2016/02/29
The following is a chapter from Ryan Holiday’s new book, The Perennial Seller, a fascinating look at what it takes to help books, tech projects and art that last. In this chapter he discusses the questions that no startup founders ask before they begin work.
For more background on the book I encourage you to visit his post about how he made the book over a grueling (and fun) two-year period.
The critic Toby Litt could have been talking about all bad art and bad products when he said that “bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self.” Bad startups are the same. They aren’t actually businesses, they are self-indulgent playthings that do nothing for no one heatvape.
In my library I have a little book called Worms Eat My Garbage by Mary Appelhof. Unless you’re a permaculture nerd, there’s no reason you’d have heard of this book. That’s the whole point—the book is for permaculture nerds, or at least aspiring ones. This might not seem like a big niche but this indie-published engine-that-could has gone on to sell some 165,000 copies (more than most books will ever sell) and is still in print some thirty-five years after publication. It’s on its second expanded and revised edition—the first came fifteen years after initial release, the second twenty years after that. It’s the kind of perennial seller that all authors aspire to—indeed that creators of all types should aspire to. The author made something that lasted and she made something that will continue to last (unless society suddenly stops producing garbage).
This kind of success doesn’t happen accidentally, and it’s not the result of marketing either. Her book, like many other perennial products—from Craigslist to Pixar movies—is a conceptualization success story. They didn’t bump into their audience or lasting success, they aimed for it. They built around it.
Yet if you ask most creators the relatively simply question: “Who is this for?” they can’t give you an answer. They cannot fill in this very basic sentence: “This is a ______ that does ______ for ______.”Over the years, my firm Brass Check has worked with many hundreds of startups, writers and makers. I’ve asked clients this very question many times. As a writer myself, I’m always shocked at the answer. Because these people have spent hundreds of hours working on something without ever stopping to ask who the hell they are making it for. If they had, they wouldn’t give me answers like:
· “Everyone”
· “You know, smart people”
· “Malcolm Gladwell fans”
· “Myself”
The problem with those answers is not just that they are vague (“smart people”) or ridiculous (“myself”); it’s that such audiences don’t exist. There is no convention where Malcolm Gladwell fans get together. They don’t all read the same website. Just as every politician has to create his or her own coalition in order to win, no creator can magically inherit the audience of another. Whatever you’re making is not for “everyone” either—not even the Bible is for everyone. For yourself? Are you honestly satisfied selling just one unit?
Paul Graham famously wrote that “having no specific user in mind” is one of the eighteen major mistakes that kills startups: “A surprising number of founders seem willing to assume that someone— they’re not sure exactly who—will want what they’re building. Do the founders want it? No, they’re not the target market. Who is? Teenagers. People interested in local events (that one is a perennial tar pit). Or ‘business’ users. What business users? Gas stations? Movie studios? Defense contractors?”
At least those answers are plainly wrong or unspecific . The most common response is even more alarming. It’s the creator who answers the audience question with:
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought much about it.”
If you haven’t thought about who your product is actually for, then what the hell have you been thinking about?
Successful products know who they are for–not generally, but specifically. Even the ones that have ambitious long-term goal to monopolize a broad and large market with a big audience, start with much smaller ones. As Peter Thiel outlines in Zero to One, the key often to start by dominating a small niche where you have a specific audience. Facebook started on Harvard and expanded to other campuses to now global dominance. As he put it, “Dominate a small niche and scale up from there, toward your ambitious long-term vision.” I like to think of it as concentric circles: Each small audience is contained inside a potentially larger audience. It’s like the line from Sex and the City (which happens to make Lady Gaga’s career trajectory quite well): “First come the gays. Then the girls. Then . . . the industry.”
When Susan Cain sat down to create a book about introversion, she had a very specific audience in mind: introverts. This was also a traditionally underserved audience, which is even better from a positioning perspective (when supply is down, demand is high). The result was Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking—a publishing sensation that has not only moved in excess of two million copies, but spurred courses, leadership consulting, and a viral TED talk that has been watched more than 14 million times.
In the same way, the Left Behind series is obviously for Christians. Its films, novels, graphic novels, video games, and albums are preaching with a very specific choir in mind. Cannibal Holocaust, on the other hand, is a dark and twisted horror film meant for the most extreme horror fans—it’s certainly not for highbrow critics or average theatergoers.
The Blue Collar Comedy Tour (with well-known Southern comedians), The Three Amigos Tour (with well-known Latino comedians), The Original Kings of Comedy Tour (with well-known black comedians) and the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour (with well-known Middle Eastern comedians) were all aimed at very specific ethnic and social groups. Since 2009, ABC has taken a similar approach with its weeknight programming. They developed a series of family sitcoms that target discrete segments of their overall viewership. Modern Family (2009) is about a mixed family featuring different types of modern relationships. The Middle (2009) is about a struggling Midwestern working class family. The Goldbergs (2013) is a nostalgic show about family life in the 1980s. Black-ish (2014) is about a suburban, upper-middle class black family . Fresh Off the Boat (2015) is about an immigrant Asian family trying to make it in suburban Florida. Obviously each one of these shows appeals to larger audiences but they would not success without first nailing the proposition for their first and most important audiences.
If you haven’t thought about how your product(s) do this, then again I ask, what have you thought about? Presumably you have some vision of people purchasing or using this thing you’ve spent all your time making. How could you not know who they are? It’s not going to happen by accident!
