I’ve seen it happen, again and again.
You build a great product. It solves a real problem. It looks sharp. You’ve done your homework. And still… silence.
No traction. No signups. No movement. Just you, a whiteboard full of ideas, and a growing sense of “what am I missing?”
I’ve been in those moments myself. And I’ve worked alongside teams launching projects under high uncertainty—some with global ambition, some with no clear roadmap to follow.
Over the last four years, I’ve taught Behavioral Economics and Consumer Behavior at Universidad Panamericana. And one of the core truths I’ve shared with every student, every semester, is this:
People do not act on reality. They act on perception.
That sentence tends to land hard because it explains so much of what we get wrong in product, marketing, and growth.
And I’ve lived it in the field.
When we launched Buffon Academy, which now operates in 20+ cities across multiple continents, organizing information clearly was the only way to make the model scalable. If local teams couldn’t understand the promise, process, and positioning—we were done before kickoff.
And when we set out to create Calaverandia, the world’s first Día de Muertos theme park, the real challenge wasn’t logistics or tech. It was perception.
People couldn’t “see” what we were building. They worried it was a haunted house… a cultural misstep… or just a scam.
We had no past references, no physical previews, no price anchors. The only way we earned trust was by carefully crafting how people would interpret what we stood for, long before opening day.
So believe me when I say this: Perception isn’t just a feeling—it’s a process.
It moves through three stages: Selection, Organization, and Interpretation of what our five senses present to us. It’s how our brains decide what’s safe, what’s valuable, and what’s worth our time (or not).
And in uncertain times like these, this process becomes even more defensive, more selective, and more biased by risk.
Let’s break it down.
