Memorable quotes
In his book Exponential Organizations, Singularity University global ambassador and former head of innovation at Yahoo Salim Ismail defines an exponential organization as one whose impact (or output)—because of its use of networks or automation and/or its leveraging of the crowd—is disproportionally large compared to its number of employees. A linear organization—like, say, Kodak—is the opposite: lots of employees and lots of physical processes and facilities. For all of the twentieth century, exponential organizations did not exist and linear companies were protected from upstart intruders by sheer size. Those days are gone.
This is possible, in part, because the structure of exponential organizations is very different. Rather than utilize armies of employees or large physical plants, twentyfirst-century start-ups are smaller organizations focused on information technologies, dematerializing the once physical and creating new products and revenue streams in months, sometimes weeks. As a result, these lean start-ups are the small furry mammals competing with the large dinosaurs—meaning they’re one asteroid strike away from world dominance
Every aspect of the $10 trillion manufacturing sector has the potential to be transformed. That’s $10 trillion worth of opportunity.
General Electric—which manufactures and leases jet engines to all major airlines—now puts up to 250 sensors in each of their 5,000 leased engines, to allowing their health to be monitored in real time, even in midflight.
These medical applications will keep coming. According to William Briggs, Chief Technology Officer for Deloitte Consulting, “the value of the IoT-related healthcare sector will be a multi-trillion dollar market within the next one to two decades.
The cloud is democratizing our ability to leverage computing on a massive scale,” says Weston. “Today the computation speed that someone in the middle of Mumbai has access to outstrips what the entire US government had during the sixties and seventies. We’re entering an epic period of global innovation where high-performance computing is abundant, reliable, and affordable.
Even better, for entrepreneurs interested in building Watson-backed business, Cane was stunned by how easy it was to work with IBM. “They provided so much support and guidance,” he explains, “that we were able to build our entire Watson-powered prototype in two weeks.”
If I were an exponential entrepreneur looking to create tremendous value, I’d look for those jobs that are least enjoyable for humans to do.
Everyone from Raytheon and DuPont to Walmart and Nordstrom has gotten in on the skunk game. In the early 1980s, to offer another example, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs leased a building behind the Good Earth restaurant in Silicon Valley, stocked it with twenty brilliant designers, and created his own skunk works to build the first Macintosh computer. The division was set apart from Apple’s normal R&D department and led by Jobs himself. When people asked him why they needed this new facility, Jobs liked to say: “It is better to be a pirate than join the Navy.
In the late 1960s, University of Toronto psychologist Gary Latham and University of Maryland psychologist Edwin Locke discovered that goal setting is one of the easiest ways to increase motivation and enhance performance. Latham and Locke found that setting goals increased performance and productivity 11 to 25 percent. 5 That’s quite a boost. If an eight-hour day is our baseline, that’s like getting two extra hours of work simply by building a mental frame (aka a goal) around the activity.
Organizational inertia is the notion that once any company achieves success, its desire to develop and champion radical new technologies and directions is often tempered by the much stronger desire not to disrupt existing markets and lose their paychecks. Organizational inertia is fear of failure writ large, the reason Kodak didn’t recognize the brilliance of the digital camera, IBM initially dismissed the personal computer, and America Online (AOL) is, well, barely online
As Burt Rutan, winner of the Ansari XPRIZE, once taught me: “The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.” Trying out crazy ideas means bucking expert opinion and taking big risks. It means not being afraid to fail. Because you will fail. The road to bold is paved with failure, and this means having a strategy in place to handle risk and learn from mistakes is critical
That’s why LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman famously said, ‘If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.’ ”
Walling off the innovation team creates an environment where people are free to follow their own curiosity—it amplifies autonomy. Rapid iteration means accelerated learning cycles, which means putting people on the path to mastery. And aligning big goals with individual values creates true purpose.
