Seth Godin's Marketing Secrets to Launching a New Business

The $1,000 Business Challenge

Louis: What happens if you take three struggling freelance marketers, lock them in a 17th century cottage and don’t let them leave until we fix their businesses? In August, I rented an old cottage in rural Ireland and invited copywriter Rob E. Commerce, designer Laura and book coach Vicky. Three freelancers desperate to stand the fuck out. And over two days, I ripped everything apart. Their offers, their messaging, their branding, their legion. To find what was really holding them back. This is the concept of a new YouTube channel that I’m launching. You can watch the first episode for free right now. It’s half an hour long. It’s supposed to be entertaining as well as practical. I hope you’ll enjoy watching it. So please set half an hour aside to watch it around your morning coffee, breakfast, lunch break, or on the bus or at the gym, whatever. The link to Access this new YouTube channel is in the episode Show Notes. I really, really appreciate you taking the time to watch it. And then, you know, the usual to like it, comment to share, talk about it around you. If you like it. Thank you so much. Bonjour. Bonjour. And welcome to everyone hates marketers.com, the digital marketing podcast for tech marketers who are sick, shady, aggressive marketing. And I’m your host, Louis Garnier. Today’s a special episode. Seems kind of unreal to me. That Seth Godin, a marketer I’ve admired for years. I’ve agreed to speak on everyone heistsmarketers.com so I knew he was a very impatient person. So I challenged him for 50 minutes. I really tried to find the best question I could ask to really put him out of his comfort zone. So I challenged him to come up with a business idea on the fly. He didn’t know about it before and I challenged him to explain exactly how he would launch it with a lot of details. The catch was he couldn’t use his real name. So set. Thank you so much once again for being on the podcast. I have some bad news for you. We’re going to have to start a business together right now. We’re going to have to come up with a sort of a business idea together. It’s a bad news because you have to work with me for a bit and I’m not the best at it. You are. So let me frame that. The challenge I want us to go through together right now. So we are starting a business. We have, let’s say, one grand to spend and we have to be profitable in three months or less. The only thing that I like to set as a condition is that you cannot Use your name at all. You have to remain anonymous. So you can’t use your audience. Right?

Seth Godin: Sure.

Louis: So let’s start right now. Let’s say we have to create a business together from scratch. Let’s say it’s an online business. We have to sell it. We can use the medium of Internet to sell it.

Starting with the Smallest Possible Market

Seth Godin: How?

Louis: How would you go about creating a product that people would actually like?

Seth Godin: Well, it’s a great way to start. Let’s understand the first thing, which is we are going to be marketing with people, not at them. And that is a fundamental shift from the way most business people think. They think they should have a factory. It should be up and running. They should figure out what they make, and then they should do something to people to get those people to notice them and to believe that they need what’s being sold and then to buy it. And that method made a lot of sense for 100 years because you could pay money for media, and for that money, you got people’s attention. That was the deal. But what we have to do is begin with the following. We must begin with something that is so on point for the people who we seek to serve that they, once they become aware of it, cannot imagine engaging without it. So that means we can’t pick a giant problem, because there’s no giant problem that can be solved for $1,000. Those have all been taken. We have to think of not the biggest possible market, but the smallest possible market, the smallest possible market that can sustain us and figure out how to bring that group of people something that they can’t imagine being without so that they will tell other people. So the Internet is a symptom of this. It’s a sidelight of this. It’s not an Internet company. It’s the Internet that’s being used to spread the word about what we did. So that’s how I would begin the smallest possible audience in a generous way where no one thinks we’re interrupting them because they can’t believe we have what they need.

Louis: Okay, so let’s get a little bit specific. Do you have anything in the top of your mind, something, a challenge that you encountered recently or a problem that you’ve seen recently that you think is worth solving for a particular small audience?

Building Trust Through Valuable Free Content

Seth Godin: Well, so if I have 90 days, I’m just making this up as we go here.

Louis: Yep.

Seth Godin: What happens if I create a PDF document that is the 150 best Airbnb places to stay in Paris? Okay. It’s going to take me. You’re going to do this work, actually, it’s going to take you a week of real effort to visit places, take pictures, do an analysis, explain which are under smallest, which one. And in this 40 page document, you are going to be able to deliver to people real value about where they should stay when they’re in Paris. And we’re going to give it away. And we’re going to give it away, we’re going to make it a medium post and we’re going to put it in other places so that anybody who searches for where should I stay in Paris? Is more than not likely to discover it. And even better, when people do discover it, they’re going to tell other people they know because it’s so beautifully done that this is something that they need.

Louis: Okay.

