Make easy things look difficult.
Make difficult things look easy.
Flying a plane from one city to another, on time, is incredibly difficult. There’s a million things that can go wrong. And yet, for years, the airlines worked hard to make it appear easy. They wanted to appear competent and to make us feel safe.
The other day, as I waited for a flight, I heard the dreaded announcement. The flight was delayed, there was a mechanical problem. Angst filled the gate area.
Five minutes later, they announced that the problem was fixed, and we could board… we ended up leaving ten minutes early. Joy throughout the land!
Where did the joy come from? It came from the rapid shift in expectations. For a moment, the airline made it look hard. then they did the trick and we were saved.
Houdini never said, “check out these trick handcuffs and watch how easy it is for me to take them off."
May 6, 2009
A business model is the architecture of a business or project. It has four elements:
- What compelling reason exists for people to give you money? (or votes or donations)
- How do you acquire what you're selling for less than it costs to sell it?
- What structural insulation do you have from relentless commoditization and a price war?
- How will strangers find out about the business and decide to become customers?
The internet 1.0 was a fascinating place because business models were in flux. Suddenly, it was possible to have costless transactions, which meant that doing something at a huge scale was very cheap. That means that #2 was really cheap, so #1 didn't have to be very big at all.
Some people got way out of hand and decided that costs were so low, they didn't have to worry about revenue at all. There are still some internet hotshot companies that are operating under this scenario, which means that it's fair to say that they don't actually have a business model.
The idea of connecting people, of building tribes, of the natural monopoly provided by online communities means that the internet is the best friend of people focusing on the third element, insulation from competition. Once you build a network, it's extremely difficult for someone else to disrupt it.
As the internet has spread into all aspects of our culture, it is affecting business models offline as well. Your t-shirt shop or consulting firm or political campaign has a different business model than it did ten years ago, largely because viral marketing and the growth of cash-free marketing means that you can spread an idea farther and faster than ever before. It also makes it far cheaper for a competitor to enter the market (#3) putting existing players under significant pressure from newcomers.
This business model revolution is just getting started. It's' not too late to invent a better one.
May 5, 2009
You might not be as permanently stuck in a rut as you think. The rut you’re in isn’t permanent, nor is it perfect. There are certainly less perfect ruts, but there may be better ones as well. The certain thing is that you can change everything…
- Buy a competitor
- Sell to a competitor
- Publish your best work for free online
- Close your worst-performing locations
- Open a new branch in a high-traffic location
- Hire the best salesperson away from the competition
- Join the competition
- Host a conference for your competitors
- Connect your best customers and organize a tribe
- Fire the 80% of your customers that account for 20% of your sales
- Start a blog
- Start a digital bootstrap business on the weekends
- While looking for a job, spend 40 hours a week volunteering and freelancing for good causes
- Go on tour and visit your best customers in person
- Answer the customer service line for a day
- Learn to be a killer presenter
- Let the most junior person in the organization run things for a day
- Delete your website and start over with the simplest possible site
- Call former employees and ask for advice
- Move to Thailand
- Listen to audio books in your car instead of the radio
- Sell your cash cow division to the competition and invest everything in the new thing
- Find more products for your existing customers to buy
- Become a gadfly and tell the truth about your industry
- Quit your job
- Move your operations to another city
- Become a vegan
- Have all meetings in a room with no chairs, and everyone wears a bathrobe over their clothes
- Open your offices only four hours a day
- Open your offices 24 hours a day for a week
- Find every project that is near the danger zone (in terms of p&l or deadlines) and cancel it, no appeals
- Go for a walk during lunch
- Get an RSS reader and read a lot more blogs
- Go offline for longer than you thought possible
- Write five thank you notes every day
- Stop sending spam
- Do your work somewhere else. Set up your chiropractic table at the mall
- Have everyone at work switch offices
- Give your most valuable possessions to a stranger
- Go see live music
- Start a company scrapbook and take daily notes
- Hire a firm to make a documentary about your organization
- Buy some art
- Make some art.
- Do the work.
May 4, 2009
Email is dying because it's free. If you can send an email for free to 100 of your closest friends, instantly, you probably won't abuse the privilege. But someone else will because they might define 'friend' differently than you or I.
100 times 100 is ten thousand. Spam.
So now, people don't reply when you send them a resume, because it costs too much to do that ten thousand times.
Twitter is next. The paradox is obvious: to grow, you need to remove friction from the medium. If it's not easy and free to use, people won't. But then it gets big and it becomes profitable, so people use it too much.
The churn rate at twitter is reported as more than 50%. That's because of lack of friction as well. Easy to get in, easy to get out.
Stamps are underrated. Friction rewards intent and creates scarcity.
May 3, 2009
I got a call a few weeks ago from a telemarketer at Premier Impressions. (Her number is 800 778 6304). She told me she was selling ads for a free directory being published by my local library. Actually, first she said she was calling from "Westchester County," but when pressed, said she was working with the County, and then when pressed further, acknowledged that she was working with the local library. I was Googling and taking notes the whole time. I told her I was concerned about her approach, and that I was going to write a story about what she was doing. I even read to her from a website complaining about stuff like this her firm had done in the past.
Well, I know the folks at the local library and asked who she was working with. She told me the head of the library's name (!) and I said I'd check with her and call back. The telemarketer insisted on giving me her full name and number so that after I checked, I could call her back and do business.
