Inside the Office
Classes at Duke start soon. And before they do, campus is going to fill with freshmen showing up for “orientation week".”
I&E loves orientation week. Yes, part of that is because we enjoy welcoming all the new students to campus. But there’s also a more entrepreneurial reason we put lots of energy into being visible during those first few days.
Freshman orientation represents what I like to call a “golden moment.” As the name implies, these are the moments where entrepreneurs are best able to generate the gold, and they occur whenever someone is actively looking to change an existing behavior. This bias toward change helps entrepreneurs overcome one the hardest parts of acquiring customers, which is convincing them to stop doing whatever they’re already doing.
For example, you can build the greatest car in the world, but if I bought a new car six months ago, good luck selling me another one. Your product quality isn’t the problem. Your timing is.
Or consider a significantly cheaper product than a car. Imagine opening the greatest pizza restaurant anyone has ever experienced. If you open it in a town where everyone has been happily ordering Friday-night pizza from the same beloved neighborhood place for 30 years, you’re going to struggle getting customers. And it’s because those customers already have a solution they like. Before you can sell them your pizza, you first have to convince them to change a habit. And convincing people to change their habits is usually expensive.
But that’s not the case during golden moments. Golden moments remove an enormous part of the friction in customer acquisition because the customer has already decided something needs to change.
By the way, this dynamic is a huge part of what made Google such a valuable advertising platform back in the heyday of Internet search. Someone searching “best pizza in Durham” is basically announcing, “Hello! I’m currently trying to figure out where to get pizza.”
That person is in a golden moment, and smart pizza restaurants will pay good money for access.
Freshmen arriving at Duke are in the same part of their “customer journey” as it relates to the kinds of things they’ll be doing once on campus. They’re coming from all over the world. They don’t know where they’ll eat lunch, which clubs they’ll join, where they’ll exercise, what classes they’ll take, or how they’ll spend most of their time for the next four years. Their old routines have disappeared, and they’re actively constructing new ones.
That’s exactly when Duke I&E wants to meet them.
In contrast, if we wait until junior year to tell a student about our entrepreneurship classes and programs, that student might already have two majors, extracurricular commitments, research projects, leadership roles, and an entire social ecosystem consuming their schedule. At that point, we’re asking them to replace something in order to take our classes, which is a difficult sale.
But during orientation… that’s when we’re helping them fill empty space. It’s why we work hard to show up early and be visible. We want entrepreneurship to be one of the options they consider while they’re in the process of making decisions about how they’ll be spending time on campus.
And I’m sharing this little piece of operational insight with all of you because you should be thinking the same way for your business. Whatever you’re selling, stop thinking only about who your customers are. Start asking when they’re most likely to become customers. What happens in someone’s life immediately before they need what you sell? What event disrupts the existing behavior? What makes someone suddenly reconsider the solution they’ve been perfectly happy using for years?
Find those moments because they’re golden. They’re the moments that will dramatically decrease the cost and challenge of acquiring customers.
-Aaron
Worth Your Time
I really liked Ben Lang’s system for getting a job at a startup he shared this week, especially his advice to start adding value before you’re actually employed.
It brought me back to my own startup experience. Not a single startup role I’ve ever had was posted on a job board. The opportunities came from thinking about what the founders were probably dealing with, developing a point of view on how I could help, and then getting in the door to show them (showing up with a “first 90 days” deck before anyone ever asked).
That feels like good career advice, but also a pretty fundamental and transferable entrepreneurial lesson: don’t wait for someone to give you a job description. That may never happen. Find a problem worth solving and show that you can solve it.
Great article! It's a good reminder of how important timing is in sales and networking.