Eliminate more

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Apple has done a lot of things right over the years, but their focus on elimination is one of their greatest strengths. While that has perhaps faded a bit in recent years, it’s a huge reason why they’re such a successful company.

In Walter Isaacson’s book “Steve Jobs“, he explains Jobs’ focus very simply:

He made devices simpler by eliminating buttons, software simpler by eliminating features, and interfaces simpler by eliminating options.

It’s much easier said than done. If people want another feature, the default response is to add it to the product and Apple works hard to avoid doing that. In my recent move from Android back to the iPhone, this is still quite evident. While the phones are more similar today than they’ve ever been, the iPhone still wins when it comes to simplicity. This is a bit frustrating at times, but it’s a big reason why they sell so well.

Sometimes you need to add more features to your product to help it sell, but often the better action is to remove features to make it more accessible to everyone.

The Main Goal

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The best companies in the world focus on a single goal and wrap all of their products and ideas around that goal. Going back in history, we can see how this kind of focus created some of the best companies that we see today.

Low price

For Henry Ford, price was the key. Unlike many of his competitors, he wanted to sell his car to the everyday man, and lowering the price was the way to do that. In the book “I Invented The Modern Age“, they share Ford’s focus like this:

Ford had just one sales strategy, and that was to keep lowering the price of the car.

That was his sales strategy, and it worked amazingly well.

Lightness

Nike had a similar focus in the early days, with Bill Bowerman focusing solely on making their shoes lighter. In Phil Knight’s book “Shoe Dog“, he explains Bowerman’s focus:

Lightness, Bill Bowerman believed, directly translated into less burden, more energy, and more speed. Lightness was his constant goal. Bowerman didn’t like to lose. (I got it from him.) Thus lightness was his constant goal.

It can be hard to keep a focus that tight, but that focus is what made those companies stand out. If you wanted a car with the best value, Ford was it. If you wanted the lightest shoe, Nike was your choice.

Keep the main goal the main goal, and people will much more easily recognize your value.

Customers make a list of brands before they research, and most of them buy from that list

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It’s well-established that most customers make a list of vendors and do some degree of research before they make a purchase, so the traditional best practices make sense: have quality content, answer questions, and be a guide as customers are doing their research.

However, prior to that research, 80-90% of customers have a short list of vendors in mind already, and 90% of those people end up purchasing from one of those vendors! In short, if you’re not in your buyer’s mind before they start their research, you have no chance with more than 75% of your potential customers. You can find some detail on that in this great article from the Harvard Business Review.

So how do you get into their mind before the research? Spend time in the same places as them online.

Rand Fishkin recently put out a great (short!) video that walks through this, and you can check it out here.

Ultimately, you need to be present on podcasts that they listen to, on social media sites they frequent, in videos that they may want to watch, in blog posts that provide information, and in email newsletters that they consume.

The best part about this kind of work is that it’s a win-win-win:

  • You show up where they already are.
  • You’ve providing content and value to help them for the decision ahead.
  • Large Language Models (like ChatGPT) will eat up that content of yours and make it more likely that you’ll show up there too!

So much of marketing these days involves simply staying top of mind. When a customer is making a list of vendors like yours to consider, make sure you’re already one that they’ve thought of before or else you’ll never even have a chance.

Using AI to prepare for meetings

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I recently came across an interesting AI prompt that I’ll likely start using every Friday as I look forward to the week ahead.

David Cummings recently posted about some new AI use cases and they were all very insightful, but one I’ll be using a lot. He said:

Preparing for a Board Meeting
Last week, I attended a board meeting with 30 other board members. Prior to the meeting, we received a PDF containing the board agenda, a list of attendees, and governance items. I uploaded this PDF to ChatGPT and Grok, asking each tool to extract all the names and companies listed, then search the web for two to three news items or recent events about each person or company. Within a couple of minutes, they generated a bullet-point list of all the attendees, their companies, and relevant recent news. As a result, I entered the board meeting much better prepared, with a variety of topics to discuss during our dinner session.

