I Saw the Rosetta Stone. Here's What It Taught Me About B2B SaaS.

In April I went to London on vacation. At some point I walked into the British Museum because it was there and it was free.

I did not expect to walk out a changed man.

The Rosetta Stone is a 2,200-year-old slab of granodiorite with the same text written in three different scripts. It just sits there. Behind glass. In a room. People crowd around it and take photos of what is essentially a broken rock with very small writing on it, and I was one of those people, and I stood there for 18 minutes, and I missed my call, and it was absolutely worth it.

Here is what it taught me about B2B SaaS.

The Lessons

The same message, three audiences

The stone says the same thing in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, Demotic script, and Ancient Greek. The pharaoh did not pick one. The pharaoh did not say “let’s just do Greek, that’s where the growth is.” The pharaoh said all three. Are you speaking to your CFO, your CTO, and your end user in the same breath? The pharaoh was. Think about that.

Write things down

For 1,400 years nobody could read hieroglyphics because everyone who knew how to had died and nobody wrote down how it worked. 1,400 years. Write comments in your PRs. I am not being dramatic. The pharaohs were not being dramatic either and look what happened to them.

Commit

The priests did not iterate on this decree. They did not say “good first draft, let’s pressure test the messaging.” They carved it into a rock and that was that. Your pricing page has been “under review” since Q3 2022. Be the stone.

I don’t have a fourth one. I saw a rock. You read an article about it. Neither of us comes out of this looking great.