A market inflection point occurs when the market is of the same mind, but not of the same voice. The market unites around the voice. 

A customer inflection point occurs when a market actor with a disproportionate amount of influence on the market becomes a customer. Because of that, in that one single customer conversion, the startup is actually converting scores more customers because the market believes, “If it’s good enough for _________, it’s good enough for me.” The market unites around the influential customer. 

In a consensus inflection point, the market unites around the shareable asset and medium. Let me share with you what I mean. 

✅ A consensus inflection point occurs when there are small pockets of believers that understand the value, but the market’s awareness of the startup's product is still very limited. 

Then, something happens. Either internally designed or completely independent of the startup, the startup goes from limited awareness to rampant market awareness almost overnight. ✅

Truth be told, the consensus inflection point is one of the hardest inflection points to execute. But if it happens, it is remarkably powerful. 

✅ More often than not, a consensus inflection point happens due to a shareable asset, such as a link, an article, a video, or hyper-condensed word of mouth referrals. ✅

A consensus inflection point creates what I’ve learned to call a “Talkable moment.” I learned that term from one of our portfolio founders, Ben Kvalo of Midwest Games, who led major movie marketing campaigns at Netflix. 

A "talkable moment" is a hyper-condensed period of time where everybody is talking about that "one thing." It could be on a global scale or it could be a talkable moment within a niche community. Audience size doesn’t matter. What matters is how the message is shared and creates an echo chamber of attention for that asset and downstream for the startup itself. 

This is where the startup is intentionally trying to make a big splash and create a talkable moment. It decides on the asset - a video, an article, a well-orchestrated in-person scenario, and the startup spends time, effort, and often money to thoughtfully design it and carefully plans the execution. The startup might have an inkling of how the asset will perform and what the response will be. But ultimately, the startup doesn’t know until it’s released in the wild.

Many of us may be familiar with The Dollar Shave Club, the startup that launched in January 2011 advertising a monthly subscription for razor blades for guys to have that new shave feeling every week. If you didn’t know about Dollar Shave Club then, you more likely heard about it when on March 16, 2012 they released this video.

Although the video cost just $4,500 to make and took only a day to shoot, it went viral and established the Dollar Shave Club brand in one fell swoop. The Dollar Shave Club website crashed almost immediately. The next day when it was back up, they had 12,000 new subscribers for their $1 per month subscription razor service. Within just a few days, 3 million people had watched. The video racked up 4.75 million views in the first 3 months and has over 27 million views to this day. (Source)

DropBox also had an internally designed consensus inflection point that happened even before the company’s product officially launched. Imagine a time when cloud storage wasn’t really a thing and you and I were carrying USB drives around with our presentations loaded on them. When this video hit the internet, people knew those days were over.

Although users couldn't give the product a try just yet, they understood its value (i.e., they didn't realize that they had this file storage problem before, yet now couldn't imagine their life without such a secure solution at hand). The Dropbox MVP tour video resulted in a viral website traffic increase, grew the team’s waitlist from 5k to 75k in just a day, got them sought-after feedback, and helped the team raise money as it proceeded with the startup funding process. (Source) 

I will say that trying to internally design a consensus inflection point requires thought but oftentimes it results in a much poorer distribution than intended. Hence, it’s very unwieldy. How many products want to go viral? But how many actually do? Exactly. 

Hitting a grand slam at the first at bat is extremely hard. If you attempt this, you need to understand your chances. I’ve seen a lot of startups try to orchestrate this, spend months or time and money, and the results are whisked away in a fleeting moment. Fair warning.

The second type of consensus inflection points happens when an external actor catalyzes the situation, without any specific tactic done by the startup.

The startup is executing very well and most likely has a disruptive product for the industry that its in (See the three characteristics below). There has to be tremendous core product value to talk about. With that prerequisite, an externally surprised consensus inflection point happens when the value that already exists is spotlighted. An external actor creates a talkable moment in the form of an "asset." It is independent of any marketing or outbound work the startup is doing. It’s done to the startup. 

