Cheap signals lie

Hey everyone,

Here’s a hypothetical: Imagine 200,000 people put down $100 deposits on your next product. 

You build, right? In what world is that not a green light to get started?

But context is everything. Because if that $100 is a deposit on a $70,000 truck, suddenly your signal looks a lot weaker.

Unfortunately for Ford, this wasn’t a hypothetical, and it cost them about $20 billion dollars. 

Lots to learn. Let’s dive in. 

The numbers I mentioned are for Ford’s attempt at an all-electric truck, the F-150 Lightning.

They went all in and built new manufacturing plants, hired 950 dedicated employees, spent billions in investment. 

And by December 2025, the entire program was dead.

But a $100 deposit is not a commitment that anyone will spend even $10,000, let alone $60-70,000.

It’s called revealed preference. Basically, never trust what consumers tell you they’ll do. Look at what they actually do when it costs them something real.

Surveys, waitlists, people who say they’re “interested”... these are easy to give and easy to abandon.

Over time, I’ve learned to look for expensive signals instead: real money, real time, real sacrifice. A customer who negotiates hard and pays anyway is telling you something completely different than one who fills out a form.

I should add that deposits are a totally valid form of signal, in the right proportion to the end cost. But anyone who’s actually going to buy a $70K truck doesn’t treat $100 like a binding commitment.

By the way: When the rubber hit the road (literally), the actual demand for Ford’s all-electric pickup is about 24,000 vehicles a year. Roughly 10% of what Ford planned for.

The F-150 Lightning’s failure wasn’t just Ford reading the market poorly. They’re not dumb. 

It was also a failure to deliver what their customers actually wanted.

Because truck buyers don't purchase for what they do every day. They buy for what their truck might need to do: tow a camper, haul equipment, survive a week at a remote job site. 

The Lightning promised 300 miles of range. But towing a trailer brought it down to under 100. Cold weather cut that in half again. 

Not that many people are actually towing trailers in cold weather. But Ford was killing the dream that they could.

There’s another lesson there: especially for high-ticket purchases, a lot of people are buying a dream. 

It’s not about where they drive it every day. It’s about them having it in the driveway, knowing they could go do truck-commercial things like driving through mud puddles and over big rocks.

Plus… it kinda sucked. 

My cousin bought one early on. I sat with him over the holidays and asked how he liked it. He listed a ton of quality defects. Heaters failing, software glitches, stuff literally falling off the truck. 

(To be fair, he says he still loves it for driving around town, carrying his very tall family, and “has a very useful frunk”. But when they go out of town… they take his wife’s car.)

This was clearly a first effort that wasn't ready.

Because your badass truck dream bubble definitely pops when the Bluetooth won’t connect. 

One more quick aside about signals: raising prices will tell you a ton. 

When Ford hiked the price of the Lightning from $40K to $61K in six months, their demand collapsed. 

If demand disappears the moment you raise prices, you never had real demand. You had curiosity at a bargain.

The flip side is true too: customers who stay when prices go up are showing you something real.

So stress-test your own signals. What happens if you raise prices 10%? 

Do customers push back and pay anyway, or do they vanish? 

That'll tell you whether you've built something people genuinely need — or something they'll abandon the moment a better option shows up.

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That's my take, anyway. What signals are you reading? 

(By the way: this is a deeper dive into my YouTube video on the Lightning — you can watch that here.)

Thanks for reading!

Michael

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