- How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets
- Ogilvy on Advertising #book
- The key is creating, developing, and dominating new categories of products and services
- Uber made us all aware that we had a taxi problem—and that the problem had a new solution
- Uber stressed all of personal transportation was too expensive and too messy. He said Uber could become more desirable than owning a car. He wanted to make 'transportation as reliable as running water.'
- Uber teed itself up to solve enormous problems so $40 billion or $50 billion seemed cheap in the long run
- Uber put it into our minds that it uniquely understood the problem and could craft a solution
- Smart companies typically go public about the time their category takes wing—usually six to ten years after the company's founding
- The most exciting companies create. They give us new ways of living, thinking, or doing business, many times solving a problem we didn’t know we had—or a problem we didn’t pay attention to because we never thought there was another way.”
- They don’t sell us better. The most exciting companies sell us different.
- For the smartest pirates, dreamers, and innovators on the planet, disruption is never the goal. Creation is the goal. Elvis Presley didn’t set out to “disrupt” jazz. He set out to create rock and roll—a product that came from his soul.
- “Every monopoly is unique, but they usually share some combination of the following characteristics: proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding.” - Peter Thiel
- One company wins big and dominates a healthy category, and the rest struggle, get acquired or perish
- Apple, Facebook, and Tesla we're the first products in their markets, but they all made something different from what came before, and built a category that pulled in customers and made them desire the product
- The first inventor is an innovator to be thanked. The first to define and develop a category is a category king to be followed
✓ Positioning by Al Reis #book
- Brands don't make a category kind. Category design does
- A problem is a category
- Winning companies today market the problem, not just the solution
- People look for ways to make fewer choices in the face of more choices
- Once you've committed to a product or service in a new category, you're likely to feel certain that it is the best even if something slightly better comes along. Once a king emerges customers believe it's the best, regardless of any evidence to the contrary
- Studies show that people will and do change their minds to fit in
- Your number one job is to change the way people think. Your product, your company culture, your marketing—everything has to be aligned with transforming the way potential customers think. If you change the way they think, they will change their buying behavior. If you are the company that changes the way people think, people will see your company as the category king, and you will win the majority of the customers
- A great team is nothing without a great category
- The product just has to be good enough to satisfy the category
- Category designers condition the market to see their aha moment the way they do and demand the new thing
- Category design is the discipline of creating and developing a new market category, and conditioning the market so it will demand your solution and crown your company as its king
- Remember, a great new category is one that solves a problem people didn’t know they had, or solves an obvious problem no one thought could be solved. Either way, you are introducing something new to potential customers’ lives. You have to help them move from the way they used to think, to a new frame of reference. This is what it means to condition the market. You have to first define and market the problem—and only then can you help people understand that you can solve the problem better than anyone else
- “We needed to introduce an entirely new market and promote a new way of doing business.” - Mark Benioff
- Once people can see the problem, they can't unsee it
- When the category demands a product, the problem doesn't have to be perfect right from the get-go
> Dave’s Three Questions:
1. Can you explain to me like a five-year-old what problem you’re trying to solve?
2. If your company solves this problem perfectly, what category are you in?
3. If you win 85 percent of that category, what’s the size of your category potential?”
- A market insight involves seeing a “missing” in the world at large and believing that technology can be built to solve it
- That knowledge/serendipity combination is behind the story of Evan Spiegel and Snapchat. Spiegel grew up as a privileged kid in Southern California, the eldest child of two high-powered lawyers. By the time he attended Stanford, Spiegel was the kind of wealthy, connected, snowboarding, BMW-driving party guy who would’ve been at home in an episode of “Entourage. Such a guy apparently had quite a bit of experience with women sending him potentially embarrassing photos, which got him thinking about a missing: Spiegel believed there would be a market for a way to send images or text that would automatically disappear. He was at Stanford, steeping in the school’s computer science and start-up milieu, providing him with knowledge of the possibilities of new technology. So he pursued his disappearing-picture idea, originally called Picaboo. Picaboo soon became Snapchat, and Spiegel’s market insight evolved into a full-blown media property and turned into a business valued at billions of dollars
- It was also not obvious that these entrepreneurs could build the technology, companies, and categories that would make the insights come alive. And that’s the other trick about market insights. When you have a good one, it seems a little crazy. It is nonconsensus. It becomes your job to make it consensus, and to believe in it when no one else does
> The 11 facets of a company
1. Vision mission
- What was the original market or technology insight that led you to create this company?
