- You need a great product to start.
Of course you need to offer something to be able to deliver value and make money from it, but the first thought should not be about the product you are offering. It must be about the problem you are solving. Successful value entrepreneurs obsess over the problem because it gives them a much broader perspective on building their offering.
- Marketing is about selling.
People react to stories. All relationships we build are subject to storytelling. Marketing is the art of telling your story in a way that resonates with your audience so that they are willing to listen. Selling is only the resulting final act. If you focus on selling more than on your story, you can come off as inauthentic and people will sense it.
- Anyone can do anything.
Since, in the modern world, everything is available to most of us, we often feel that we can pursue any venture we want. While this is technically true, it’s far from ideal because in many cases we ignore what we are best at: our purpose. When we jump head first into something without asking if it matches with what we believe in, what we are good at and our own passion, we get on a path that will neither make us happy nor bring us our own version of success.
- Get the best people to help you.
We are easily blinded by fancy resumes, diplomas and corporate experience. But the fact is, that the people that appear great on paper are rarely the right people for our mission. If we don’t dig deep during interviews to find out what people really care about, if we don’t share with them why we run the business we do, and the problem we tackle, we could end up with brilliant paper weights. People that don’t carry our mission forward. There are dozens of people that may not look great on paper, but will carry the torch of your business mission onward and upward.
- Beat the competition and become number one.
Very early in life, we learned about the concept of being first and beating the competition. We see this concept very clearly in schools and in sports. However, such a mindset distracts us from doing our actual work and costs us valuable resources when we should only focus on doing our best work. To believe in “the competition” and keep them in our rearview is known to cause stress and makes our work less original and more cookie cutter because we think that that will help us win the race to number one. Don’t fall for it.
