Archive of posts from January 2024

I built my first products at 11…

Lost in craft, losing track of time.

And you know what?

Being free of adult worries helped me make waves.

As an adult, I try to do the same: Before work, I let go of ‘adult stuff’ and go into that same zone.

Not easy, but it’s a superpower.

How to be bigger than attention:

• Discovery (seen in places of meaning) – Attention (shouting for algos)

• Here (for people like us) – Everywhere (for everyone)

• Long-term (grow relational equity) – Short-term (burn relational equity)

Loudest isn’t best.

Closest is best.

Warning:

‘Influencer’ today… ‘Used-car salesman’ tomorrow.

Remember:

HOW people discover you is as important as IF people discover you.

Consistency is…

• Switching it up because you don’t feel sure it’s right
• Taking a few days off because you need to recharge
• Missing a day because something important came up
• Wondering if this is what consistency looks like
• Taking two steps forward and one step back

…and then getting straight back to it.

If you want social post engagement, engage with people who want to engage.

If you want social sales, sell to people who want to buy.

If you want social follows, follow people who like to follow.

If you want people to watch your videos, put them where people watch videos.

If you want people to buy your course, offer it in places course buyers are.

Is that over-simplifying it?

What if you’ve been over-complicating git?

I thought I was about to get my butt kicked.

The school bully approached me in the corridor and grunted, “Adam, meet me here at lunch.”

A fight’d scupper my plans of selling more of my games on the playground…

But stubbornness won. I showed up, adrenaline up, fists tight, wondering what my mother would say if I arrived home with a bloody nose.

Then he showed up. “Adam we need to talk.”

I figured he was secretly into anime or something, as fighting tends not to involve much talking in real life.

“I absolutely love this game and we need to plan more tournaments.”

I’m sorry, what?

Even the bruisers were playing my games now.

20 years later, I still remember the feeling: golly, with enough rotations, anything can spread like wildfire!

I go into the marketing lessons learned in more detail in this week’s issue of The Productoon Newsletter. Check it out!

Many brands feel entitled to market share.

But if you play safe, you deserve to lose it.

Here’s why:

• No innovation? Customers miss better options
• No brave ideas? Markets don’t progress
• Copying competitors? You add nothing

So, skip expecting expansion. Be brave: desirable content, elevated experience, stickier product.

What do you think?

I made edutainment for >20 years.

My secret sauce is asking + pitching.

I don’t:

• wait for genius to strike
• build alone in a dark room
• force my own agenda

Instead I:

• interview customers
• pitch ideas before making them
• build the winners in high-quality

Remembering who you’re creating for forces positive results.

I dare to be bold with your brand.

• Your social content
• Your advertising
• Your landing pages
• Your product onboarding

People will either:

• Love you (customers)
• Hate you (not your people)
• Follow you (fans)
• Ignore you (they already are)

Feeling bold yet?

Step 1: Spend time in your customers’ world daily.

Step 2: Ideate ways to make things they would LOVE.

Step 3: Pitch your best ideas to them, get feedback.

Step 4: Add their feedback. They know them best.

Step 5: Create the best idea. Give it to them. Let it lead ethically toward your product if they want more.

Result:

You’ve made something you know for certain they’ll love (thanks to step 2–5), and given it to them as a peer and comrade (thanks to step 1).

This is edutainment. This is something they’ll look forward to.

If that doesn’t transform your product business, you need a new product!

Your brand is like a bank account.

Here’s why:

A good brand has:

• A positive balance
• More deposits than withdrawals

A bad brand has:

• Overdrawn relational credit
• More withdrawals than deposits

What kind of balance does yours have?

And are you building for compound interest?

Marketing’s evolved.

It’s no longer for selling:

Marketing to Sell results in ‘Skip Ad’. Marketing to Edutain invites a ‘Subscribe’.

Which is your style?

You’ll be rewarded for 1 of 2 things (choose wisely).

1. Attendance (Grind daily with marginalised work).

2. Excellence (Evergreen ubiquity others are drawn to).

Which is it to be?

Y’know what’s hard… but unlocks everything?

Consistently writing.

Consistently producing.

Consistently listening.

Consistently iterating.