With this kind of psychological core, it’s no surprise that Google, Zappos, and Toms all became industry leaders in record time. Creating a company with autonomy, mastery, and purpose as key values means creating a company built for speed
In any organization,” says Teller, “the bulk of your people will be climbing the hill they’re standing on. That’s what you want them to do. That’s their job. A skunk works does a totally different job. It’s a group of people looking for a better hill to climb. This is threatening to the rest of the organization. It just makes good sense to separate these two groups.
You assume that going 10x bigger is going to be ten times harder,” he continues, “but often it’s literally easier to go bigger. Why should that be? It doesn’t feel intuitively right. But if you choose to make something 10 percent better, you are almost by definition signing up for the status quo—and trying to make it a little bit better. That means you start from the status quo, with all its existing assumptions, locked into the tools, technologies, and processes that you’re going to try to slightly improve. It means you’re putting yourself and your people into a smartness contest with everyone else in the world. Statistically, no matter the resources available, you’re not going to win. But if you sign up for moonshot thinking, if you sign up to make something 10x better, there is no chance of doing that with existing assumptions. You’re going to have to throw out the rule book. You’re going to have to perspective shift and supplant all that smartness and resources with bravery and creativity
Focus on the User. We’ll see this again in chapter 6, when Larry Page and Richard Branson speak about the importance of building customer-centric businesses. 2. Share Everything. In a hyperconnected world with massive amounts of cognitive surplus, it’s critical to be open, allow the crowd to help you innovate, and build on each other’s ideas. 3 . Look for Ideas Everywhere. The entire third part of this book is dedicated to the principle that crowdsourcing can provide you with incredible ideas, insights, products, and services. 4. Think Big but Start Small. This is the basis for Singularity University’s 109 thinking. You can start a company on day one that affects a small group, but aim to positively impact a billion people within a decade. 5. Never Fail to Fail. The importance of rapid iteration: Fail frequently, fail fast, and fail forward. 6. Spark with Imagination, Fuel with Data. Agility—that is, nimbleness—is a key discriminator against the large and linear. And agility requires lots of access to new and often wild ideas and lots of good data to separate the worthwhile from the wooly. For certain, the most successful start-ups today are data driven. They measure everything and use machine learning and algorithms to help them analyze that data to make decisions. 7. Be a Platform. Look at the most successful companies getting billion-dollar valuations . . . AirBnb, Uber, Instagram . . . they are all platform plays. Is yours? 8 . Have a Mission That Matters. Perhaps most important, is the company you’re starting built upon a massively transformative purpose? When the going gets hard, will you push on or give up? Passion is fundamental to forward progress
Applying this idea in our daily life means breaking tasks into bite-size chunks and setting goals accordingly. A writer, for example, is better off trying to pen three great paragraphs at a time, rather than attempting one great chapter. Think challenging yet manageable—just enough stimulation to shortcut attention into the now, not enough stress to pull you back out again
F§low—the state of optimal human performance—shows up only outside of our comfort zone, when we are pushing limits and using skills to the utmost. Want proof? How about the significant correlation between early retirement and death. According to a 2005 report in the British Medical Journal, people who retire at fifty-five are 89 percent more likely to die in the ten years after retirement than those who retire at sixty-five
Flow—the state of optimal human performance—shows up only outside of our comfort zone, when we are pushing limits and using skills to the utmost. Want proof? How about the significant correlation between early retirement and death. According to a 2005 report in the British Medical Journal, people who retire at fifty-five are 89 percent more likely to die in the ten years after retirement than those who retire at sixty-five.
Charles Lindbergh was correct: “The important thing is to start; to lay a plan, and then follow it step by step no matter how small or large one by itself may seem.
He also gets that risk mitigation is critical. “Superficially,” he says, “I think it looks like entrepreneurs have a high tolerance for risk. But, having said that, one of the most important phrases in my life is ‘protect the downside.’ It should be one of the most important phrases in any businessperson’s life. So okay, we made a big, bold move going into the airline business. But the most important negotiation with Boeing was that we had the right to give the plane back after twelve months
What’s going to change in the next ten years?” And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: “What’s not going to change in the next ten years?” And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two—because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. . . . In our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true ten years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future ten years from now where a customer comes up and says, “Jeff, I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher” [or] “I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.” Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers ten years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.
