The limits of vibes

Lucas Quagliata is a marketer who has spent time in the field in various industries for the last decade plus. He writes the State of Play newsletter.

Fake it til you make it. An old adage but honestly not bad advice. When you’re building a media business you need hype. 

To survive, though, you also need a strong business. You can launch without one and you have some runway before you need to be profitable, but you need to bring in revenue to justify your existence. This is true even when you have hype. Remember Quibi? CNN+? Venu? One could listen to the litany of excuses that Jeffery Katzenberg, David Zaslav or uh, (checks notes) David Zaslav could make about each of those endeavors, but the bottom line is they were not bringing in money. 

But vibes and numbers – hype and financial success – are far from mutually exclusive. In fact they can feed into each other quite well. Vibes often translate into numbers, and at the beginning stages of any new business, financial projections are rarely more concrete than the vibes behind them. It works the opposite way too, a project with no hype is much less likely to garner the support it needs to get off the ground, sound business plan or not. 

Think of this in your own work life. Who among us has not gone into a pitch with some numbers they copied from another pitch, slightly adjusted? Do we really think - at least in this respect - that entrepreneurs are any different than us? You do what you need to in order to gain support. 

How many agencies’ pitches say something like, “We probably can’t get Will Ferrell, but we’ll get someone like him.” Techniques that help get your clients excited about the campaign, more willing to put budget behind it and garner that sought after executive support. This generates less sought after but still important middle manager support. Before you know it, baby you got a stew going. 

Once you have some support and momentum, you start to see how you can actually hit some of your projections. Campaign extensions appear out of midair. Media dollars start to materialize. John C Reilly signs onto the campaign. This is the path for many an advertising campaign, but the idea can be applied well beyond this. 

Concrete financials have a role to play, but it doesn’t come at the start of an effort. Showing slide decks with test results, survey data, and details about the Total Addressable Market will do you well in front of economists and certain investors, but it’ll also put most people to sleep. 

Excitement and vibes generate willingness to participate. You have to start with a reference point and an exciting twist. Uber for Dogs. DoorDash for Suburban Moms who love cannabis! Morning Brew for Football Fans, and Pat McAfee is involved. Now I’m ready to learn about the financials. 

Of course you do need to make money eventually. The vibes will run out, usually faster than you anticipate. Vibes people are critical to getting a business the support it needs to launch, but the numbers people need to make it work quickly. If you think you can do both of these things, you’re probably wrong. Try to find a partner. Jobs had Wozniak. Zuck got Sandberg. Adam Neuman had…uh oh.

As with any rule, there are exceptions. Some of them major. WeWork built a huge business and sustained itself for a long time on good vibes and the promise of eventually turning the corner. They had such great vibes that they tried to apply them to the financials when they created “Community Adjusted EBITDA”. This worked until it didn’t. Adam Neuman had great vibes, he just flew too close to the sun. At least there was weed on the plane. Allegedly. 

Additionally, smaller companies or B2B sales organizations don’t need the vibes as much as they do the promise of financial return for their users and their investors. In these situations, you’re speaking to an audience that already understands your relevance or that can be excited about solutions to problems they already know about. Or your growth can be slow, steady, and under the radar. In this area, bootstrapping without much hype is just fine. As you go more general and expand your potential audience, you expand the opportunity for your idea to be prematurely panned out of existence. 

One of my favorite financial periodicals is Axios Closer, a newsletter sent at the close of the market each day with a summary of the market’s performance that always leads with the day’s biggest gainer and loser. This comes complete with an explanation as to why that stock rose or fell. So often, though, there doesn’t seem to be any discernible reason for the gain or loss, and the writers just type ¯\(ツ)/¯.

Numbers are critical, but even with established companies, vibes often reign supreme. Be wary of their power. Create and use them wisely. Just don’t push them too far.