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Seth's Blog

• The distraction, the tail and the dog 29 May, 2010, 2:52 am
  Your business has a core, a goal, a challenge and a deliverable. There is probably one thing that would transform your project, one success that changes things, one hurdle that's tougher than the others. What's difficult, what would respond to overwhelming attention? That's the core.Getting from here to there involves making sales, delivering on promises, overcoming the Dip and shipping.Along the way, there are supporting tasks you can engage in, things you can do to make the goal easier to achieve.A popular blog might gain attention and then trust and ultimately help you sell more widgets.A lot of followers online might give you permission to tell a story that gets you better employees.A vibrant party at SXSW can create buzz that gives your salespeople entree to important meetings.These aren't trivial activities. In fact, they're part of what marketing means today. But...But if they give you and your team an outlet to avoid the difficult work of achieving your goal ("I can't go to that sales call, I'm busy uploading pictures of last night's party to the blog and then tweeting out the url") then you're not building, you're hiding. Rich calls this playing with turtles. The thing is, the turtles are alive, and they're going to demand a lot from you.There's a huge downside here: once your side activity gets going, it will lead to crises (we have an urgent email we have to answer), to feelings of abandonment (hey, you haven't been on the forum lately!), to irresistible offers to have the CEO speak or get people involved. There will always be a feeling of sunk cost, of opportunities missed and of things on the verge because these are human movements, not paid ads.Two choices: 1. find a way to make your goal completely aligned with the tactics you use to achieve it. What's good for your blog is good for your business. or 2. Now that these approaches are working, and working incredibly well, it's time to come up with boundaries so the tail doesn't end up wagging the dog.
• Reminders 1 June, 2010, 8:33 am
  A few deadlines are coming up, and alas, we can't do extensions, so I thought I'd remind the last-minute hold-everything types:More than 4,000 people in 700 cities have signed up for the June 14 Linchpin meetup. Maybe you'll meet someone who's shipping. It's free and it's semi-unofficial.Deadline for submitting a picture for the Linchpin cover is June 1 at midnight EST. Also on June 2, the price for the full day ticket for the Boston road trip event goes up.
• Drill baby drill 5 June, 2010, 12:14 pm
  I used to see a black Hummer driving around town, complete with a "Drill, baby drill" bumper sticker.What a fabulous slogan.Slogans are fabulous when they use few words (two! one used twice) to unite, energize and signify a tribe. You're either an insider or an outsider, but there were no fence sitters on this one. The slogan captured a can-do, engineering-centric, please-get-out-of-my-way, anti-intellectual, regulate-industry-less mindset that this driver (and presumably others in his tribe) could broadcast and be motivated by. In three words! A key part of the slogan is the extraneous word 'baby', which reinforces the informality, the certainty and the impatience with bureaucracy. Support it or not, you have to agree that it was a great slogan. (Until it wasn't).Like most good political slogans, it called for something to happen in the future, something someone else would do and be responsible for, nothing that could come home to roost in a really short time. Of course, few could predict how close the future actually was. Ideally, next time you'd pick a slogan that had a much longer expiration date.
• Lula's logic 12 June, 2010, 2:04 am
  When Blythe and her partners started Lula's Apothecary, the best vegan ice cream stand in this hemisphere, they didn't have enough money to afford the letters to put "Dairy free" on the sign in their window. They couldn't even afford "vegan." So the signage says nothing about what they don't put in their ice cream.What they discovered was that word among the tribe of vegans in the East Village of New York City (an even bigger group than you might imagine) spread fast. The product was remarkable enough that just a few happy customers were enough to spread the word.The other thing they discovered is that non-vegans were willing to walk on in if the place looked cool enough. In fact, the lack of ingredient-declaration on their window actually helped them reach out to people who might have been scared away at the lack of milk.Ink on the website is free, so they use the v-word there, but even though they can now afford it, the window is still proudly mute on their rigor regarding ingredients. No sense scaring away customers who don't care (and the customers who do care probably heard the news from their friends in advance.)
• Fear of shipping 11 June, 2010, 3:40 am
  Shipping is fraught with risk and danger.Every time you raise your hand, send an email, launch a product or make a suggestion, you're exposing yourself to criticism. Not just criticism, but the negative consequences that come with wasting money, annoying someone in power or making a fool of yourself.It's no wonder we're afraid to ship.It's not clear you have much choice, though. A life spent curled in a ball, hiding in the corner might seem less risky, but in fact it's certain to lead to ennui and eventually failure.Since you're going to ship anyway, then, the question is: why bother indulging your fear?In a long distance race, everyone gets tired. The winner is the runner who figures out where to put the tired, figures out how to store it away until after the race is over. Sure, he's tired. Everyone is. That's not the point. The point is to run.Same thing is true for shipping, I think. Everyone is afraid. Where do you put the fear?
