Matthew Boulton

Horsepower was invented as a marketing unit to sell steam engines

James Watt and Matthew Boulton found mine owners didn't care about boiler specs; they wanted to know how many horses they could stop feeding. So Watt invented the horsepower, a sales unit that let buyers do the ROI math on the back of an envelope.

“So Watt went out and invented a unit we still use today, which is called the horsepower. And the reason it's not named after a famous scientist like the ohm or the Newton or the Coulomb or the Watt for that matter, or Celsius or anything of that kind, is because it's a marketing unit. It was invented for marketing purposes because he could then go and say, if you buy a 25-horsepower steam engine, you can actually get rid of 75 horses because I think the horses worked in shifts.”

Steal thisExpress your product's value in the unit your buyer already budgets in, not in your engineering spec.