The story of the name "Expertise Demo"

What's in a name? How long to claim it?

I've started to write a book on how to create Workshops for Consulting. You can help here.

Perhaps you do this too

Whenever I talk about a new idea, my natural tendency is to explain how I arrived at it. Explaining the essence of the idea often becomes secondary.¹

I suspect that many Experts have this habit of mine as well.

So let me tell you how the notion of an Expertise Demo came to me.

2023 - Workshops for Experts

Although this story goes back further, I'll begin closer to today.

The full account would have to include how studying Industrial Design Engineering changed my brain; moving to Brazil to work on innovation consulting; starting a Visual Facilitation company; working as a Product Manager at 3 separate fintechs and my return to indie consulting.

But I'll start with my initial positioning thesis for my second run at indie consulting (circa 2023):

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• I'm very good at creating workshops from scratch.

AND

• I love everything about Expertise (stuff like philosophy of science; how people learn; epistemology, etc)

I had seen first hand that Workshops have the magical power of shaping people's behavior leading to really productive collaboration, quick results and increased people's abilities to work on complex problems together.

However, there are many really good workshop facilitators out there.
The internet works on power distributions (not gaussian distributions) and I knew I needed to focus on something different that still connected with my passions.

So I started talking about “Workshops for Experts”.
I created a newsletter, posted roughly weekly for a while.

Slow starts, wavering confidence and hedging bets

Most people didn't get it. A lot of Experts were intrigued but I hadn't yet hit my stride in talking about it.
It led to very awkward chats during family BBQs. Everyone felt this was quirky but not really necessary.

Most of my work was still coming from past clients. And this told me that having an interesting positioning is nice, but ultimately not very relevant.

I fiddled with this for a while, but the list of unknown-unknowns was still quite large (is this list even knowable?)

A few months in, I felt unsure about this positioning (“am I crazy? Is there something in this?") and made an intentional effort to land more work as a contractor for innovation consulting firms as a fallback plan. It worked.

However, after a couple of projects it became clear I was not building any sort of equity (no brand, no expertise, no stakes in companies, no proprietary products). I would end up in the same place.

Lesson:

Things can remain in "still gathering up speed” mode longer than you can remain confident in your own assessment of the situation. Confidence is not static. Account for that in your planning. Move faster.

Around this time I also set up calls with peers and other indies I would find on LinkedIn. Quickly it became apparent that my challenges were shared ones.

After a couple of months of this, I was more sure that Workshops for Experts made sense.

Lesson:

I started with what I had (Expertise around creating Workshops), which was a good way of making sure I was starting from reality and not some dreamed future state.

But I needed to find a market for what I had. Of course!

Late 2023 - Posting and experimenting

As I posted more and more, some people started noticing. Especially those that had known me from before (I had a good reputation with them) and they started to risk working with me on new ventures.

I say they “started to risk” because these projects were often broad in scope and hinged largely on them saying things like “I don't know exactly how, but I know you can help me”.

This is a common pattern of solo and independent consultants at the start of their entrepreneurial journey (which is separate from their Expertise-building journey).

Lesson:

I had a Legibility problem: people trusted my ability, but did not necessarily understand what that ability was. They could sense the skill, but could not really interpret it. All that remains is Trust. I had plenty of that in my initial network, but this Trust should be seen as a stock that must be expanded and replenished.

I had to understand how others saw me and my work and to what they would relate it to.

In every new project I started to collect as much feedback as possible.

• Setting up debrief sessions with clients that had become friends.

• Asking them questions about what they thought was unique about my approach;

• Checking how they would describe my work to others.

I also joined communities and courses adjacent to what I was offering. I met loads of people.

Patterns emerged, but still, I underestimated how structured this ought to be.

The point is not so much that I was unstructured (I was targeting a profile, I had scripts, I made copious notes). But in order to really accrue conviction on the model I was building, due to my own nature², I'd have to be even more structured.

I was putting in the work, but the level of detail was not enough to lead to novel insight.

Lesson:

Clarity comes from the work. The rate of improvement exploded when I started to put my ideas out into the world. In the past I was fascinated by people honing and polishing their stuff behind closed doors. Now I see it mostly as a bad sign.

Mid 2024 - Getting serious about Customer Discovery

We all have our facepalm moments. This was a major one for me.

When I finished my Industrial Design studies at TU Delft (The Netherlands) I went back to Portugal and got into startups. This was the era of Business Model Canvas being a novelty, Lean Startup, etc.

At that time I learned a lot about customer discovery and development , how to collect feedback and insight to make better products, etc, etc.

When I left for Brazil to work in innovation consulting that knowledge was useful, but eventually it laid dormant.

Fast forward to 2024 and I'm still trying to figure out exactly how to sell Workshops to Experts.

But I was still talking to them from my own perspective as an Expert on Workshops. Talking to people that were not Experts on Workshops. Of course this would not connect.

Facepalm

I needed to just abandon my now eroded notions of Customer Discovery and rebuild them. Get back to brass tacks and put together a structured-enough method to learn about my Customers.