The single most important consideration a creator can make with their project is to sit down and think about who its for. Not after they’re finished and they’re trying to market it, but right now, before they’ve even begun.
For more background on the book I encourage you to visit his post about how he made the book over a grueling (and fun) two-year period.
The critic Toby Litt could have been talking about all bad art and bad products when he said that “bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self.” Bad startups are the same. They aren’t actually businesses, they are self-indulgent playthings that do nothing for no one heatvape.
In my library I have a little book called Worms Eat My Garbage by Mary Appelhof. Unless you’re a permaculture nerd, there’s no reason you’d have heard of this book. That’s the whole point—the book is for permaculture nerds, or at least aspiring ones. This might not seem like a big niche but this indie-published engine-that-could has gone on to sell some 165,000 copies (more than most books will ever sell) and is still in print some thirty-five years after publication. It’s on its second expanded and revised edition—the first came fifteen years after initial release, the second twenty years after that. It’s the kind of perennial seller that all authors aspire to—indeed that creators of all types should aspire to. The author made something that lasted and she made something that will continue to last (unless society suddenly stops producing garbage).
This kind of success doesn’t happen accidentally, and it’s not the result of marketing either. Her book, like many other perennial products—from Craigslist to Pixar movies—is a conceptualization success story. They didn’t bump into their audience or lasting success, they aimed for it. They built around it.
Yet if you ask most creators the relatively simply question: “Who is this for?” they can’t give you an answer. They cannot fill in this very basic sentence: “This is a ______ that does ______ for ______.”Over the years, my firm Brass Check has worked with many hundreds of startups, writers and makers. I’ve asked clients this very question many times. As a writer myself, I’m always shocked at the answer. Because these people have spent hundreds of hours working on something without ever stopping to ask who the hell they are making it for. If they had, they wouldn’t give me answers like:
· “Everyone”
· “You know, smart people”
· “Malcolm Gladwell fans”
· “Myself”
The problem with those answers is not just that they are vague (“smart people”) or ridiculous (“myself”); it’s that such audiences don’t exist. There is no convention where Malcolm Gladwell fans get together. They don’t all read the same website. Just as every politician has to create his or her own coalition in order to win, no creator can magically inherit the audience of another. Whatever you’re making is not for “everyone” either—not even the Bible is for everyone. For yourself? Are you honestly satisfied selling just one unit?
Paul Graham famously wrote that “having no specific user in mind” is one of the eighteen major mistakes that kills startups: “A surprising number of founders seem willing to assume that someone— they’re not sure exactly who—will want what they’re building. Do the founders want it? No, they’re not the target market. Who is? Teenagers. People interested in local events (that one is a perennial tar pit). Or ‘business’ users. What business users? Gas stations? Movie studios? Defense contractors?”
At least those answers are plainly wrong or unspecific . The most common response is even more alarming. It’s the creator who answers the audience question with:
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought much about it.”
If you haven’t thought about who your product is actually for, then what the hell have you been thinking about?
Successful products know who they are for–not generally, but specifically. Even the ones that have ambitious long-term goal to monopolize a broad and large market with a big audience, start with much smaller ones. As Peter Thiel outlines in Zero to One, the key often to start by dominating a small niche where you have a specific audience. Facebook started on Harvard and expanded to other campuses to now global dominance. As he put it, “Dominate a small niche and scale up from there, toward your ambitious long-term vision.” I like to think of it as concentric circles: Each small audience is contained inside a potentially larger audience. It’s like the line from Sex and the City (which happens to make Lady Gaga’s career trajectory quite well): “First come the gays. Then the girls. Then . . . the industry.”
When Susan Cain sat down to create a book about introversion, she had a very specific audience in mind: introverts. This was also a traditionally underserved audience, which is even better from a positioning perspective (when supply is down, demand is high). The result was Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking—a publishing sensation that has not only moved in excess of two million copies, but spurred courses, leadership consulting, and a viral TED talk that has been watched more than 14 million times.
In the same way, the Left Behind series is obviously for Christians. Its films, novels, graphic novels, video games, and albums are preaching with a very specific choir in mind. Cannibal Holocaust, on the other hand, is a dark and twisted horror film meant for the most extreme horror fans—it’s certainly not for highbrow critics or average theatergoers.
The Blue Collar Comedy Tour (with well-known Southern comedians), The Three Amigos Tour (with well-known Latino comedians), The Original Kings of Comedy Tour (with well-known black comedians) and the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour (with well-known Middle Eastern comedians) were all aimed at very specific ethnic and social groups. Since 2009, ABC has taken a similar approach with its weeknight programming. They developed a series of family sitcoms that target discrete segments of their overall viewership. Modern Family (2009) is about a mixed family featuring different types of modern relationships. The Middle (2009) is about a struggling Midwestern working class family. The Goldbergs (2013) is a nostalgic show about family life in the 1980s. Black-ish (2014) is about a suburban, upper-middle class black family . Fresh Off the Boat (2015) is about an immigrant Asian family trying to make it in suburban Florida. Obviously each one of these shows appeals to larger audiences but they would not success without first nailing the proposition for their first and most important audiences.
If you haven’t thought about how your product(s) do this, then again I ask, what have you thought about? Presumably you have some vision of people purchasing or using this thing you’ve spent all your time making. How could you not know who they are? It’s not going to happen by accident!
The single most important consideration a creator can make with their project is to sit down and think about who its for. Not after they’re finished and they’re trying to market it, but right now, before they’ve even begun.
