Crushing It!: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence—and How You Can, Too

by Gary Vaynerchuk

You don’t get to call yourself an expert until you’ve put in the work—and the market decides, not you.

It was only when I was of age and sure I had something of real, unique value to offer customers that I went public and started building a brand around my expertise.

they’re just taking the age-old advice of fake it ’til you make it. But no one needs to do that anymore. The only reason people used to have to fake it was because they had to convince the gatekeepers—the agents, the directors, the publishers, the music producers, the talent scouts—to give them the shot they needed to prove themselves. But the Internet plays the middleman role now, and the Internet can’t stop you from putting your work out there.

It is not OK to be manipulative; it is OK to be a novice.

Embrace your newness; in many ways it could give you an advantage. You will likely have a fresh energy and enthusiasm that many more-seasoned professionals have lost.

happen. If enough of us start to document, we could completely destroy the myth of the overnight success.

As long as it’s valuable and you know it’s true, don’t judge it.

[I wasn’t] trying to grow it as big as possible but to make sure that the people who were paying attention to me and had taken the time to follow what I was doing received something of value that would be beneficial in their lives. Approaching it from a professional point of view and shifting my mind-set to that of a practitioner was very powerful and empowering at the same time.

Rich was relentless, writing blog posts for anyone who would let him contribute, appearing on any podcast that would give him a slot, accepting every single interview he could get, and speaking in front of any and every group, even if his audience was only four or five people.

job. So for me the most difficult part was to say no to that and to stay the course even when we were forty-eight hours away from our home being foreclosed on, even when I couldn’t put food on the table, even when my car got repossessed.

I’m wracked with guilt that my daughter associates Hawaii with trauma, but I’m a better parent now than I would be if I had had to go back to being a lawyer just so that I could hold on to a house, so that my daughter won’t be upset. What kind of example is that?

My advocacy and my message are about the power of transformation. It’s about owning your story. It’s about the courage to be vulnerable. It’s about the innate capacity that we all have to not only change but to tap into reservoirs of potential that are lying dormant. And it’s about performance.

And that feat is really just a metaphor for the sorts of things that we all overlook in our own lives that perhaps we should pay more attention to.

I’ve been proven right by the consumer, aka the market: developing a strong personal brand leads to business success. Don’t worry about seeming vain. Embrace it. Everybody else who is crushing it did.

bought from you because you finally gave me an opportunity to pay you back. I didn’t even need the book; I’ve already passed the exam. But you provided me so much information, I felt I needed a way to give back to you.” I eventually learned that this reciprocity is human nature, and I was setting up systems for that kind of interaction and transaction.

That’s what Crush It! is also about, you know: being confident in who you are, not trying to be like somebody else. When you really own it, and you put yourself out there and be you, your vibe is going to attract your tribe, and you’re going to be able to make change in this world.”

Please dig deep into what you know best or what you love most, or better yet, what you know best and love most, and start creating content.

Follow the blueprint Pat’s story provides; go deep, go niche, and provide real value in the form of entertainment or information.

When considering where to build your personal brand, you want to use nothing less than platforms upon which you can actually build your life. Every platform we discuss in the following chapters fits that description.

No matter what kind of influencer you want to become, everyone must start with this step: create a Facebook business page.

Facebook will get to the young demo; you can count on it. Don’t ever underestimate Mark Zuckerberg, and don’t ever bet against Facebook.

No more direct mail, no more SEO, no more commercials. Instead, he took to YouTube, and in between cars and after work until two a.m., he taught himself about Facebook ads. “I didn’t want to storytell incorrectly. I didn’t want to miss an opportunity.”

He started putting out educational videos to help inform potential customers about the ins and outs of their cars. “We have put out videos on the different types of oils, the difference between a full-synthetic and a conventional, on when you should do an engine flush. And we’ve gotten lots of feedback. People will type messages like, ‘This is the first time anyone has actually explained to me what the purpose of my air filter is.’ I truly believe that the most educated customer will always pick us.”

Education

You need to understand something: when you’re starting with nothing, you will find that your absolute breakthrough opportunities will be developed in two ways: By the smart use of hashtags, a strategy that requires an unbelievably long grind. By direct-messaging, i.e., reaching out directly to people and offering something of value in return for their attention, a strategy that requires an unbelievably long grind.

Collaborations are the absolutely most tried-and-true way to grow a fan base quickly—quickly being a relative term. In most cases, you should count on this process taking years, not months. If that bothers you, close the book.

but the general process is essentially the same on each platform: reach out, make an offer they can’t refuse, and get to work producing something that doesn’t make them regret giving you a chance.

