Stolen Product
The idea that people troll the Internet to steal ideas is amusing. It’s characteristic of either over-believing in your idea or not having enough of an idea. Consider this:
After releasing a product, the hardest thing to do is to get people to care. Contrast that to the fear that trolls will not only find your product, but launch a company to compete with it!
Have you heard of any stories in which an idea was stolen because it was released too early?
Face it, there are very few truly new ideas. It’s highly likely someone is already considering, if not building (or has built), your idea.
You’re going to launch someday anyway, right? All the time you’re not releasing, you’re not getting early customers. Customers are what create the business!
It’s actually hard to build someone else’s idea.
Case Study: The Minimum Viable Audience
Whether you call them your customers, your market segments, or your audience, they provide the necessary context paramount in effective product development of any sort. We spoke with Brian Clark of Copyblogger, considered one of the founding fathers of content marketing, about his concept of the Minimum Viable Audience.
Lean Entrepreneur: How was Copyblogger born and how does it relate to the Minimum Viable Audience?
Brian Clark: Initially, the idea was that if you create high-quality content, people will share it if you can draw enough attention to it in the first place. As a one-person blog, I wrote a couple of articles a week. I didn’t publish everyday because I wanted everything that came out to be good. But my fundamental idea was: If you build an audience, you can build a business.
I had no idea what I was going to sell. No idea. I had no products, no services. I really didn’t want to be in a service business. I looked at companies like 37signals and I thought, “Oh, I’m so envious. I wish I could start a software company.”
It’s funny because seven years later, we’re a software company with a hundred thousand customers. But it was all because I had built the audience and all of the opportunities that subsequently came to me, again, because I had built the audience. And as such, we’re intimately familiar with what the market that we’d created wanted. That’s invaluable to the lean concept for startups—really, for any business.
LE: This relates back to the beginning of blogging.
Clark: The idea starts with the blogging subculture getting started in late 1999, early 2000. By 2005, it was starting to get to that point where people were thinking, “Okay, there’s got to be a commercial angle to blogging.” At that point, many people were still arguing whether it was okay to put ads on blogs.
I started talking about it, and said, “You know what you really ought to do? You ought to build an audience and sell them things.” And everyone just freaked out, but because that was radical compared to the conversation that was happening at that time.
And I can tell you for the first three months of Copyblogger, it was awfully lonely. I had no contacts, I had no friends. Every day I had to create great stuff and somehow draw attention to it.
The initial three months, I tried things, a lot of them failed. Some worked. I learned from that. You can’t build it and hope they come. That doesn’t work. But if you put something up there and you work to get attention to it in some fashion, you’re either going to get indifference or you’re going to get a positive response. During that period of time, I was going through this process of doing more of what worked and doing less of what didn’t work.
In the process I got to the point where I had enough of an audience where they started telling me, they started promoting the content themselves and that grew the audience organically. But most importantly, I think from this discussion standpoint, I started to get an insight into what was lacking in the market.
Your audience is never going to tell you “I need XYZ.” They’re going to tell you, “I have this problem. I have this desire. And it is unfulfilled.” That, to me, is entrepreneurial gold. I always had faith in that process and that’s how the whole company was built.
LE: How did you know that build-it-and-they-will-come won’t work?
Clark: I think I had a vision but vision has got to be flexible. You have a general viewpoint of what you want to share with people.
You’ve got to stick with what you know but, when it comes down to the brass tacks, the audience is going to say, “Yes, I want to know more about that,” and “No, I don’t want that.”
If you just relentlessly push forward what you think that other people need to know, we call this “feeding people broccoli ice cream.” Yes, it’s good for them, but they’re not interested in it. You’re basically lost out in the cold. You’re not having any kind of resonance.
What are you going to do about it? I think from the social or ideological standpoint, maybe you carry forward. As an entrepreneur, I think you go with what the audience or the prospective market actually wants.
LE: How do audiences drive pivots?
Clark: I was thrilled and I even wrote a Forbes 4 article about this when I saw that you two were mentioned in a Fast Company 6 article using an example of the Beastie Boys, who started out as a punk band in New York back in the 1980s, when hip-hop was emerging.
These were very progressive guys from Brooklyn and Manhattan in a punk band, then they eventually started including rap songs in their act, and they saw the audience reaction.
It was a much stronger reaction compared to anything that they have been until then. This is a brilliant example because how do you pivot without feedback? And how do you get feedback without an audience?
That was the story of Beastie Boys. That is how they became a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame rap group that started as three Jewish guys as a punk band. That’s an amazing story but it’s the same story I think you’re seeing play out with startups who start out with an audience online because like you two have said before, it’s simple, but it’s not easy.
But it’s so well worth it because in addition to starting a successful company, which is hard enough, you’re building a media asset, right, with the website that builds the audience. That’s worth the money in itself, and I don’t think you can discount that.
I’ve been offered a couple million bucks for Copy blogger.com, not the businesses that generate the revenue. That’s pretty amazing when you think about it.
LE: How do you counsel entrepreneurs afraid to take the first step?
Clark: I tell you what, I admit to small-business people and entrepreneurs all the time that I’m a freak. I was a writer who started a software company. That doesn’t happen often. I was geared to make content, to create stuff, to put it out there.
I was driven to do that even at the expense of my former career. In that sense, I’m strange. But the whole concept behind Entreproducer is you don’t have to be the content creator. You’re the entrepreneur. And that is an aspect to modern business that we’re seeing emerge that has to do with content, how one company markets better than the other. How one company provides a sales experience that is superior to another company’s. Why does this person choose that company in often undifferentiated marketing?
But you have to think like a producer. You don’t have to be the writer. You have to be the guy who makes it all come together.
Isn’t that what an entrepreneur is, the person, the man or woman that brings it all together?
And at the end of the day, I’m just saying, why not also add the audience in?
There are instances in which the lean startup mantra “release early, release often” needs to be more carefully managed.
In the B2B world, some customers don’t want early-release products. Their own internal processes demand that products must be fully vetted before they are released into their particular environments. In other words, these customers are not early adopters.
Large, well-known businesses need to protect their brands. Releasing products that are minimally viable to some, but buggy and poorly designed to others, could potentially have a negative effect on their reputation. Even with releases to a controlled audience, there’s a chance of having negative results bleed over to unintended audiences. Startups don’t typically have this risk.
Even in these cases, it’s worth considering that not releasing doesn’t really resolve the primary issue. If you wait to release, you are still assuming you know what the final version looks like. Waiting to release a finished product is going to gain you a lot more negative attention if the product isn’t right versus letting out a controlled release.
There are options:
Be careful which customers you choose to release early product to.
You could, of course, release under a different brand. In other words: Create a new entity solely for the purpose of testing your ideas.
You could manage the press. The media wants exclusives. So give an interview, talk about problems in the industry, your vision, and when you hope to get the product out to the masses, while testing an early release with an exclusive set of customers. It’s really more likely to be harder to land the interview than having to face a mob of angry customers who will never forgive you for releasing such a horrible product.
Build and release separate “mini” products that test risky aspects of your main product.