What ever happened to details?
The red sole of a Louboutin shoe, or the elegant tag on a pair of Tom’s? The sweeping fenders of a Porsche 911 or the needless complications of a fancy watch…
Today, a certain kind of customer is using a Muji notebook, or wearing a plain Everlane t-shirt. Is this what we’ve come to? One might come to the conclusion that consumers have rejected all the effort that designers and marketers have produced in a statement that rejects design. Not so fast.
Design is the new marketing. It is the product itself, not the ads or the slogan. Design is the supply chain of Patagonia, the ethics of Purple Carrot and the customer service at Union Square Cafe. It’s design, not advertising, that turned Apple into the most valuable luxury brand (and the most valuable company) in the world.
But design requires a point of view. The confidence to make an assertion. And the skill to turn that assertion into something that resonates with the person you seek to serve.
It’s probably easier to create heavily adorned mash-up than it is to produce a Field Notes notebook. Stripping away the artifice doesn’t always leave something pure. It often creates banality, the simple commodity that’s easy to buy cheaper one click away.
The elegant nothing brands aren’t about nothing. Not all. They merely have a different, more difficult sort of artifice. The artifice of no artifice. The elegance of leading with utility as its own form of style.
And what is a brand? It’s not the logo, certainly. I have no idea what Everlane’s logo is. The brand is our shorthand for the feelings that an experience creates, the promises that a product or service brings with it.
If Nike announced that they were opening a hotel, you’d have a pretty good guess about what it would be like. But if Hyatt announced that they were going to start making shoes, you would have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER what those shoes would be like. That’s because Nike owns a brand and Hyatt simply owns real estate.
For a company that stands for few details to become a brand, then, there needs to be a promise associated with what they make and what you’ll get if you engage with it instead of buying the cheaper commodity.
In most cases where brands have been built, the brand has:
1. Served users who care about origin and elegance. They resist the idea of buying the cheaper commodity, because telling themselves they have the real one creates personal value. Beyond that, these users have the sensitivity (or taste) to be able to tell the difference between the real one and the knock off. Cayce Pollard (the fictional heroine of Gibson’s Pattern Recognition) only wears an authentic MA-1 jacket (you can buy a real life version right here). Her narrative about sensitivity, origin and authenticity makes the jacket worth the $675, even though she knows she could buy the knock off for 10% of that artificially high price.
2. Served users who care about status. The status of ‘people like us do things like this.’ These users know that their peers will recognize the invisible products they’re carrying, and this recognition is worth far more than the product itself costs. Seeing a designer with a genuine Uni-ball Signo UM-151 Gel Pen in her hand (from Japan) is to see someone who is better than you (perhaps). Better in the sense that she cares enough to go to the trouble. That she cares enough to know the difference. That she cared enough to pay a bit extra in time and money, because it matters–to her, and perhaps to you.
3. Found the intestinal fortitude to play a longer game. There are shortcuts everywhere, corners that can be cut, profits that can be taken. Once you get a small head start, you can license your name to others. You can cash out with a vodka or an affiliate deal of what sort or another.
The invisible brands that last, though, realize that the artifact is only an artifact. It’s not the point. It’s a souvenir of the point. The point is that people like us do things like this. Our tribe, our group. That when we see the others, we see ourselves.
Will the momentary mania among a small group who is busy measuring just how invisible they can be in their design fade away? Of course, it will. It always does. The cycle moves because the very people who drive the market, the neophiliacs, are in search of something new. Because something new gives them a new chance to tell a story, to earn status, to engage with that which is scarce.
But the brands that matter are voices that choose to matter. Voices that make assertions on behalf of their users. Who market with people, and for them, not to them or at them.
Work that matters for people who care.
April 13, 2019
I broke two bowls today.
I was emptying the dishwasher, holding both small clean bowls in one hand. One of them slipped, and I watched, aghast, as it started to fall in slow motion toward the hard kitchen floor.
In a valiant but vain attempt to miraculously catch the bowl, I dropped the second one as well.
Now both were gone.
Often, the best thing to do with a lost cause is to let it go. Because pursuing it gets in the way of the causes you haven’t lost yet.
April 12, 2019
Traditional courses, online or off, are linear. They’re based on a direct connection between the instructor’s content and the student’s attention. Write this down, memorize this, understand that.
Traditional courses scale in a particular way. They scale even better when the instructor appears on video.
Workshops are different. Workshops are about the cohort. The other students. The people you meet, the people you learn from and the people you teach. Workshops involve work, not the compliance inherent in testing and certification.
If you want to learn to build a boat, take a workshop.
