Selling to small businesses means selling to someone who's tired

Software companies love to talk about their "user".

My user is tired.

Not lazy. Not unsophisticated. Tired. The person who runs a rural guesthouse, a bar or a grassroots club has usually been on their feet since early morning, has a dozen things pending and has just remembered that one of them is the website.

That's who reads my emails. That's who opens our tools.

It changes everything.

The product demo fantasy

When you build software, you picture the user sitting calmly at a desk. Coffee in hand. Curious. Ready to explore every menu you designed with so much love.

That person doesn't exist in small businesses.

The real one opens your tool between two other things. On a phone, probably. With half their attention. If they don't find what they need in a few seconds, they close it and go back to the spreadsheet, the notebook or the WhatsApp group that has always worked well enough.

You're not competing with other software. You're competing with "I'll do it later".

And "later" almost always wins.

When you sell to a small business, your real competitor isn't another product. It's the owner's tiredness.

What that means for selling

I've learned to distrust any sales conversation that needs a lot of explaining.

If I need twenty minutes to explain why something is useful, it isn't useful enough. Or I haven't understood the problem. A tired person won't give you twenty minutes. They'll give you one sentence, and they'll decide in that sentence.

So the sentence has to be about their problem, not about our features. Not "an integrated management platform". Something closer to "you'll get your evenings back". The first one sounds impressive. The second one sounds like a rest.

And the price has to be simple. Tired people don't compare plans. They want to know how much and whether there's a catch.

What that means for building

This is where it really bites.

Every option you add is a decision you're asking a tired person to make. Every setting is homework. Every "you can customise this" is, for them, "you have to configure this".

So the best products for small businesses are, I think, a bit boring. They do fewer things. They make the obvious choice for you. They work the same way every time, so nobody has to remember how they work.

That's harder to build than it looks. Adding features is easy. Taking decisions away from the user means you have to make them yourself, and get them right.

It's also, I suspect, the only way a small company like ours can compete. We'll never have the biggest feature list. We can have the shortest path from "I'm exhausted" to "done".

So when someone asks me who our product is for, I don't describe a market.

I describe someone at the end of a long day, opening their phone, hoping this one thing won't take long.

If it doesn't, we've done our job.

P.S. If you're reading this at the end of a long day: yes, I mean you. Thanks for giving me more than one sentence.