Make Your Mark

by Jocelyn K. Glei

That’s why the best businesses aren’t profit-driven or even product-driven; they’re purpose-driven. They strive to solve real problems, meet pressing needs, and change the world in ways big and small. They make a commitment to constantly learning and iterating and evolving to become better at executing their missions. They focus on creating value, and let everything else follow.

What does the world hunger for? What does it desire? What does it need or suffer from a lack of? What are the unique talents of the organization? Who has the company timelessly been? And who must it fearlessly become? A company’s purpose lies at the center of these four forces.

To define your personal purpose, start with these questions: How will the world be better off thanks to you having been on this earth? What are your unique gifts and superpowers? Who have you been when you’ve been at your best? Who must you fearlessly become?

Restraint and discipline come to those who are clear about their purpose in life.

In the early days of a new business, you make choices—conscious and unconscious—that will influence your culture far into the future. If you’re not careful, those choices can become patterns that limit your ability to thrive.

It reminded me of so many conversations that I have had with publishers. They ask, “How are we going to preserve our place in the ecosystem?” And I say, “Nobody cares about that. That’s the wrong question.” The right question is, “What does the world need? What do my customers need? What can I do?”

By focusing on the problem you’re solving, you move beyond a functional description of what your product is, to an emotional solution that connects with people at their core. It also keeps us honest that what we’re doing really matters, which will perhaps make all those late nights a little easier to bear.

Here are seven such questions. Tackle them early—but learn to live with them, too, because these are questions you should keep asking, again and again, as your business grows and matures.

1. WHY ARE WE HERE IN THE FIRST PLACE?

2. IF WE DISAPPEARED, WHO WOULD MISS US? AND WHY?

3. WHAT BUSINESS ARE WE REALLY IN?

Nike started out selling athletic shoes but figured out early on that its real business was addressing active-lifestyle needs of all kinds. This enabled it to expand its offering and to evolve as its customers’ lives evolved. Continually asking this question becomes even more important in times of dynamic change. The business you started out in last month may not even exist next year, but if you’ve identified the real value you offer to the world, you can adapt and survive even as the market around you changes.

4. HOW CAN WE BECOME A CAUSE AND NOT JUST A COMPANY?

Sure you’ve got a great product; so do lots of people. If you want to really form a bond with customers, ask yourself how you can connect with them on a deeper level—one that taps into something people really care about.

5. WHAT ARE WE WILLING TO SACRIFICE?

6. HOW CAN WE MAKE A BETTER EXPERIMENT?

The primary concern is usually with ‘making products,’ not ‘making experiments.’ But the way to make better products is by first getting better at experimentation.

This means that instead of asking the question, ‘What will we make?,’ the emphasis should be on ‘What will we learn?’ “And then you work backwards to the simplest possible thing

A side benefit is that this approach can help unlock the creativity that’s already there in your company. “Most companies are full of ideas, but they don’t know how to go about finding out if those ideas work,” Ries says. “If you want to harvest all those ideas, allow employees to experiment more—so they can find out the answers to their questions themselves.”

7. WHAT IS OUR MISSION QUESTION?

View your business itself as a product that you are constantly iterating on, tinkering with, and evolving.

Consumers don’t need many things from your brand—they just need one thing from your brand. You may want them to need everything from you, but guess what: consumers don’t care what you want. Your job is to care about what they want, not what you want them to want.

But what pulls us through? The hook.

BE SURE TO HAVE A HOOK An effective hook appeals to short-term interests (aka our selfishness and impatience) but is connected to a long-term promise. When you see a prompt to “Sign Up in Seconds to Organize Your Life,” it’s a hook. The headlines we read in newspapers are hooks. Dating sites are full of hooks.

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DEFAULT Another insight on product stewardship that I’ve learned is that users don’t follow directions. For instance, when was the last time you read an instruction manual? Most people don’t. Instead, they just dive in and start exploring. People will quickly become acquainted with your product and discover the surface features without your assistance. The vast majority of your users will continue to use the product with just those initial features that they discovered at the outset. Have you ever used the “Return to Last Channel Watched” button on your remote control? Have you ever used your iPhone to set reminders based on your location? Have you programmed your computer to use the keyboard shortcuts that let you type a few letters to insert commonly used sentences? None of these features are part of the default user experience, and so you likely do not use them. Dave Morin, co-founder and CEO of the mobile social network Path, likes to say that “the devil is in the default.” While you may have a lot of other things to offer, the “default experience”—the one that happens without any additional learning or customization from the user—will determine the success or failure of your product. Which means that the default experience is the one you want to focus on the most. It’s difficult to do this because you, as the product’s creator, will always be an advanced user. But your newest users will always matter more than you.

You’ve developed a number of revolutionary products. How do you focus your energies at the beginning of a project? When thinking about products, I like to use a mountain-climbing analogy. The first step is to pick a peak. Don’t pick a peak because it’s easy. Pick a peak because you really want to go there; that way you’ll enjoy the process. The second thing is to pick a team you trust and that’s willing to learn with you. Because the way mountain climbing really works is that you can’t climb the entire route perfectly. You have to know that you are going to make mistakes, that you’ll have to turn around, and that you’ll have to recover. You also have to maintain your sense of purpose. For a long time, it may feel like you’re on the wrong path, but you must have the resilience to forge ahead. You just have to keep moving uphill.

