The Tim Ferriss Show - #269: The 3 Critical Rules of Branding

Episode Date: October 3, 2017

This is a special episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This time, I focus on tactical, specific advice on branding, marketing, and the most common mistakes of growing an audience.***If you enjoy ...the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would seem an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is going to be an in-between episode, a shorter solo episode
Starting point is 00:00:32 instead of the long-form interview format where I deconstruct world-class performers. If you'd like one of those and you've never heard them, check out Jamie Foxx. That's a good place to start. Tim.blog forward slash Jamie. That is one of my most popular of all time. And I'm not going to have a sponsor in this episode or sponsors. So I'm just going to ask you very nicely, please, pretty please do one of two things. If you haven't already, grab a copy of my latest book, Tribe of Mentors. You can find that at Tim.blog forward slash tribe. Check it out. It's something I'm very excited about. Or you can sign up for my newsletter that goes out every Friday. It's five bullets of the coolest stuff I've found that week. It's called Five Bullet Friday. You can go to tim.blog forward slash Friday to sign up for that. It is one of the
Starting point is 00:01:20 most popular newsletters in the world. About a million people have signed up for it and has a 60 to 65% open rate. So if you've spent any time in the email world, you know that is just bonkers. Coco nuts, as Chris Saka would say. So this in-between-isode is going to be a rant of sorts, but it will have tactical specifics about branding. So I could say it is going to cover my three rules of branding, but that's a little tongue in cheek and we'll get to that. I'd like to start with a quote. This is something new I'm experimenting with. And this is from Peter Drucker, very famous management theorist, author of one of my favorite books called The Effective
Starting point is 00:02:05 Executive. Very boring title, fantastic actionable content. And the quote is as follows, quote, there's nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all. And I consider the vast majority of anything associated with branding to be in that bucket of useless activities. And there was a book several years ago, I think it was 2009. Wow, I'm old. Several. Eight years ago that was published by someone I haven't seen in a very long time, Lucas Conley, called Obsessive Branding Disorder. And the subtitle was The Illusion of Business and the Business of Illusion. And it talked about the business, the racket, the industry of branding. And I'm not saying all of it is nonsense,
Starting point is 00:02:57 but the vast majority is exactly that. So I wanted to talk about just a few frameworks perhaps for thinking about branding and not making time-wasting mistakes. Okay, so let's just jump into it. Many errors in judgment and a lot of conflict is created when we have nebulous terms, undefined terms. So if, for instance, you're debating whether someone is successful or not with a counterparty, you should define successful. You might be talking about completely different things, and then you can argue until the cows come home and no one is going to change their mind. Similarly, if you're debating the existence of God, well, let's make sure that the two people having this debate agree on a single definition of God first. Brand suffers from this same problem. And I would encourage you,
Starting point is 00:03:52 rather than spending a lot of time chasing your tail semantically to figure out what brand is, just discard it altogether and forget about fixating on brand and think instead of how you can own a category. So own a category. And this can be own or create a category. So this is rule number one. Forget about brand and either own a category or create a category in the minds of specifically 1,000 diehard fans. And I highly recommend you read an essay, and I'm going to come back to this, called 1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly. You can go to his site, kk.org. He is one of my votes
Starting point is 00:04:31 for the real world most interesting man in the world. Check him out, Kevin Kelly, and kk.org, you can find 1,000 True Fans, and you can read it for free. Why are diehard fans important? Because the diehard fans obviate the need for any marketing if you do it right so if you are able to design a product or service that creates or owns a category for 1000 diehard fans they become then your strongest marketing force, your unpaid sales force effectively. But diehard requires that you're extremely clear on who you're targeting and the pain points that you solve for them or the benefits you create for them. If you can't be number one or number two in a category, right? So that could be Uber for X, could be imported light beer, low cost airline, whatever.
Starting point is 00:05:27 Find or create another category. Jack Welch took a similar approach to continuing or closing down business divisions. I encourage you from the very get go, if you're thinking about launching a product or just refining your focus that you think about owning or creating a category. So if you can't own, that is be the number one player in whatever you currently consider your category, you need to up your game or you need to find a new category. And I'll give you an example of how I'm thinking about this myself. In the world of podcasting, there is a lot of noise. There are also a lot of very, very good competitors if I viewed them as such. Meaning every week you have say NPR or Gimlet or these extremely professional outfits putting out very well narrated and produced sound engineered episodes and shows. If I choose to compete along those metrics, I will lose.