At TED 2014, when I asked Bezos what advice he would give to exponential entrepreneurs, he, like Musk, counsels a focusing on passion, not fads. “It’s so hard to catch something that everybody already knows is hot,” says Bezos. “Instead, position yourself and wait for the wave to come to you. So then you ask, Position myself where? Position yourself with something that captures your curiosity, something that you’re missionary about. I tell people that when we acquire companies, I’m always trying to figure out: Is this person who leads this company a missionary or a mercenary? The missionary is building the product and building the service because they love the customer, because they love the product, because they love the service. The mercenary is building the product or service so that they can flip the company and make money. One of the great paradoxes is that the missionaries end up making more money than the mercenaries anyway. And so pick something that you are passionate about, that’s my number one piece of advice.”
When I was a student at the University of Michigan,” he said, “I took this summer leadership course. Their slogan was: ‘Have a healthy disregard for the impossible.’ That’s stuck with me all of these years. I know it sounds kind of nuts, but it’s often easier to make progress when you’re really ambitious. Since no one else is willing to try those things, you don’t have any competition. And you get all the best people, because the best people want to work on the most ambitious things. For this reason, I’ve come to believe that anything you imagine is probably doable. You just have to imagine it and work on it.
So how do we decide what to do? How do we decide what’s really important to work on? I like to call it the “toothbrush test.” The toothbrush test is simple: Do you use it as often as you use your toothbrush? For most people, I guess that’s twice a day. I think we really want things like that.
These tools are exponential in power for three simple reasons. First, over the next decade, the size of the crowd (those folks online) is expected to more than double—from roughly 2 billion to 5 billion people (perhaps 7 billion if some of the orbital or stratospheric communication solutions are deployed). This means 3 billion new minds are about to join the global conversation (this is the group referred to in Abundance as the rising billion). Second, the communication technologies underpinning the crowd are growing exponentially, morphing once thin data connections into ubiquitous broadband. The multinational professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers projects that the penetration of mobile (broadband) Internet services will reach 54 percent of the world’s population by the end of 2017. 10 As a result, the crowd is becoming hyperconnected and hyper-responsive. Third, and perhaps most important, all of the exponential technologies discussed in part one of this book are starting to become easily accessible to the masses, further empowering this hyperconnected, hyper-responsive crowd. What this means is that the people you can now tap for support are themselves far more capable than ever before.
Charles Lindbergh was correct: “The important thing is to start; to lay a plan, and then follow it step by step no matter how small or large one by itself may seem.
He also gets that risk mitigation is critical. “Superficially,” he says, “I think it looks like entrepreneurs have a high tolerance for risk. But, having said that, one of the most important phrases in my life is ‘protect the downside.’ It should be one of the most important phrases in any businessperson’s life. So okay, we made a big, bold move going into the airline business. But the most important negotiation with Boeing was that we had the right to give the plane back after twelve months.
What’s going to change in the next ten years?” And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: “What’s not going to change in the next ten years?” And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two—because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. In our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true ten years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future ten years from now where a customer comes up and says, “Jeff, I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher” [or] “I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.” Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers ten years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.
These tools are exponential in power for three simple reasons. First, over the next decade, the size of the crowd (those folks online) is expected to more than double—from roughly 2 billion to 5 billion people (perhaps 7 billion if some of the orbital or stratospheric communication solutions are deployed). 9 This means 3 billion new minds are about to join the global conversation (this is the group referred to in Abundance as the rising billion). Second, the communication technologies underpinning the crowd are growing exponentially, morphing once thin data connections into ubiquitous broadband. The multinational professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers projects that the penetration of mobile (broadband) Internet services will reach 54 percent of the world’s population by the end of 2017. 10 As a result, the crowd is becoming hyperconnected and hyperresponsive. Third, and perhaps most important, all of the exponential technologies discussed in part one of this book are starting to become easily accessible to the masses, further empowering this hyperconnected, hyperresponsive crowd. What this means is that the people you can now tap for support are themselves far more capable than ever before.