2. Customers
- Who do you envision buying this product or service? Who will use it?
3. Problem statement
- What’s the problem you think you can solve for your potential customers?
4. Use cases
- What are the specific ways people will use this product or service to solve their problem?
5. Product/solution
- Give a detailed explanation of the technology behind the solution—what does it do now, and what else is it capable of doing?
6. Ecosystem
- In many cases there are other companies involved in solving the problem or adding additional value. These companies form an ecosystem around the problem and solution. What are all the companies and where in the ecosystem are the control points where one company has leverage?
7. Competition
- Who else is trying to solve this problem—or, if no one else sees the problem yet, who might jump in to compete with you to solve the problem once you identify it?
8. Business model
- How will your product or service change business for your customers? Will it increase their return on investment or reduce costs in a significant way? Or does it allow“them to do something that couldn’t have been done with prior technology, creating huge value?
9. Sales and go-to-market
- Enterprise companies should articulate how the product or solution will make its way to the market. Through a sales force? Through distribution partners? Both? For a consumer company, how will users find out about your solution? From app stores? Search? Viral adoption? Growth hacking techniques? Advertising? PR?
10. Organization
- How is the company organized? Who are the major influencers on the company? How are decisions made? What kind of culture will work?
11. Funding strategy
- What’s the next funding event? A private financing? An IPO? How much runway does the company have before it needs more money and what kind of funding is in place to execute against the category strategy?
- The category name will inform the strategy of the company, not the other way around. It should describe the nature of the problem being solved. For companies aimed at the enterprise, the name should speak to the business function where the problem lives. Ideally, the category name will become a line item in every company’s budget. Consumer-facing companies need a category name that’s direct and descriptive, like “social network” or “on-demand transportation.
- Once a company discovers its category, it must fully embrace the category internally. The category has to become part of the very fabric of the company.
- Sketch out what the category means to every part of the company. What does it mean for the product and its features? What does it mean for marketing and sales, for the types of investors you’ll pitch, for the partners you might approach?
- Once you know your category, it becomes your true north. It must guide all of your journeys.
> The Play Bigger Guide to Category Discovery and Expression
- Step One: Start with 'Who'
- Who will take on the time to think and work on figuring out the category?
- Step Two: Fact Finding
- Have that person interview every senior leader and key board members and external advisors
- Pull together outside research with analyst reports, search the web, see how the media covers the space
- Don't use customer focus groups, customer opinions can be deadly
- New categories are nonconsensus
- Questions to explore:
- Vision mission: What was the original market or technology insight that led you to create this company?
- Customers: Who do you envision buying this product or service? Who will use it?
- Problem statement: What’s the problem you think you can solve for your potential customers?
- Use cases: What are the specific ways people will use this product or service to solve their problem?
- Product/solution: Give a detailed explanation of the technology behind the solution—what does it do now, and what else is it capable of doing?
- Ecosystem: In many cases there are other companies involved in solving the problem or adding additional value. These companies form an ecosystem around the problem and solution. What are all the companies and where in the ecosystem are the control points where one company has leverage?
- Competition: Who else is trying to solve this problem—or, if no one else sees the problem yet, who might jump in to compete with you to solve the problem once you identify it?
- Business model: How will your product or service change business for your customers? Will it increase their return on investment or reduce costs in a significant way? Or does it allow them to do something that couldn’t have been done with prior technology, creating huge value?
- Sales and go-to-market: Enterprise companies should articulate how the product or solution will make its way to the market. Through a sales force? Through distribution partners? For a consumer company, how will users find out about your solution? From app stores? Search? Growth hacking techniques? Advertising?
- Organization: How is the company organized? Who are the major influencers on the company? How are decisions made?
- Funding strategy: What’s the next funding event? A private financing? An IPO? How much runway does the company have before it needs more money and what kind of funding is in place to execute against the category strategy?
