Depth Is A Debt

For a stretch, I spent my off hours driving to local game shops. Board game shops, card shops, anywhere with dice behind the counter. Not to buy anything. To pitch. I wanted them to partner with us on events like a Dungeons and Dragons night at the bar.

A beer bar. A place whose entire identity was the tap list. We had spent years going deep on exactly one thing, and there I was asking a guy restocking miniatures if he wanted to help me host a campaign between the taps.

The standard advice says I should have stayed home. Focus on the core. Protect the thing you’re known for. It’s the most repeated strategy note in business, and it’s incomplete in a way that doesn’t show up on any invoice until later.

Depth creates an obligation, though.

When customers go deep with you, they do not want deeper and then deeper again. Nobody buys single depth. They show up to have their expectations met, then exceeded, and exceeded eventually means surprised. The deeper your core gets, the wider your customers expect you to reach.

You don’t get to opt out of that expectation. You only get to decide whether you’ll meet it on purpose or disappoint it by accident.

Here’s the mechanism…. The core’s actual job is to de-risk the weird stuff.

The aquarium in Denver will let you climb into a cage while sharks glide past your face. That’s an unhinged product, and it sells, because the rest of the building is the safest place in the city. Avanti works the same way: enough variety to pique you, something new and something safe under the same roof. The safe thing is not the opposite of the new thing. The safe thing is what makes the new thing purchasable.

D&D night worked at the bar for the same reason. If the dice bored you, the beer didn’t. Nobody was betting their whole evening on a twenty-sided die. The tap list was the net under the trapeze. And the game shops got the mirror image: their regulars walked into a bar that had already been vouched for by the hobby they trusted.

The trap, and the reason I say obligation instead of opportunity… the safety you build is exactly the thing that obligates you.

Once people trust the roof, they start expecting you to put new things under it….That’s the bill for loyalty. Depth is a debt, and your customers collect it in surprise.

Which also explains why some experiments make everyone wince. When a company known for one thing ships a basketball, a speaker that follows you around the room, and a meme generator, the reflex is to call it unfocused. (I’m talking about Open.AI if you couldn’t guess.) I don’t think that’s the diagnosis. It’s unearned width. The core hadn’t gone deep enough to make those bets feel safe, so instead of surprise, customers felt confusion.

Same move, different balance sheet.

The question was never whether to stay focused…The question is whether you’ve gone deep enough that your customers are quietly waiting for you to do something strange.

Stay Positive & If Nobody’s Waiting, The Weird Thing Isn’t Your Problem…The Core Is