Seth Godin: Over the course of the next month, we’re going to focus obsessively about earning trust. We want to earn trust with the people who are seeking a place to stay and we want to earn trust with people who are hoping that people will stay with them. And so we’re creating a two sided equation here where the word gets out that we’re the person to ask about where to stay in Paris. We give great free advice and the word gets out among people who are looking to rent their gara or villa or whatever that this is someone who can find you the customers that you need. So we’re going to spend a whole nother five weeks doing that, engaging with 100 to 1,000 people a day, back and forth, back and forth for free online until we’re the indispensable middleman and once that occurs, will make more than $1,000, maybe even $1,000 a day, because people on either side will come to us and say, I trust you, you’ve never steered me wrong. Can I give you some money to do X? Take me on a tour, find me, get me into a place I can’t get into, or come visit my villa and write a review of it honestly, so that other people will see it. That middleman position is not currently filled. It’s in Paris. It could be filled by someone who has less than $1,000. And 90 days from now we have an asset which is people who trust us on both sides. And we will be able to turn that asset into a cash flow over time by serving the people we seek to serve.

Louis: So let me break that down first of all, the first task would be to actually create sort of a PDF so free content that is actually really valuable and something niche enough for people to be interested in. I’d like to get deeper than what you just said. Not only we should help people to find a great Airbnb in Paris, but I think we should help Americans to find a great Airbnb place in Paris.

Seth Godin: Right, right. Because I’m an American. I think everyone is an American.

Louis: Yes, I know you said Paris because you think I’m French. And actually I’m French, which is a great guess from you, but only missing to start to go back to it. I think if we pick the tiniest audience, the one that we are the, the most uncomfortable with, we almost fear it’s too small. I think it’s a great start. So for Americans that might have specific needs. Right. Or even we can dig deeper, are we talking about people from California specifically?

Seth Godin: Right, exactly.

Louis: So those people might have needs such as high speed Internet, they want to see monuments from the balcony, they want to discover some food that they’ve seen in San Francisco, but they actually are the real deal in Paris. Maybe I’m just making that up as well. But by niching down that much, we’re able to exactly understand their problems. We create this big list that you make me do and you pay me to do that, which is great. So we have that, we publish that. Because you’re anonymous, you can’t use your name. How would we go about promoting it, this first piece of content?

Seth Godin: So I wrote a blog post a bunch of years ago called FirstTen and. And it’s still one of my most important posts. And what I say is everyone knows 10 people and if you don’t know 10 people, you have to start over. If you know 10 people, you give this thing to them. If they tell other people, it’s good. If they don’t tell other people, you need to make something better and so you don’t have to put my name on it. And we only need 10 people. We only need 10 people in this hyper targeted market. And I’m not sure I’d pick California. Maybe I’d say people with kids between 3 and 7 years old. Right. Because they know lots of other people who have kids between 3 and 7 years old. That what we’re seeking to do. Another one that’s very similar is we all know the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi that became a sensation. And now the waiting list to get in to have dinner with Jiro is enormous. Well, I could imagine a business that does nothing but act as a concierge for people who want to eat dinner at Giro’s. That’s the entire business that’s super targeted. But the Fact is, if you know one person who knows Ed Levine at Serious Eats, Ed Levine will write about what you just did because it’s so hyper targeted and aligns with his audience of people. So I picked something that I thought we could do in 90 days, but you know what, it might take 200 days. And that’s okay because you can do a bunch of them. My point is the marketers that are disliked by humans are disliked because they have non remarkable products that cause them to act like selfish jerks. So if you begin by asserting that you need something that is remarkable to a unique group of people, you’re 80% of the way there.

The Middleman Strategy and Scaling

Louis: Right? So we create this very good content. I might have to update it a few times until I know that those 10 people I shared it to actually really love it so much that they are willing to share it for free. So those are the first two steps. And then how do we get into this middleman position where people would start to ask us for advice?

Seth Godin: Well, so what happens is what we want in a low trust world is someone to trust. And our problem is not piracy. Our problem is obscurity. And the record industry spent way too long fighting piracy. Piracy is awareness. Piracy leads to attention, attention leads to trust. So if over time you are able to become trusted, then people who want something extra will reach out to you. And they will reach out to you. Because my pseudonymous right, Jacques Godin is right there at the bottom with my email address. And I answer all my email and most of the time, if I can engage with someone for three minutes, it’s free. But if you want me to get on a plane, or you want me to cross the street, or you want me to do something special for you, then let’s agree to charge for it because it’s worth it.

Louis: All right, so I’m going to call you Jacques for the next few minutes, if that’s okay. So Jacques, you will. So what you expect from this piece of content is that it’s so valuable, it’s so insightful, it’s so targeted, so good that people will tend to want to contact you to ask you more questions, to dig into the problems a

Seth Godin: little bit more correct.

Louis: And by answering them, by being kind, by being helpful, you hope that they would trust you in return and therefore trust you enough to perhaps pay for something slightly bigger than what they got from the free content.

