Intro
We’ve been working on this for a while now, and we’re excited to share it with you. It’s a collection of elements that together form the foundation of our brand.
And…
You know what? We think you already know what it is. You just don’t know how to use it because of the way it was presented.
That doesn’t mean we don’t want to help you learn about this brand. In fact, we are more than happy to do that for you, but the best way for us to help you is by giving you a chance to try out the brand at its most immersive (i.e., most fun) and exciting state before sharing with the world.
We are excited because we think it will be fun as well as useful, and have some exciting news in store!
Background
I’m a big fan of the startup founders in my office. I think they were all geniuses, and I share their vision of what it means to build successful companies.
I just had lunch with a startup founder who said something really smart to me.
He told me he was trying to do everything that people in the traditional software world do (which is a lot, by the way). He has no idea how much time he’s spending on this, but he was telling me that “I just don’t have time” and that it was “a waste of time” because he wanted to be building a “real product” (he didn’t say what that meant). That bothered me a lot because I think this guy is very smart and his company is very unique. He knows his stuff, and the work he does is amazing. He told me that it was taking him 20 minutes per day to update his product — not even coding or design work. So, maybe he has tons of time left for product work, but just doesn’t want to spend it on something that isn’t helping him achieve his goals? What would you tell him?
What do you think about this? Have you experienced something similar? What are the reasons behind it?
Why Do You Need to Embrace Your Vibe?
A lot of the time, it can be very difficult to make a fresh product. It’s even more challenging to make a fresh product for a specific audience, because you may have to do something different with each or every user.
If you’re just starting out, you may feel like you have to follow the rules of your other products. You need to build out features that are familiar (e.g., the “Text on Sticker” feature) and that people will use over and over again (e.g., the “Sticker ID” feature). But as you become more established, you should be able to play around with different approaches, mixing and matching ideas until you find what works best for your particular audience — and it probably won’t look anything like any other app in the market.
Just because it works better doesn’t mean it is more effective or efficient; if anything, it might look like an example of a ‘better’ app…because it lets users experience a feature before they buy into it!
Soft skills such as empathy and listening are absolutely critical in this process of discovery. Embracing your product’s vibe means that your team is able to understand their user base better than most competitors — so they can prioritize features based on what makes them most valuable for their target audience(s). Having an honest discussion about whether or not your product has been successful enough for its current iteration is also important: if not, there may be opportunities to introduce new features that will turn things around.
Hard skills such as getting buy-in from senior management are also vital here: they need to know how much time is really being invested into finding and addressing customer needs (and if they don’t, then there was never going to be enough time). And finally, keeping everything focused on one thing at a time is crucial: if we get distracted by trying too many things at once and end up making something that looks like a bunch of random unrelated features bolted together in an arbitrary way (or worse yet, giving up altogether), then we run the risk that we won’t build our brand as strongly as we could have if we had focused everything on one thing at a time — which could have severe consequences down the road when we get into scaling our business or dealing with customers who have fallen out of love with our platform.
How to Embrace Your Vibe on Social Media
I’m not sure if you have followed the cryptocurrency space at all. But I’ve been following it for a while now and its two main players are Bitcoin and Ethereum. Both of them originated as open-source software projects (driven by the open source philosophy), but they have since moved away from that to become private, closed-source companies.
I want to give you a quick insight into both of them so you can understand how they developed and what their future is. Bitcoin is currently used as a form of payment in almost every country in the world, with some countries banning it outright (I know Australia has banned it). Ethereum is an open-source currency that anyone can use to send money across borders (think Western Union for Bitcoin).
There are many good reasons for using Bitcoin or Ethereum. Some companies have even started accepting it as payment in the form of a new payment system called “Bitcoin Cash”. And there are some companies which use both Bitcoin and Ethereum (like IBM or Microsoft) which allow their employees to pay with either currency or fiat currency automatically when they sign into the system. But here’s what I find fascinating:
To date, both Bitcoin and Ethereum were conceived originally as open-source projects (hence why they are still around), but over time they became proprietary companies where people make money by selling their services on top of them . The logic behind this is fairly simple: if you think about it, your company will be able to thrive only when consumers use your product/service — so it makes sense that once your product/service gains enough traction, you could charge for it. So if you care about making money with your product/service, then why not start charging? After all, if the consumer doesn’t have to pay for it at all, there’s no incentive for you not to do so either .
For example, take Dropbox . It was created by three college students who had no background in technology whatsoever; now Dropbox has over 100 million users , has been acquired by Box (which was bought by Google) and is already worth $6 billion — but let’s say Dropbox doesn’t want to charge its users because doing so would put too much strain on its business model; then what happens? People would stop using Dropbox! They wouldn’t be able to afford paying over $20 a month just because they like its service enough! So instead of charging something like $20 a month ($20 per month = $2 million
Conclusion
This is, in a way, the end of the post. I hope you have enjoyed reading it and that we’ve provided you with some useful insights on how to better understand what your customers and market are looking for. I’ve also mentioned a few specific examples of how these perceptions can be turned into marketing actions and products that can help startups succeed.
Thank you for reading!