The Real Product

In 1891, a soap salesman in Chicago found out his customers didn't want his soap. They wanted the free gift he'd been attaching to it.

William Wrigley Jr. had been attaching free gifts to that soap for years. He once bought 65,000 cheap red umbrellas to give away with it. The red dye came off them in the rain, but they sold soap anyway, so he kept going: cookbooks, fishing tackle, lamps, razors, cash registers. Whatever he could attach to a sale, he tried attaching it.

Then he added baking powder. He was selling to shopkeepers, one order at a time, and before long they were ordering the soap to get the baking powder.

So he shut down the soap business. By 1892, he was selling baking powder, with two free packs of chewing gum thrown in on top.

You can guess how this goes. The shopkeepers did the same thing with the gum, so he shut the baking powder down too and built a chewing gum company instead.

I like to think about how the first one must have felt. You spend years learning to sell something, you get good at it, you build a business on it, and then you look at what's actually selling and it's the free thing in the box.

The easy version of this is a story about listening to customers, and I don't think that's what happened. Nobody wrote to Wrigley asking him for a gum company. His revenue kept insisting the answer was soap. What people take for free measures demand better than what they'll pay for, because it strips out everything a customer tolerates to get the one thing they actually came for.

Most founders I know are good at noticing this stuff. The rarer thing is acting on it while the old business is still paying everybody's salary.

What are your customers already taking for free that you haven't admitted is the product?