Seth Godin: Yeah, just so we can get out of the consumer mindset, I was looking at learning management software the other day. This is like blackboard. But the next Generation that you can run a course on. Turns out there’s 40 products in the space, and it’s really complicated. If I had a week, I could write a special report about the advantages of each one. If I wrote a report on the advantages of each one, with no help from Seth Godin, I, I, Jacques Gaudin would easily be the number one SEO match for which LMS software should I buy. And once you’re in that position, again, the number of companies where it’s not their money, who would call you up and say, look, my boss wants me to buy one of these. I don’t know which one. How much is your consulting fee? Well, I actually charge $1,000 an hour. So that means that for after one hour’s worth of work, I broke even, which is what you said my job was.

Louis: You might not be able to charge 1,000 an hour if you’re not. If you’re just go down, People don’t know you.

Seth Godin: No, they do know me. They trust me because I wrote the definitive 70, 40 pieces of software. I’m just giving people an abundance of confidence by creating an abundance of value. And all I’m asking in return is to be trusted.

Louis: Fantastic. Okay, so to summarize, we create very good piece of content. So good that in return, people start to trust us, contact us. We start to charge for problems that are adjacent to the problem we solve. And should we invest in ads? Let’s say we need to scale this business. Let’s say that a few people have contacted us, we made some money. What would you do next? Where would you invest the money?

Seth Godin: I would invest the money in using the process again and again and again. It would be a really long time before I started running ads, because the fact is, the pie is this big and I’ve touched this many people. So when I go to an advertiser, it’s to reach this many people. I don’t need to do that yet. What I need to do is give the people who trust me a really good reason to tell their friends. So if you think about how you heard about Facebook or Twitter, you didn’t hear about it from advertising. You heard about it from people who benefited if you started using it too. Right? So that if you can start creating cycles where it’s in their interest, not because you’re bribing them, but in their interest to tell other people they will. So here’s an example. So when I published this book, I put it in a milk carton and only 5,000 people got it at the beginning And I made no money. Zero. I broke even. But if you got this and you read it, you decided that your job would be better if other people you worked with understood what the hell you were talking about. And so people put this on their desk, because if it’s on your desk, someone comes in and says, what’s that? And you have a conversation about it. So that’s got it. If you didn’t say you wanted scale when you gave me the assignment, but if you want scale, you got to pick a solution that works better if my friends are doing it, too. And one of my favorite examples is Alcoholics Anonymous. They’re not anonymous. In fact, the first rule of Alcoholics Anonymous is tell other people about aa, because AA will work better if your friends aren’t drunks. But if instead they are like you, in recovery, that will make it better for you. And so that’s how it spread to millions and millions of people.

Louis: Well, fantastic. I think that’s a great start for the episode. It’s going to give a lot of people some ideas on where to start. Just to mention to the listeners who are not necessarily watching the video, you mentioned your book, the Purple.

Seth Godin: Oh, I forgot all about the fact that we were only on audio. Yes. My book, Purple Cow, came in a milk carton. And I also want to say, since we’re shifting gears, that’s the most innovative, energizing way anyone has ever started a podcast with me. Good for you.

Louis: Thanks. I’m definitely not going to edit that out, but let’s go back a little bit to you. And I’ve listened to a lot of things from you. I’ve read your books, and I’m not going to repeat what a lot of people will be saying. I’m just curious about the type of kid you were. Where are you? Very curious. Were you questioning your teachers to the point where you were annoying them? What type of kid were you?

Seth Godin: Before I answer the question, I have to put a disclaimer here, which is that that question is often asked by people who aren’t you as a way of letting themselves off the hook. Because if we are different than the person who has done that other stuff, then it’s not our fault, because we weren’t born that way. So I’ve studied a lot of people who have done creative work and who are artistic and have made change happen. And the only thing we have in common is that we have nothing in common. So tall and short, rich and not rich. Grew up with great parents. Grew up with no parents. All across the Spectrum. Jeff Bezos loving family took him in. But Jeff Bezos did not grow up in the same kind of nuclear household that I did. Right. So which is it? Which is which one do you want? And I’m not in his league in many, many areas. But I’m just using that as an example of someone I’ve talked to. The point is, I was super obnoxious as a high school student. Teachers rolled their eyes when they saw me. My high school teacher wrote in my yearbook that I was never going to amount to anything. And on and on and on. But I don’t think that is a requirement to be somebody who learns to look at the world differently. I just think it happened to be true in my case.

Why Everyone Hates Marketers

Louis: Fair enough. I wasn’t asking that to know whether people like you are more likely to succeed. I’m genuinely interested in the past because that’s usually the best prediction of the future and how people are. So let’s go back to marketing a little bit more because that’s what I want to spend the most time speaking about. You touched on it at the start, but why do you think marketers have such a bad reputation in general?

Seth Godin: There are two reasons. The first reason is that most of us deserve it because we’re selfish, lying, short term thinking scum who believe that our job is to manipulate people as we market to them. But the other reason, which is just as big, is that people understand that they are culpable, that consumers fall for short term stuff. They’re not disciplined enough to ask the hard questions. They’re looking for magic beans and rainbows and pots of gold. And we feel terrible that when we get tricked, partly because we knew better. The reason that buying a car in the United States is so horrible is because customers insist on it being that way. And if instead customers just paid the price the way we do with bread, that’s the way cars would be sold. Car dealers do it the way they do it because even though we pretend we hate it, we do it with them because we want to feel like we could beat the system. That’s a human failing and we get punished for it all the time. So it’s both the marketers are bad and the consumers are bad together.