- Step Three: Workshop
- Workshop with the CEO and leadership team for a full day. Half educational and half engaged discussion and debate
- Topics to be tackled in order:
- Who are the customers?
- Who are you addressing now and who do you really want to address?
- Who are they? What do they do? Why might they want your shit?
- What's the problem they don't yet know they have or can't yet solve?
- How do you frame your insight from the customer's point of view?
- What would make them have the same aha you had?
- What are the from/tos?
- Once you identify the problem, what's the solution?
- What's the journey customers need to take to reject an old way of doing things and embrace your new way of doing things?
- What's the new 'thing'?
- What is the new thing that every person or company has to have to make that journey?
- Origami identified 'marketing signals.' Airbnb identified 'community-driven hospitality.' Les Paul identified 'electric guitar'
- What's your new thing that never existed before but that your customers will feel they must have?
- Twos: remember *things*
- Step Four: Name That Category
- Talk about words that would describe the category, and what kind of impact those words would have on the customers you want to influence
- Keep it simple, powerful, clear, and different
- The words shouldn't describe your specific product—they should describe the category of product you make
- The product you make should be the unique solution to the problem the category identifies
- Play with combinations of two to three words
- Step Five: Package the Work
> Create a category design document:
- Category Landscape—what the category you create would look like and where it fits.
- Category Ecosystem—the customers, competitors, developers, suppliers, analysts, media, and everyone else who would plug into the category.
- Frotos—the from/to journey you want customers to take.
- Category Name and Description—the final version.
- The Case for the New Category—write out why the category should exist and what the world will look like if the company creates and dominates the category.
- Early Draft Game Plan—a sketch of how the company can create and dominate the category.
- Usually takes many drafts to get right
- Watch out for the 'Zed': the person who seems intent on derailing the whole process
- It is imperative in the current era to become a category king
- When pitching a venture capitalist, entrepreneurs get funding when they craft a great story
- Raw information reaches us on an intellectual level, but stories reach into our hearts and our pants
- Decades of brain research have demonstrated that stories have a more lasting impact than facts
- A POV tells the worlds you're a company on a mission, not a missionary company looking to make money any way it can. It frames the new problem that your category identifies, and sets you up as the answer
- When someone can articulate your problem, you believe that person must have the solution
- The story leads potential customers on their from/to journey, so they understand both what is missing and why your company can fix that problem
- No one remembers what you say, but they remember how you made them feel. That feeling can be excitement about something that's coming, or fear of missing out
- To reach people's emotions, a POV has to sound the way people talk. It has to be simple, direct, visceral
- The story about your business is more important than the facts about your business
- The POV tells the world why this category and the company creating it are different. Different forces a choice between what was and what can be
- Once you establish your initial category, you will need to continue to expand into new markets
- Back in 2008, when Twitter first exploded onto the scene, Kevin interviewed cofounder Ev Williams onstage at a Churchill Club event in Silicon Valley, and asked Williams how he’d describe the vision and strategy of Twitter. “I have a sense for what will take off and why and it’s mostly gut so I’m not good at articulating it necessarily,” Williams responded. “Jack [Dorsey] and Biz [Stone], my other cofounders, have always had grand visions for Twitter. There’s a shared sense in the company that we’re connecting people and we hear daily how we’re changing how people communicate. It’s sort of something we feel through osmosis.” Translation: We have no POV. We have no strategy. We’re watching what our users do and just winging it. (And, by the way, that’s been the perception of Twitter ever since.) Twitter got lucky. It created the right thing at the right moment and won the lottery. You, too, can hope you get lucky. We’re saying that developing a POV is another important step toward improving your odds of success. It’s a way to improve the chances that your initial insight will turn into a company, product, and category that matter.