I did that, I created my own processes and documents to track it all.
No more chats, it was time for actual interviews. I did a bunch of those.

And now I had a much more granular notion on what mattered to my clients.

Lesson:

Conviction-inducing research needs a direction (hypothesis) and a critical look into how you know things (did you read it somewhere, did you experience it first hand?).

Also, it needs a certain volume and cadence. No point in doing it too sparsely.

Late 2024 - Taster Workshops

Two main things emerged from my research:

• Experts look at the world in a very different way ( roughly ¼ of the people I talk to are neurodivergent in one way or another. I am too)

• Experts love their tools and want others to see it as well, but the best way to talk about tools is displaying proficiency while solving customer problems with those tools.

• Once prospects became clients, most Experts could demonstrate the true depth of what they knew, but getting past that door was hard.

• Experts loved the idea of a small workshop they could run to show clients how they work

A lot of people found the name “Taster Workshop” quite clear, but still, it relied on them having a mental concept for what a Workshop is. This is a friction point.

At this stage, “Workshop” still feels like an imperfect name for a couple of reasons:

• Some people don't know what a Workshop is

• Of the people who have an idea, they tend to have different ideas…

• …“Workshop” describes the “How”, but not the value of the thing itself (“why would a workshop help me?”)

The “Taster” part is great, because it is self-descriptive and connects to experiences we all have had (e.g. someone offering you a cookie at the supermarket, getting you to try out a new brand)

Lesson:

It's much easier to get people excited about a product if they can see how it solves a real and present problem they have. Still, you must find ways to convey this as best as you can. In my case, this meant polishing the name a bit more.

Early 2025 - "Expertise Demo”

To get away from distorted interpretations of the name “Workshop” I started to bet on talking about the effect, not the format.

As more of the world is digitized, tech companies occupy a larger space in our collective consciousness. And with that, they shape the culture.

This is easy to see in all the luxury companies rebranding into the same sort of clean sans-serif font logotypes.

source: https://cubicleninjas.com/what-is-blanding/

This increase of Tech's influence on global culture means that some experiences are truly universal:

• Signing up for a service with your email

• Using the free version of an app and paying for premium features

• Comparing product tiers with side-by-side feature lists for each plan

Everybody pays for some software now. So everyone has gone through that sort of process.

And in B2B, the ubiquitous thing is the “Book a Demo” button.

I've looked around and the first note I can find that links Tech Demos with Expertise is from June 24th, 2024. I just had not fully connected the dots.

Around December 2024, it hit me that “Expertise Demo” could be a great name for a specific type of Workshop.

It replaced the “Taster” with “Demo” and instead of mentioning the tool (“Workshop”), it focused on the focus of the experience: one's Expertise.

Also, it connected with the existing practice of "booking a demo” before buying software.

just an example

“Expertise Demo” sounded good.

I checked for prior use (I wanted to be able to be associated with the name of "Expertise Demo”) over several places and as a bit of an intellectual exercise, checked what would be the best process to protect this name.

As expected, much of the advice on the matter is around using the name so much and in so many places, that it becomes associated with you. Litigation is expensive, even if you are the right one in a dispute. ³

This is where I am right now:

1. I've written around a dozen long-form posts around the concept

2. I've tested it in conversation (does not click for everyone)

3. I've come to realize that this is basically an exercise in Branding (of an idea) and that always takes much longer than one would wish.

Lesson:

Developing a novel concept is not an isolated task. For the concept to bear fruit, you need to coordinate multiple aspects, from the development of the concept, the claiming of it and how you can make sure it is associated with you.

Next steps

I'm very familiar with the feeling of having an idea that appears to be groundbreaking but ends up leading nowhere.

So now, I'm measuring my steps and not putting an inordinate amount of effort into this specific name.

Even if it all blows up and “Expertise Demo” never turns into anything special, the process itself has been fantastic at forcing me to think about how to generate value for clients in a disciplined way.

After all, that was the question I was trying to answer from the start.

If you're trying to name a thing, get ready to talk about non-stop

I don't talk much about Expertise Demo on my larger social channel (LinkedIn) because I wanted to keep the test smaller.

Right now I have a set of a dozen posts that I can send prospects and clients if a conversation veers in that direction.

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In other news:

• I'm getting so much more comfortable talking about the problems that workshops solve. It's a much more compelling PoV than just talking about workshop techniques and principles.

• Changed my Mesozoic.co home page. I'm trying to do as much as a can with clear writing and refrain from formatting tricks. This really forces me to write in very clear ways.

• Since my last email I've had many interesting conversations, too many to count. But one thing is real: people are creating absolutely fascinating jobs for themselves out there.

And here's the Exotic Matter podcast, 5 episodes up already:

I've started to write a book on this stuff. You can help here.

1. I now know that a lot of people find this a bit boring and so I refrain from it on most occasions.

2. I have weak spot for structured data

3. Professor Joe O'Mahoney has a very practical overview on this: https://joeomahoney.com/creating-and-using-intellectual-property-ip-to-increase-the-value-of-your-boutique-consultancy/