Louis: So every single consumer, every single person would think that they are smarter than the system and try to play the system right.

Seth Godin: Yeah. Or we look at all the waterways clogged with bottled water trash. Well, we bought into bottled water hook, line and sinker because we wanted to believe that it would make us thinner, cooler, faster, whatever. We wanted that feeling. We didn’t need bottled water. Right. There are countries in the world where they do, but not where I live. And so consumers are culpable. We look at all the trash and we go, we hate marketers who got us to buy into this trash economy. Yeah, but we bought into the trash economy. And so it’s both.

Louis: That’s an interesting take. I usually think about that. And in the topic of fast food, for example, or shitty food that you’d buy in supermarkets that are overly processed and fat and full of sugar, I talk to my friends about it sometimes I’m like, I don’t think it’s the people’s fault who buy the food that is cheap. I don’t think it’s them who are at fault. I think it’s the big companies that have the big money behind them who are trying to trick and lie and manipulate people into thinking that this is good food. It’s 100% chicken or it’s 100% whatever. So I’m done with this. I don’t think it’s 50 50. I think it’s a big company’s fault first, right?

Seth Godin: Well, I didn’t say it was 50 50. It’s really hard to apportion blame. What I’m saying is the thing about responsibility is they don’t give it, you take it. And when a culture says we’re not going to stand for it, we have this wonderful process in most countries where the government ought to listen to us and make a rule, right, that the companies are incented by the fact that they’re public as public companies. They have investors. Those investors are us. The investors are short term selfish people who want the stock to go up tomorrow. And so we push the companies to do the very thing we say we don’t want the companies to do. And so it’s this giant circle where everyone is responsible. Who is the most responsible and the well paid CEO for sure. Because the well paid CEO needs to have the guts to look the market in the eye and say, no, we’re not going to do that. We don’t stand for that. And if you want to sell the stock, go ahead. Yes, that is her responsibility. But all of the factors at work make it so that she has to make that difficult choice. So I refuse to let anybody off the hook. I don’t let myself off the hook. I think that the government is letting us down, the CEOs are letting us down, the shareholders are letting us down and we are the all of those.

Louis: Let’s Get a little bit more detail about the bad marketing that we talked about. Is there any particular tactics or things that you see happening at the minute in digital marketing or marketing in general that you would consider to be plain wrong? Like those so called best practices that are plain wrong.

Bad Marketing Practices to Avoid

Seth Godin: Well, where does it start? It begins with the race to the bottom for attention. If you say my only job is to get eyeballs and my job is to get eyeballs as cheap as possible, then you buy into algorithmic advertising, then you buy into sneaking around tracking people’s data, then you buy into questionable content that you’re busy paying for. Then you buy into the degradation of our culture as we rush to make everything dumber and make it more of a click. All of that starts with this misguided assumption that all attention is the same and that we don’t need to be trusted. So that’s part of it. And then the second part of it is we let ourselves off the hook by making ever crazier promises to people that we know we can’t keep. Because our competition is making these promises so we feel like we have to out promise them. So that’s where the Flat Belly Diet comes from. That’s where the idea of seducing people into going into debt comes from. Because we say, well, it’s not me, it’s my competition. Another race to the bottom. The reason I’m in this field is because at the same time there’s also a race to the top. And it turns out that if you go on the race to the top, you can win more reliably, it’s just harder. So the race to the top is how do I become the most trusted? How do I become the most distinctive, how do I become the most ethical? If you do those things, you win just as well. But it’s not obvious how to get there. You need to think hard.

Louis: So you mentioned there is no like, not all the eyeballs are created equal. You shouldn’t really chase any kind of clicks or all type of clicks. So how do we convince those marketers that genuinely believe 100% that attention is the only currency available out there? What would you say to them?

Seth Godin: Well, I need to talk to their boss because the boss has said we’re going to make average stuff for average people. As soon as you commit to that, then the customer wants the cheapest one, the cheapest one that they can find. And so now you’re caught again in how do I interrupt more people, how do I make it cheaper, how do I sell it cheaper? Once you buy into that cycle, everyone’s acting rationally. My problem is buying into that cycle in the first place. So when you think about Sam Walton said the container ship is a miracle. How can I build a trillion dollar company or $100 million billion dollar company? Well that’s sell average stuff junkly made at the lowest price I can by eviscerating my communities and bringing it in from from a low wage country. Right. Well the game theory there said that that was in his interest cause he couldn’t build the other kind of company because that spot looked too hard to get to. But each community he showed up in, whether it was investors or customers, let him do it. And so what we have to figure out how to do, cause on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog. On the Internet anyone can show up with anything is we’ve got to figure out how to create standards so that no, you’re not going to see an ad like that on a well known website, or no this store is not going to sell those items, or no, I’m not going to do business with advertisers who play this way. And if we don’t speak up that way or get our government to speak up that way, then we’re just going to end up with crap.