Consistently building.

Consistently putting in the reps.

Consistency is hard. But it unlocks everything.

What people think edutainment is:

• Take existing content
• Add jokes and memes
• Pat yourself on back

What edutainment actually is:

• Deeply understand topic
• Integrate with niche culture
• Pat audience on back

Make their day and they’ll make yours.

Great content marketing needs great cultural understanding.

…Which naturally leads many businesses to start on the wrong path:

Customer segmentation.

But wait, isn’t audience segmentation a good thing?

Sure, but only if the right people do the segmenting.

You don’t need stereotypes or segments. Users already segmented themselves.

To you, it’s ‘segments’. To them, it’s ‘culture’.

Get to know them. The cultural and communal ‘segments’ will reveal themselves, nuances and nuances will become apparent, and users will thoroughly enjoy talking about them.

All the customer data you need will flow to you, if you just ask.

You’ll be rewarded for 1 of 2 things (choose wisely):

1. Attendance (Grind daily with marginalised work)

2. Excellence (Evergreen ubiquity others are drawn to)

Which is it to be?

You know what the market is desperate for?

Go on, have a guess.

Wrong!

It’s not that.

It’s people with Shokunin Kishitsu.

It may sound like a mecha anime… but it’s even cooler:

It means “craftsman spirit”.

Markets are flooded with ambitious upstarts eager to generate Big Fast Bucks™️ by building an audience around a skill, then delegating it away to cheap labour. But this contributes nothing of worth to society. It’s eBay flipping and ticket scalping meets entrepreneurship.

What people are desperate for, is shokunins:

• Those who commit themselves to their craft with relentless focus.
• Those who continually refine their work and elevate what’s possible.
• Those who create exquisite things that become category of one.
• Those who do their best for the honour and satisfaction of a job well done.
• Those who take a fiduciary responsibility to do right by their customers.
• Those who move their industry forward with their narrow area of genius.

And there’s good news:

You can do this in practically any field.

I cover this topic in more detail in the latest issue of The Productoon Newsletter. Check it out!

Rather than “sales people” and “account managers”…

We should have:

- Non-customer success managers - Customer success managers

That way, we help everybody win.

And when they’re ready, some will switch sides.

Is the perfect pencil pristine and untouched, or half-length and gnawed from daily use?

Is the perfect laptop still in the box, or dinged with memories and travels?

Is the perfect mug untouched in a cabinet, or cracked and glued from daily use?

Is the perfect wife covered in Prada, or stretch marks from bearing your children?

Is the perfect book concealed in a vault, or dog-eared on your desk from daily study?

Are you pursuing ‘imperfectly perfect’, or ‘perfectly imperfect’?

Jiro Ono teach you a LOT about marketing and brand.

He’s “the best sushi chef in the world.”

He literally dreams about sushi.

What he Didn’t do:

• Open a tourist trap
• Claim to be great
• Pass it off to cheap labour
• Chase big buxx™

What he Did do:

• Became a Shokunin
• Committed to mastery
• Offered something 1:1
• Became a societal good

He didn’t scalp the market with big promises publicly & a dirty secrets privately. (This is more popular than you’d believe.)

Are you building with a craftsman spirit?

Are you a Shokunin?

Y’know what increases your signups?

Put it this way:

Imagine your audience, on a couch, with:

1. A smartphone (w/ your site loaded)
2. Their Switch (w/ a game loaded)

One helps achieve their goals. One is just plain fun.

‘Progress’ and ‘fun’ aren’t the same… Unless you make it so.

If you can be the best of both… Why wouldn’t you?

6 Business Lessons from Games (that apply to most businesses):

1. Enjoy uncertainty, it’s the game.

2. Encourage creativity, it’s how to win.

3. Intrinsic > extrinsic motivations.

4. Failure = learning, just don’t quit.

5. Storytelling moves people.

6. Gamify it and we’ll do anything.

See if you can spot the opportunity…

(65% of businesses can’t):

• 86% of businesses use video for marketing
• 65% of those videos are just “presentations”
• Edutainment market worth 10 Billion by 2025
• 90% of customers discover products on YT
• 88% of customers decided to buy on YT

My takeaways:

• Everyone’s watching.
• The bar is so low.
• There’s no better time to build brand.