Compared to the seven to ten pieces of content the traditional process produces, Tongal competitions generate an average of 422 concepts in the idea phase, followed by an average of 20 to 100 finished video pieces in the video production phase. That is a huge return for the invested dollars and time.
or example, a while back I wanted to determine whether Time magazine cover articles have gotten more negative during the past sixty years. At first I had my executive assistant start in 1945 and group articles into positive, neutral, or negative categories. After a day’s work, she had barely put a dent in the problem. That’s when I decided to turn to the crowd. By offering $0.05 per categorization, I got the entire 65 years’ worth of issues, roughly 3,000 in total, done for under $200. We used Amazon’s site Mechanical Turk ( www.mturk.com) to get those magazine covers analyzed. While MTURK isn’t all that useful for more complicated jobs, it is where to go to get simple, quick tasks done fast.
Creative assets include a wide variety of design-based assets such as logos, videos, website designs, CAD models, marketing plans, and advertising plans. We’ve already mentioned two of my favorite creative asset development sites: Tongal (www.tongal.com), which can make you a TV or Internet ad in weeks instead of months and at a cost that is usually about a tenth the industry average, and 99Designs (www.99designs.com), which provides crowdsourced graphic design (logos, apps, web pages, infographics, blogs, and more). I’ve used 99designs repeatedly and have found that contests usually yield between 25 and 400 entries, depending on purse size. Even better, if you don’t like any of them, 99Designs will provide a full refund.
A great example of this is TopCoder (www.topcoder.com). You’ve probably heard about hackathons—those mysterious tournaments where coders compete to see who can hack together the best piece of software in a weekend. Well, with TopCoder, now you can have over 600,000 developers, designers, and data scientists hacking away to create solutions just for you. In fields like software and algorithm development, where there are many ways to solve a problem, having multiple submissions lets you compare performance metrics and choose the best one
Deloitte Consulting’s Chief Innovation Officer Andrew Vaz explains: “As Big Data overwhelms traditional computing and analytical tools, the combination of A.I. and Big Data will create an insights ‘arms race,’ where competitive advantage will be dominated by individuals and organizations that capitalize on these emerging technologies.
AbundanceHub.com: This is the place I’ll be posting my own experiences, providing updates on my lessons learned (successes, experiments, and failures) and working with entrepreneurs interested in creating wealth while creating a world of abundance. AbundanceHub content is driven by the Abundance360 community, my mastermind group of entrepreneurs whom I’ve committed to coach over a twenty-five-year period. Crowdsourcing.org: The industry-leading resource for everything crowdsourcing. Known as one of the most influential and credible authorities in the crowdsourcing space, they are recognized for their in-depth industry analyses, definitive crowdsourcing platform directory, and unbiased thought leadership. Their mission is to serve as a complete resource of information for analysts, researchers, journalists, investors, business owners, crowdsourcing experts, and participants in crowdsourcing platforms. Crowdsortium: Using the crowd to dissect, organize, and collectively move the young and evolving crowdsourcing industry forward, Crowdsortium helps organizations find, evaluate, and execute new ideas by working with online crowds and providing events, meet-ups, resources, and guides. Crowdsortium was formed by a group of industry practitioners that have the mission of advancing the industry through best practices, education, data collection, and public dialogue.
