Spend More Time Explaining How to Use Software

I’m not sure how he does it but Seth Godin keeps up this constant stream of innovative ideas and challenging questions.

We won’t the only people who learn something every week, if not every day, reading his articles. This is what we learned from the article shown below.

Instead of ramping up the “aspiration” side of our promotion we need to address the fear of appearing foolish. There’s obviously value in introducing new thinking, but if that in turn requires independent thought, it runs the risk of scaring users off. We need to spend more time on explaining as well as exciting.

At the farmer’s market the other day, not one but three people (perfect strangers) asked me what sort of apple to buy. What do I look like, some sort of apple expert? Apparently.

In our industrialized world, people are now afraid of apples. Afraid of buying the wrong kind. Afraid of making a purchasing mistake or some sort of pie mistake.

And they’re afraid of your product and your service. Whatever you sell, there are two big reasons people aren’t buying it:

1. They don’t know about it.

2. They’re afraid of it.

If you can get over those two, then you get the chance to prove that they need it and it’s a good value. But as long as people are afraid of what you sell, you’re stuck.

People are afraid of tax accountants, iPods, chiropractors, non-profits, insurance brokers and fancy hotels. They’re afraid of anything with too many choices, too many opportunities to look foolish or to waste time or money.

Hey, they’re even afraid of apples.