The market reacts to the packaging before the product.

But most people build in the opposite order.

In many cases, you can derisk your investment in product by testing packaging first.

Packaging has one job — to compress the value proposition of the product.

Also worth noting, if you can't do that, it doesn't matter if the product is good.

The better job you do in compressing, the faster it can travel.

Could be a sentence, a name, an image, a phrase — anything that increases the velocity of the idea between people.

@JamesClear wrote "Atomic Habits" compressing hundreds of pages into 2 words.

I like to think we've achieved this with @visualizevalue

It does what it says, but not in a generic and forgettable fashion.

"A collection of graphically designed intangible ideas" guaranteed dead on arrival.

Same goes for product: "Build Once, Sell Twice"

It's often massively overlooked, but it's the most important piece of the puzzle.

"Never judge a book by its cover" is such a prevalent idiom because everyone judges books by their covers (and until we get some sort of DNA overhaul, we always will)

Also worth saying that it’s a dangerous skill in the wrong hands, and is used unethically every single day.

“Sell the dream, deliver the nightmare.”

And one last point to address a couple of comments, I do not mean packaging in a literal sense (but not excluding it).

Whatever you give people to help them make a decision about becoming (or not becoming) customers, is packaging.