DO YOUR RESEARCH These days, almost anything you want done can be done online. Freelancer.com alone has experts available in six hundred disciplines. The point here is whenever you need something, instead of defaulting to your normal fulfillment process, try leveraging the power of the crowd to do it faster, cheaper, and better. Define your crowd, get familiar with available platforms, and then pick the right one. “If you’re going to start a company, it’s never been easier and it’s never been cheaper to do so,” says Matt Barrie. “All the tools you need to build an Internet company today are basically free— all the software: Linux, MySQL, voice-over-Internet protocol, Gmail, and so on. The best thing I would suggest you do is browse the projects on Freelancer.com, and look at the mobile phone section or the web development section or whatever your area might be, and see what other people are doing and how they’re wording their projects and what they’re paying. Start from there.”.
ii. JUST GET BUSY The most consistent advice we received during our research was perhaps the simplest: Just get busy. In most cases, it’s free to sign up and post a project. People from all around the world will start bidding on it. And once you start talking to them and looking through their samples of work, they’ll give you ideas. They’ll tell you, “Hey, I’ve done similar sorts of projects. Why don’t you do it like this or why don’t you do it like that?” and so forth. Really, as with all things in entrepreneurship, it’s really just a matter of giving it a go and proceeding through trial and error.
iii. TURN TO THE MESSAGE BOARDS Completing a crowdsourcing project can be really tough your first few times. Each platform is different and there are confusing elements in all of them. For platform specific guidance, turn to the site’s community forums for help. Experts and forum moderators will come out of the woodwork to give you incredible tips and guidance throughout the process. And all that help comes free of charge.
iv. ESTABLISH CONTEXT AND BE SPECIFIC Don’t expect the crowd to understand the core philosophy of your business. What is critical is to give people the context of the project and supplementary resources to consult should they want more background information. A properly established foundation means people spend less time trying to guess your desires and more time delivering exactly what you want.
v. PREPARE YOUR DATA SET For non-design-specific tasks, there is usually a data set that you must submit for analysis, categorization, and so on. If you don’t have a perfectly formatted and ready to-go .csv file, you can turn to the crowd for help. Most of the time crowdsourcing workers have actually crowdsourced projects themselves, so they know all the best ways to prepare your data for this process.
vi. QUALIFY YOUR WORKERS Unfortunately, crowdsourcing does have the potential to create undesired results. The quality of the results can sometimes be inadequate, and crowdsourcing is not sheltered from the scammers and bots lurking on the Internet. Luckily, qualifying your workers and curating a trustworthy work force can help you avoid these issues. To qualify a work force, simply put out a few very simple and inexpensive requests to see how quickly and accurately the job gets done. For example, if you have one hundred images you need created, and a dozen crowdsourced workers to choose from, rather than choosing a single graphic artist immediately, consider taking a few of your images and asking a few freelancers to show you their style and speed. Then choose the best to give the entire job to for completion. Just this sort of quick prequalification can save you considerable heartache and time.
vii. DEFINE CLEAR, SIMPLE AND SPECIFIC ROLES The more clear you are about the role you want your crowd to play in the project, the better the results. If you want creative solutions, tell people. If it’s practical solutions, make that clear. Ambiguity doesn’t work well in crowdsourcing. Make sure you think through every element of the product or service you need, and be ready to field questions, concerns, or confused comments. These are almost inevitable.
viii. COMMUNICATE CLEARLY, IN DETAIL, AND OFTEN “Remember,” says Freelancer’s Matt Barrie, “you’re often working with someone on the other side of the world. If you just write a one-line sentence—‘I need a website’— that could mean anything. The better the description you provide of what you want and the less room [there is] for interpretation, the better outcome you’ll get.” Many platforms allow you to communicate with the crowd during the campaign—choose one of these and communicate often. This collaborative strategy is critical for producing the best results.
ix. DON’T MICROMANAGE; HAVE AN OPEN MIND FOR NEW WAYS OF THINKING This may seem counterintuitive considering the previous two bits of advice, but often the best results from crowdsourcing come from unexpected angles. Sure, if you’re dealing with a microtask, then creativity isn’t welcome, but for larger projects—like, say, a Tongal video—give people the space they need to surprise you and they will. “Don’t do what’s expected,” DeJulio said. “Try something new. Allow the crowd to come up with wild and crazy bold ideas that might complement the genius of your brand. Trust the process; don’t try to re-create what you’re doing normally. The goal is to get something new and fresh.”