If I felt they weren’t just trying to use me, if I thought they were genuinely trying to be helpful, if they could recognize a hole in my business and had the knowledge and skills to fill it, I might consider talking to them.

When you can’t offer exposure or money, what do you have? Knowledge and skill. Do you own a pizza shop? You could offer free pizza from your shop for six months. Are you a graphic designer? You could offer to make six hundred custom filters. Do you own a liquor store? As soon as your targets post shots of themselves enjoying wine, you could direct-message them with an offer for a case a month for the rest of the year

read DRock’s story in chapter 3 of my book #AskGaryVee, or you can hear his version of the story in his Medium piece, “How I Got My Job for Gary Vaynerchuk.”)*

Provide something valuable to your collab partner, and you’ll quickly raise your profile as an influencer and in all likelihood make a new friend.

if you’re just starting out and have no money, this is the number-one thing you can do to build your brand.

It literally does not matter how long a platform lasts. What matters is that it exists. If you’re seeking to build your audience, go where the audience goes, wherever that may lead. Consume the platform’s content for a couple of weeks to get a feel for what’s appealing to users, then strategize how you can create content that will successfully penetrate that market. Get to know it and put your resources into it. Not all, mind you. Just some. More if you’re comfortable with the platform, less if you decide it’s not for you. But to label any platform as irrelevant shows a lack of imagination and vision.

The only thing you risk by taking leaps into the social-media unknown is time.

Download every new social platform, taste it, and understand it. Drop it if it doesn’t work for you or you can’t get comfortable, but never reject anything without educating yourself about it first (which is good advice for like, life).

Engage, comment, share, and create without asking anyone for anything. Become part of the community, and you’ll have a much better chance of getting someone to create a meme using your material, or better yet, create your own meme that other people fall in love with and share.

Musical.ly is the perfect place for a performance-oriented person to sell a performance, but it’s also a place where a performance-oriented person can sell pencils, or açaí juice, or fidget spinners.

DNA. A dancer intuitively knows how to produce content for other dancers; someone who has transformed his life through self-development knows how to reach others seeking a similar epiphany. Your creativity will be the variable to your success on this platform—and any other.

Let me clue you in to an important tell: when the “normals,” that is, the nontech, nonbusiness crowd, are the first to start spending inordinate amounts of time on a platform, that’s the signal to start paying close attention.

Its founders, Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, conceived it as the anti-Facebook, a photo-sharing app for spontaneous, imperfect, and impermanent content.

I often talk about Kutcher when I talk about the history of Twitter, because it was only four months after joining that he became the first Twitter user to boast one million followers, thanks to a brilliant campaign of challenging CNN to a race to hit the milestone. Suddenly Twitter, which had seemed like a joke to most people, was mainstream.

How does a grown-up become famous on a platform that serves as a communication tool among tweens and teens? By not overthinking anything. Unpolished content is native to Snapchat, and Khaled just was who he was.

On Twitter we’re expected to be clever or politically astute and insightful. Facebook is where we show off our families and vacations. On Instagram we build relationships through images and short videos. Snapchat, though, is where we put our throwaway content.

Whether or not Snapchat can compete over time, it’s a terrific training ground to become a superior marketer and branding expert, not just a conversion-based digital salesperson.

The business world is separated into two camps, conversion-based salespeople and branding-and-marketing people. The former are short-term players; the latter, long-term. With no disrespect meant toward sales, I always try to teach you to be branding-and-marketing people, because the great, life-changing upside resides in long-term thinking, not in figuring out how to make a quick buck.

With every single thing I do, I try to hit those four points. I’m not just going to post a picture of my coffee cup. I’m going to say, “Today, I’m drinking iced coffee. I’m drinking it with a silicone straw because it’s BPA free, and I like cinnamon in it because it helps with your blood sugar.” Every single snap needs to leave them with something or else it’s narcissistic.

Some of these influencers have just been taking pictures for the last five years. Snapchat forces you to show your personality. Are you intelligent, are you funny? What are you bringing to the table other than what you’re wearing?

That means that to be a Snapchat influencer, you need to be strong on the other platforms as well. The content you produce for Snapchat has to be powerful enough to draw views on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.

There is no discoverability on Snapchat; people have to know who you are and be motivated to come find you and follow you.

Write multiple blog posts about Snapchat, so when the media need a quote about it, they come to you.

Pay for a Google Ad that asks something like “Who Should I Follow on Snapchat?” and offers a list of names, with yours at the top.