“What Would Don Draper Say?”
As many of you know, I’m obsessed with Mad Men. I think everyone I meet loves the show, and I’m late to the game. That said, over the past few months, a surprising number of early-stage founders on the verge of that elusive “product/market fit” have approached me to start to brainstorm about how they should be communicating about their product to different audience segments. Rather than offering my own opinion, which will inevitably be tinged with my own biases, I try to change the conversation slightly by asking “What would Don Draper say about your product or service?” There’s usually a pause after that. The root of what I’m trying to get at is simple, but the question prompt to get there is entirely different. What would Draper, a man who has a job of boiling down communication to its essentials, say about your creation in order to get others to stop what they’re doing and try it?