Money and Brand are opposites.

Here’s why:

Money’s value is dictated by everyone. Brand’s value is dictated by the owner.

Money rots over time due to inflation. Brand grows over time due to legacy.

Money can be stolen (and frequently is). Brand cannot be stolen.

Money growth gets taxed. Brand enjoys tax-free growth.

Money could die one day. Brand could survive such an event.

To the best of my knowledge, building your own brand / a brand led by those you trust is one of the safest investments you can make.

Build brand.

“Why did the marketer cross the road?”

“To get to the other side!”

Marketing - Branding = chasing MQLs for SDRs to harass.

Marketing + Branding = building community that can’t wait to buy.

Don’t play in traffic.

Be somewhere worth crossing the road for.

When content marketing plans change, content strategy change can feel really, really chaotic.

You’ve got so many things to think about: your content matrix, customer progression-point data, distribution, production… Slow down. It’s fine.

If your customer targeting changed, modify your master notes and refactor them across your schedule. Get a qualitative content pitch in with an inner-circle of customers. Done.

If your content topics/goals changed, modify your content matrix and flow into your new assets with all subsequent production. Done.

If your distribution changed, leverage what you learned from your current platform and blend it with best practices on the new one. The customer didn’t change. Done.

It’s really simple if we let it be!

Marketing best practices are holding you back.

There’s no better example of this than the infamous “Dumb Ways To Die” campaign:

• Their goal: Promote safety
• Best practice: Show ways to be safe
• Opposite: Promote ways to die

Results:

• Over 1M YouTube subs
• Top10 iTunes song
• Popular iOS game
• Millions reached who would NEVER watch a railway safety video

Don’t be limited by best practices.

Instead, practice not being limited.

‘Create content’ is a bad strategy.

Like getting fit by ‘eating food’.

We must be more specific:

• For whom?
• When in their journey?
• What problem does it solve?
• Where does it lead them?
• Why would they love all that?

In 2024, stop thinking about ‘creating content’.

Instead, start ‘helping people on the internet’.

How could that NOT be a great thing?

Big things take time.

With it being the beginning of a new year, it’s usually a time to reflect on your goals for what you’d like to achieve between now and next December.

I’ve felt a little differently about this though lately.

Instead of making another laundry list of goals for the year…

I’ve defined a “100 year plan”.

Bodies of work worth contributing to that I won’t be around to see work out.

I think these bring out the best in us.

For instance, I won’t be here to see my son’s final days. But I’ll sure do my very best to ensure I leave a positive lasting impression on him that he carries through to those days.

There’s no goal of ‘extracting what you can’ with plans like these. They’re not about you at all. They’re simply about doing the right thing, doing your best, and planting trees for others to enjoy in the future.

These are good plans.

They shift your thinking.

Ask yourself: what would you put in your 100 year plan?

And how would you behave differently if you were to make that your focus?

Marketing is asking for a date.

Branding is why they say yes.

Got no branding, or bad branding, or weak or average branding? Or branding that copies your competitors but doesn’t have a personality of its own? You’re going to wind up playing a numbers game but you miss ‘the one’, the ‘keeper’ that stands by you, advocates for you, tells everyone how great you are, helps you work out how to grow, and sticks with you through your mistakes.

No marketing? ‘The one’ never gets to know you even exist. To them, and to you, ‘the one’ starts feeling like a silly pipe-dream, where no one values you or your work, where the best you can hope for is a bleak scattergun hopium strategy of just ‘swiping right’ as much as possible and accepting whatever comes your way.Neither sounds like a great place to be, does it? But do both — great unique branding, great edutaining content, novel digital experiences for those you serve, while also showing up meaningfully and thoughtfully in their feeds and inboxes regularly with things they’re looking forward to?Well then now we’re onto something. I’m painting my studio here so when I bring you “diary” video entries showing you what I’m working on and showing you how to do what I do, we’ll have a great, novel, on-brand environment to share together. The details matter. Brand matters. The effort and the care matters.

So… Marketing? Branding? We need both, friends.And things are a heck of a lot simpler and a whole lot more fun when you have them both, too.