Making Commodities Remarkable

Louis: Here’s the challenge for you. I’m just thinking about that now. It wasn’t in the question I was planning to ask you, but there is an industry, I live in Ireland, but I know from living in France and in the US it’s the exact same. There’s an industry that, that really annoys me, it’s the telcos. So Internet providers, phone providers, mobile Internet, that kind of stuff. To me that’s the summary. If I had to choose one industry, they are the one that are really racing to the bottom. They are always competing on price. They are coming up with every single time the same features. Let’s say we have a brilliant idea of starting our own Internet company. We provide Internet just like the others. But how would you make it remarkable?

Seth Godin: Well, so you asked the question exactly the wrong way. I don’t know if you did that on purpose. You can’t begin by saying how do we make it just like the others and make it remarkable? You have to say how do we make it different from the others so that it is remarkable. And then you say and how do we make it for the smallest possible audience? And that part takes discipline. But when I think about the magic of an Internet company or a telecom company, what do they do for A living. They connect us to other people, something we desperately want. So there are only two ways to do it. You can connect us to other people the way everyone else connects us to other people, in which case I’d like the cheapest, thank you very much. Or you can connect us to different people in a different way than people I can only reach through you. This is what Facebook does. Facebook says anyone could build the software. That’s Facebook. It would take, you know, 10 smart people a month because you’re copying it. But it wouldn’t be worth it because the people you want to reach aren’t on your site, they’re on Facebook. So the opportunity for someone is to say, where’s the minimum sized group of people who desperately want to be connected in a new way? If I can connect them using hardware and software, they’ll want to be connected because they don’t want to be left out. And from that little circle, if what I’m doing actually works, the circle will get bigger. That is the way it always happens.

Louis: Yeah, I think that’s the right way to frame it. So we wouldn’t start by trying to be average and reaching the same amount of people that they would be reaching out to. And the. The other important thing here that you just said naturally, as if it was so easy, but I think a lot of people struggle with that is you were able to quickly identify the job to be done. The actual core first principle of the reason why people use Internet for. So I think that’s a very good lesson for listeners, is that we always have to think about the first principle behind the product or service we use. That’s the best way to market. It’s really to think about the core emotions, the core feelings, the core things that we do with it. So I really very much like that part of the answer as well. In 1999, you wrote the book, you came up with the term permission marketing. And since then, a lot of other companies and people have used the term or changed it slightly from permission marketing to inbound marketing. But basically the same concept. Right. So you’re pretty good at spotting trends before anybody else. Do you have any methodology behind it? Do you have any way to find things before they seem to be mainstream?

Spotting Trends Before They Go Mainstream

Seth Godin: Well, since it’s my main claim to fame, I’ll let you know that I started doing it in 1990 and I named it in 96. So it was thrilling. And I was early. So one of the things I would say to people is, you really don’t need to invent any of These trends, you. You just have to be a little earlier than everyone else. And the way you can do that is by listening for the crazy people, because the crazy people are always going to talk about it before you will. So in the case of the Internet, Kevin Kelly, a proud crazy person like me, wrote a book in which he outlined all of it, the whole thing. And it’s called Where Is It? You can find it on kk.org but he just wrote it. He was the founding editor, Wired. I think he wrote it after I did. Permission markings, probably 97. And if you read it there, it was all laid out. And what people did was they looked at it and they said, I can’t see it. And the reason they couldn’t see it is they were reading it the way they would read Time magazine. Tell me something I already know. But the trick is to get yourself into a mindset where you can say, I’m reading this. Tell me something I don’t know. And when you come across something you don’t know, you’re going to have to change your mind. Because right now your mind is made up that you know what’s important, that you know what’s working. If someone says something new, you have to change your mind. And it begins with, oh, I didn’t know that that’s important. I knew something. I didn’t know something that was important, and now I do. Then you act as if, well, what would this mean and what would this mean and what would this mean? How do I take it all the way in one direction? And if it feels like there’s something there, then you can start talking about it like a normal person, and maybe other people will want to hear you talk about it.

Louis: And how would you identify crazy people?

Seth Godin: Well, I think what we’re trying to do is live in the gray, in the zone between black and white, in the zone between wrong and right, proven and unproven, in the zone of possibility, that what we do is live in that zone. And so we’re wrong a lot. That’s why people think we’re crazy. Wrong a lot. And if you realize that being wrong is really cheap, if you do it right, then you can live there for a long time because it’s cheap to be wrong. People don’t remember all the times I was wrong. They just remember the six times I was right.

Louis: When was the last time you were wrong?