It’s very difficult to run workshops at scale in the real world. The physics of interaction make it awkward. But it turns out that online, a workshop is a powerful way to learn.
A course can be quite effective. Students get a ton of actionable insights from the highly-rated video courses I offer at Udemy. But a course can’t possibly provide the magic of a workshop.
And workshops are the future of online learning.
That’s because in a workshop, you are able to connect, and connection is at the heart of the economy we live in now. Connection means finding the others. Embracing peer support, giving more than you get, engaging with ideas and with other people. Connection is part of the process of growth. Connecting with possibility, with change and with the generosity of new ideas and new approaches.
The Akimbo Workshops aren’t courses.
In the most recent session of one of our seminars, a typical day saw students interacting with each other every three minutes, 7,000 times a day. In a typical course, that number would be zero.
We’re launching two workshops this week. One might be a good fit for you, if that’s the direction you’re headed:
The Freelancer’s Workshop (a short sprint toward finding better clients).
The Bootstrapper’s Workshop (a deeper dive into building an organization without outside funding).
Each of these is specific. They use Akimbo’s customized discussion platform to create large-scale communities built around solving a particular challenge. They are there to help you find the others.
Four times a year, we run the altMBA, our elite flagship, a workshop that’s very different from the others. It has curated small groups, video conferencing, hands-on alumni coaches and focused cohorts that meet every day for a month. It’s designed to help you see more clearly, decide more effectively and most of all, transform into the leader you’re capable of becoming.
I’ve been a teacher my entire career, and the workshops we’re running now are the most effective way I’ve found to help people level up. I hope you can join us.
[also, another new riff on this from me on Medium]
April 11, 2019
is that there aren’t any.
That’s precisely what makes them so interesting. The null set. The impossibility of it.
A unicorn is not a black swan, which is a rare bird that proves a point. A unicorn is by its very nature, impossible. That’s actually not a problem. That’s the entire point. That there’s something unavailable.
Instead of aspiring to unicorn status, a pipe dream which is simply a place to hide, we can instead decide to do something useful (and possible) instead.
It’s more challenging to set your sights on something that’s possible. More useful, too.
[HT to Michael, for a tangential unicorn riff. He points out that now that so many companies are called ‘unicorns’, the term is meaningless, a lazy trope used by some in business media who eagerly substitute lazy tropes for insightful analysis and interesting assertions.]
Disneyworld is stressful.
The occasional visitor has far less fun than you might expect. That’s because without habits, every decision requires attention. And attention is exhausting.
And it’s stressful because the choices made appear to be expensive. There’s a significant opportunity cost to doing this not that. You’re leaving tomorrow, what are you going to skip? What if it’s not worth the line? What are you missing?
It’s all fraught. We feel the failure of a bad choice in advance, long before we discover whether or not it was actually bad.
And it’s not just Disneyworld. It’s now the whole world.
Every minute on a website is a minute not spent doing something else. Every decision about what to write in social media is enervating. It’s not like the old days, with just three TV channels and a TV Guide to make that difficult decision even easier.
(The most popular magazine in America, for decades, was devoted to helping people figure out which one of three channels to watch).
Here’s my list, in order, of what drives behavior in the modern, privileged world:
- Fear
- Cognitive load (and the desire for habit and ease)
- Greed (fueled by fear)
- Curiosity
- Generosity/connection
The five are in an eternal dance, with capitalist agents regularly using behavioral economics to push us to trade one for the other. We’re never satisfied, of course, which is why our culture isn’t stable. We regularly build systems to create habits that lower the cognitive load, but then, curiosity amplified by greed and fear (plus our search for connection and desire to love) kick in and the whole cycle starts again.
April 10, 2019
Are you a freelancer or an entrepreneur?
It’s not simply semantics, your answer changes everything.
Freelancers get paid when they work. We’re not focused on scale… and we’re not tiny versions of real entrepreneurs. Freelancers do the work for clients who need them.
Hiring employees to scale when you’re a freelancer can be a bit of a trap, because you are likely to give up the very thing you set out to do in the first place.
Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are organized for growth. The job of the entrepreneur isn’t to do the work, it’s to build a company that does the work. Mary Barra doesn’t make cars at GM. She organizes so that GM makes cars.
And, it turns out that there are two kinds of entrepreneurs: Funded and Bootstrappers.
Funded entrepreneurs are the ones you hear about all the time. They use other people’s money to fuel their growth, and one day, they have to pay that money back, either by going public, selling, or distributing the profits.
