Story time:
When I was 11, I had a large moth fly right inside my left ear – it then got stuck deep inside, unable to fly out. In fact, it got so deep that there was no way I could reach there either. I tried jumping on one leg, getting it out with my fingers, pouring water into my ear. Nothing helped – waterboarding the poor thing actually made it worse.
I constantly heard vague flapping inside my ear and felt vague vibrations from time to time. The dumb thing was trying to save itself. It wasn’t scary or painful, just sorta surreal and weird.
Speaking of surreal and weird: nobody believed me when I mentioned it. “Moths are too large to get into your tiny ears!” they would say, nothing could be seen from the outside and getting in there with pincers did nothing.
Parents were convinced I just had a clogged ear and it’ll pass. My other relatives and friends were laughing at the notion. Flapping noises stopped next evening, I only felt vague vibrations from time to time. After a couple days, I sorta doubted the moth hypothesis myself. Tried to make peace with not hearing anything with my left ear.
This went on for another day or so, until my grandmother noticed me scratching at that ear and being the old overbearing woman she was, immediately brought me to a doctor. Said doctor cleaned my ear and got the giant beast out (seriously, it was a big moth).
He wrapped the long-dead thing into a napkin and gave it back to us as a trophy. Everyone at home was shocked and apologized for the gaslighting.
I wasn’t crazy after all.
Now you might be thinking “Alex, what the heck does this disgusting tale have to do with anything?”
See, most companies in the current SaaS landscape remind me about how I was slowly going insane, doubting I actually had a moth in my ear.
I can feel the vibrations, I can see the ground sinking under their feet and yet they keep sending the same weak, canned, generic messages and terrible explainer videos to their prospects and investors. There’s gonna be a massacre on that market, especially when serious BaaS (Blockchain-as-a-Service) platforms roll out.
Yet many of them are telling me they’ve got these great products and just need one good push for everything to work out, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with how they’re talking to their audience, their numbers are going up after all!
I know that the moth is in there, flapping its wings. It’s only a matter of time before people start going deaf, especially if they don’t have an overbearing grandma like me to drag them for a checkup.