264: Signaling Quality

Today I want to talk about something that showed up in three different coaching sessions this past week:

The importance of signaling quality.

Before you can make an impact with your skills, products, or services, you must first convince people that you are worth taking a chance on.

Searching for and evaluating the actual quality of something—whether a doctor, a date, a piece of software, or a home—requires time, effort, and often money. And there's no guarantee you end up with something better.

So people often rely on simple signals of quality—the appearance or first impression matters a lot. For instance:

• Doctors wearing formal attire and a white coat were rated by patients as more knowledgable, trustworthy, and caring than those wearing casual attire [link].
• In one recent study, both men and women were 10x more likely to match with potential for a date who had been given a bump in photo attractiveness versus similar bumps to intelligence, height, or job status [link].
• In real estate, studies have found that how good a house looks from the street accounts for 7% of a home's sale price, while a different study found improved landscaping can boost sale prices by 12% [link].

Here's the point → substance matters most in the long run, but presentation determines whether you get the chance to prove it.

1. Don't Understate Your Strengths

After doing a Genius Mining exercise with a client, a serial founder, I asked why he hadn't listed "persuasion / fundraising"—something I think he's quite good at—as one of his strengths. He argued that he wasn't as good as someone like Adam Neumann, who raised hundreds of millions for new ventures despite his previous company imploding in valuation by 99%.

I countered by highlighting that my client had raised more money in than 95% of the founders in his YC cohort—which is already a highly capable group of entrepreneurs. When meeting new people and thinking about opportunities, he could honestly represent that he was significantly better at fundraising than many of his peers while not indicating that he was in fact "the best in the world". (The reality is, most people wouldn't think that anyway even if you told them so).

My client loves basketball so I gave him this analogy: Jeremy Lin might not be as good as LeBron James, but he will easily smoke even the most dedicated amateur hooper on the court. He is definitely really good at basketball.

2. Look as Good as the Competition

I have a founder client who has put tremendous effort building a highly capable AI workflow assistant. Even with a small team they are already better than many established players and have been starting to approach the quality of the top products in their category.

But their (worse quality) competitors' had sophisticated websites describing features, use cases, and testimonials that made it appear like a high quality product. Meanwhile, my client's website, while clean and simple, had been designed in house by a bunch of highly technical engineers and did not adequately convey the quality of their product.

The team was thinking about making some updates to the site on their own, but I encouraged my client to consider hiring a design agency to really level up their public presence. It would go along way in helping them secure meetings with potential customers, through which they could demonstrate their superior product and land deals.

3. It's Not Selling, It's Teaching

In this third example, my client is a psychiatrist associated with a major hospital but is looking to grow his private practice where he can charge more and work with great-fit clients. However, he has expressed an aversion to selling or marketing himself because he's seen many "B.S. doctors" peddling too-good-to-be true cures.

Because he perceived marketing as narcissism, which conflicted with his core value of humility, he was feeling blocked on moving forward with promoting his business. I tried to help him connect to a different core value: teaching and education, something he cares a lot about.

I encouraged my client to focus on educating his customers on the risks, challenges, and treatment options in his area of mental health. That he could help these people by sharing trustworthy information, and over time, those people will likely come to see him as a go-to provider should they need that kind of care.

This idea of teaching over selling can be applied to many markets—people want to buy from those they've learned from. Providing helpful knowledge is another signal of quality.

Whether you're a founder, service provider, or professional, people judge your capabilities long before they ever experience them. In a world of many options and limited time, people take shortcuts to identify quality.

The good news is that you don't need to be the best in the world. You just need to convey that you're better than the alternatives your audience is considering.

So ask yourself: What signals is your public presence sending? Do they match the quality you deliver?

If not, it might be time to upgrade your packaging—not because substance doesn't matter, but because great presentation is the only way great substance gets a chance to shine.