Reader,

Here's some great books, with a critical flaw.

Built to Last – Jim Collins & Jerry Porras
Good to Great – Jim Collins
The Innovator’s Dilemma – Clayton Christensen
Zero to One – Peter Thiel
The Toyota Way – Jeffrey Liker
The Lean Startup – Eric Ries
Hooked – Nir Eyal

All good books. But they all try to nail the idea that the product is the most important thing to obsess over in your pink, wrinkled, gummy brain.

Not bad, or completely wrong advice—however—the vast majority of business owners take this as a free pass to obsess over their widgets as opposed to building better sales and marketing systems for them.

I see old grey boys who tell me they'd rather work on the product because it's more fun, and makes them feel less icky. And I see young-gun founders who wear their product pride as a badge of honour.

Different demographics.

Different alleged reasons for neglecting sales & marketing.

Same outcome: Pockets emptier than they should be.

Let me introduce to you a brand of phones called OnePlus. They did everything the market—and those books—tells them to do.

They:

• Obsessed over the product quality, had the best chips, screens, and charging
• Passed savings onto the consumer by selling direct to consumer (no middlemen with carriers)
• Skipped official waterproof testing to save money, and passed the savings on
• Focused purely on the experience of using the phone, instead of the phone being a cog in an ecosystem (like Apple locks you in)

As a result phone enthusiasts called it not only the best bang for your buck, but potentially the best phone full stop.

But still, they made very little in comparison to the other companies who allegedly do 'everything wrong'.

They had attracted a crowd of price sensitive enthusiasts. You know the type. Ginger, balding, unkept beard, stained t-shirt with a little bit of belly poking out the bottom. A little smelly and very unkempt. Usually a distant great Uncle, or cousin.

The type to snigger at you on Christmas Day when you get a new iPhone, and mutter "sheep" under their breath.

Eventually OnePlus decided enough was enough. They had a great product, the best product, but still hadn't cracked the wider market.

They slowly started to improve their distribution, aka their marketing. They paid for the official waterproofing test so they can use the rating in their marketing, they approached the carriers to develop an affiliate deal, and they started cranking advertising.

They introduced features expected by your everyday Joe.

And funnily enough things got worse for them.

The loyal crowd they thought they had built—the ginger types I mentioned earlier—turned on them. Refused to buy their phones, created hit pieces in the media, and completely tarnished their reputation. Complaints of pricing, feature changes, and minor spec upgrades littered the inter-webs .

OnePlus made a crucial error. They had created an audience of price sensitive geeks who'd complain about the charging hole being 1mm off centre. They thought that they could appeal to two markets at once.

The geeks, and the normies.

Silly gooses.

Here's the point.

The market you choose has the highest correlation with your success.

When offered the choice between a perfect product, and a starving crowd—choose the latter.

A bad offer to the right market will outperform the right offer to a bad market every time.

>>Build your business for buyers, not fans

At this point I can already hear the astute amongst my readers saying "Hang on Connor, you started this email in a way suggesting marketing is the most important thing".

And you'd be correct.

Without a well defined starving crowd there is almost no point in marketing your wares. You'd end up shouting a bunch of shit no one cares about into the void.

Furthermore—When choosing between a perfect product, and a starving crowd—we are making one critical assumption. That you have the means of distribution. A way of propagating your offer, good or bad, into the markets mind.

Meaning marketing, a continuous promotion of your wares, is the very baseline of a company.

If you have no way of promoting your wares, you are dead on arrival.

Bringing me nicely to a brief announcement.

My non-compete, exclusivity contract has expired. So my hat is officially back in the ring.

What will I be doing exactly you ask.

I'll save that for tomorrow's email.

In the meantime...

...If you want my hands on help in defining your market, the messages required to get that market to buy, the mediums in which to deliver said message, and for me to do it all for you...

...Hit reply.

Stay serving a starving crowd,

Connor Benham

—CWB

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