This Is Marketing: You Cant Be Seen Until You Learn to See

The simple marketing promise
Here’s a template, a three-sentence marketing promise you can run with:
My product is for people who believe _________________.
I will focus on people who want _________________.
I promise that engaging with what I make will help you get
_________________.
And you thought that all you were here to do was sell soap.
Case Study: The Open Heart Project
Susan Piver was a respected teacher of meditation. She had written a New
York Times best-selling book, and her classes were well attended. She, like
many before her, had a practice and a small following.
What she found, though, was that after a retreat, people from out of town
would ask, “How do we find a local teacher we can connect with to
continue our practice?”
To meet this need, she decided to build an online meditation center, a
sangha.
A few years later, the sangha has more than twenty thousand members.
Most of them get periodic updates and video lessons, and pay nothing for
the interactions. Some, though, are more deeply connected. They pay a
subscription fee and engage with their teacher (and with each other) as
often as every day.
How did she get to twenty thousand? Not in one fell swoop. In thousands
of small swoops.
After just a few years, this small project has become the largest
meditation community in the world. With just one full-time staff member, it
connects and inspires thousands of people.
There are countless meditation instructors in the United States, all of
whom have access to a laptop as connected to the world as Susan’s is. How
did the Open Heart Project make such an impact?

---

1. Start with empathy to see a real need. Not an invented one, not
“How can I start a business?” but, “What would matter here?”
2. Focus on the smallest viable market: “How few people could find
this indispensable and still make it worth doing?”
3. Match the worldview of the people being served. Show up in the
world with a story that they want to hear, told in a language they’re
eager to understand.
4. Make it easy to spread. If every member brings in one more
member, within a few years, you’ll have more members than you
can count.
5. Earn, and keep, the attention and trust of those you serve.
6. Offer ways to go deeper. Instead of looking for members for your
work, look for ways to do work for your members.
7. At every step along the way, create and relieve tension as people
progress in their journeys toward their goals.
8. Show up, often. Do it with humility, and focus on the parts that
work.

---