One of the early mistakes I made after starting Saywise was this:
I was too obsessed with making the world a better place.
As an exited founder, I didn’t have to start another company; if I started one, I wanted it to be deeply mission- and purpose-driven. Our mission was (and still is) ambitious: use the power of conversational AI to unlock human wisdom.
Instead of AI creating all the content for humans, what if AI helped humans create content themselves? By prompting, interviewing, and drawing out original insights that would otherwise stay trapped in people’s heads. If we could unlock even 0.01% of net new human wisdom, what an incredible contribution to human society that would be.
When I shared this vision, people told me it was so great.
So we built our first alpha version product, reflecting that vision: an audio-based Q&A app (“Airchat meets Quora”). We never officially launched it; we just shared the early version with a closed group of friends and supporters – the same people who were deeply resonating with our mission.
Result? No one really used it 😅
Why? Because it didn’t solve their immediate problem. There was no clear “what’s in it for me” – a direct user incentive. The main benefit to users was just a good feeling of helping others and paying it forward, which was nice but not a strong enough incentive.
People weren’t looking for a product that made the world better someday. They wanted something that helped them today: getting more followers and more leads. Fame or money. Get laid or get paid.
That’s when I listened to a podcast with Ivan Zhao, where he talked about a concept of wrapping your broccoli with bacon.
- Broccoli = your world-changing mission
- Bacon = what users are immediately drawn to and can solve their hair-on-fire problem right now
Your job as a founder is to wrap the broccoli with bacon.
You need both. You need broccoli because you need true North and the feeling of making the world a better place. But you also need bacon, to solve a real, urgent problem for the user.
You earn the right to change the world only after solving user’s hair on fire problem first.
So what’s your bacon and broccoli? It’s something worth thinking about for founders.