And Bootstrappers? Bootstrappers build a business using their customers’ money. Bootstrapping is a special case, an intentional choice, the chance to serve your customers so well that they eagerly fund your growth.
I’ve been a funded entrepreneur, and I’m fortunate it worked out well.
And I’ve also been a bootstrapper, more often than not, and sometimes that’s worked as well.
Today, I’m often doing the work of a freelancer (no one writes these posts and those books but me).
Which means, if you work on your own, you’ve got three choices, and we’ve built two Akimbo workshops that might help.
Today, we’re launching the first session of the Freelancers Workshop. It’s an intensive interactive workshop with about ten lessons… you can finish it in just a few weeks if you want to, but you don’t need to worry about falling behind. Mostly, you will meet and engage with freelancers from around the world who will help you accomplish your goals (and vice versa).
The Freelancers Workshop is focused on just one thing: Helping you get better clients. Because better clients are the only way for a freelancer to find the support and respect and income you seek.
And, also today (because I want you to make the choice!) we’re relaunching the famed Bootstrapper’s Workshop. To date, thousands of people have experienced this deep dive into making deliberate choices about how to be an entrepreneur without scraping together money from investors and banks.
I’ve been talking about the freelancer/bootstrap/entrepreneur trichotomy for years. Here’s what I hear most often:
“Thank you for giving me permission to be a freelancer. It’s as though a weight was lifted, and I’m doing the best work of my career.”
and
“I’m so glad that I don’t have to obsess about valuations, bro fundraising culture and the rest of it. Our business continues to thrive, because we’re proud to be bootstrappers.”
Resources: More than 23,000 people have taken my Freelance course on Udemy. You can get it here for 10% off.
And nearly a million people have read the Bootstrapper’s Bible. Here’s a free copy.
The new workshops take these ideas and run with them. They connect you to others on the same path, using the proven Akimbo methods to help you go way beyond text or video and dive deep into how it works and why.
Today’s an excellent day to decide if you’re a Freelancer, a Bootstrapper or something else… And if you visit the site, look for the purple circle for a rapidly decreasing discount for early birds.
April 9, 2019
It was 100 degrees outside, and far hotter inside the barn (which had no air conditioning.)
But SwissMiss invited me, and I’m glad I followed through. Watching this video a year later, I’ve realized I have very little recollection of what happened in that jam-packed barn, so I’m thrilled that Kertis Creative captured the day.
[You can rewind for a very kind intro from Tina.]
I ended up riffing on dozens of topics, and it might be the best session like this I’ve ever done. I hope you get something out of it. And thanks to the amazing Creative Mornings community for bringing so much care and energy to the event.
The timing for the release of the edit couldn’t be better, as we’re launching two workshops today:
The Freelancer’s Workshop is brand new. Join us as we work together on the single biggest issue facing anyone who is out on their own: How to get better clients.
And The Bootstrapper’s Workshop is an effective and proven method for starting an organization financed by customer investment. We’ve brought it back for entrepreneurs who are looking for a better, saner way to make a difference.
Early birds, don’t forget to click the purple circle.
I’ll be posting later today with some thoughts about the urgent but non-obvious choice so many of us face: Which are you, a freelancer or an entrepreneur?
There are two kinds of marketing, and the gap between them keeps widening. You’ll need to choose.
Do marketing to people or with them…
Actually, there are a few other gaps worth considering:
Average stuff vs remarkable edge cases
Brand vs. direct
Unmeasured vs. measured
Largest imaginable market vs. smallest viable audience.
And… Attention as a precious resource vs. something to be purchased or stolen, cheap churn, and then move on.
April 8, 2019
As the news cycle has trained us to find out results the moment they happen (or sometimes, as polling promises, before they happen), it’s easy to lose track of a simple truth:
There’s a sweet spot between knowing with certainty at a low price (yesterday’s weather report is free) and guessing with a bit of a head start at a huge price (insider trading information).
When we’re anxious, we spend too much time and thus too much money trying to hurry up what we’re about to find out anyway.
A deep breath is usually a better plan.
April 7, 2019
There was an outcry when they banned cigarettes from bars in New York. The restaurant owners were certain that disaster was imminent.
And there was panic when we began to switch to LED bulbs, with concerned citizens and opportunistic politicians proclaiming that it was the end of civilization as we know it.
And when law firms started offering women partnerships…
And when seat belts were required in cars…
And when the building codes required fire exits and accessibility ramps…
And when work rules required more training and more rest for pilots and airline crews…
And when doctors were required to wash their hands before and after delivering a baby…
Change isn’t always guaranteed to work, but change often brings the frenzy.
April 6, 2019