A number of weeks ago, I was driving down to a conference in Milwaukee and drove through our Tundra Angels' portfolio company Octane Coffee in Pewaukee to pick myself up a Salted Caramel Coldbrew on the way to a conference. While on site, I saw the Founder and CEO, Adrian Deasy and he said, “Things have been a bit crazy. We have received a lot of interest from potential franchisees in the last 24 hours.” Perplexed, I said, “Why?” He said, “A reporter from TM4J in Milwaukee did an article on us. We have 57 inquiries on our website for franchises.” For reference, here is the article Adrian was speaking about. 

The next day, I got a text from Arian and separately from co-founder Chuck Kubiak, which resulted in the following texts, phone calls, and subsequent texts over the next few days.

In Adrian’s own words on distribution, “[The reporter] packaged it with a real clickbait-y title and posted it to Instagram and TikTok, where it apparently spread really widely. The NBC news story was also syndicated by other NBC local stations and we got a lot of inquiries via our website as those stories were presented.  We've had interest from Australia, Europe, Brazil, Costa Rica, South Africa, and the Middle East so clearly it was shared far and wide without us doing anything specific.”

By complete coincidence, just this week, Biz Times did an article on Octane Coffee this week on the opportunities that this consensus inflection points has created, now totaling over 1,500 business inquiries!

✅ Octane Coffee went from limited market awareness around Milwaukee to global market awareness, in a very short period of time. ✅

Soda Sense is another company that had a massive consensus inflection point. The company’s product is like Dollar Shave Club but rather CO2 canisters for Soda Stream machines. It sells via a monthly subscription and arrives at your door in a frictionless manner. Soda Sense is based out of Seymour, Wisconsin, about 20 minutes West of Green Bay. 

Prior to the existence of Tundra Angels, the company raised capital from individual angel investors in 2018 and launched their product in late 2019. I spoke to Dean in December 2019 where if I recall there were somewhere around 10-20 orders a day. Nothing to write home about. Then in March 2020, when the lockdown started, the world completely changed. No one could go out to the store and get CO2 canisters for their Soda Stream machines as they used to. What happened next occurs in Dean’s words, 

“What happened was that Soda Stream was shut down on the East Coast because New Jersey had stricter laws on facilities staying open during Covid. And when they did open, they ran out of product and canisters to get the product to market.

We stayed open here in Wisconsin and it was just customers, now locked down at home, searching for alternatives for Soda Stream because they were out of product.

 We went from 60 orders a day to 4,000 a day almost overnight.

 That is when the scramble and chaos started…”

Soda Sense did not change their marketing. They didn’t change their outbound. In the hyper-condensed moment of the COVID-19 lockdown, Soda Stream customers presumably were texting each other asking, “Does anyone know where I can get CO2 for my Soda Stream machine?”

Then, A few select people had the answer - “I use Soda Sense.” ✅ And that hidden knowledge to a limited few became mass market awareness very quickly. ✅

✅ A limited number of people on the East Coast, which most of Soda Sense’s customers were located, rapidly became mass market consensus because COVID-19 created a moment which hyper-condensed word of mouth referrals. ✅

After observing this happen to a number of startups, I’ve observed several characteristics of the the startup and the asset that is shared to create this talkable moment and consensus inflection point. 

In Octane Coffee's case, I cannot prove, but highly suspect, that a highly influential person in a niche community of franchisee owners saw the Octane Coffee article and shared it into the niche community. The fact that Octane Coffee received a ton of attention from a similar profile of person doesn’t just happen because of mass market attention. It happens because it was shared by someone of influence in the right context. ✅ A consensus inflection point isn't just rapid distribution. It's rapid distribution within the right context. ✅

✅ Consensus inflection points are rare, and only possible by incredible startup execution. Sometimes internally designed or externally surprised, the startup gets a big break. It moves from limited market awareness to mass market awareness very quickly. 

The market unites around the shareable asset and medium. ✅