End Hype 002 - The Ultimate Marketing Strategy

End Hype Podcast. I am Callye Keen. Today I'm going to talk to you about the ultimate marketing strategy. This is the marketing strategy that you can use to build products that sell themselves. So we can funnel tons of money. We can create really fancy strategies, engagement strategies, affiliate strategies, ad strategies, all those fancy things. We can get data analytics, we can get our quant nerd friends to come in and help and figure out exactly how to squeeze all the value out of a market. Or we can make really cool stuff.

All right. So if you're passionate about making things, if you're passionate about running a business, if you're passionate about doing cool stuff, I tell people, make something that's worth sharing. Make something that's worth talking about. If you're just getting started, in my opinion, it's always better to make something that is incredible, that's to make something not really like a luxury product, but a disproportionately better product. If you have a service and you're just entering the market, you need to be disproportionately better.

This is a catch phrase that I tell clients all the time, is that good enough has been commoditized. The internet has flattened the market. I can go out and I can buy whatever service or product that I want. I can engage professionals here, there, wherever. The only way to really stand out is by word of mouth, is by doing such an incredible job and so many co-signs on your business. So just like some starting rapper, get some famous rapper to collaborate with them, and then you're like, "Oh my God, who is this guy? I got to buy this album. This is incredible."

The only reason that that came on your radar is because somebody says, "Hey, I'll sign off on that. That's good."

So how do you do it? You make incredible things. And for every market, for every market, I don't care if it's a service if you're making ... This is a card deck. This is a box. It's just a little machine sculpture. It doesn't matter what you're doing. There's always an upmarket version of that. There's always a reason why somebody wants to make that extra, extra thing.

We need to engage our customers, talk to them, figure out what do they really care about. Do they care about being cool to their tribe, to the people that, that they know, that they work with, that they interact with? Do they want additional functionality? Do they want speed? Do they want a smooth, easy process? What do they want? And then we need to do that at a level that sets us so far apart that they tell their friends.

So we're looking for that viral oceans to our products. So for every customer I get 1.3 customers, 1.1 customers. So it spreads from person to person to person. My content spreads from person to person to person. If you follow me on Instagram, the Netscape V2, the Netscape hybrid vessel bead, the thing that came before this one, it just got re-posted on a bunch of engineering channels the other day. With the combined reposts, we have millions and millions of views. The project that came before that, our video got viewed 650,000 times. We were featured in YouTube videos that got millions and millions of views.

Why? Because it was way out there. It was way in that that sharable, interesting ... It was in that zone where people looked at it and they said, "What the hell is this?" I posted a picture of the artifact, the spinner the other day. And the number one comment that I get is, "What the hell is this?" And I tell them and they say it's ridiculous. And then they share it.

You can do that with any product. So this is something my brother's working on and it's just a card case for magic gathering. It's aluminum machine, a bunch of different versions, different artwork coming out. He's going to be collaborating with artists to machine and laser engrave artwork into it. Customize them. And the lesson here is you can put your cards in a Ziploc bag, you can put them in your pocket. You don't even need this thing. So making something that is not a commodity isn't always about making incredible technical products or amazing business model. Sometimes it's just about making something that's a little bit extra. It's unique like this, they're nontechnical products. It's not like I'm using machine learning to rack the code of some industry problem, just making something that we call a tribal totem. So for people that are in a tribe, this shows your affiliation, that you're in the know.

Novelty is a problem that all humans face, for the things that you like, for the things that you're into. Showing that affiliation and showing your expertise through novelty, it's like a core human desire. And you can tap into that desire by making cool shit.

So at any rate, products on the market that are made in more simple ways, they're sheet metal, they're injection molded plastic, they're 10 bucks, 20 bucks. This is $250. He's been documenting it. I think he has like 65 followers on Instagram right now, made this Nintendo cartridges. Every time he makes something, somebody wants to buy it. More people want to buy it than he can make him. He has no followers, he has barely any followers on his Facebook. But that's the power of making something that people really want.

As he starts to sell them, those people are going to want to share it on their Instagram when they buy it. So that sale doesn't just go into a black box. It doesn't just go into a black hole. So imagine making products that are so powerful, they're so unique, they're so desirous, desirable that customers become your marketing engine. That people buy it and they show it off. They say, "Oh yeah, well I got it from this guy, but like, I don't know. It's pretty cool. He only makes like, 10 a month and they're all custom. So you probably can't get one. But it's pretty expensive because it's cool."

That's what happens. And again, it doesn't just have to be this, it can be about your technology. It doesn't have to be about technology. It can be about your business model. It doesn't have to be about the business model. It can be about any aspect of your business, but if you're just starting out, competing on costs or being the same as this other person, it's very hard. It's very expensive. I hate it.

We have a little post about thought experiments so it's going to be dropping probably this week. Just a short little Instagram TV post, but this is one of the thought experiments that we always go through with product development, with business strategy, with growth is what if your product costs 10 times as much? What if your product costs a hundred times as much? What would it look like? What would you do that's so unique, so powerful that people would be clamoring to buy a product that's 10 times as expensive as its competitors?

You have to get outside of this thinking of, "Hey, my competitor sells this thing for $35. I'm going to sell it for $33." It's just a loser thinking. You're coming in to something new saying, "Well, I'm already going to get my ass beat by this competitor, so I got to come in and maybe just get those crumbs."

We're not in the crumb game. We're in the success game, the feast game. So make something amazing, something objectively quantifiably amazing because your customers tell you so, because the sales tell you so. Not because your mom tells you so, and you will see that that that's a pathway to viral growth.