Daily Lab: The key ingredient
Success needs more failure.
Success needs more failure.
Cold outreach often sends the exact wrong signal.
It’s never too late to improve your launch.
When we have a new idea, a new business concept, or a new product or service, we’re motivated to move fast. We see everyone else out in the market, seemingly crushing it, and we strive to get in on the action. We think that speed is the key to success. When the opposite is true.
The astronaut Chris Hadfield once provided perhaps the most important lesson in all of business, life, and marketing: “No matter how bad a situation is,” he wrote, “you can always make it worse.”
You’ve probably tried a lot of things to market your business over the years. And you may have noticed that the tough part isn’t coming up with new ideas to try out. The tough part is stopping the stuff that isn’t working.
The fact is, the more we say, the less our audience will hear. Every time we feel like we should add another offer, another product, another message, or another focus to our marketing, we should try to pause.
"There’s only one thing you can count on...On any given moment in any given day, somebody somewhere is screwing up."
Everything we do in our business either reinforces or damages our market position. Including, or even especially, how our product works and looks.
If you want things to change, you have to try to change things, and that entails assuming the risk that things might not go the way you want. Every plan is a guess about the future, and sometimes our guesses are wrong.
It’s a dangerous myth that struggling businesses just need more customers. In my experience, many businesses aren’t struggling because they don’t have enough customers, they struggle because they have too many customers. Or too many of the wrong customers. They’ve become busy, but broke.
It’s easy to panic and imagine the worst-case scenarios for any project we embark on. And it’s just as easy to fantasize about the very best outcomes. But it’s a little more difficult, yet profoundly more important, to analyze the most likely best and worst cases.