I tried it for an upcoming meeting and the results were amazing!

I used this prompt: “Here is a list of people attending a meeting with me in a few days. Look at their names and companies and find any news items or recent events for each person or company.“

Below that, I simply pasted the list of people attending, copied directly out of my calendar. It was an ugly looking list, like this:

to: “[email protected]” <[email protected]>, Ron Jones <[email protected]>, “Johnson, Steven A.” <[email protected]> … (with a bunch more)

It had perhaps 20 names in the list, each with the formatting slightly different, and it parsed through and gave me a great list. For example, one person attending the meeting is with the Credit Union of Georgia, and it pulled this based solely on her email address (as part of the larger list that ChatGPT provided):

16 of the attendees had info similar to that, and there were just four that it couldn’t find any info for (and those were just free email accounts like “[email protected]”).

Do this weekly?

Now I’m considering doing this weekly as part of my weekly preview. I looked ahead at next week and gave it five names and email addresses of people I’d be meeting with, and it gave a great list of insights with links to details on the stories that mattered for each organization.

It’s imperfect, for sure, and the output should always be verified since AI models are known for sometimes making things up, but it’s a great start. If I see an interesting item about someone I’ll be seeing soon, I can click the link to verify and learn more.

Give it a try for yourself. Head over to ChatGPT (or the AI tool you prefer) and try that prompt with a few names and emails and see what happens.

Are you eagerly sending business to your competitors?

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The title of this post might seem a little odd, but if your company has solid positioning then you should be turning away many of your leads. If your ideal customer is “anyone”, then who are you really trying to serve?

If you’re well-positioned then you shouldn’t be getting too many ill-fitting leads in the first place, but when you do you should be quick to recognize them and pass them along to another company that is better equipped to handle that kind of opportunity. I’m good friends with most of our business “rivals”, and we pass potential clients to one another frequently in an effort to find the best solution for them.

This came up in a fantastic podcast episode where Stephen Houraghan interviewed Seth Godin about the state of marketing today, during which he unpacked this very idea. You can watch the full interview right here:

This reminds me of a story from years ago when I met an insurance agent that sold literally every kind of insurance, so I had no idea what he really was an expert in. If I had a specific need, he was never going to be the ideal answer. His audience was literally everyone so he was the perfect fit for no one.

None of us are going to be truly eager to turn down business, but if you have a clear position it should make it very easy to send business to your competitors. As a result, when the right opportunity comes along they’ll know that you’re the perfect fit for them.

AI bots talking to each other is very inefficient

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The podcast series “Shell Game” was quite eye-opening to me, where host Evan Ratliff created an AI bot of himself and tested it in various scenarios (answering spam calls, calling customer service, even calling friends). His approach to testing things out was fantastic, and it really got me thinking about how these AI bots can behave and what’s coming in the future.

One part that’s sticking with me is the idea of AI bots talking to one another, which is certainly happening a bit already and will be growing rapidly in the coming years. If you have people using AI bots to make robocalls, but then have people using AI bots to screen them, you’re going to have a lot of bots talking to one another. It’s similar to the idea of using AI on both sides of an email conversation.

Bot conversations are inefficient

What struck me was just how inefficient those bot conversations are. Compared to the speed of computers, human speech is painfully slow. A typical human speaks at around 150 words per minute, whereas a computer can easily process millions of words per minute. Rather than having two AI bots convert everything to human speech, if they had a way to negotiate directly using text it would be far more efficient — a 30 minute “conversation” could be done in seconds.

That said, what is the purpose of AI bots talking to one another? The biggest use of them today seems to be spam-related (or “customer service”). The spam pieces are fine, as inefficiency doesn’t matter. How about with customer service? If I need to rebook a plane ticket and I send a bot to do the work, why do they need to “talk” through everything? There should be some kind of mechanism where they can connect directly and just knock things out.

This opens a new can of worms related to protocols and connection methods, as there are already thousands of types of bots out there, so getting them to “connect directly” is far easier said than done.