What’s the most common mistake that people make when they’re developing a product? One mistake I see a lot is the eternal thinker, the perfectionist. This is the person that builds all the components without putting them together, because there’s perfection in component development. And they have this idea that if you only put things together right before launch, everything will go fine. Of course, that never happens. The second mistake I see is more of a character issue, which is being discouraged by failure. Where you do something three or four times, spend half a year in development, and think, “Oh my god, I’m not there yet, let me change my career . . .” So that’s a lack of perseverance. The last one I see is being driven by fear. When your competitor does something new, you become fearful and decide that you’re going to change course. But every single time you do this, you’re already behind your competitor and that’s just a bad idea. You have to have faith in yourself, and believe in your vision. At some time, everybody is driven by fear. But we need to—as much as we can—take fear out of the game. One way to do this is to imagine that you are already successful. You’ve looked into the future, and you’ve succeeded. What would you enjoy doing today given that knowledge?

It’s very uncommon for people to have the attitude of “Wow, I don’t know.” In childhood, researchers call this a “growth mind-set”—this idea that you’re comfortable with the fact that you just don’t know something yet, or that you just can’t do something yet.

Empower your users to be your ambassadors, their word is more powerful than yours.

What am I making? Whom am I helping? Answering these questions—in word and deed—is crucial for the ongoing care and feeding of your army.

When you make the focus of your work what you can do for people instead of what they can do for you, you’re not only being a good person; you’re also building the loyalty of your small army. Like relationships, loyalty isn’t created in a single conversation or transaction. Instead, it’s built over time. One of the best ways you can establish loyalty is through a series of touchstones—small things you repeatedly do that create a positive impact in someone’s life. A few examples:

Make your expertise available to the community at regular intervals.

Share your paid content with users for free on different channels.

Look around and be generally helpful wherever you can.

Reciprocity is a powerful practice. The more you give away, the stronger the bond you’ll create with your army of allies.

Think about all the tone-deaf customer service interactions you’ve had. The ones where you were treated like a stepping-stone to profit rather than an actual human. The tech support person telling you to restart your computer as he reads a script, the airline attendant throwing up her hands and telling you, “There’s nothing I can do,” the bureaucrat refusing to even consider your problem until you’ve filled out all the right forms. Chances are you only interact with companies like these when you have no other choice. And that’s why they’re not going to last. Because they forgot that the person standing in front of them is the reason they have a job in the first place, and that listening to that person and making his life easier should be priority #1. Your customer is someone who spends hours at his or her job away from friends and family to earn a paycheck. One of the things they choose to do with part of that paycheck is willingly give it to you, a complete stranger that they will likely never meet, because that thing you make is just so great they think the trade-off is worth it. Your job? Instill enough trust and respect in the customer that they are willing to make that leap. And then do it again. And again.

REMOVE PAIN POINTS

Every time someone lands on your website or purchases your product, they’re raising their hand and letting you know that they care. We’d be wise to return the favor. Listen to your customers, no matter how much it slows you down.

If you think about Apple, their marketing strategy is about inspiring confidence every step of the way. When you go on the website, you think, “Wow this is really is the best product for X, Y, and Z reasons.” Then when you get an iPhone, for instance, and take it out of the box, you see that it’s not jammed in there; it’s not difficult to get out, nor does it fall out. It just sort of slides out into your hand at exactly the right speed. You may not think about it consciously, but that whole process is giving you confidence that this is going to be a good product.

The story, and the emotional connection, are built right in. – Ask yourself: How are you tapping into your audience’s aspirations and dreams?

Ask yourself: How is my product going to change the way people think or go about their daily lives?

Ask yourself: How can you share more of the process behind your product with customers? It can be good, bad, or ugly—as long as it’s honest.

“It’s easy to miss the real point of our lives even as we’re living them,” writes Arianna Huffington in her book Thrive. “And it is very telling what we don’t hear in eulogies.” Those things include making senior vice president, sacrificing kids’ Little League games to go over those numbers one more time, or my personal favorite: “she dealt with every email in her inbox every night.”

In Thrive, Huffington argues that power and money have too long been life’s main yardsticks of success, and that we should measure our achievements instead by four new metrics: Wisdom, Wonder, Well-Being, and Giving. If the eulogy test is an indication, Giving is likely the most memorable of the four.

Transparency breeds trust,

With openness, you attract loyalty. The benefits of transparency extend to your customers, users, readers, viewers, and future audience, too. When you start sharing the details of your business and decision processes, you make yourself more human. When you share failures as well as successes, people know that you’re doing everything you can to make customers happy. Doing this consistently over time develops incredible trust and loyalty. People know that you “have their back” and not only will they be much less likely to jump to a competitor; they will also become vocal supporters and friends, bringing new customers.

Creative people are good at inspiring others. So in theory, they are good at leading. But they so want to make.

Nelson Mandela, “Do not judge me by my successes; judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.”

Ready is an emotional choice, the decision to put something into the world and say, “Here, I made this.”