Belief builds products, and objectivity gets them bought.

I recently worked with an inventor developing really cool new product.

Let’s call it a compact water filtration system, to protect the guilty.

Who in this case is a really nice guy.

Smart.

Capable.

Utterly convinced the market was gi-normous.

His math was ambitious.

Three billion possible buyers worldwide.

Everyone and their dog drinks water.

Everyone needs cleaner water.

Therefore, EVERYONE with a wall plug-in might become a customer.

Then came the value explanations.

Gallons filtered over a lifetime.

Bottles avoided.

Long chains of logic meant to prove inevitability of mass adoption.

Each pass added intelligence … and also added distance from how buyers really do decide.

This is where I often start to feel like the villain.

My job is to anticipate resistance.

To imagine the buyer’s doubt, laziness, distraction, deep skepticism.

The miserly cheapskate in all of us.

And our ridiculously hard-to-shake commitment to the established way of doing things.

(Are you looking to invest in a new water filtration system?)

Of course, that tends to sound a lot like negativity when you are the one dreaming day and night about pure, massive potential.

It is a natural tension. But it’s tension.

Inventors think in total addressable possibility.

Buyers think in personal inconvenience, cost, trust and timing. And back to cost.

If you fail to plan for that gap, belief collapses the moment the product meets the market.

Objectivity is not pessimism. It is respect for how decisions really get made.

I HATE being right when it means watching disappointment land later.

The goal is never to puncture enthusiasm. It is to remove friction before it becomes rejection, and to turn resistance into momentum.

Great products need conviction. They also need someone willing to sanity-check and say, “THIS is where the buyer will hesitate.”

Even if it gets me thrown out of the room.

Want to make your product irresistible? That’s what we do as product marketing consultants at Graphos Product, helping innovators turn need-driven ideas into market-ready successes.