Why do we buy stuff

When I was building buildathesis.com, I realised that building was the easy part. Selling is the hard part. In order to figure out how to sell, I attempted to reverse-engineer why we pay for something in the first place.

We buy stuff because the perceived value of the item or service is greater than its monetary cost.

Gullible, hopeful folks pay scammers for their courses because they believe that they’ll gain a skill that’ll earn them riches far beyond the amount “invested” in the course.

Hopeful startup founders pay Marc Lou for his SaaS template and his data analytics tool, because he sells them a dream of what they could earn if their startup turned out well.

Students whose whole lives and self-esteem depend primarily on getting good grades might pay up for shortcuts, such as services promising to help them understand concepts faster and more clearly (e.g., LearnKata), or expensive tuition that buys them attention and guidance from a better teacher.

Consultants who mostly have not built anything successful themselves are approached by distressed company executives and paid an exorbitant amount, in hopes that their self-proclaimed intellect can come up with fun theories that can save the company.

Rich housewives spend a working-class person’s annual income on Hermes bags, thinking that the satisfaction from their peers’ flattery, praise, or recognition is worth more than the cost of the bag itself (except for the rare few who are truly in it to trade these bags).

In almost all cases, the hope that an item or service might be worth more to us in terms of something that we hold in high regard than the cost paid to acquire it justifies a purchase decision, regardless of the eventual effectiveness of the item or service.

In almost all cases, selling a dream is the end goal. The only difference is in the way the lie is spun.

But that’s not to say that every monetary transaction and subsequent trade of goods is a scam. Most of the time, the perceived value is indeed the realised value, which justifies the money spent.

The key takeaway is that to sell a product, you must understand your client well, understand what dream they want to realise, and phrase your pitch in a way that appeals to their dream without mentioning it. Mentioning it makes you too obvious and they’ll see through you right away. If your product is A and the dream is C, find a selling pitch B that automatically implies C, and show how A leads to B.

Disclaimer: The ideas presented in this post are solely my personal perspective and have not been substantiated by any verifiable evidence. Please form your own opinions on such matters.