Of course, as Evan shares in his show, maybe the time that they spend “talking” is irrelevant. It’s not tying up a phone line in the traditional sense, and the time it takes them to accomplish something isn’t usually a big deal. Maybe working through the unnecessary human speech pathway isn’t a big problem.

AI bots are changing things quickly, and it’ll be interesting to see where we end up in a few years. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to check out the Shell Game podcast and see what kind of thoughts it conjures up in you.

Branding is building a story

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When people think about branding, they often think about logos and colors. Those are important aspects to a brand, but they’re really just reminders. Your true brand is telling a story.

This isn’t the story of your founder. It’s awesome that your grandfather started the company during the great depression and that it’s been in your family for 90 years, but that’s not the story that people care about. People want to know the story of why your company matters to them.

It’s the story of how your product will make them feel better, or work more efficiently, or raise more money, or keep their employees safer. It’s the story of how your product will make them healthier, or how it will help their children perform better in school.

Even moreso, it’s the story behind those stories. What does working more efficiently really gain for a company? Why does it matter if their children perform better in school?

You need to have this story polished, and it should be front and center. People have problems, and your business solves a problem of theirs. Share the problem, share your solution, and share how their life will change as a result of working with you.

Then, once they’ve become a big fan of yours and how you’ve helped change their life, they might find it really neat that to learn about how your grandfather was able to get things started all those years ago.

Great logos are often just brands that you admire

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Think about a great logo. A truly classic logo. One that everyone knows and admires. Do you have one in mind?

You likely though of Nike or Apple or a company like that. Their logos are perfectly fine, but you thought about them because you admire their brand, not because the logo itself is necessarily great.

You can extend this to other brands like Starbucks, whose logo isn’t particularly good by most standards. It doesn’t matter, because to millions of people Starbucks is a brand that is dearly admired and the logo is a reminder of that.

In the end, that’s what a logo is — a reminder of who you are. Your logo and brand are not about how you look at feel, but they’re about how other people think you look and feel.

Don’t cheap out on your logo, for sure, but don’t think that a “great” logo is going to solve your problems. A great logo will be recognizable, and it will scale well in different situations, and it’ll have a well-thought color palette, but at the end of the day it’s simply going to remind people what your company is already about. Will it be a positive reminder for them?

Credentials are the easy part

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As recently shared by Seth Godin, there is a big difference between credentials and expertise. They might overlap a lot, sure, but they don’t always.

As Seth says in his post, “credentials are awarded to folks who are good at being awarded credentials“. If you’re a good student you’ll have an easier time earning a degree, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have much expertise.

Personally, I appreciate the value in someone earning a college degree as it shows that they know how to buckle down and work, but that’s about it. When we’re hiring someone, we barely glance at their credentials and instead dig directly into their expertise, habits, and personality.

  • Do they have the skills for this role?
  • How will they continue to improve those skills?
  • How will they work with a team?
  • How do they respond when they make a mistake?

If they have credentials that will help in that role that’s certainly a fantastic thing, but it’s among the pieces that matter least.

Learn processes at a deep level before you try to fix anything

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It can be tempting to dive into a new organization and start making changes. At times that may be good, but generally you’d be wise to wait to fully understand what’s happening before trying to shake things up.

In a recent episode of the Founders podcast, the host was talking about the popular YouTube star MrBeast and what makes him so successful. In part, MrBeast shared this:

“You need to be nimble and produce content our way, not the way you were taught before. If you want the highest probability of success, I beg you to learn why we do what we do at a deep level before you try to fix anything.”

MrBeast has become wildly popular after many years (and thousands of videos) of trial and error to get where he is. He hires great folks, but he always encourages them to learn his way of doing things before they try to make changes.

It reminds me of the concept of Chesterton’s Fence, which can be summarized as simply “Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place”.

You may have some great ideas that will make a positive impact, but the better you can understand the organization first, the more likely your new idea will succeed.