UNSCRIPTED: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship

by M.J. DeMarco

As an entrepreneur, you must always ask, why do you exist in the marketplace? What value are you skewing? And who will yearn for your company should you close up shop? Or would your sudden market absence be met with eerie silence?

As a result of the blockbuster myth, you never do anything because lightning never strikes. I just don’t have any good ideas, so therefore, I’ll do nothing.

The crowded-room myth reasons that your idea is no good because someone is already doing it.

The crowded-room appears crowded because we don’t typically think from a value skewing perspective.

Once the entrepreneur discovers the room is empty, the idea is devalued based on the rationale, “Oh, there isn’t a market for it” or “There mustn’t be any money in this industry.”

You see, it states nowhere in the entrepreneurial rule book that you have to be an avid user of your product in its industry. Yes, you must believe in your product and its superiority. You must be a fan of its value to the world, but you yourself? The use myth holds that only other people need to find it valuable; you do not.

Opportunities hold no prejudices. Solved problems and filled needs don’t care if you love an industry or use the product. Women can sell products for men and vice-versa.

Innovation entails anything new: an invention, a board game, a fashion accessory—any product or service never offered before. On the other hand, improvement is taking something that already exists and doing it better or differently. Improvement is where most new business opportunities reside.

If you’re in “I need an idea” mode, the focus shouldn’t be either innovation or improvement but whatever the market tells you.

So how do you hear the market, its demands, and its problems? It’s as simple as learning its language. The market speaks a language of negativity and selfishness.

Any complaining, whining, and dissent is a potential opportunity.

This bickering should sound familiar because it’s everywhere. Search Twitter, Facebook, or Topsy for these key phrases and you’ll find a treasure trove of potential ideas.

My friend takes this a step further. He searches Amazon for products that sell well but have poor reviews. He then dives into the complaints and determines if he can solve those complaints at the manufacturing level. If so, he develops his own products.

Anything inconvenient is an opportunity. The inconvenience can be the product itself or the process surrounding the product.

Anything complicated which needs simplification is an opportunity.

Most wants fall into the vanity, entertainment, and fashion fields, where utility is secondary. Want opportunities are plentiful because demand can be influenced by marketing.

Crappy customer service is an opportunity.

Geographical arbitrage, or changing the pond, is taking something common in your area and repositioning it to an area where there is an inadequate supply.

Geographical arbitrage is also a powerful bootstrapping method if you need both experience and capital. Any value-adding experience is good experience.

“Crowdfeeding” emerges from the Commandment of Entry. Wherever entry is violated, opportunity arises. Why? Because the unlocked doors to an enterprise are always crowded, and crowds need to be fed, housed, and served. When the gold rush is in full bore, sell shovels.

The best opportunities rarely come from joining the crowd, but serving it.

After suffering marginal success (being kind), he sought to improve his book covers. When he looked to test different covers with various audiences, he couldn’t find a solution. And then it hit him. OMG, is this the *need* MJ always talks about? It was. And so he built a website addressing the problem. Within a matter of weeks, his cover-rating service blew up—without advertising.

With value arbitrage, 1+1+1+1 does not equal four but five. The incremental missing unit is your profit.

There are thousands of products out there that have the potential for profit but aren’t marketed properly.

Any company who serves shareholders first is vulnerable to you—the entrepreneur who elevates his customer onto the marble pedestal.

Improvement is the muscle behind the Commandment of Need like iron to a workout. Improve something, effectively communicate it, and you will be needed.

Improvement’s counterpart is removement. Removement is when your product removes or subtracts something, becoming differentiated.

Removement can occur in any industry but is most common in food processing.

You see, the biggest roadblock to finding legitimate ideas isn’t your insensitivity to the concepts of needs/wants but a lack of experience—both in life and at the workplace. The fact is, most new businesses spawn from the founder’s domain experience. Domain experience is any activity or industry you are intimately familiar with.

A common theme in many successful entrepreneurial backstories is a need discovered while working a job: an employee suffers a problem or an unfilled need and decides to solve it.

Unfortunately, many aspiring entrepreneurs remain aspiring for one simple fact: They refuse to acquire domain experience—namely, job experience. And in doing so, they isolate themselves from opportunity. If you’re not getting out of the house and encountering life, you won’t encounter life’s problems. Opportunity doesn’t ring doorbells and it certainly doesn't wait for "someday."

Don’t have time for domain experience? Then ask the people who do. Every so often, a drive-by user posts this generic question at my forum: “What do you guys need help with most in your business?”

Or you could attend any industry’s trade convention and keep your eyes and ears peeled for the language of opportunity.

Getting a job and being responsible is never failure. When you identify as an entrepreneur, a job is simply a means to an end, a part of your unfolding story.

Much like value is a predecessor to money, a systemized productocracy is a predecessor to passive income.

Another component of legacy value creation is legacy structures. Legacy structures are other perpetual systems that support, promote, or market your LVS, also 24/7 and separate from your time.

Back in 2011, I did a Smart Passive Income Podcast with the well-known Internet marketer and blogger Pat Flynn. The interview consumed about forty-five minutes of my time, and yet, more than six years later, people still message me, saying they bought my book because of that interview.

my doppelgänger never stops peddling and promoting for me while I’m off doing something else.

I am often asked to be interviewed on radio. These interviews take about twenty minutes, and while they can garner good exposure for me and my book, I typically decline. Why? No legacy structure. These interviews aren’t available anywhere except in one space of time. Once the interview is over, it evaporates like a fart in the wind.

Nonetheless, if you’re trying to grow a business or inspire a movement, I don’t recommend declining interviews.

Remember, before you can do what you love, you have to do what you hate.

Don’t be afraid to spend oodles of time building your system.

Unfortunately, in the Internet space, technology moves so fast that permanent passivity is a misnomer. If you sleep too long and ignore your goose, competitors take over.

An UNSCRIPTED lifestyle should be challenged regularly. Whenever life gets routine or mundane, it potentially signals it’s time for a new pursuit.

Play small and you shortchange a strong effort with weak rewards. Build a business that makes a difference in your customers’ lives but, more importantly, yours.

Every established productocracy started with ONE SINGLE CUSTOMER!

You can scale anything: a laundromat, a retail store, rental houses, your husband’s secret mustard recipe, anything. The question is, how difficult will it be?

Once the local productocracy achieves profits, you then intentionally iterate it (cookie cutter) by adding distributorships, opening more locations via chains, or selling locations via franchises.

His initial strategy was a customer strategy: selling direct on his website. However, he knew a channel strategy was where the explosive growth would occur. After a Shark Tank appearance and a subsequent deal, Sal’s business exploded.

Likewise, 99 percent of the sales of this book, and my last, come from channels—not my eCommerce website. Amazon, ACX, Kobo, Kindle, iTunes, book wholesalers, retailers, and a whole slew of channels sell this book as a legacy structure. My job as an entrepreneur and a marketer is to leverage those channels by igniting demand. If a productocracy exists, sales naturally accelerate.