x. PAY TO PLAY—THAT IS, GO FOR QUALITY FIRST, THEN PRICE Crowdsourcing is cheap, yes, but you shouldn’t be. If you’re running a 99Designs contest, for example, the difference between the number of design submissions you’ll get for $199 and $299 is far greater than the $100 you spent. “Put a budget range down,” says Barrie. “Then it’s a free market. The freelancers will bid on the project and tell you what they want to be paid. It may be an hourly rate, if it’s that sort of a model, or it may be a fixed price. You can look through the bids, but the most important thing is go for quality first, because the price is going to be so cheap anyway that you’re going to have tremendous cost savings. That gives you tremendous leverage in terms of what you can do with your starting capital.”25
xi. PREPARE FOR THE FLOOD Crowdsourcing offers a counterproblem to the classic dilemma of “not enough good ideas.” The issue with crowdsourcing is the opposite. You’re going to be flooded with good ideas. Prepare for the deluge. You’ll need to be clear about your big objectives, but remain open to new ideas—that is, new paths to your big objectives. This deluge is the true advantage of crowdsourcing.
xii. BE OPEN TO NEW WORKING METHODOLOGIES “The other day I was in London,” said Barrie, “and I met a financial analyst working from home doing financial models for pension funds on things like infrastructure projects. He needed a mathematician to develop these models in MATLAB to be able to do his research and present his findings, so he hired a PhD student in Pakistan to do the work. They set up a chat on Skype. The streaming video quality to somewhere like Pakistan is now unbelievable. It was just like the guy was in the room with him. He’d get up in the morning, have his cup of tea, sit down, put the iPad there, do the video call, and then they’d sit there and talk all day as if they were in the same room together. The ability to communicate with anyone on the planet is getting better and better. That means the ability for us to work with anyone on the planet is fantastic.” So there you have it. A quick overview on the exponentially exploding world of crowdsourcing, today’s poor man’s version of artificial intelligence. More incredibly, today the exponential world is starting to overtake the crowd.
1. Choosing your crowdfunding idea (product, project, or service)
2. How much? Setting your fund-raising target
3. How long? Setting your campaign length and creating a schedule
4. Setting your rewards/incentives and stretch goals
5. Building the perfect team
6. Sharpen your ax: planning, materials, and resources
7. Telling a meaningful story (and using the right words)
8. Creating a viral video: three use cases, shareability, and humanization
9. Building your audience—the three As
10. Super-credible launch, early donor engagement, and media outreach
11. Week-by-week execution plan: engage, engage, engage
12. Make data-driven decisions and final tips
You also want to pick an idea that is far enough along that people believe you’ll be able to pull it off. If your product or project is underdeveloped, people will doubt your ability to make it real, and you’re unlikely to get the support you need.
The Expert. If your celebrity is not the technical wizard behind the product or service, make sure that the person who is sitting right next to him is. If you are raising money for a product, someone on your team better be able to be the expert and answer the tough questions about how you’re going to make it happen. He or she will understand what you can and can’t promise backers and will provide product specs, timelines, and technical explanations, giving credibility to your entire operation. When it’s time to actually develop the product, the expert takes over.
Materials. While campaigns vary, some common items you’ll need for launch include a prototype or rendering of your product, the campaign video, a crowdfunding platform web page, company or product web page, prewritten emails and announcements, physical promotional materials and handouts, logo and content designs, infographics, and miscellaneous incentives and perks (such as T-shirts and posters). Many of these materials will need to be developed in-house, or via the crowd on websites such as Freelancer, Tongal, or 99Designs. Bottom line: the more you finish before launch, the better off you will be.
Traditional fund-raising is something of a niche game. The goal is to please a specific kind of person—a venture capitalist or bank loan officer. Crowdfunding is the opposite. Its focus is exceptionally wide instead of seriously narrow. Every element of a crowdfunding campaign must appeal to the masses. What’s the best way to do that? Simple. Use the same technique employed by the very best books, movies, and songs—tell a great story
Focus on the why, not the what. With a product or service, the easiest way to tell a story is to focus on the why. Don’t worry so much about explaining what it is and how it works. In other words, remember that the view is different on the inside. If you’ve been working on a product or service for years, of course all the nitty-gritty details are fascinating to you. But they are perhaps not so fascinating to your audience. Instead, what most people want to hear is why your product/service/idea will improve their life—why it is significant, cool, and important to them and the world. Think solutions and improvements, not explanations or specifications.
