Attention Is All You Need, But Not The Tech Kind
Cutting through a noisy world
Happy Sunday and welcome to Investing In AI. I’m Rob May, and I run the AI Innovator’s Community in New York and Boston. Sign up if you want to attend our various events.
The modern AI wave was set off by a paper titled “Attention Is All You Need.” It’s a famous paper in AI technology circles but today I want to approach that same statement from a customer perspective.
The last 15 years of online marketing have exploited new ways to reach customers. First it was just being online with a website, then it was online ads, then search ads and SEO, then social media, and eventually mobile app stores. New waves of startups were able to challenge incumbents using these new channels that the incumbents didn’t understand. However, I think those days are mostly over. (One exception - agents could be a new channel but I think incumbents will dominate them)
One of the challenges with such a noisy world is that you need more than just an ability to “solve a customer problem” or “offer a benefit, not a feature” or “tap into a customer’s job to be done" and all the other startup aphorisms that are supposed to get you to the growth stage promised land.
Let me explain why with an analogy. Let’s say I’ve eaten 3,000 calories already today in good, but not great meals. And then I have a chance to get a 50% off deal at the nicest restaurant in NYC. I may not go. Why? Because I’m already satiated. The marketing team for the restaurant will have a difficult time understanding why I turned them down. I have to eat, right? And they are the best, right? And they are offering a once-in-a -lifetime deal, right? What idiot wouldn’t take that?
The thing that is missing from the equation of all these startup is that concept of satiation. When you translate that into selling software, satiation equates to attention. To sell software, attention is all you need, but it’s the hardest thing to get.
I get email offers EVERY DAY in my inbox for things that I should want. People offer to lower my insurance costs, my financing costs, my HR costs, my marketing costs, and my development costs. People offer me the chance to generate more leads, which I would like to do, and they offer it as a free trial. I turn down all of them. Why? Because even though I have a problem that you are offering to solve, and your product or service has product market fit, and you are taking all the risk out of it for me to try it out, I still DON’T HAVE TIME. I need at least 15 minutes to understand it and think through it. It probably takes a little time to setup. I have to explain to my team why we are adopting this, and I don’t have time for that.
What is getting ignored in this current startup world is that we have so much !@#@% jammed into our limited attention spans because of a million notifications a day and a follow-up NPS survey for every single restaurant/software/service/product/travel experience and a million other things occupying our attention, there is no room left even for good stuff.
So the problem for startup founders is, you can have product-market fit, you can execute flawlessly, you can take the risk out of the buying process, you can offer a deal, and you still may fail because we live in a world where you are just… crowded out. You did everything right. You did everything your VCs said, but I just don’t have the mental bandwidth to pay attention to you.
And that’s just for low friction products. A lot of AI products are higher friction, so the situation is even worse.
Which brings me back to my original point - attention is all you need. The companies that win now are the ones that can find ways to get attention. I’d even go so far as to say attention-market fit may soon become more important than product-market fit. Building the 4th best product in the category but being able to get attention to it might be a better path to success than building the best product in the category and struggling to get attention. A decade ago I would have told you that those things, product quality and attention, were correlated but today I don’t think they are. (side note as an example, I’m 0 for 7 on apparel bought from instagram ads… it all sucked. I bought “the world’s most comfortable shoe” from instagram and it’s horrible.)
The problem for startups is… you know who has a lot of attention already? Incumbents. Building attention before you launch a product may become more important than building a product before you get attention, because for startups, attention is all you need.
Thanks for reading.