OK, Now What?

OK, Now What?

By now, I hope the foggy shit has cleared.

Because you can stand the fck out without drowning in marketing bullshit. You can stand the fck out and have fun in the process. You can stand the f*ck out no matter what curveballs your life (and career) throw at you.

First, you ditched the assumptions you had about your customers by foraging for insights. Then you discovered frustrating problems others have overlooked to describe how you’re uniquely positioned to attract the right people. After that, you developed a brand that’s distinctive—not disruptive—to create an identity that gets noticed, remembered, and liked. And finally, you’ve put together a plan to continuously reach as many of the right people as possible when it’s most relevant to them. (See Figure I., first presented at the beginning of the book in the Introduction.)

Figure I.4. The four stages of Stand The F*ck Out.

I hope you’re proud … because I am really proud of you. And I really don’t mean it sarcastically.

Before I let you go, I have one last story to share.

You see, the time I struggled most in my career was when I would have an idea, work on it for a few weeks while it was new and exciting, and then abandon it.

Back in 2011 I had a blog called The Attic of the Web—my last name, Grenier, means “attic” in French—about entrepreneurship, marketing, and social media (see Figure 1). It wasn’t easy to build a blog from scratch back then, so I spent a lot of time on the design, then wrote and published six or seven articles.

Yes, that’s it.

Figure 1. My blog’s homepage from 2011.

Then I stopped.

A few years later, I moved to Dublin and was interested in starting my own company. I attended a couple of “start-up weekends,” where you meet people, come up with an idea on the spot, find a team who wants to develop it with you, and then try to validate it and sell it in one weekend.

I did a couple of them. Nothing ever came of it, and I stopped going.

Then I had a business intelligence project I managed to sell to a company I was interning with. I saw an opportunity in an area where the company struggled and I had an idea to create a new dashboard. The company invested money to help me hire suppliers to build it and I spent months and months developing it without ever showing it to anyone … and it failed. No one ever got to use it.

Much of my early adulthood and career was spent in this pattern of feeling excited about my ideas, starting projects, and then dropping them. Why? Probably because I didn’t have a map to turn those random bursts of inspiration into something real.

Which brings me to my main point: anyone can read a book like this one, get super excited about the possibilities, and then … and then do absolutely fuck all with that knowledge. I don’t want that to happen to you. I want you to stand the fck out for real—not just in your head. Because doing something that stands the fck out is such a thrilling experience. It gets results, it makes you feel good, and it’s contagious. Once your clients, your teammates, your boss have experienced it, they will want to live it again and again and again.

I hope you’re going to go through this book again whenever you feel like the marketing bullshit is all over your windshield and you struggle to see the road.

Maybe it’s a new product you’re launching with your team, maybe it’s a new business venture you’re thinking of launching with your mate from college, or maybe, just like the story of Jon Goodman I shared at the start of the book, it’s when the business is in deep trouble and needs rescuing. Whatever it is, I’m here rooting for you on the sidelines. And if you ever need someone to grab the wheel with you? I do that too. But first—go make something satisfyingly uncomfortable happen.

I’m rooting for you; I truly am. You’ve got this.

Bisous.