Seth Godin: Well, there’s a reason I don’t have any money in the stock market, because every time I put money in the stock market, I am wrong. But the biggest one that I talk about was when I was sure that the World Wide Web was a fraud and was never going to work. And that cost me a couple billion dollars. So that was an expensive time to be wrong. But I still got to keep playing the game.

Louis: So your core advice here would be to try to identify people who seem to be wrong quite a lot. But at least I think if they are wrong, they are taking risk, right?

Seth Godin: Yeah.

Louis: And so I would say the core advice. I’m not trying to reword what you said, I’m just trying to simplify it so that I understand it as well.

Seth Godin: Sure. No, you’re doing great.

Louis: Is trying to find people who take risk quite a lot, who say stuff as they are, who try to write quite a lot or record videos on YouTube quite a lot. So probably people who would produce a lot of content, as the term is being used, quite a lot. So people who take a lot of risk in that aspect.

Seth Godin: Well, let me just interrupt for a second. I don’t think it has to be volume. So Eric Raymond wrote a book called the Cathedral and the Bazaar and it described all crowdfunding, all crowdsourcing, Wikipedia, Linux, all of it. And this was 20 something years ago. I don’t think he’s ever written anything else. So it’s not necessarily that it’s a lot. It’s that other people who are crazy are referring to it. That’s sufficient.

Louis: Okay, that makes a lot of sense. One thing that I’ve noticed, I’m a marketer myself. I know a lot of marketers and there’s one common challenge amongst marketers. And it’s like, you know that very well. You know this challenge very well. People seem to be completely overwhelmed with all the options out there, all the channels, the tactics available. So there’s growth hacking, there’s, you know, Facebook and the bots coming. You know, there’s like so many things I can think of right now that would really make me crazy if I had to think. Think about it every day. So what’s your advice for people and marketers in particular, who are getting lost in the sea of all the things?

Overcoming Marketing Channel Overwhelm

Seth Godin: Right. Marketers in 1966 only had to buy TV and they were done right. The TV was the magic bullet. So we grew up believing that there was a magic bullet. There isn’t one. What I would say is, number one, the asset you’re building is trust, connection, direct connection with the end user. Whatever method you want is fine as long as it leads to a direct connection with the end user. And number two is being in a lot of places is not nearly as important as being in a place. Well, so I’m not on Facebook, I’m not on Twitter. It’s fine that you just pick something. It doesn’t matter if you pick the perfect one. You just pick something. And by picking it, by choosing it, by saying, I’m a podcaster, not a blogger, by saying, I speak at conferences, but you can’t find me online, pick your thing, own it. Build your asset there in a way that others don’t have the resolute force of will to sustain. Because that’s what you’re trying to do is to be the one and only. So you have to build a fort high enough that everyone looks at this. I could never build a fort that high. That’s what you have to do is over invest in your channel so that the people you engage with feel like they can trust you.

Louis: But I guess that goes back to one of your core advice from earlier on, whereby you choose a very hyper local audience. I think if you go to a very specific niche, the channels or the tools you’re going to use are going to be almost chosen for you. Right? Because this particular tribe, this particular niche would probably only use Facebook way more than Twitter or only use Pinterest way more than Facebook. And therefore it’s kind of going to be obvious. So I think those two are connected, aren’t they?

Seth Godin: That’s right. You nailed it.

Examples of Remarkable Customer Experiences

Louis: Have you had any? No, let me rephrase that. What’s the best buying experience you ever had? Or let’s say in the last year or six months, quite recently, so many

Seth Godin: that I’d like to talk about. All right, so Penguin Magic is a great little company that sells magic tricks to amateur magicians. Professional magicians don’t buy magic tricks because they only need 10, and they just do the same 10 over and over again. But amateur magicians need a lot of tricks because we keep doing for the same people and they get tired of them, so we have to buy new ones. And it’s a great, great site because what they do is they show you a video of the trick, but you can’t find out how it’s done unless you buy it. And the tricks cost 10, 20, 30 bucks. All right? So when you buy it, then they email you a video of them packing your exact item as it gets shipped to you. And in the box when you get it comes something you didn’t ask for, which is a magazine filled, beautifully produced with other tricks that teach you how to do this, that or the other thing. And if you are a regular customer, you may discover that the CEO just sends you stuff in the mail with a personal note saying, I thought of you when I saw this trick. How much does it cost them to do all this extra stuff? Pennies. Pennies. I mean, they charged me $10 for a trick that they just emailed me. The answer there wasn’t even a gimmick. Right. So the margins are great, no problem. So that’s one example that I’ll give you the other example.

Louis: Let me cut you right there. What’s the trick that you bought?

Seth Godin: Oh, I’m not doing any magic for you right now. I’m not preparing.

Louis: No, no, I don’t expect you to trick me with anything. But genuinely, what’s the trick that you got?

Seth Godin: I do a lot of mentalism, mind reading tricks. And the trick that I’m thinking of now involves, it’s an ordinary deck of cards. I hand it to you, I don’t touch it again. And I ask you to. To put the trick to separate the cards without looking at them into black and red. So without turning them over. Red, red, red, black, red, red, blah, blah, blah. Right. So you put 26 in each pile. You’re guessing. I turn the piles over. All the black are in one pile. All the red are in the other pile.

