Calls from entrepreneurs the past four weeks have been about "What must I do to make my startup so good that it attracts the missing money and people that I desparately require?"
As I reflected on our discussions, I realized their needs and my suggestions had formed a pattern, a kind of recipe for cooking up a tantilizing dish.
Here are the main ingredients:
- "Do one thing better than anyone in the world."
- "One thing" means FOCUS. It is not many things to many people. Focus brings clarity, many brings confusion.
- "Better than anyone in the world" means your thing stands out, is distinguished, respected and talked and blogged about by a lot of people. You get credit for "the best" while your competitors look on with envy. There is no "me too" nor is there "better, faster, cheaper" words that signal that you unfortunately have an "undistinguished" and "commodity" product.
- "Your thing has to have WOW!" You have to trigger emotions. Your thing has to have the stuff that makes the user's eyes pop open, hands grab for the thing, start riots in Beijing. It is the stuff that triggers adrenaline. Immediately wild words start flying over the Internet. Otherwise your thing is boring. Boring means death for a new enterprise. WOW! is what feeds the fire.
Put that together and you have what will stimulate outsiders, including investors and talented people, as well as bloggers who will spread the word (eagerly, without cost to you).
That is what entrepreneurial product marketing is all about.
When you can do that, you have a winner on your hands.
BOTTOM LINE: What do you need to attract the missing resources you desperately need in your new enterprise (e.g. money and people and lots of buzz)? You need a product/service that is the best of its kind in the world and which excites users to inflammatory heights. That is what Marketing is to deliver for your startup. It is about doing ONE THING BETTER THAN ANYONE IN THE WORLD with a product that is so exciting to users that upon first sight of it they gasp WOW! When you do that, you are well on your way to creating an unfair competitive advantage.
I wish you The Best on your Adventure!
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