The Desert of Arizona
Cloudy 41 Degrees – 6:29 a.m.
One of the biggest challenges we have in business (and life!) is TUNNEL THINKING. We’ve been trained to think and view problems in certain ways.
Much like our eye can only see a limited spectrum of energy, our minds are trained to only see a limited spectrum of thought.
The people who are able to transcend this get a name. We call them exciting thing like innovators and geniuses.
But anyone can do this if you work at it. Most of us have spent decades practicing the other way, so it can take some time and concerted effort.
For example, a lot of businesses want to scale. That word means a lot of things. To most people, it means to “get bigger,” hire people, etc.
While that’s exciting to some people, that word can be applied in other ways as well.
For example, how about “scaling” the size of the problem you solve and/or the number of people for whom you solve the problem without scaling the resources you need?
This presents a constraint. It brings to light an “impossibility” that most people would pass on by.
But this is where the value is hiding. And when you reach a point like that, you can create an answer that makes that “impossibility” the new reality.
Take DistroKid.com for example.
They’ve built a product for musicians that solves the problem of artists getting their music out to the world in a way that’s never been done before.
When your product or service solves a problem better, more comprehensively, with less effort and it does it CHEAPER and truly helps customers or clients win, that’s a recipe for the business to win as well.
So what does THIS type of scaling look like?
In DistroKid’s case, that means:
100,000+ customers… with 3 employees (including the founder)… and zero investors.
When you build something that offers a superior solution, not just one you enhance with slick marketing, then you truly DO feel people are nuts for not choosing you.
From the founder’s blog post:
(btw you’re a dummy if you give any percentage of your earnings to a distributor. for goodness sakes. if you don’t use DistroKid, that’s okay-but please don’t give a cut of your earnings to any distributor unless they’re also massively promoting you and helping with marketing; the only way they’d deserve it. if we took 9% of earnings [we take nothing] there are a handful of artists who’d owe us more than $100,000 each. for moving a few files around. that ain’t right.)
When information was scarce, marketing was enough of a leverage point to create big results.
These days, RESULTS are what are in short supply. Great marketing alone doesn’t produce results in the lives of clients and customers: products and services that WORK do.