Louis: I’m not going to ask you the question.

Seth Godin: It’s so good.

Louis: To get the trick, you have to pay $10. So here you go.

Seth Godin: It’s so good. It’s so good. All right. And then the other one is a little more subtle, which is Danny Meyer, the great New York City restaurateur, has some of the fanciest, nicest restaurants in New York. And there’s no tipping allowed. Now, I don’t know about Ireland, but I know in France it’s a different thing, but in the United states, people tip 15% or so and all the money goes to the waiter. The people in the back who cooked don’t get anything. Danny thinks that’s ridiculous and unfair. So he’s betting his whole company on creating a new standard. And as a buying experience, it’s extraordinary because your engagement with the staff, front of house and back of house, is different because the people who are working there feel differently about how and why they are serving you. And so that’s no gimmick. Super subtle and the kind of bold responsibility taking that I’m a huge fan

Louis: of, that’s something I heard from an episode of Freekonomics, the podcast. So they Were saying that this guy has more than one restaurant and he started to avoid tipping with this one restaurant. So let me just think about the benefits that happen. So there’s one thing, first of all, when you don’t expect tipping as a waiter, your relationship with the customer is much more genuine. So that’s one thing that they said. The second is, I remember, if I remember well, that in the back of the house, the cooks and all of those people were generally paid way less. Don’t remember why it happened, but they were paid way less. So in this instance, because it’s against

Seth Godin: the law to give them tip money.

Louis: That’s it. So it’s against the law. So now that everybody’s not on tip, they were able to increase the pay for those people, if I remember well, so that people were happier and they were staying for longer because there was a low retention rate of particular people in the back of the restaurant. There’s another benefit. I don’t remember when. Well, actually, one of the big benefit that happened, one of the best things that happened to him and the restaurant is that this move made him so much publicity that he was booked for months and months and months and months. So I guess he was being remarkable this way. But that’s a very interesting topic. In France, you don’t tip. In Ireland, you kind of tip. Sometimes you don’t, but it’s not as far as the US where you kind of have to tip. So it’s a very strange place to be at the minute because you have to judge people based on their performance. And then you don’t tip them if they’re bad or if you think they’re bad, which is not really a good feeling, is it?

Seth Godin: Right. But you asked me about the buying experience and what it makes me feel like when I go is someone who is engaging with professionals who care about equity. And that feeling is one of the things I want when I go to a restaurant. Because if all I want to do is eat, I stay home and have a can of beans. Yeah.

Louis: It’s all about the experience. More and more, I’m interested to know you flagged. You’ve identified a lot of remarkable companies in the past. Do you have any example of remarkable companies that used to be remarkable that are not remarkable anymore?

When Remarkable Companies Stop Being Remarkable

Seth Godin: Well, almost every company I’ve ever mentioned is in that category. That’s why I don’t mention them as often, because it’s a curse. What happens is competence is something that a lot of people like the feeling of. And as an organization gets bigger, the People they hire tend to be people who want to feel competent. That you join a 500 person company not because you want to be egg throwing pioneer, but because you want to do a quote, good job. So what happens is when you get after 100 or 200 or 400 people and you’re good at something, you want to stay good at it. Well, eventually you start defending your old win, even though the outside world has raised the bar, you’re afraid to. Because in order to change, you must become incompetent again. Because change always creates incompetence on the way to a new kind of competence. And so we end up with this cycle. So we see McDonald’s was a super remarkable company in 1958. In 1958, if you were driving across the country, you only had two choices. Eat lousy food that might make you sick or eat McDonald’s. That was extraordinary. But then they went through a 40 year period of time when they were just defending something that they stood for. And over time, you can’t keep growing. Over time, it peaks. And it was interesting to watch my friends at Lululemon stumble last week because same store sales were way down. And one reason they were down is the easiest thing to do if you’re Lululemon is to sell what you sold yesterday. Because if you roll out something new and bold, it might not work. And so you don’t. And so again, figuring out which areas you’re willing to be incompetent at is the only way to grow.

Louis: So how would you advise, let’s say, a company that have quite a lot of employees where they, they’re not really, it’s not easy for them to be flexible that much, at least on paper. How would you advise them to become incompetent again?