- Tableau's POV: It's business analytics software for people who are merely curious or bright and want to see and understand data
- A great POV is not just the right story—it's the right story for its time
- If the POV sits too much in the present, then at best it’s not very exciting, and at worst it makes you seem like a me-too copycat. Cast the POV too far forward ahead of the technology and your team can struggle to make a product that lives up to the promise, while your external audience either isn’t ready for your vision or flat-out doesn’t believe it
- It is very important for founders and CEO to write their POV down
- In as few words as possible, it should lay out the problem and its ramifications, describe a vision for the category, sketch a blueprint for how to build the category, and paint a picture of potential outcomes
- The story simply and clearly defines the problem and creates a “thing” that people will feel they must have. That thing is not your company per se—it’s the category offering! Your company first needs its potential market to say, “We gotta get that thing!” Once people decide they need it, your company stands a good chance of winning those customers as long as it builds a product that solves the problem well enough. If analysts, journalists, and bloggers understand the category story, they too will describe this new thing, and describe it in the way your company describes it—which is tied back to the way your company can solve the problem.
- “You’ll attract the employees you need if you can explain why your mission is compelling: not why it’s important in general, but why you’re doing something important that no one else is going to get done.” - Peter Thiel
- The integrity of your software is the integrity of your business
> The Play Bigger Guide to Point of View Discovery and Expression
- Step One: Who?
- The same person who does the work of category discovery and expression
- Step Two: Fact Finding
- Use the same research from the category discovery and expression, but dive into strategic and cultural questions
- How is the company and product different?
- The POV needs to be different, not better
- Which differences strike a chord with which audiences?
- How this company will create the product or service that solves the category's problem
- How will you get there?
- What's the roadmap for achieving the vision?
- What's the roadmap for getting to different?
- The envisioned ultimate outcome
- If the company is successful, what will the world look like?
- How will it be changed?
- The nature of the company
- What is your company's culture?
- What kinds of people lead it?
- What image does it want with the public and in the media?
- The POV needs to be as much emotional as it is factual
- Step Three: Agree on the Problem
- Figure out your category's problem, and find a way to say it in a way that touches people's emotions
- Step Four: Craft a Story, Rinse, Repeat
- In a limited number of powerful words, the POV should lay out the problem and its ramifications, describe a vision for the category, sketch a blueprint for how to build the category, and paint a picture of potential outcomes
- Set up the problem with a dramatic flourish, then describe the solution
- The bigger, more urgent, and more strategic the perceived problem is, the more time, attention, and money people will spend to solve it
- At the end of the POV, simply describe your company’s particular solution in a broad, visionary way. At no point should a POV get into product features
- Keep it simple. Use human words, not business or technology words. Keep sentences and phrases short. Be provocative. Think movie trailer!
- Make it emotional. Make people feel they must have this. Make them fear not having it
- Paint a vision for the future. This vision will give the audience a sense of where you are going and why they should ride along with you. The vision will also guide the company, its strategy, and its culture. The vision will create a shared sense of mission for employees, customers, partners, investors, and everyone else in the ecosystem
- Inject the POV with the company's personality
- Step Five: Distribute, Evangelize, Mobilize
- The things the customers ask for rarely line up with the true north originally set by the CEO. Instead of working on true north, engineers increasingly find themselves working on customer requests, and customers generally ask for something better, not different
- It can happen very publicly for consumer companies, as the gravity-inducing requests and criticisms pour out into social media. These forces are the beginning of gravity dragging the product and company away from true north. Pull the product a little off course now and it will continue to veer wildly away from true north over time
- A lightning strike is an event meant to explode onto the market, grab the attention of customers, investors, analysts, and media, and make any potential competitors crap their drawers
- Other tasks that have to get done in the run-up to the strike include creating new sales decks; writing and producing the lightning strike press materials; updating the brand so it lines up with the POV; preparing analysts so they understand the use cases, company, and category strategy; nailing the growth hacking approaches required to drive digital metrics; and readying the company website so it reflects the POV and takes full advantage of the strike
> 4 documents for category creation
- Category blueprint
- A design for how the product or service will work going forward
- Tell customers what they can expect the category king to deliver
- It's a vision of a category that the company wants to bring into existence
- The company that best describes the category has the best odds of owning it
- Product taxonomy
- Sit down and think about the current product through the lens of the blueprint
- See what's missing, misrepresented, or packaged wrongly
- Maybe you need to pull out features that were buried inside the overall product and give those pieces new names
- Maybe you need to split the product into pieces and re-label and re-price them, or put pieces together in a new way
- Use cases
- If the category develops the way you're designing it, how will customers use your product?
