Drawing someone in vs getting them to stay

When you walk by J.Crew, you’ll see a rainbow assortment of colorful t-shirts on the front table.

There's bright coral, lemon yellow, vibrant blue. You decide to go in and take a look.

But most of the time, you'll walk out with a shirt that's grey, white, black, navy.

The folks at corporate HQ know this. As an analyst at Gap Inc, it used to be my job to make sure that inventory levels reflected what customers actually bought, not what they thought they wanted to buy.

I think this is a great analogy that applies to marketing, especially for complex and technical startups.

When you talk about your startup, you may feel the urge to give a detailed, technical, comprehensive description of your product right off the bat.

After all, you're probably doing something different or solving a complicated problem that takes more than one sentence to describe. For example, your product might do ten different things. The competition can only do two of those things. When you have to be concise, it almost feels unfair to not talk about the dozens of ways you’re different and better. It seems like a shame to have to hold back.

But sometimes trying to cram too much into a tagline, description, or in-person pitch completely backfires.

If you try to communicate too much too soon, you lose the person's interest. It's too complicated, and requires too much thinking to understand. It's not interesting enough at the moment for the person to want to know more about you or your product. Then they decide to stop listening because you're bringing difficulty into their lives.

Use this two-step approach:

Step 1: Attract enough interest for people to want to know more.

Step 2: Once they’re at least a little interested, then you can gradually share more details.

You might have an ideal solution to a problem. But if you scare people away before you have a chance to tell them about it, then the solution is null.

Give yourself a shot at winning over your customers. Once you have a bit more buy-in, you can unveil more features and dive deeper into what you do.

It's like welcoming a potential customer into the store knowing they're drawn to the neon coral…

Then once they're in the store, you can take your time to show your full suite of products and help them find what they need.