You've already guessed this: My library had never heard of these guys. But plenty of other organizations have. I called the company for comment, was transferred to their parent company and they refused to comment.
I'm just astonished by this organization. Astonished that the telemarketer would be willing to do this all day–defrauding small businesses in the name of a local charity or institution. Astonished that a company in the US can do this for years and years without someone shutting them down. Most of all, amazed at how trivial the whole thing is. Drip, drip, drip it apparently ends up with enough money on the table for people to sacrifice their ethics.
May 2, 2009
There are a thousand things you can do to improve the mechanics of people spreading the word about you, your conference, your product, your event, your service. You can create hashtags, provide kiosks, host discussions, give out free postcards or hand out bumper stickers. There are plenty of useful tactics available to you.
Mechanics are important, no doubt.
More important by far is creating a desire to share. If people intend to share, they'll find a way, the mechanics are just a convenience. But if you don't go the extra mile and I end up not caring, all the tactics in the world won't help.
May 1, 2009
My dad likes to say, "even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and then." And it's true. You shouldn't pick your strategy by modeling someone else's success. The success might have been strategic and planned, but it's just as likely to be a matter of blind luck. Someone had to get that big deal, and this time it was him.
The numbing reality of the net is that now we can see all the blind squirrels, all the time. A recent piece in the Times talked about bloggers getting six figure book deals in just a few weeks after posting community-driven goofy websites. It's easy to read this and say, "I should do that! I could do that!"
What's missing from the article is that for every 10,000 goofy websites that get launched, one turns into a six-figure book deal and the other 9,999 fade away. If you want to build a goofy website, go for it. Just don't expect to be the lucky squirrel.
April 30, 2009
If you had a little business in a little town, there was a natural limit to your growth. You hit a limit on strangers (no people left to pitch), some became friends, some became customers and you then went delivered as much as you could to this core audience. Every day wasn't spent trying to get bigger.
There's no limit now. No limit to how many clicks, readers, followers and friends you can acquire.
I don't think this new mindset is better. It shortchanges the customers you have now (screw them, if they can't take a joke, we'll just replace them!) and worse, it means you're never done. Instead of getting better, you focus obsessively on getting bigger.
You're at a conference, talking to someone who matters to you. Over their shoulder, you see a new, bigger, better networking possibility. So you scamper away. It's about getting bigger.
Compared to what? You're never going to be the biggest, so it seems like being better is a reasonable alternative.
The problem with getting bigger is that getting bigger costs you. Not just in time and money, but in focus and standards and principles. Moving your way to the biggest part of the curve means appealing to an ever broader audience, becoming (by definition) more average.
More, more, more is rarely the mantra of a successful person.
There are certainly some businesses and some projects that don't work unless they're huge, but in your case, I'm not sure that's true. Big enough is big enough, biggest isn't necessary.
April 29, 2009
If you don't know what to do, and you're frightened, might as well panic.
That seems to be the first rule of being a member of the human race. Apparently, panicking is an acceptable substitute for forethought, contingency planning or actually taking productive action. We almost want to blame the thing we're anxious about on the person who isn't panicking. "Don't you care! Can't you see that we're all gonna die! That we're going to go bankrupt? That the world as we know it is going to end?"
More people are killed by deer than sharks, but you don't see park rangers running around like nutcases.
There's huge pressure on our leaders and co-workers and institutions to panic. If for no other reason, we say, they should panic as a sign that they care, that they are taking things seriously.
A while ago, I said that the devil doesn't need an advocate.
Let me add to this: we have enough caution. We don't need an abundance of caution. That's too much.
I've been a huge fan of Hugh MacLeod since he first showed up on the web a few years ago. Hugh is a provocateur, a brilliant marketer and a nice guy. He's also a great cartoonist.
Hugh's images, combined with his insightful promiscuous licensing policy (want to use this cartoon? Sure!) propelled his blog to the top of the charts and led to a book deal.
His newest project, though, is the point of this post.
Hugh is making fine art prints of his cartoons, in very limited editions. It's basically a collectible (like Andy Warhol silkscreens or Swatch watches) but for businesses. But it's more than that, because you can hang it on the wall. By putting something up for all to see, you start conversations or remind people of the mission.
So far, it's working. I'm told that every other poster in the series has sold out its pre-sale allocation, and my guess is that while resales will be rare, they'll go up in value.
Totem poles have been around for a long time, because they work. We need a place to tell our stories, and a reminder of what to talk about. I think it's really cool to start a conversation with something that hangs on the wall. Years ago, I visited the offices of DC Comics and noticed some plaster on the wall of the conference room. That's when I noticed a hand (Superman's hand) punching through the dry wall. It changed the conversations that got held in that room. Most products (or even services) could turn into totem poles if you worked at it. I'm sort of amazed at how little this idea has been leveraged.
Hugh's latest print made me blush. He asked me for permission to do the cover of Purple Cow, a book he found inspirational. I agreed to let him take a shot, and here it is. The book exists for people to talk about it, so this is perfect. I told Hugh that my readers needed hear about it first, but Hugh's posting his take on it in a few minutes.
Every penny of my share of the project goes to roomtoread.org. My hope is that this project alone will pay for most of a school in a small village that really needs one. If you're looking for a big purple totem pole, here you go. It's up to you whether to hang it in the portrait or landscape view. Thanks Hugh!
PS I'm signing each print, and so is Hugh.
April 28, 2009
