We are modern day entrepreneurs. We cut new ground and bring change. We need to act a little bit like rockstars – rockstars of a new genre. Like rockstars we need self belief which borders upon arrogance.
We need attitude. We can’t fake it.
We can’t act like employees
Employees are conformists
Conformists never change the world
We’re bringing change
We are not conformists
I used to think that it’s better to keep your business idea a secret. Then I read that “secrets kill you” in the Bootstrappers Bible by Seth Godin. It’s very true. You can get a copy here.
Firstly – no one is going to steal your idea. The idea is the easy bit. The execution is the hard part. Truth be told it is more likely that someone else will start doing what you are if they don’t know it’s already being done.
Proof – how many times have you had a great new business idea only to find out it has already been done. Then you simply move on.
By keeping it a secret – it not only chips away at your confidence, you remove the potential for your circle to help you nurture it and bring it to life.
Here’s a live example of niche marketing in action.
At rentoid we are currently implementing a niche strategy by ‘clustering’.
As blogged about, rentoid is the place to rent anything. To make this true, we need people to have a great user experience. Therefore we are focusing our global website on one town. The town rentoid was founded in.
We think it makes sense for these reasons:
We have many items for rent in this town
We can implement old school awareness campaigns like letter box drops, and hand outs at the local train station
We can leverage local contacts & friends
When people first visit the rentoid, they’ll see many items in ‘their’ suburb
People want to rent things locally where possible
We can rent items off new members and provide a great user experience
It leverages a growing sense of ‘community’ in small suburbs
It has a higher chance of users telling their friends – who also live there
Membership will grow geographically to the next suburb, and so on – virally
We can test what works on a micro level before investing on a larger scale
You get the picture.
So our niche plan is to cluster geographically, and grow from their. I’ll let you know how it goes.
The biggest problem with the perfect strategy is this: It’s pretty hard to implement the plan, maybe impossible. That’s why business plans can be overrated. The simpler the strategy and therefore plan, the greater the chance of implementation.
Here’s the start up blog view:
Create a 1 page mud map, and make up the rest as you go along. That way we just might keep up with the world.
Granted, The Simpsons is a well established brand. But here lies an example of something with a strong propensity to spread virally.
As an on line promotional vehicle for the new Simpsons movie, create your own Simpsons avatar. Click on the donut.
It makes this website really sticky, the really clever thing is that your avatar then appears randomly through the website. Very cool. I just spent quite an amount of time making up avatars for all my friends and family members.
How did I find out? Word of mouth, multiple times.
Probably the worst phobia entrepreneurs can suffer from is ‘fear of knowledge’
Epistemophobia, as it is clinically known sounds so ridiculous it’s hard to believe it exists. It does, and we all suffer from it to varying degrees. Sometimes we simply don’t want to change our world view.
As entrepreneurs we quickly learn that introducing something new to the world requires our audience to overcome their ‘fear of knowledge’. When people are comfortable in what they believe, they’d rather not know there’s a better way to do things, or a more logical thought pattern to embrace. Think about the PC and the years it took for it to penetrate households.
Like consumers, we entreopreneurs don’t like to acquire knowledge that contradicts our goals, methods or ambitions either. The trick is knowing whose turn it is to ignore the fear of knowledge; ours or the consumers.
Maybe it’s the spaceship interior or the futuristic aerodynamics, but there’s no doubt that when it comes to hybrid cars, the Prius has the monopoly of the mind.
This has been verified by the board game itself – Monopoly, where the Prius has now taken place of the racing car.
The hybrid movement is not without its naysayers…
A $50,000 Greenpeace badge?
The eco-razzi car of choice?
Not as green as public transport?
It shouldn’t matter if it is moving human consumption in the right direction.
That fact is all this is the result of some damn good marketing. Kudos to Toyota.