Seth Godin: Well, we must begin with what’s your asset? Is it your relationship with suppliers? Your relationship with the stock market, Relationship with customers? Because you don’t want your asset to get broken. But if you take part of that asset and put it into an experimental mode, that’s how you can grow with advantage. So when I was at Yahoo, I sat down with the CEO and co founder and I said, jerry, here’s what I want to do. I want you to cut my salary by 80%, give me two employees and let me go across the street and we will build stuff that will siphon just 1% of Yahoo traffic and keep you from having to buy the next company for $10 billion. That we can be a skunk works to build those things. So what assets would Yahoo Put on the table what 1% of the daily traffic. Point it to mysterious new stuff. Let the core group do what the core group does. But what you can do is build a skunk works across the street. This is how Lockheed revolutionized the airplane. Tom Peters has written about this extensively. It takes guts to do that. And I was amazed at Jerry’s answer because it was so honest. And what he said to me is, well, I’d love to do that, but if I did that, everyone else would want to do that job too. And so he was concerned that he’d have to say to his core group of 300 people, you have to do the boring work. I’m going to go let Seth do something that’s fun. What he missed was Most of those 300 people wanted to do the boring work because they had stock options, they were going up every day, they were competent, they were having a good time, and they were good at it. Most people don’t want to give that up. But when you find someone who’s willing to give that up and you give them a place where they can go explore, they will. So another example is John Patrick. When he was at IBM, he invented IBM’s entire Internet consulting business by himself because the CEO let him have a year and a couple offices and 10 people and said, Go use IBM’s name, but don’t do anything stupid. He did things that might fail, but he didn’t do things that would bring shame upon IBM.

Louis: So your across the street description is actually on purpose. You wouldn’t advise leaders to let a group of 10 people just walking in the same office, just in another location. You would advise them to get away from the main.

Seth Godin: I think that’s essential because here’s the asset that’s not helpful, the assets that’s not helpful is all the people around the water cooler. The asset that’s not helpful is your instinct to level off and sand off the edges. That’s not what makes your company good. It’s just a byproduct of the fact that your company is good. So you got to get away from that, and you get away from it by physically leaving the building.

Louis: So as a leader, you need to identify people who are willing to take risks, who, who are genuinely outliers, people who like to take matters in their own hands. And usually you will have a lot more people who are willing to stay in their comfort zone and be comfortable there, and that’s perfectly fine as well. Obviously, as a big company, you kind of have to keep running the show and make sure everything runs smoothly. So I really like that. I think that’s a really good take on innovation. That’s actually a good practical advice as well. I also have a lot of young graduates who ask me, I want to get into marketing, how should I do that? So I know that you mentioned before that people shouldn’t have really CVs, they should have a reputation that precedes them. Right. So if you link that with the companies, therefore companies shouldn’t hire by cv. How should they hire them?

Advice for New Marketers and Essential Resources

Seth Godin: Two part answer. The first part is the best way to learn marketing is to do marketing, not to be part of a marketing department. So the beauty of it is marketing doesn’t cost money anymore. So go market a cause you believe in. Go market a company that doesn’t exist. Go market a political thing. Just go and market. Don’t ask anyone’s permission, just begin. And then from the company point of view, I don’t hire people unless I’ve worked with them first. And it’s so much easier to work with someone now. So that’s what companies ought to do. Not say, oh, he’s good at interviewing, therefore he should work here. They should say, oh, we worked with him on a project, he does exactly the kind of work we like. Let’s get him in. And the ability to be in the world doing this work and being seen. Right. Don’t show me your resume, show me your work. And in our field, that’s easier than almost any other one.

Louis: Let’s say somebody kind of is lost or she’s lost in the causes that she cares about or the things that, that she likes. How would you advise briefly somebody to pick something that she should work on for a while?

Seth Godin: By lost you mean they’re too caught up.

Louis: They’ll just be like, there’s so much noise. They don’t really know whether they need to work for charity or you know.

Seth Godin: Yeah, so it doesn’t matter. Make a spinner and spin the wheel. Do a thing. So my first jobs as a marketer were building a ski club in Buffalo, New York and marketing it to high school students. Then for my dad, writing copy for his ski binding division of the company he worked for, then starting a coffee shop and travel agency and ticket bureau in college and then marketing computer games for six year olds. They don’t have anything in common. Right? So begin. And that’s the secret, that people who are marketers are marketers because they know the difference between things that might work and things that don’t. And the only way to learn that is to do marketing.

Louis: So just go and do it. What do you think marketers should learn today that will help them in the next 10 years? 20 years? 50 years?

Seth Godin: Humility and empathy.

Louis: What are the top three resources that you would recommend marketers and digital marketers in particular to read or to discover or to digest?

Seth Godin: Well, I’ve written 18 books for you, so I would definitely start there. I would read some of the classics of marketing that are now being ignored. David Ogilvy, the book Scientific Advertising. I would read Steve Pressfield and the War of Art. I would definitely read the Art of Possibility by Ben and Ros Zander. These are books about humility and empathy, not books about algorithmic advertising.

Louis: Set, you’ve been absolutely amazing. Before I let you go, anything you’d like to add, anything you’d like to say to the listeners?

Seth Godin: Well, I would just like to remind them that the thing you’re doing right now is not easy. It’s time consuming. It takes a long time and I hope they appreciate it and you. So I’m glad you’re doing this work.

Louis: Thanks. That means a lot.

Seth Godin: Au revoir.

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Seth Godin: Sam.