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In November of 2018, author and entrepreneur Seth Godin returned as a guest on the Tim Ferriss show. Godin has written over 40 books on marketing and personal development, and in this episode, he shares a few key insights on how to manage life and market effectively. Here are just a few of the tidbits from the episode that I found the most intriguing.
You are your own boss, and you probably suck at it.
This one really stuck out. As Godin describes it, you are your own manager. You decide the things you do and don’t do every single day, so you should treat yourself the way that you would expect a great manager to treat you. A good manager wouldn’t let you waste hours watching YouTube, or scrolling through Instagram, then Twitter, then Snapchat, then Facebook. They wouldn’t talk to you in the negative and demeaning way that you talk to yourself. Instead, they would be focusing on making you better at every step, so that you can work as efficiently as possible and find deep meaning in what you do.
This is not easy to do. It requires a great deal of discipline and practice, but if you can learn to manage yourself, then you can start to do some really amazing things.
Find your smallest viable audience.
For a long time, I was under the impression that products needed to be made for the largest audience possible. In doing so, they would be able to make the most sales. But in recent years, I have discovered that the opposite is actually true, and Godin sums this up perfectly.
Godin gives the example of Tim Ferriss himself. Tim is a millionaire with an extremely successful podcast and a long list of bestselling books, but 99% of people on Earth have never heard of him. Fans like myself are more than willing to listen to his shows and on occasion, buy his books, but no one else really cares. Even so, he doesn’t need a massive audience, he just needs his small group of die-hard fans who will support him endlessly.
This principle is true of all marketing. I thought for a long time that whatever content I produced, it would need to appeal to a massive audience in order to be profitable. This simply isn’t true. If you want to grow your customer base, find the group of people who really like what you do, and let them pay you for it.
People will pay. A lot.
According to Godin, the biggest mistake a new business can make is pricing their product incorrectly. He cites the example of ketogenic dog food. It is marketed as being much healthier and higher quality than other dog food brands, so naturally, the price is considerably higher. The actual difference between brands may be marginal or nonexistent, and it may be produced for just as much as the other dog foods on the shelf, but that’s not why people buy it. They buy it because they think it is high quality and it makes them feel good. If it was priced considerably lower, it might be more cost effective, but the customer would also think that it was a lower quality product, and probably wouldn’t buy it.
Some people love a bargain, but more people love quality and status. Buying the best, most expensive product leads one to believe that what they are getting really is the best, and it also sends a message to the people around them that they have the money to buy these expensive products. People aren’t looking for cheap knockoffs, they want the real deal. That’s why when you walk into Walmart and you have to choose between name brand Aspirin or Walmart’s knockoff brand, you probably choose Aspirin, even though the ingredients are exactly the same in both and Walmart’s is half the price. People don’t buy logically, and if you choose just the right price, you can take advantage of this to make a whole lot of money.
Thanks for reading, and make sure to head over to Tim’s blog to listen to this podcast for yourself, there are a lot of deep insights that I didn’t cover. Come back next week for my next post, and make sure to check me out on social media!
Josh
Josh's Journey 