- What's the new problem and how will you solve it?
- What is that from/to journey you want to take users through?
- What's the ultimate benefit?
- The more the use cases can be specific and detailed, the easier it will be for marketing and sales to be effective
- Category ecosystem
- No company exists in a vacuum
> The Play Bigger Guide to Mobilization
- Step One: Who?
- The CEO is the only one who can believe in the category design plan, evangelize it throughout the company and ecosystem, and stick by it when the shit gets real
- The lightning strike master control should not be the CEO, it can be anyone from the leadership team—a CMO, CTO, CFO, etc. who will track the entire process and all dependencies, and sound the alarm when something goes awry
- Step Two: Set the Lightning Strike in Motion
- After adopting the POV, plot a date three to six months out for a lightning strike
- Look for an event to hijack
- Decide what the strike will deliver
- Who will be targeted?
- What are the from/tos for each target?
- What will be unveiled that day, and how?
- Step Three: Mobilize Everyone
- Decide what every part of the company has to do to make it happen
- Every single employee needs to know their role
- Step Four: Draw Up the Four Seminal Mobilization Documents
- Use visuals to paint a picture of what the category will look like once you become the category king and solve the problem that the category raises
- Show it in a way that proves to investors, customers, and competitors that you've thoroughly thought this through and already know how to do it
- Step Five: See If the Suit Fits
- The CEO needs to be critical, self-aware enough to know whether they can pull off a category king strategy
- Measure the company's capabilities next to the POV and see if they fit
- If the suit is too big, scale back the vision captured in the POV
- Step Six: Watch for Trouble
- Watch out for Zeds not doing what they need to do, people not knowing the critical deadlines, the CEO not providing strike updates, the board of directors not understanding they are investing in a strike rather than 'marketing', and sales people saying customers don't like the message
- As CEO, double down on evangelizing the category strategy - Step Seven: Getter Done
- The stresses will increase the faster you go and the closer you get, until it seems like the whole thing is going to blow. Keep going. Keep working. Improvise where you have to. Believe the strike will begin to bend the universe in your direction
- Sensity, the Light Sensory Network or LSN category king planned to launch their lightning strike at the annual Lightfair International convention in Philadelphia but ended up launching after the Bostom Marathon bombing
- A great lightning strike is a category-defining event that evangelizes a new problem or an old problem, that can be solved in a new way. It tells the world that this company knows how to define the problem and knows how to solve it
- 'The beginning of a new generation, not only of computers, but of their applications in business, science, and government.' - Thomas Watson Jr., IBM CEO
- Get the target audience to think: 'That company understands my problem better than any other, and must have the solution.'
- The simple argument for a lightning strike is to cut through the noise and get into people's brains
- For the lightning strike, you have to start by precisely identifying the target and the desired outcome, and work back from there
- Sensity didn't aim to sell lights to technologists—it wanted to sell technology to lighting people
- They wanted to make lighting people start thinking that dumb lights were a problem—or at least a waste of resources—and that LSN was the most powerful, thought-through solution
- A strike can't be expected to hit every possible audience all at once. Better to hit the right audience—including the right accounts, analysts, influencers, and press—at the right time to produce an outcome that sets the Experience Curve in motion
- Pull out a calendar and see where your audience might be in three to six months for planning
- Too big of a convention like the Consumer Electronics Show runs the risk of getting lost in the noise
- Your target audience won't turn out for a glorified commercial, but they will turn out for good content, high-level networking—and an open bar
- 'Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.' It was pitching different, not better. It would focus on the long term and take crazy chances
- The content of the strike has two requirements:
1. The content has to be big, bold, and different enough to cut through the noise and reach the brains to the target audience
- It can be an engaging superstar speaker, saying something no one has heard before (like a company saying it won't be evil), demonstrating a product that takes people's breath away (an iPhone)
- If there's any debate, lean toward playing bigger and bolder
2. The content must evangelize the category problem first and your product or service second
- Identify the problem that can be solved, and then help your audience come to the same aha you had about how to solve it
- Take them on a journey from what they know now, to how things can be if they adopt your solution
- If you lead with your solution and the audience doesn't yet understand the problem, whatever you say will bounce off their brains and land with a clunk on the floor
- The problem is the key that unlocks your target audience's mind
- The event has to match the content and audience, or else the message will be lost
- 'The event is the message. Ensure that every decision you make—from venue to food to speakers—reflects well on your business and conveys your message' - Mark Benioff, Salesforce CEO
- Think of teasing events, thunderclaps, to prime the audience and make the lightning strike effective
- Smart companies don't waste time and money on pointless vanilla, overly polite public relations. They go for PR that is opportunistic and edgy
- After the lightning strike, hijack other stories every 3-6 months to remind customers and competitors about the category, the problem you've defined, and the solution you're offering
> The Play Bigger Guide to Strikes, Hijacks, and Attention Grabbing
- Step One: Who?