• The art of seduction 22 July, 2010, 2:36 am
  Carole Mallory was Norman Mailer's mistress. Seducing him probably wasn't that difficult, though, as he was already on his sixth wife at the time.Marketers seek to seduce. So do painters, authors and job seekers. The most important thing to understand about seduction is this: it only works when the other person cooperates, contributes and is at some level interested in being seduced.In short: it's a lot easier to seduce someone who's worldview and attitude makes them open to it. If you want to be successful at whatever form of seduction you have in mind, seek out the right people.Some people were seduced by the iPad. Many ignored it. It wasn't that the iPad changed from person to person, what changed was the audience's worldview and openness.And yet...And yet as marketers we seem to want to treat everyone the same, want to please everyone, want to come up with the magic words that open every heart.
• Organizing the unorganized 6 June, 2010, 2:22 am
  There may be no bigger opportunity online for bootstrappers than finding people who would benefit from being connected and then connecting them.Not so they can waste time sending digital love notes back and forth, but so they (and you) can create value for others.Build a network of experts and make it available for hire.Build a network of researchers and generate information useful to others.Build a network of leaders and represent them to advertisers, marketers or recruiters.Getting people and organizations in sync is the project of our times.COMDEX was the largest trade show in the world for years, and it generated millions in profits as well as billions in value to the attendees. What happens if you do that in the small? But more efficiently...
• Paperback Kindle 7 June, 2010, 3:40 pm
  Steve Jobs reports today that Apple is selling an iPad every three seconds.This is a pretty urgent moment for my friends on the Kindle team, so here are some bonus thoughts on pricing, business models and competition:1. The paperback Kindle. Don't worry about touchscreens or color or even always available internet to download new books. Make a $49 Kindle. Not so hard if you use available wifi and simplify the device. Make it the only ebook reader in town.2. The Kindle as razor. Buy any 8 bestselling books on the Kindle ($10 each) and get a paperback Kindle for free. 3. Kindle of the month club. In the 1950s, the most powerful person in all publishing was the guy who chose the book for the book of the month club. It didn't pay the author glamorously well, but if your book was chosen, it guaranteed people would talk and it would become a bestseller. Sign up to get a Kindle book of your choice every month for 12 months and get a free Kindle. Amazon presents you with ten book choices, and since the cost of delivering it is zero, there's plenty of margin for all...4. Let publishers, leaders and corporations push PDFs and chosen books directly to their tribes via the Kindle. For example, I could put Kindles in the hands of the 1,000 service techs of my ventilation company and they'd see the new service manual daily. Or an author could create her own version of a book club, collecting a monthly fee and pushing the latest book directly to people who want to read it. Simpler still, how about letting me gift a book directly to anyone I know who has a Kindle? (thanks Lisa, for this idea).The only way to get authors and publishers to embrace this device is to sell 20,000,000 of them. You either become the best and only platform for consuming books worth buying or you fail. And the only way to create that footprint in the face of an iPad is to make it so cheap to buy and use it's irresistible.I saw a two-year old kid (in diapers, in a stroller), using an iPod Touch today. Not just looking at it, but browsing menus and interacting. This is a revolution, guys.
• The wrapper matters 11 June, 2010, 3:05 am
  When you have a big idea, the question is, how to spread it?You can go through a traditional publisher and have it printed in the tried and true way, like Clay Shirky. I had a chance to read Clay's new book a few months ago. No surprise: it's pure gold, unalloyed insight about the state of media and the world.If you're looking for big ideas and are prepared to lose a little sleep, there's no better book to buy right now.You can have someone take a short speech based on your book and have them turn it into a animated video. Dan Pink's video has been seen about 20 times as often as his book has been purchased. Video spreads.You can turn your idea (like a focus on entrepreneurs) into cool trading cards, like Evan did.You can skip the printing altogether and start your own video university, like Khan Academy.Perhaps write a short manifesto and watch it spread as a free ebook. Like Changethis, a free service that has reached millions with the work of top authors from around the world.Don't forget podcasts or mp3s, which can be very funny or motivational.Consider starting a conference with a unique platform and worldwide reach, like TED.Or you can blog your idea for several years in a row, slowly building up trust and making an impact over time.Of course, there's no right answer. But there's probably a best answer that matches your time frame, budget, audience and idea.
• Cheating the clock 10 June, 2010, 2:39 am
  One way to do indispensable work is to show up more hours than everyone else. Excessive face time and candle-burning effort is sort of rare, and it's possible to leverage it into a kind of success.But if you're winning by cheating the clock, you're still cheating.The problem with using time as your lever for success is that it doesn't scale very well. 20 hours a day at work is not twice as good as 18, and you certainly can't go much beyond 24...What would happen if you were prohibited from working more than five hours a day. What would you do? How would you use those five hours to become indispensable in a different way?Go ahead, try it. Just for a week. See what happens. Even if you go back to ten, you'll discover you've changed the way you compete.