In another Draper U session, the speaker asked a nastier question than “why would a customer buy?”
If the customer has the problem, has budget, and can see your value, why are they still not buying?
Founders tend to reach for familiar answers.
We have not explained it clearly enough.
The timing is off.
They are not the right target.
We need a few more features.
All of those can be true. They are also often too quick. Sometimes the real blocker is not weak value. It is that switching still feels painful.
That session called it friction.
The term I have ended up using more often is adoption cost.
Because a lot of products do not fail because they are worthless. They fail because the customer is being asked to swallow a whole second problem after saying yes.
Your real competitor is often the current state
This is something I used to misread.
In a founder’s head, the competitor is another startup.
In the customer’s head, it is often:
- the ugly system already in place
- the spreadsheet everyone knows how to use
- a manual workaround
- a helpful assistant doing it by hand
- or simply postponing the problem
In other words, you are not just competing against another roadmap.
You are competing against inertia plus familiarity.
That is why the complaint “our product is clearly better, so why will they not switch?” keeps resurfacing across every generation of SaaS companies.
Because the customer is not only comparing features.
They are comparing the pain of changing.
Switch value is a fuller equation than most founders want to run
The speaker in that session used a crude but useful formula:
Switch value = perceived value - price - adoption cost
It is not an accounting model. It is a reminder. Customers are not only asking what your product is worth and how much it costs. They are also asking what else they have to carry if they move.
- Is it worth it?
- What do I have to pay now?
- What inconvenience, risk or effort arrives after I say yes?
If the third bucket is too heavy, the first two can look excellent and the deal still dies.
That is one reason I now distrust pricing as the default explanation for stalled adoption. Quite a lot of dead deals are not price problems. They are adoption problems.
Adoption cost rarely looks dramatic. It accumulates.
This is part of what makes it easy to underestimate.
Adoption cost often shows up as a pile of small annoyances:
- learning a new interface
- migrating data
- rebuilding edge cases in an old workflow
- getting security or procurement comfortable
- persuading colleagues to change habits
- carrying the blame if the rollout goes badly
On their own, none of these always looks fatal. Together, they can be more than enough.
That is why customers often say something vague and polite rather than naming the real issue. “Interesting, but not for us right now.” “Maybe later.” “We are not ready.”
What they may mean is simply that the switch still feels too expensive in ways your pricing page does not capture.
Friction is not a UX nicety. It is often a business problem.
This is one of the more important corrections I have made in how I think about product growth.
Teams often treat friction like polish. Improve onboarding later. Trim the form later. Fix the purchase flow later. Clean up the migration experience once the product matures.
But if your path to adoption is fundamentally painful, this is not a finishing problem. It is a product and go-to-market problem.
Baymard’s long-running checkout research is useful here. The current global average cart abandonment rate they track is still around 70.19%. That does not mean all abandonment is UX-related, of course. Plenty of people are browsing. But Baymard repeatedly shows that checkout complexity itself destroys conversions that were already close to completion.
Nielsen Norman Group makes the same point more bluntly in its form research: forms are mental work. Every extra field, ambiguity or pause adds cognitive load.
That principle does not stop at e-commerce. In B2B it usually gets heavier, not lighter.
The most expensive friction is often political, not technical
Founders often imagine adoption cost as migration and integration. That is part of it. It is rarely all of it.
The bigger cost can be political:
- who inside the company is going to champion the switch
- who has to persuade everyone else
- who owns the risk if the rollout fails
- who is going to answer security, legal and procurement
- whether you are selling a tool or asking the company to change how it works
Those costs do not show up neatly in a product demo. They absolutely show up in the deal.
So when a customer refuses to switch, it does not automatically mean they missed your value. They may have seen a different bill you did not include.
This is also why I have become unusually sensitive to adoption cost. Not because I later read a few more studies, but because I ran into it directly while doing business development in hospitality. The problem we were trying to solve was real enough: OTA take rates were high, hotels did not truly own the guest relationship, and loyalty infrastructure was weak. The issue was never “is this a fake problem?” It was that recognising the problem did not mean operators would move. Once short-term value was not immediate enough, implementation required workflow change, and the perceived downside still sat with the buyer, a reasonable solution could easily die in adoption rather than in demand. I wrote that experience out in more detail in another piece, “Everyone knows the problem. Why are hotel operators still not moving?”. In hindsight, that piece is not really a side note to this one. It is one of the reasons I trust this argument at all.
Not all friction is bad friction
It is worth saying this clearly because “remove friction” can become childish very quickly.
Some friction is obviously wasteful: unnecessary fields, premature sign-up walls, vague next steps, duplicate inputs, internal mess exported straight into the customer journey.
That sort of friction should be removed.
Some friction is necessary: high-value purchases need diligence, enterprise buying is slow, permissions and compliance checks exist for reasons, and some setup steps genuinely require thought.
So the better question is not “how do we eliminate friction altogether?”
It is:
- which friction is unavoidable?
- which friction exists because we have been lazy?
- which friction is actually our internal complexity being pushed onto the customer?
The third category is usually the ugliest.
Early on, one of the smartest things you can do is absorb adoption cost yourself
This is one area where the Attio story is useful. In OpenView’s write-up, Attio’s early onboarding was effectively 100% white glove: configuration, migration, support, all heavily assisted by the team. They only gradually productised those steps later.
That is not glamorous. It is also not scalable in the neat sense.
But it is honest.
It accepts that adoption cost is real, and instead of pretending it is not there, it temporarily brings that burden back inside the company. If you do that long enough, you learn which parts should become product, which parts are category constraints, and which parts were self-inflicted.
That sequence is often saner than building more features and hoping adoption will eventually sort itself out.
The check I trust now is painfully unflashy
When a product is not moving, I no longer start by asking whether the value proposition is exciting enough.
I start here:
- What does the customer have to do in order to switch?
- Which step is most annoying?
- Which step is most error-prone?
- If something goes wrong, who gets hurt internally?
- Have we quietly outsourced our own complexity to the buyer?
If those questions have not been answered, teams often fall into a familiar loop:
sales stall
→ assume the product is not strong enough
→ add more features
→ make adoption harder
→ slow sales further
→ add more features again
And eventually bury themselves under their own helpfulness.
Markets do not reward “better” on principle
This is the correction I probably trust most from that session.
Founders often treat “our product is better” as a kind of moral advantage. As if the market ought to recognise quality sooner or later.
Reality is less sentimental.
Markets often reward not the better product in the abstract, but the better product that is easier to adopt.
That difference sounds small. It is not.
Customers are not there to validate your ambition.
They are running a risk calculation.
So if a deal keeps stalling, I would rather spend time mapping the adoption cost than repeating that the product is superior. You may not be able to remove all of it. But you do need to know where the pain actually lives.
Series | What Reality Corrected
Chinese series name | 被現實修正之後