The secret to winning any game lies in not trying too hard.
Marketing can grab customers, but product multiplies them.
Marketing to me means to identify exactly who your ideal customer is: knowing their behavior, knowing their age, knowing their gender, knowing their location. And 9 times out of 10, in my opinion, the easiest way to do that is to just sell to people who are as similar to you as possible.
Clever marketing and PR stunts can get customers… but only for so long. It’s the product that will create long-term word-of-mouth and the groundswell needed for a global phenomenon.
The easiest way to distinguish yourself is to ask yourself how you can be different, and not just better.
Step 1 on the best 3-5 ways to secure first clients: The best way to quickly build a services business, or any business – especially since you have income from your full-time job – is to “buy” your first clients. This means that you offer your services for free, or at a massively discounted rate (or for a temporary free “trial/test” period), to clients who would make excellent and impressive testimonials. The key here is that your cost-to-value-delivered ratio must be clearly better than anything else they use.
Step 2: Once you have testimonials or referrals from 3-5 marquee clients, you’ll be in great shape to charge others full retail. I’ve done this in multiple fields, whether teaching accelerated learning, selling massive data storage systems, angel investing in tech (i.e. investing a tiny amount, so I own a tiny piece of equity, but putting in a lot of sweat and labor), or podcast advertising.
The best entrepreneurs I’ve ever met are all good communicators. It’s perhaps one of the very few unifying factors.
Learn the art of the pitch and of messaging.
I think there’s always a market for quality.
I’m really excited about the future of content marketing. But in the same fashion that you have Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon – who all used to be very cleanly separate – on this collision course where they are competing on the same verticals, I think you’re going to end up having television producers, movie producers, writers, song writers, all competing for the same mental bandwidth.
That 1000 true fans will lead to a cascading effect. The 10 million that don’t get it don’t matter.
If you only have time to read one article on marketing, make it 1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired Magazine.
The customer is not always right. “Fire” high-maintenance customers.
Deadlines over details. […] Perfect products delivered past deadline kill companies. Better to have a good-enough product delivered on-time.
I want to convert casual listeners into die-hard, fervent listeners, and I want to convert casual sponsors into die-hard, fervent sponsors. This requires two things: 1) Playing the long game, and 2) Strategically leaving some chips on the table. As a mentor once told me, “You can shear a sheep many times, but you can skin him only once”.
An entrepreneur isn’t someone who owns a business, it’s someone who makes things happen.
All of my biggest wins have come from leveraging strengths instead of fixing weaknesses.
Niche is the new big.
It’s much more interesting to me to sell something like a small-scale, $10,000-per-seat seminar every 2-3 years, instead of obsessing over monthly, weekly, or even daily Amazon commissions, for instance.
Who you portray in your marketing isn’t necessarily the only demographic who buys your product — it’s often the demographic that most people aspire to. The target isn’t the market.
“General fame is overrated. You want to be famous to 2,000 to 3,000 people you handpick.” I’m paraphrasing, but the gist is that you don’t need or want mainstream fame. It brings more liabilities than benefits. However, if you’re known and respected by 2–3K high-caliber people (e.g., the live TED audience), you can do anything and everything you want in life. It provides maximal upside and minimal downside. (Tools Of Titans, Eric Weinstein)
Broadly speaking, as good as it feels to have a plan, it’s even more freeing to realize that nearly no misstep can destroy you. This gives you the courage to improvise and experiment.
Good stories always beat good spreadsheets. Whether you are raising money, pitching your product to customers, selling the company, or recruiting employees, never forget that underneath all the math and the MBA bullshit talk, we are all still emotionally driven human beings. We want to attach ourselves to narratives.
We don’t act because of equations. We follow our beliefs. We get behind leaders who stir our feelings. In the early days of your venture, if you find someone diving too deep into the numbers, that means they are struggling to find a reason to deeply care about you.
First get the crowd, then sell the product.
There are people I have outsourced to in India who now outsource portions of their work to the Philippines. It’s the efficient use of capital, and if you want the rewards of a free market, if you want to enjoy the rewards of the capitalist system, these are the rules by which you play.
Being able to quit things that don’t work is integral to being a winner.
If you take a strong stance and have a clear opinion or statement on any subject online, you’re going to polarize people. And without that polarity, there’s no discussion. Discussion is what I want, which means that I’m fine with the consequences.
What we really need to do, to design, is look at the extremes. The weakest, or the person with arthritis, or the athlete, or the strongest, the fastest person, because if we understand what the extremes are, the middle will take care of itself.” In other words, the extremes inform the mean, but not vice versa.
I think the ‘soft sell’ is very undervalued.
I still feel there are much smarter self-promoters out there than me. I am very methodical about my messaging, and I know how to gain attention very quickly.
Everything that works in sales has been done already. Just keep track of the crap that you buy, or the awesome stuff that you buy, and decide what was the trigger, and then just sell to people like you. It’s really that easy – and that’s what I do.
Famous tech blogger Robert Scoble later described my intricate marketing plan as “get drunk with bloggers.” It worked surprisingly well.
People don’t like being sold products, but we all like being told stories.
