From Doors to Distribution.
A short, slightly damp memoir about knocking, being knocked back, and the quiet usefulness of having had a door shut in one's face.
The first door I knocked on, in the spring of my nineteenth year, was a green door, and behind it was a woman called Mrs Henley, who answered with a tea-towel in one hand and a small, faintly suspicious dog in the other. I had rehearsed my opening sentence in the car. The opening sentence vanished, on Mrs Henley's threshold, in the manner of all rehearsed sentences. What came out of my mouth instead was the word hello, and then, after a long and increasingly unbearable pause, the word knives.
Mrs Henley closed the door. Not unkindly. Simply, and with a small economical click that I have, in the seven years since, heard a great many times.
I sat in the car for what was probably eleven minutes, although it felt, at the time, like the better part of a Saturday, and I tried very hard not to cry. I was not, as it turned out, going to cry. What I was going to do was something subtler, and rather more useful: I was going to recalibrate, by extremely small increments, the precise way in which I would, on the next door, say the word hello.
The first revision.
The next door was answered by a man in a cardigan. I said: Good afternoon — I'm sorry to interrupt your Saturday. The man in the cardigan, who had been on the verge of closing the door before I had finished speaking, paused. He did not buy a knife. He did, however, give me four further sentences, which was three more than Mrs Henley had been moved to give, and at the end of those four sentences he said something I have not, in seven years, forgotten. He said: You're new at this, aren't you.
I said yes.
He said: Don't open with the product, son. Open with the apology.
I have, since that afternoon, knocked on perhaps eight hundred doors. I have also, in a different and rather warmer room, written perhaps four thousand cold e-mails. The lesson the man in the cardigan gave me, on his front step, in a voice that suggested he had once, in his own youth, sold something he was no longer proud of, has not, in any of those eight hundred or four thousand exchanges, ceased to be true.
What rejection actually feels like.
People who have not been rejected at scale tend to imagine, when they think about it at all, that rejection feels like one large, dramatic blow. A door slammed. An e-mail returned. A no, capitalised. This is not, in my experience, what it feels like. What it feels like, on the eighty-third door of a cold, slightly drizzly Tuesday, is a kind of low, unglamorous tiredness in the small of one's back. The dramatic part — the slammed door, the curt e-mail — happens, in fact, only on the first day. By the eighth day it has been replaced, mercifully, by something nearer indifference.
The indifference is the gift. The indifference is what permits the eighty-fourth knock.
I have noticed, in software, that founders who have not had this particular tiredness in their backs tend to send precisely one cold e-mail before concluding, on insufficient evidence, that cold e-mail does not work. They are, of course, mistaken. Cold e-mail works perfectly well. They simply have not yet been bored by it, which is the precondition of doing it well.
The bridge.
I have been asked, occasionally, what door-knocking has to do with software. The honest answer is: rather more than I would like. The shape of the work — the writing of the opening sentence, the patient absorption of the first eleven nos, the slow, faintly statistical realisation that the eighty-fourth knock is not, after all, qualitatively different from the first — is the shape of all distribution. The medium changes. The tiredness in the small of the back is, I am sorry to report, identical.
When I sit down, now, to write a cold e-mail, I think about Mrs Henley. I think about the dog. I think about the eleven minutes in the car. I do not, particularly, want to be back on her front step. But I am grateful, in the slightly grudging way one is grateful for a school one did not enjoy, that I was on it at all.
The man in the cardigan was right. One does not, on the whole, open with the product.
— B.