I help a small gallery with its website. They wanted one picture: a particular carved altar table, three drawers, worn lacquer, standing in a beautiful room.
A picture of the room was easy. The table was the problem.
Every version got something wrong. The colour went orange. The drawers multiplied from three to six. A handle grew a latch it doesn’t have. Each fix to one thing quietly broke another, because every edit redrew the whole image.
Three hours in, I had a dozen lovely rooms and no true table.
What finally got the table right took minutes. I asked the machine for the room with nothing in it. Then I cut the gallery’s own photograph of the table out of its white background and stood it on the floor.
The room is invented. The table is real. A buyer who drives out to see it will find the same table they saw on the screen.
Where founders do the same thing
I see the same pull in early ventures. You have something real – a first customer’s words, a rough prototype, an actual price someone paid – and instead of showing it, you describe a more impressive version of it.
The described version is always tidier. It’s also a claim, and a claim has to be believed. The real thing only has to be looked at.
The test
Before you make a mock-up or a demo, ask one question: does the real thing already exist?
If it does, put the real thing in front of people, however rough, and spend your effort on the setting around it.
The imagined version is for what you haven’t built yet. Don’t spend three hours inventing what you could have shown in three minutes.
Want more like this? Rick writes about the go/no-go decision, founder counterintuitions, and the business of building ventures worth building.
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