pitch down to under 30 seconds, keep your prospect’s attention, and persuade him.

How does SCIPA work? SCIPA is short for Situation, Complication, Implication, Position, the Asks. Each letter takes the prospect and you closer to your goal, with a funnel approach.

You start out by describing the context, or Situation. This is a general, obvious statement like “this table cloth is nice”. You then refine the situation with a Complication: “this table cloth gets used a lot, and is frequently spilled over”. See what we’ve done here? We’ve introduced the matter, and presented a problem with it. Then, you show that the problem is an important one, and detail the Implications of it: “it takes a lot of time and money to clean the cloth after every meal, and if you don’t do a good job at it, clients won’t come back!” (adapting the implication to the audience can help). Then, and only then, do you Position your product or service, by describing both What and Why: “We make tablecloth specially designed to be impervious to stains and food odors (=What), so you eliminate the risk of bringing non-immaculate tablecloth to your customers (=Why)”. You then end with the Asks, in which you bring up what you want from the conversation: “We have reached product/market fit, and are seeking growth capital to accelerate market dominance.”

Oh, and by the way, did you see what I did here? I used SCIPA for the blog post

Here’s the one I made for Scalr:

Situation: A website requires a web server, right?

Complication: But as traffic grows, it will overload that single server; you’ll need several, and network, configure, and manage them all.

Implication*: If you don’t do this right, your site will be down, slow, and you’ll lose potential customers because of poor user experience.

Position: We write software that scales your app (=What), so you don’t have to go through trial and error learning to do yourself, or spend the money hiring scaling experts (=Why).

The Ask: If you know someone who faces or might face fast growth, let me know and we’ll help him out.

*Implication should be tailored to the listener’s sensibilities.