Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (30 page)

It’s so tempting to seek out more strangers.

More strangers to pitch your business, your candidate, your nonprofit, your blog. Finding more strangers means more upside and not so much downside. It means growth.

The problem is that strangers are difficult to convert. And the other problem is that they’re expensive to reach. And the hardest problem is that we’re running out of strangers.

Consider this hierarchy: Strangers, Friends, Listeners, Customers, Sneezers, Fans, and True Fans. One true fan is worth perhaps 10,000 times as much as a stranger. And yet if you’re in search of strangers, odds are you’re going to mistreat a true fan in order to seduce yet another stranger who probably won’t reward you much.

Let’s say a marketer has $10,000 to spend. Is it better to acquire new customers at $2,000 each (advertising is expensive) or spend $10 a customer to absolutely delight and overwhelm 1,000 true fans?

Or consider a nonprofit looking to generate more donations. Is it better to embrace the core donor base and work with them to host small parties with their friends to spread the word, or would hiring a PR firm to get a bunch of articles placed pay off more efficiently?

Take a look at just about any industry with many competitors—colleges, hotels, sedans, accounting firms (especially accounting firms).

The websites bend over backward to be just like all the others. You can’t identify one hotel website from another if you delete the name of the hotel (unless there’s a beach or a snow-capped mountain in the background).

Sometimes, we try so hard to fit in that we give consumers no choice but to seek out the cheapest. After all, if everything is the same, why not buy what’s cheap and close?

How about a site that says “here’s why we’re different”—and means it?

(Easy to read this and nod your head, but what does your résumé look like?)

1. People don’t like deadlines. They mean a decision, shipping, and risk. They force us to decide.
   
2. Deadlines work. Products that are about to disappear, auctions that are about to end, tickets that are about to sell out—they create forward motion.
   
3. Deadlines make people do dumb things. Every time I offer a free digital document or an educational event that has a deadline, I can guarantee that I will hear from several (or dozens of) people with ornate, well-considered, and thoughtful arguments as to why they missed the deadline. Never mind that they had two weeks; the last fifteen minutes are all they are concerned with. If it’s important enough to spend an hour complaining about, it’s certainly important enough to spend four minutes to just do it in the first place.
   
4. Deadlines give you the opportunity to beat the rush. Handing in work just a little bit early is a surefire way to tell a positive story and get the attention you seek. The chart below tracks the day (out of ten) that I received each of the more than a thousand applications for the free nano MBA program. Want to guess which day’s applications got the most attention from me?
   
5. When we set ourselves a deadline, we’re incredibly lax about sticking to it. So don’t (set it for yourself, in your head, informally). Write it down instead. Hand it to someone else. Publicize it. Associate it with an external reward or punishment. If you don’t make the deadline, your friend gives the $20 you loaned her to a cause you disagree with.
   
6. They have a lousy name. Call them live-lines instead. That’s what they are.
   

Key takeaway: deadlines are a cheap and useful tool to use for yourself (and others) to make a decision and to ship.

Shipping is fraught with risk and danger.

Every time you raise your hand, send an email, launch a product, or make a suggestion, you’re exposing yourself to criticism. Not just criticism, but the negative consequences that come with wasting money, annoying someone in power, or making a fool of yourself.

It’s no wonder we’re afraid to ship.

It’s not clear you have much choice, though. A life spent curled in a ball and hiding in the corner might seem less risky, but in fact it’s certain to lead to ennui and eventually failure.

Since you’re going to ship anyway, then, the question is: Why bother indulging your fear?

In a long-distance race, everyone gets tired. The winner is the runner who figures out
where to put the tired,
figures out how to store it away until after the race is over. Sure, he’s tired. Everyone is. That’s not the point. The point is to run.

Same thing is true for shipping, I think. Everyone is afraid. Where do you put the fear?

… is probably the opposite of “this might work.”

“This better work” is the thinking of safety, of proven, of beyond blame.

“This might work,” on the other hand, is the thinking of art, innovation, and insight.

If you spend all day working on stuff that better work, you back yourself into a corner, because you’ll never have the space or resources to throw some “might” stuff into the mix. On the other hand, if you spend all your time on stuff that might work, you’ll never need to dream up something that better work, because your art will have paid off long ago.

A mass marketer needs to reach the masses, and to do it in many ways, simultaneously. The mass marketer needs retail outlets and fliers and a website and public relations and TV ads and more, more, more, and then … bam … critical mass is reached and success occurs.

Best Buy is a mass marketer, but so are Microsoft and the Red Cross. Ubiquity, once achieved, brings them revenue, which advances the cycle, so they reach scale.

The direct marketer, on the other hand, must get it right in the small. That pitch letter can be tested on 100 houses and if it gets a 2% response rate, then it can be mailed to 100,000 houses with confidence. That business-to-business sales pitch can be honed on one or two or three prospects, and then when it works, it can be taught to dozens or hundreds of other salespeople.

The key distinction is
when
you know it’s going to work. The mass marketer doesn’t know until the end. The direct marketer knows in the beginning.

The mass marketer is betting on thousands of tiny cues, little clues, and unrecorded (but vital) conversations. The direct marketer is measuring conversion rates from the first day.