- The whole mobilization process should be led by a strike master controller, who coordinates all the mobilization that has to come together on the day of the strike
- This person should have strong cross-functional skills, be detail oriented, love spreadsheets, and have the respect of the CEO
- Someone who can get shit done and is not afraid to be a pirate
- Step Two: Plan the Big Strike
- Set deadlines, set expectations for what will happen at the strike, and agree on the outcomes that are the goals of the strike
- Meet weekly to go over the status with department heads
- Step Three: Plan the Event
- Part of this job is event planning—get the venue right, set the tone, get butts in seats, make sure things run smoothly
- Step Four: Codify the Documents
- The POV should drive the website content and experience
- The POV, taxonomy, and blueprint all go into sales presentations and training boot camps
- Press releases must communicate the POV and content of the lightning strike
- Step Five: Go Time
- Everything should be planned and executed so that last-minute news events can be absorbed or hijacked
- You should feel confident that all will go smoothly, or even better than expected
- Step Six: Evaluate and Keep Going
- Take a look at all of thee results. Be honest. What worked? What didn't? Why?
- Look for the dent in the universe and keep pounding
- Reward your team with time and money, then get them back in the field and keep rolling
- When category potential, position in the category, and execution all come together in investors' minds, they see the future and want a piece of it
- The only way Google will be weakened is if a new category of search emerges that makes the old category seem outmoded
- The POV has to be tailored so that the ambitions of the company fit with its capabilities; otherwise the company won't be able to execute and its disappointing performance will scare off investors
- Outside developers are a critical element of most technology ecosystems, and they have a huge impact on the flywheel. They build add-ons and plug-ins and tangential products that extend far beyond any one company’s reach
- The best people want to work for a king. They know when a company is going to change thee way we do things, create new career opportunities, and compensate them well
- A flywheel can be the most powerful force in business. Get it started by employing category design. Guide it with a POV. Power it with lightning strikes and mobilizations. Grow it by expanding the category potential. Do all of that, and a company will increase its odds of becoming not just a category king, but a legendary category king that alters everyday life and work
- “When you get started as a college student you limit your scope. It’s like, ‘I’m going to build this thing for the community around me.’ Then it’s ‘I’m going to build this service for people on the Internet.’ But at some point you get to a scale where you decide we can actually solve these bigger problems that will shape the world over the next decade.” - Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO
- Over and over, Facebook has played bigger, redesigning its category, product, and company in synch with one another to expand its category potential
- A company's value is based on its category potential
- Google started as a simple search engine. It soon redefined the company’s POV to say it was “organizing the world’s information.” That in turn expanded Google’s category potential—the more kinds of information Google could organize beyond just what was on Web pages, the more users it could address. So Google digitized books, built out Google Maps, introduced Gmail, bought Picassa for photos, and bought YouTube for video, each time bringing into the mix a new kind of information the company could organize
- A category is a problem to be solved in a new way, and once the public sees that problem, they can’t unsee it. There is no way to unring a bell. The market will demand a solution. If you define that category and disappoint the market for any reason—you don’t have the resources or wherewithal or whatever to become its king—then the market will look for a different king
- This is why the old saw about “first-mover advantage” is mostly bullshit. The first mover has an advantage only if the first mover has the wherewithal to become king and deliver on its promises
- Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan #book
- Listening to customers leads you to constantly build better, but never to build different. And different is what creates new categories
- Listen to customers so that you understand what the root problem is rather than just doing the solution, because if we just do what we’re told, they wouldn’t need us, and if they didn’t need us, we wouldn’t be able to generate the kind of profitability and competitive advantage that it takes to define a category
- The larger lesson from Amazon is the way CEO Jeff Bezos built a culture that encourages category creation. He conditioned investors from early on to expect Amazon to fund category creation at the expense of profits