Video Tip: Show, don’t tell. People need to see something to believe in it, but more important, they need to see something to pull out their wallets. If it’s a campaign for a new product, then the prototype or rendering of your product has to be a prominent feature in the video. And it shouldn’t just sit there. The easiest way to convey the value of your idea to a potential backer is to show people using it. The good news in these days of 3-D printing and computer animation is that it’s very easy to create compelling visuals of your product.
What to do if you don’t have active followers? First, take the time to correctly identify possibilities. Make sure you understand who is going to be interested in your offering and why. Next, find their online hangouts and reach out to them with an invitation to your website. Finally, on your website, have a capture page that invites them to join your community. One of the best ways to get email addresses is to use “ethical bribes”—trades. What can you trade potential customers in exchange for their email address and membership in your community? The simplest answers are often best: an invitation to receive access to your monthly blog, future discounts on products, early access to limited edition products, invitations to events, or in some rare cases (like PayPal back in the day), money. Get creative.
Launching with super-credibility. As we discussed in chapter 5, when you launch above the line of super-credibility, people instantly accept your project as real and believe in their hearts that it is going to work. The key is bringing together as many credible sources as possible and aligning their efforts with yours. Credibility comes from the quality of your video, who is in your video, endorsements on your crowdfunding website, and, if you can muster a launch-day press conference, who is at your press conference
Timing is everything in crowdfunding. And there are two different timing sequences to pay attention to: market timing and launch timing. Market timing means the world has to be ready for your solution. Why was the Pebble such a hit? Because the general public was hungry for affordable smartwatches. Be aware of development trends. Pay close attention to increased sales of similar products and do your homework. One of the best ways to test the market is to ask a hundred friends, family, colleagues, and—especially important—complete strangers what they think about your product/service/idea. Do this well before launch.
Trend surfing. You want to launch your campaign on a rising tide. Trends matter. Term popularity is important. Check out Google.com/trends. Trend surfing means riding the wave of a trending keyword just as it’s becoming viral. Position yourself correctly and you’ll surf the wave to its peak, using the term’s popularity to drive traffic to your campaign.
2 . Start with a Crowd. The second lesson Ryan learned was the importance of having a community of people who care about your product. Earlier in this chapter, I showed you how to create a group of Vanguards to play this role. In the case of the Coolest Cooler, Ryan’s supporters from his first campaign filled that bill. “During that campaign,” he explains, “we did a lot of outreach—going to tailgating parties, networking, connecting. It was these same people who encouraged me to try again. And when I did, during our second campaign, these preexisting fans were with us from the start. They were a big boulder we threw into the pond. It made a very big ripple and had a very big effect
Structurally, the change has been equally significant. Consider that the major structures that handled the dissemination of information of the last century—radio, television, print—went in only one direction. Communication flowed from the top down, and even then just barely, by contemporary standards. But today the Internet permits top-down and bottom-up and side-to-side communication. In communities, these new possibilities for communication don’t just allow a leader to lead, they allow other leaders to emerge. They permit collaborative structures that would have been unthinkable just a decade back.
Law of Niches, the idea, quite simply, that you are not alone. This is one of the most telling features of the web—the somewhat humbling fact that no matter what oddball notion you’re deeply passionate about, well, there are plenty of folks who share the same passion.
The ability for entrepreneurs to nimbly find and serve niche interests—and to produce platforms that allow those groups to address their needs en masse—is better than ever before.
Look, if you can leverage an existing community to fulfill your dreams, go that route. But if you’re passionate about something and no one else is sating that desire, then you have first-mover advantage. Don’t underestimate this power.