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Stakeholder demotion usually begins once a company receives outside funding as
customer satisfaction becomes secondary to investor satisfaction (ROI).
#13: IMPROVEMENT (AND REMOVEMENT)
Few know that Thomas Edison didn't invent the light bulb—he merely
improved it by using a carbonized bamboo filament which increased its
illumination duration, ultimately making the light bulb commercially viable.
And so it goes with the theme of most needs: Something is simply improved or
changed.
Improvement is the muscle behind the Commandment of Need like iron to a
workout. Improve something, effectively communicate it, and you will be
needed.
Look, this isn’t rocket science.
E.L. James took Prince Charming and gave him a helicopter, a billion dollars,
and a sex room full of sadistic playthings, and bam,
Fifty Shades of Grey
. The
Cinderella
“rich guy sweeping you off your feet” archetype isn’t exactly a novelty
—but add a BDSM fetish, whips, and a trapeze hanging from the ceiling and
suddenly the media wets its panties.
Sara Blakely, required to wear pantyhose in the hot Floridian sun for her sales
position, modified hosiery by removing the stocking toes and improved both its
comfort and functionality. Several years later, she’s the world’s newest billionaire.
When Drew Houston couldn’t find any reasonable storage solutions that
seamlessly integrated with his files, he founded Dropbox.
100
These worldly modifications don’t take a PhD in chemistry or a rich uncle;
they take persistence, vision, and the cinch to the pinch—a product that people
want.
Improvement’s counterpart is removement. Removement is when your
product removes or subtracts something, becoming differentiated. It is addition
by subtraction, whereas the subtraction is the removal of something while the
addition happens within your value skew.
For instance, I’ve been working out for years and taking nutritional
supplements to support my fitness. Unfortunately, in the fitness world lies the
greatest hypocrisy of health: Most supplements are loaded with artificial colors
and flavors—Sucralose, Aspartame, Red 40, Cancer 80, or whatever else sweetens
the offer. Up until recently, it has been virtually impossible to find fitness
supplements that were both naturally sweetened/colored and didn’t taste like a
bag of chalk.
Removement solves this challenge by eliminating the artificial ingredients. In
turn, the value skew is improved. Fitness buffs who don’t trust chemical
shitstorms now have a product to trust.
Opportunities to remove features, ingredients, and hassles are opportunities
to gain competitive advantages. Removement can occur in any industry but is
most common in food processing. For example, if you owned the only product
on the market that was Paleo focused or gluten-free, you would skew value and
create a nice little market differentiation for yourself.
As consumer preferences change over time, removement opportunities
appear if you just listen to them. From “GMO-free” ingredients in foods to
“paraben-free” in skin conditioners to “animal-free testing” in cosmetics—
consumers demand LESS just as much as they demand MORE.
WHY YOUR BEST BET AT FINDING A NEED MIGHT BE THE WORST
Your best bet at uncovering a great idea and paving your
UNSCRIPTED
path
comes from the worst thing an entrepreneur wants to do:
get a damn job
.
You see, the biggest roadblock to finding legitimate ideas isn’t your
insensitivity to the concepts of needs/wants but a lack of experience—both in life
and at the workplace. The fact is, most new businesses spawn from the founder’s
domain experience.
Domain experience is any activity or industry you are
intimately familiar with.
For example, if you spent the last five years working at a mattress store as a
manager, you would have serious domain experience in the business of bedding.
If you’re on the water every single weekend, fishing or sailing, you have domain
experience in those realms. Likewise, I ran a limousine company for several
years, which gave me intimate knowledge about the nuances and inner workings
of the industry. That domain experience led me to a great opportunity that
spanned a decade. Similarly, I now own a publishing company and run a heavily
trafficked forum. Both experiences have given me the aptitude to again spot a
cornucopia of potential ideas in those fields.
A common theme in many successful entrepreneurial backstories is a need
discovered while working a job: an employee suffers a problem or an unfilled
need and decides to solve it. These successes always start the same: “I was
working over at ACME Company and I noticed that there was a
NEED/PROBLEM for XYZ and decided to solve it.”
Unfortunately, many aspiring entrepreneurs remain aspiring for one simple
fact: They refuse to acquire domain experience—namely, job experience. And in
doing so, they isolate themselves from opportunity. If you’re not getting out of
the house and encountering life, you won’t encounter life’s problems.
Opportunity doesn’t ring doorbells and it certainly doesn't wait for "someday."
SOLUTION SELLING: SKIPPING DOMAIN EXPERIENCE
Don’t have time for domain experience? Then ask the people who do. Every
so often, a drive-by user posts this generic question at my forum: “What do you
guys need help with most in your business?”
The question is perturbing because my forum entrepreneurs know what’s
happening. The questioner is circumventing domain experience and probing for
problems, looking for opportunities. This practice, asking an audience about
their problems, is called
solution selling
.
Solution selling is particularly popular in many entrepreneurial academies. It
involves cold-calling professionals in a particular industry and explicitly asking
them about their problems, for example, asking fifty dentists, “In your practice,
what problems or frustrations do you experience most?” From there, a solution is
evaluated to fix the expressed problem. Or you could attend any industry’s trade
convention and keep your eyes and ears peeled for the language of opportunity.
While solution selling shortcuts into industry needs, it plays second fiddle to
real domain experience. During my ten-year stint operating an Internet
company, I always knew which new competitors had domain experience and
which did not—the ones without insider experience struggled.
Getting a job and being responsible is never failure. When you identify as an
entrepreneur, a job is simply a means to an end, a part of your unfolding story.
If experience and money were no concern, what needs and wants would you pursue?
And is experience and money really an obstacle, or just one of the 3Bs?
CHAPTER 36
THE COMMANDMENT OF TIME:
EARN MORE THAN MONEY,
EARN TIME
Don’t stay in bed, unless you can make money in bed.
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