Play Bigger key takeaways
by Parker · 27 things on Twos
- 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
- Create a category design document:
- 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