The Filled Pastry opportunity

It was 8:47. A light drizzle tried to flatten my quiff as I marched toward the station. The only thing between me and my train to London was the auditory need for breakfast. Something small enough to be quick, but big enough to see me through the approximately 274 minute long train journey.

As my sandy eyes scanned the surroundings, I spotted a new bakery, Mòr. Savoury pastries waving me over with their scent. Friendly but quick conversation. Warm pastry in hand. One quick bite before I find my train. What happened next was quite primal – and some of the best British culture has to offer.

There is an art to stuffing pastry with a peppery meat sauce. The filling needs to be thickened enough to stay inside without making the pastry soggy, yet liquid enough to ooze out when you engage in that first bite. Similarly, the pastry needs to be buttery enough to crisp up and provide enough structural integrity to embrace the filling, without turning into a concrete suffocating tomb. And there needs to be enough filling to work its way through.

At the surface a pasty is extremely simple, but getting it right is infinitely complex.

And let’s be honest: This pasty could have been mid, and it would have been fine. It could have been meh, and I wouldn’t have minded all that much. I was going to get food, and because this was the most open place I could find under constraints of time and location they got my business by default.

But it was neither mid nor meh. This pastry was unnecessarily excellent.

I hired it to do the job of “sustenance”. And it turned around and did the job of “joy”.

Craft as attitude

A lot of making and craft is like this: We set out to learn how to make something. This might be because we are interested in the thing itself, or in making the thing. Or in both. And then we fall in love with it, and with making it. We become obsessed, and we stay obsessed (according to Coach Bob in the Hotel New Hampshire).

We become painters because we want to paint something that seems obvious to us, or because we love how it feels to move a brush over paper. We might realise that what we see is not what most people see, and we become obsessed with expressing what the world looks like when we open our eyes.

We become carpenters because we think How hard can it be? when the table wobbles. Or because we like tools and the smell of woodchips and glue. And because shaping our spaces is so much more fulfilling than just inhabiting them passively.

And we become chefs because we like to eat, or we like the land, or the seasons. Or to travel. Or tasting things, or making people around us happy and being good hosts. Or because enjoyment is a basic human instinct that separates us from our pre-historic ancestors. Food as culture.

But then all too often another deeply cultural thing happens: Monetisation.

Craft is hard, and great craft is rare. So naturally it becomes what we do to make money. We stop doing it for the sake of it, and start doing it to achieve a goal. Or to service somebody else’s ideas, or their taste. Usually a negotiation takes place to let more people into the front-end of the craft. To get a seat at the table of the idea, and sometimes a passenger seat to the execution. Done poorly, this can get dangerous and suck the joy out of the act of making.

Even worse, it can bring with it a mindset that it’s not worth being great at it. Nobody will get it anyways, so we stop trying to make the best and we start aiming for good enough. And good enough is the opposite of obsession, so even if we once got obsessed we don’t stay obsessed, and we lose the magic. It is very very hard to maintain our love for the craft and to be able to monetise it. Only the very few best and/or most visible people get commissioned for the exact thing they want to do.

But when we do maintain it, it really really works. Great craft applied thoughtfully is a surefire way for great monetisation. So why do so many products not optimise for high craft?

Best as in Best practice.

Building things is very hard, especially in the evercomplex world of the AI revolution. Yes, we can prompt ourselves pretty quickly to something that seems good. But it takes just a moment to see the problems, like exposed API keys, personal data and missing engineering teams to fix major bugs (don’t worry, this is not turning into a post about AI).

Building things properly is hard because most easy things are actually complex, and doing anything well is intrinsically difficult. So through a lense of monetisation, it makes sense to optimise for building good enough. It also gives us a chance to learn as we go, and iterate our way to something people actually want. So what is going wrong?

The world of products and services feels like we are working to a culture of best practice, and pre-fab design systems. We think we know how most things work, and re-inventing everything feels like it is not worth the effort. We can collect references, prompt a few times and get quite far without having to make too many hard decisions. After all: If Apple does it, it must be the right thing to do.

But it leaves a big question. If everything is built on the same foundations, patterns and interactions as all the successful things, why even bother building it in the first place? If IKEA dominates the shelving market, why even bother building another shelf, ever?

Over the years we have found that he best products and founders are the ones who have a clear point of view. Good enough with the things that are invisible, or matter-of-fact, or means to an end. Deeply obsessed with the things that matter.

Or to put this differently: Building something that is unnecessarily great. Stuffing that product pastry to the brim where it counts, so it is one moment of interaction away from exploding with delicious peppered stew, right into the mouths of our ICPs.

The companies and experiences that have done this have stayed with me, often as positive memories for a very long time. More importantly, as moments that shifted my behaviour as a paying customer, and joyseeking human.

On Running’s customer service has no business being this good. A zipper broke on my jacket and it took 24 hours and zero annoying conversations with a sales agent to get a new one delivered, and a map pin to a recycling point for my old jacket close to my house. I was annoyed my zipper broke, but now I am never going to buy running gear from anybody else.

Uniqlo’s alteration experience is seamless (pun intended). you try on a pair of trousers and can get them pinned, altered and on your too-short legs within hours. I would gladly wait for a few days but because I don’t have to most of my trousers are now from them.

Firing up any Zelda game feels like you are getting to dive into a piece of love. The story is (almost) always the same, the characters are (almost) always the same and you know that the feeling of awe and cleverness is also (almost) always the same. I am a very casual gamer, but I buy every Zelda game, just to enjoy the first few hours of it.

Of course, there are many more examples than these. Some big, and some small. We remember these moments because they are great and joyful and witty and fun and helpful and human. And because they are rare. But they have deep value on a few levels.

On a brand level, these moments help us shape a narrative we want to be remembered by. Brand is a promise performed consistently over time, as Brian Collins says. What is the conversation you want people to have about you, and what is the promise you keep for them? Differentiation is key, and neutrality kills. If everything looks the same, and feels the same then we treat it the same and store it in the same mental place.

Soon, all experiences amass to a big grey blob of mental uniformity that makes no difference if I order Ramen or pay my mortgage. Being a characterful outsider in this scenario helps us become memorable, and exciting, and something people want to identify with. When we tell a good story, we give others a good story to tell. Not everything needs to have fireworks, but things need to feel like you care. Care about the thing you are solving, the experience solving it, and the people who you are helping solve it.

And on a purely human level, this matters, too. So much of our lives are spent interacting with products, or interacting with others through products. So imagine the pure levels of joy and un-frustration you could bathe in if this was the prevalent mindset. As a builder, imagine the impact you could have on somebody’s emotional state, just by making things a bit better than they would need to be.

Everybody wins here.

Point in case: The ROI and retention metrics of my now favourite peppered pastry are through the roof. I will buy so many pastries from this bakery, I am even considering going to London just so I can get another one for the way.

— Until soon,
Michael