- In the 1997 shareholder letter Jeff Bezos wrote they were going to be bold their their experiments and some of them weren't going to work
- If you’re the CEO and want to become a daring category designer, you’re going to need your shareholders’ support—or a new set of shareholders
- Invest in knowledge and skills over time, whether that’s through R&D (Corning) or hiring new kinds of employees (Amazon), then use such knowledge to pounce on category creation opportunities when they arise
- Putting yourself through a POV exercise can be incredibly clarifying. How do you define who you are and what you want to mean to the world? How do you want people to see you? What’s the problem you can solve, and your way of solving it? Write it down and hone it until it sounds like a presentation—so that if you had ten minutes to sell yourself, you could go through your POV and anyone would grok you. Your POV defines what type of person you are, what makes you different, and why people should care. And if you live your POV, it will attract the right people into your life, and repel the wrong people from your life
- Deadlines make things happen
> Play Bigger key takeaways
- The most exciting companies sell us different, not better
- The goal of the smartest pirates, dreamers, and innovators is creation, not disruption
- Winning companies market the problem, not just the solution
- Once people can see the problem, they can't unsee it
- People look for ways to make fewer choices in the face of more choices
- Your number one job is to change the way people think. Your product, your company culture, your marketing—everything has to be aligned with transforming the way potential customers think. If you change the way they think, they will change their buying behavior. If you are the company that changes the way people think, people will see your company as the category king, and you will win the majority of the customers
- A great new category is one that solves a problem people didn’t know they had, or solves an obvious problem no one thought could be solved
- Raw information reaches us on an intellectual level, but stories reach into our hearts and our pants
- Decades of brain research have demonstrated that stories have a more lasting impact than facts
- When someone can articulate your problem, you believe that person must have the solution
- The story leads potential customers on their from/to journey, so they understand both what is missing and why your company can fix that problem
- No one remembers what you say, but they remember how you made them feel. That feeling can be excitement about something that's coming, or fear of missing out
- The story simply and clearly defines the problem and creates a “thing” that people will feel they must have
- If analysts, journalists, and bloggers understand the category story, they too will describe this new thing, and describe it in the way your company describes it
- “You’ll attract the employees you need if you can explain why your mission is compelling: not why it’s important in general, but why you’re doing something important that no one else is going to get done.” - Peter Thiel
- In a limited number of powerful words, the POV should lay out the problem and its ramifications, describe a vision for the category, sketch a blueprint for how to build the category, and paint a picture of potential outcomes
- At the end of the POV, simply describe your company’s particular solution in a broad, visionary way. At no point should a POV get into product features
- Keep it simple. Use human words, not business or technology words. Keep sentences and phrases short. Be provocative. Think movie trailer!
- The bigger, more urgent, and more strategic the perceived problem is, the more time, attention, and money people will spend to solve it
- The things the customers ask for rarely line up with the true north originally set by the CEO. Instead of working on true north, engineers increasingly find themselves working on customer requests, and customers generally ask for something better, not different
- It can happen very publicly for consumer companies, as the gravity-inducing requests and criticisms pour out into social media. These forces are the beginning of gravity dragging the product and company away from true north. Pull the product a little off course now and it will continue to veer wildly away from true north over time
- Content must evangelize the category problem first and your product second
- Take them on a journey from what they know now, to how things can be if they adopt your solution
- Smart companies don't waste time and money on pointless vanilla, overly polite public relations. They go for PR that is opportunistic and edgy
- A company's value is based on its category potential
- Listening to customers leads you to constantly build better, but never to build different. And different is what creates new categories
#SharedFromTwos ✌️