I don’t think I can be more pithy than my headline currently is in summing up a deep philosophical question I’ve struggled with ever since starting Pocket Tales.

Is being logical, logical?

Without hesitation I answer this question “yes” and add that we should always strive to be logical, but that’s the easy part of the question and just the tip of the issue. Let me show you what I mean.

Read this Business Week article from 2001 (read that date again, that’s almost a decade ago): “Sorry Steve: Here’s Why Apple Stores Won’t Work?”

Then check out this post about Malcom Gladwell’s “Blink” vs. Michael M. Lewis’ “Moneyball.”

Finally, in “Mad Men” Season 4, Episode 4 the hypothesis of creative advertising genius Don Draper is being challenged by “facts” from a focus group. His response to the focus group is it has “nothing to do with what I do.”

What do all of these have in common? They demonstrate a titanic debate between two sides. One side says we must believe the facts. The other side says the facts as we know them right now don’t lead us to the truth.

In a startup, this is a core issue that will determine how you run your company. Will you only make decisions based on tangible data? How will you know when you have enough data to get an accurate picture? Conversely, will you favor your gut over the facts? How will you know when to trust your gut?

Every entrepreneur strives to be rational. No successful person believes the path to success is acting randomly, but sometimes what we know in our gut contradicts the facts. When we act on our gut, it looks random to others. It looks illogical, even though it’s not. This creates a problem when you have employees, advisors, and investors looking over your shoulder.

Like most things in life, there isn’t one right way. Your gut is as valuable a tool as Google Analytics, but you will second-guess your decisions, and others will second-guess them too. The goal is to know whether you’re following the reason of tangible facts, or the less tangible reason of your gut. This self awareness will help you make decisions more confidently and to sell your decisions to others.

Have you ever heard someone say that you should sell the benefits not the features?

I don’t get it - I mean, I GET it, but really I don’t get it.

I heard this a few times when I was at Cantaloupe.tv and I was responsible for a sales quota. I heard it from sales consultants who would come in to coach the team and I would also hear it from amateur sales consultants - in other words, a sales guy who has had some success selling but has never had to teach sales.

I know what they’re getting at. They’re trying to caution against going into a sales scenario and giving a presentation or having a conversation that’s just a feature dump. Usually, when you go into a meeting and do a feature dump, you end up with the potential client/customer/user thinking “So what?”

“Don’t tell me about features, tell me how this is going to benefit me.” That is the general idea.

That makes sense for extremely complicated products - like something IBM would sell - but it doesn’t doesn’t make sense for a lot of consumer internet companies.

The customers of CIC’s have the advantage of having probably tried a lot of your competitors’ products. They probably came looking for you, rather than the other way around, and because they’re so well informed about the market, they know how certain features will benefit them better than you do.

Thus, when they come to your website, they want to very quickly find out what features you have to see if you are finally the company that can solve their problem or if your feature set also has gaps.

What they don’t want to find on your website is some obscure language about “benefits.” 

I encountered this today when I went to Tungle.me. The first language I see on their homepage is: 

• Eliminate double-bookings, time zone mishaps and the back-and-forth of finding a time to meet
• Easily schedule meetings, inside or outside your organization
• Invite others to schedule with you, without having to sign up

The first two are benefits, and the last is a feature. This tells me little to about how the application actually works. If I go to their “learn more” page, it’s a lot more of the same thing.

Does anybody actually go to Tungle.me not expecting it to provide all these benefits? Does anybody actually get any value out of the text on their homepage? This sounds like the language you’d use if you were trying to get me to COME to your website. I’m already there so I must know how you might be able to benefit me. Now tell me more.

Compare this to Proposable. Sure, their homepage has “benefits” language - “Painless Proposals.” but what you can’t miss is the big “Features” tab at the top of the navigation, and even better than that, their “Pricing” page outlines the features and costs perfectly.

I still need to try it to know if it’s for me, but I feel a lot more confident investing my time into trying Proposable having at least reviewed the feature set at a glance, than investing my time into Tungle.me.

This presentation explains how to use Survey.io to measure product/market fit. You will get more out of it if you visit the source of this presentation at Venture Hacks and take a look at the sample survey. You should also consider reading the transcript or listening to the audio that goes along with this presentation.

Startup Usability Testing presentation from Cindy Alvarez. See a collection of usability resources from Carter Cleveland.

Lean Startup Usability Testing presentation from Meetup.com’s Andres Glusman. See a collection of usability resources from Carter Cleveland.

“Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR!” by Dave McClure

What is it: A very THOROUGH framework for marketing a consumer internet product
Who needs it: Founders of consumer internet products
When you’re going to need this: Writing your business plan and executing your marketing strategy (that means, you need this to plan, and you’re going to need to revisit it to execute)

Great advice for internet startups on how to use metrics to make REAL decisions.

You know that poem by Robert Frost? The one about the “road less travelled”? Do you know what it’s called?

It’s not called “the road less travelled”…and for good reason.

It seems like everyone loves that poem and it’s because everyone can relate to it. Everyone dreams of wanting to be a pioneer. Everyone wants to do something that’s never been done before. Everyone wants to be first and to blaze a new path.

The problem is everyone doesn’t read so carefully.

The poem alludes to “the road less travelled” but it’s actually called “The Road Not Taken” because that’s what it’s about. In one sentence - It’s about a person who reaches two roads and although he wishes he could take both, knows he can only take one. Here’s a startling fact for you - he doesn’t even choose the road less travelled.

Let’s take a look at the poem:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Like I said, a guy reached two roads and couldn’t travel both. Now check out these lines:

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