That’s the reason we often default to acting like mass marketers. We’re putting off the day of reckoning, betting on the miracle around the corner, spending our time and energy on the early steps without the downside of admitting failure to the boss.

Of course, just because it’s our default doesn’t mean it’s right. Business-to-business marketing is almost always better if you treat it like direct marketing. Most websites that buy Google ads and measure conversion confront the truth every day as well.

Same with nonprofit fund-raising. As well as marketing goods and services to the bottom of the pyramid, to people who live in villages where mass media and mass distribution are difficult and have little impact.

Get it right for ten people before you rush around scaling up to
a thousand. It’s far less romantic than spending money at the start, but it’s the reliable, proven way to get to scale if you care enough to do the work.

When a newspaper loses 15% of its readers or 15% of its advertisers, it goes out of business. There are still people who want to read it, still people who want to advertise, but it’s gone.

When a technology company increases its sales by 15%, profits will double. The sales line doesn’t have to increase that much for profits to soar.

It’s so tempting to head for green fields with a new thing, a new market, a new business. But in fact, 15% right here and right now might be exactly what you need.

The only problems you have left are the perfect ones. The imperfect ones, the ones with clearly evident solutions—well, if they were important, you’ve solved them already.

It’s the perfect problems that keep us stuck.

Perfect because they have constraints, unbendable constraints, constraints that keep us trapped. I hate my job, I need this job, there’s no way to quit, to get a promotion, or to get a new boss, no way to move, my family is in town, etc.

We’re human, that’s what we do—we erect boundaries, constraints we can’t ease, and we get trapped.

Or perhaps it’s your product or service or brand. Our factory is only organized to make X, but the market doesn’t want X as much, or there is regulation, or a new competitor is now offering X at half the price and the board won’t do anything, etc.

There’s no way to solve the perfect problem because every solution involves breaking an unbreakable constraint.

And there’s your solution.

The way to solve the perfect problem is to make it imperfect. Don’t just bend one of the constraints, eliminate it. Shut down the factory. Walk away from the job. Change your product completely. Ignore the board.

If the only alternative is slow and painful failure, the way to get unstuck is to blow up a constraint, deal with the pain, and then run forward. Fast.

The cost of being first is higher than it’s ever been.

It’s entirely possible that you’re racing.

Racing to the market with a new product or a news story or a decision or an innovation. The race keeps getting faster, doesn’t it?

If you’re racing, you better figure out what to do about the times that you don’t know for sure, because more and more of your inputs are going to be tenuous, speculative, and possibly wrong. Day traders have always understood this—all they do is trade on uncertainty. But you, too, if you’re racing, are going to have to make decisions on less-than-perfect information.

Given that fact, what are you going to do about it? I think figuring that out is worth a few cycles of your time.

Is it smart to blog on a rumor?

Worth dropping everything and panicking because of a news alert?

Should you hire someone based on information you’re not sure of?

What about changing your website (your pricing, your layout …) based on analytics that might not be absolutely correct? How long are you willing to wait?

Given that you will never know
everything
for sure (unless you’re opting out of the race), some of the issues are:

• What’s the cost of waiting one more day?
  
• Are you waiting (or not waiting) because of the cost of being wrong, or because loud people are yelling at you?
  
• Is the risk of being wrong unreasonably amplified by part of the market or your team? What if you ignore them and focus on customers that matter?
  
• And have you thought about the costs of waiting
  too
  long? If you don’t, you’ll probably end up last.
  

Have you noticed how often stock analysts quoted in the news are wrong? Wrong about new products, wrong about management decisions, wrong about the future of a company? In fact, they’re almost always first and almost always wrong.

Rule of thumb: being first helps in the short run. Being a little more right than the masses ultimately pays off in the long run. Being last is the worst of all three.

A few people care a lot about scoops. Most of us, though, care about alert people making insightful decisions. Decide whom you’re trying to please, and then ship.

The number-one reason people give me for giving up on something great is, “someone else is already doing that.”

Or, parsed another way, “my idea is not brand new.” Or even, “Oh, no, now we’ll have competition.”

Two big pieces of news for you:

1. Competition validates you. It creates a category. It permits the sale to be “this or that,” not “yes or no.” And “this or that” is a much easier sale to make. Competition also makes decisions about pricing easier because you have someone to compare against and lean on.
   
2. There are six billion people in the world. Even if your market is handmade spoke shaves for left-handed woodworkers, there are more people in your market than you can ever hope to track down.
   

There are lots of good reasons to abandon a project. Having a little competition is not one of them. Even if it’s Google you’re up against.

Philip Crosby wrote a seminal book (
Quality Is Free
) in which he argued that it’s cheaper to build things right the first time than it is to fix them later. Obvious now, but heresy in Detroit in 1980. Quality quickly became not just a better way to manufacture, but a marketing benefit as well. Not only was quality cheaper to make, but it was cheaper to sell.

I’m struck by the thought that we need a new book—call it
Efficiency Is Free
.

It’s cheaper to build carpets that don’t create poison gas than it is to do the easy thing and let people suffer later. It’s cheaper to build an eight-passenger car that gets 30 miles per gallon than it is to suffer the consequences of the 12-mile-per-gallon Suburban. It’s cheaper to design smaller, lighter, and recyclable shipping containers
once
than it is to buy and hassle with billions of foam peanuts in the long run.