- Good morning, believe nation.
Today's message is make something people want.
Over to you, Sam Altman.
(rooster crowing)
♫ I wake up every morning
♫ Espresso get me going
♫ I wake up every morning
- Startups, to be successful,
have to build something that people want.
If you get that right, you can get everything else wrong.
Pretty much, if you get that wrong,
you can get everything else perfect
and we see this all the time.
We see startups that hire the best lawyer in the valley.
They get a beautiful office.
They work with really great accountants and a great PR firm.
They do everything that a startup needs to do,
except build a product that customers or users want
and this is so important.
This is probably the most important piece
of startup advice in the early days.
This is the only thing that matters, you have to do this.
You can ignore all the other advice.
You can ignore all of the crazy stuff that people do
when they're trying to advise you
about how to set up a company.
In fact, you should ignore most advice.
Most startup advice is terrible.
You should feel free to ignore
any of this too, except this one thing.
If your startup doesn't make something the users want,
the startup will never ever be successful.
- Making something people want is massively important
and if you don't do it, your company will fail,
but it's only half the equation.
You also have to love what you're making.
This is where you will have ultimate success
as an entrepreneur and it doesn't matter
if you've gone to university or business school
or had a history with parents
as entrepreneurs or any of that.
Doesn't matter, this is the single most important thing
to understand and it's easy.
Anybody can pick it up.
You will have success as an entrepreneur
when you make something that people want,
you're providing value, and you love what you do.
These have to be intersected.
They have to match.
When you can combine those two things together,
you have a successful business
'cause look what happens when the two things don't align.
If you're making something that people want,
but you don't love it, you're never going to put in the work,
the effort, the grind to become the best
because there's somebody who will also
make something people want and does love it
and they're always going to crush you.
They're going to be putting in 16 hour days
and just dreaming about it every single day
and telling all their friends
and trying to find ways to make it work
and for you, you don't care enough about it
'cause you don't love it, so that model's not going to work.
You may make a little bit of money
'cause you see an opportunity,
but it's never going to be the thing
that will help you take off.
It's never going to be the best version of you
because you're doing something
that you're not passionate about.
On the flip side, if you're doing something that you love
but is useless to other people, then you've got a hobby.
That's great, go out and do that thing that you love,
but if you can't find a way to add value
to other people's lives and make something
that they would actually pay for,
you don't have a business either
and so the ultimate success comes
when you can combine those two things together.
You got the thing that adds value to people's lives
and that people really want and you love doing it
and as long as those two things are in harmony,
then you've got a massively successful business
that could change the course of your life
and the people around you as well.
So, the question of the day today is I'm curious
are you making something that people actually want?
Are you there yet?
Are you getting great feedback yet?
I'm curious, leave it in the comments below
and I'll join in the discussion.
I also want to give a quick shout out to Herman Pienaar.
Herman, thank you so much for picking up
a copy of my book, Your One Word.
It really really really means a lot to me
and I hope you're enjoying the read.
Thank you guys so much for watching.
I believe in you.
I hope you continue to believe in yourself
and whatever your one word is
and I'll see you again tomorrow morning
for another shot of Entspresso.
♫ I wake up every morning
♫ Espresso get me going
- Hey, believe nation, thank you so much for watching.
If you want to learn more about this subject,
get a little bit deeper on it,
I'm going to share some extra bonus clips
that I hope you'll enjoy.
- What's the single worst
marketing decision that you can make?
And I think we've all been there.
It's that you start with a crappy product,
but as marketers, this is what we do day in and day out.
Our job starts when the product is finished,
but a growth actor says why?
Why can't the product be improved?
Why does it have to start,
why does it have to start so late in the process?
Why are we getting handed this final product
when market feedback would incorporate into the product
the elements that make it successful?
So, when marketers stop thinking of their job
as to simply work on what's already been done,
but to answer these questions,
who is the product for, why would they use it,
why do I use it, marketing is baked into the product,
so I love this quote from Paul Graham,
the founder of Y Combinator.
He says, "Make stuff people want."
That's the best marketing decision that you can make
and I think if you look at a company like Instagram,
you see this very clearly, right?
Instagram launched as a Foursquare competitor called Burbn.
It was a geo-location service
and it had a feature that allowed people
to upload photos and put filters on them.
It got a little bit of traction, but nothing truly profound
and so they decided they're going to
zoom in on this single feature.
They're going to throw everything that they've done out so far
and they're going to rebrand as Instagram.
It launches.
I think it does something like
25,000 downloads its first day
and it sells to Facebook a year later for a billion dollars,
so you could argue that the best marketing decision
that Instagram made was changing from Burbn to Instagram.
Everything else was extra.
Everything else was window dressing.
The product was the marketing.
- Most businesses are the same,
whether you're selling energy products
or whether any consumer products.
If it's useful to people, the rest is just business,
so if you find something or invent something
that's really useful, at that point,
it's really common, whatever you're selling.
The process is not that different
and our process is maybe a little bit different
because we really don't have MBA type processing.
We basically common sense.
You know, we look at businesses really in a simple way.
You make good stuff and you sell it.
You know, instead of all the high affluent words,
which I really don't understand like brand awareness
and brand equity and all the fancy terminologies people use
that they don't have a product.
So, what we did was we simply stick to fundamentals,
which is you make a really good product
and 80% of marketing is making a really good product
and then you go out there and if people like it,
they agree with you, then they buy it.
Actually, you'll find most of the products
that they say are good are marginal.
Right?
Most of the folks that come up with products
usually use some kind of a gimmick.
In other words, gee, let's make it pink if it's for women
or let's make what's his name famous person endorse it.
Products themselves are marginal
and then they say, "Well, no, it's a good product."
Well, my question is do you use it?
If you're going to go out there and sell it,
do you use it yourself?
Does your family use it?
And if they don't, why are you selling it?
You know, so really you'll find most of the fellas that say,
"We have great products, but we didn't get success,"
is they really don't use the product.
They think everybody else should, but not us.
We're superior to our own product,
so there's a compromise amongst people
about the quality of what they sell
and quality's also misunderstood.
In other words, quality starts with
if a customer doesn't need it,
if it doesn't provide something that they're going to pay for.
We have different technical terms.
I mean, our technical terms are slam dunk.
You know, everybody understands what that is.
You got a slam dunk product or do you have a good product?
For us, we get pitched several products a week
and if it's a good product,
we don't go out there and sell it.
It's got to be slam dunk.
It's got to be where nobody will refuse it
and then you have a hard time with it,
so the flaw is really they don't have good products.
Definition of a good product is it will do well.
Now, there's some amount of execution,
but I would say that if you don't have a great product,
any amount of execution is going to
only buy you a little time.
After that, everybody will figure out
that this is not that good and not buy it anymore.