An analogy for keeping your eye on the ball
Your Product
Is Medicine.
Keep your attention on the condition of the person who uses it.
What is life like for the person
after your product enters it?
To my students: think of your product as medicine.
The advertisement gets someone’s attention. The name helps them remember. The packaging helps them recognize, understand, and use what you offer. Your go-to-market strategy helps you reach the people you can serve. A beautifully produced social media video can make the promise vivid.
Your core is the product’s impact on the person who takes it into their life.
How do they feel afterward? What can they do now? What burden has lifted? What new burden have you introduced? When the excitement of the purchase has passed, is their situation meaningfully better?
A medicine analogy brings these questions into focus. You can admire the bottle for an afternoon. The person taking what is inside still needs it to work.
01 / The condition afterward
Improve their homeostasis.
Homeostasis has a specific biological meaning. The National Cancer Institute describes it as the balance that allows the body’s systems to function, maintained through continual adjustments as conditions change.
For this advisory, I am borrowing the idea to describe the workable balance of a customer’s life: their time, attention, confidence, resources, and ability to handle what the day asks of them. That is an entrepreneurial analogy, not a clinical measurement.
Imagine a product that saves ten minutes but creates an hour of checking. Or one that makes a manager’s dashboard look excellent while employees spend their evenings repairing its errors. A local improvement can leave the people in the system worse off.
Look at the whole condition. Does the customer spend less energy holding things together? Can they recover from an interruption? Do they understand what is happening? Do they have more room to act?
The product should resolve the customer’s named problem, or significantly improve their ability to live and function with it. When you can remove the cause, aim there. When continuing support is what helps, make that support dependable and worth the burden it brings. Do not call temporary symptom relief a cure.
02 / Discovery before promotion
R&D is how you find
the thing that works.
You cannot stop at making something you consider a great product. Great according to whom, for which condition, and with what evidence?
The FDA’s account of drug discovery and development describes research into how a candidate works, its potential benefits, dosage, delivery, adverse effects, interactions, and effectiveness compared with alternatives. The useful lesson for entrepreneurs is a discipline of inquiry: understand the problem and investigate whether your intervention changes it.
Your R&D might involve observation, interviews, technical experiments, service rehearsals, or testing an existing tool in a carefully chosen workflow. You do not need to invent a new molecule to adopt the discipline. You do need to learn something that makes your solution more likely to work.
NSF’s I-Corps program uses customer discovery to help researchers assess the market potential of inventions. Take the underlying practice seriously: get close enough to customers to encounter evidence that can change your mind.
Ask what happens today, how often it happens, what they already try, and why that attempt falls short. Then test your explanation of the cause. A request for another reminder might reveal a missing handoff. Adding notifications could make the symptom louder.
Interviews help you discover. Actual use helps you learn whether the proposed remedy works. Define the outcome and a reasonable baseline before the test. Compare with the current approach where practical, record failures, and be honest about what a small pilot can establish.
03 / Five questions for your product
Examine the effect.
Relief
Which problem gets smaller or disappears? Measure the customer’s result: an accurate handoff, a completed task, a recovered evening. Pair what they report feeling with what actually changed.
Immediacy
How long from starting to meaningful benefit? Count setup, learning, migration, and waiting. Deliver the earliest honest relief you can, and explain when a deeper result should become visible.
Side effects
What else changes? Look for extra checking, new errors, interruptions, loss of control, and work shifted onto someone else. Ask which benefit remains after those costs.
Fit
For whom does it work, under which conditions? Study the customer’s skills, tools, habits, and constraints. State the limits of your promise as precisely as its benefit.
Durability
What happens after the first successful demonstration? Check ordinary use, busy days, exceptions, and recovery from failure. Learn whether the customer’s improved balance lasts.
Follow the customer past the purchase.
Suppose you are helping independent repair shops track special-order parts. Move through the three moments to see how the question changes.
04 / A precise first promise
Your first “cure” may serve a very small group.
Your first useful product may well resemble a niche treatment for a rare condition. That is OK.
In our example, your starting point might be independent repair shops with several technicians, frequent special orders, and no dedicated parts coordinator. That is a much narrower promise than “software for every small business.” It gives you a specific recurring problem to understand and a specific group whose outcomes you can observe.
Within the analogy, the “rare disease” is the particular problem in that particular setting. You are seeking precision about where you can help.
A small first audience can make learning manageable. It does not guarantee a viable business. You still need to learn whether the problem matters enough, whether you can reach the people who have it, and whether dependable delivery can sustain the business.
Earn the first narrow promise. Broaden it when evidence shows that the same mechanism helps another group, or when new research tells you what must change. The size of your ambition does not require vagueness in your first offer.
05 / What you are really building
A value chain from
discovery to delivery.
Your first product is one expression of a deeper capability: repeatedly turning an understood problem into a dependable improvement for someone.
- Discover
Find the people, condition, and existing workaround.
- Investigate
Research the cause and a mechanism that might help.
- Validate
Test the outcome, limits, and unwanted effects.
- Produce
Make the product or service dependable enough to repeat.
- Deliver
Reach the right person and help them realize the benefit.
- Follow up
Observe ordinary use and return what you learn to discovery.
A remedy that never reaches the person cannot help them. This is where naming, packaging, distribution, onboarding, and support earn their place. Packaging can make use clearer. An honest advertisement can help the right person recognize the fit. Your go-to-market strategy can create access to the improvement.
Each link should serve the effect you are trying to produce. A beautiful campaign cannot repair a broken mechanism. A working prototype cannot compensate for delivery that fails whenever the founder steps away.
The FDA’s drug-development overview includes monitoring after products reach the market. Carry that habit of continued learning into your own work: release begins another encounter with reality. Support requests, exceptions, abandonment, and customer adaptations can reveal what the demonstration missed.
For your next work session
Write the outcome before you polish the pitch.
Complete this statement in language a customer would recognize:
For these people, facing this problem, our product produces this improvement within this time, with these burdens and limits.
Then name the evidence you already have, the assumption most likely to be wrong, and the next small test that could change your mind. Follow one customer’s experience from discovery through use and follow-up. Mark every handoff that can prevent the benefit from arriving.
Use the result to decide where your next hour belongs. It may belong in the product, in research, in onboarding, or in delivery. Let the customer’s condition make that decision.
Research behind the analogy
The medical concepts come from the sources below. The entrepreneurial framework and hypothetical example are the author’s application of those concepts.
- National Cancer Institute: Definition of homeostasis — the biological meaning of an actively maintained functional balance.
- FDA: Step 1: Discovery and Development — investigating mechanism, benefit, delivery, adverse effects, interactions, and comparison.
- FDA: The Drug Development Process — a progression that includes monitoring after release.
- NSF: About I-Corps — customer discovery as part of moving inventions toward real-world use.
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