Starting point is 00:06:28 So I want to choose a different game. In my case, I've stuck with, in general, long form interviews of one and a half to three hours. Does that limit my audience? Yes. And that is not a bad thing. In this case, I view it as a very good thing. And it self-selects for a very particular type of demographic. I also choose content matter that in some cases is very highly technical, like cryptocurrency with Nick Szabo and Naval Ravikant, one of the most popular podcast episodes ever on what could be considered a very technical subject, cryptocurrency, blockchain, etc. That has now millions of downloads and has attracted a very particular type of person. Why is this important? This is important because then I can look at the business model of the podcast. In this case, it is subsidized by sponsorships. And I can keep in mind that I in fact have two sets of customers in
Starting point is 00:07:25 a sense I have the listeners for whom I want to provide an extremely tactically rich listening experience on very diverse subject matter second I have sponsors and what you will notice in the upcoming month or two is that I will be choosing subject matter to attract niche audiences and demographics with typically high education levels, high household income. And I will be bringing in sponsors who would typically look at say Rob report or Esquire. And in the world of podcasting, this is unusual. You don't hear what we might consider luxury brands advertising in podcasts. And I am intending to very much experiment and change that. And the
Starting point is 00:08:14 CPMs, meaning the cost per thousand downloads that I charge, will be commensurate with the ROI that I've seen already for, say, podcast sponsors sponsors. And also talk about creating a category. I am able to then piggyback on with other assets I'm using, which very few podcasts otherwise do. That means social, that means the blog, which has three, four or 5 million uniques per month. And then also the various types of email and offer say deal of the week. It's super explicit. Don't believe in native advertising, so I don't do it. Okay. So that is an example of how you might go from, say, grappling with this problematic term of brand to owning a category, right? And own a category could be not a category of product, not a category of service, but a category of customer.
Starting point is 00:09:06 And I was in Fiji recently with, never been, it was great, with Tony Robbins and a group of people from the Shopify Build a Bigger Business competition. It was a fantastic set of a few days, very rich in learning. And Tony repeatedly made the point, he's very, very astute and owns a lot of businesses that I think generate something like five or $6 billion in annual revenue. And he said, don't fall in love with your product, fall in love with your customer. This is a very, very, very, very mission critical distinction. Don't fall in love with your product, don't fall in love with your service, fall in love with your customer, and then you can determine how best to serve them. And in my case, I'll just underline something else. The target does not equal the market. So the explanation behind that
Starting point is 00:09:59 is, for instance, with the four-hour workweek, part of the reason the four-hour workweek took off the way it did is that I scratched my own itch and I wrote for people like me. At the time, that meant 25 to say 35 tech-savvy males in a handful of cities with a generally high level of education. So that meant San Francisco, New York, LA, Chicago, and so on. This made my marketing and advertising extremely precise, which made it very affordable. All right. If you think your products for everyone, and you're going to buy advertisements in USA Today and the homepage of AOL, you are going to burn through all your budget very, very quickly, and it will not be effective. So what does the target is not the market mean? That means that I'm asking myself, how can I best serve this very, very narrowly defined audience that happens to perfectly overlap with who I am,
Starting point is 00:10:52 which makes it easy to serve them because I don't have to guess. I don't have to speculate. And then once I serve that target, the market becomes broader. So then immediately, it starts to bleed over the edges to say females, again, 25 to 35 tech savvy living in a handful of primary cities in the US or densely populated cities. And then it bleeds around the age edges, both downward and upward and so on and so forth. All right. So you don't have to target the entire world. If you want to sell a product to the entire world, you need to start really, really specific and precise. All right. This leads to the next. So we already talked about don't fixate on brand,
Starting point is 00:11:35 talk about owning a category or owning a particular very, very well-defined customer. Next, don't make a product for everyone. This is a very common mistake where you might have an entrepreneur, could be you. I've made this mistake in the early days where you trick yourself with some type of very seductive math. You say, you know, I'm going to make a better Q-tip. And if I just get 1% of the ears in China, I will be a billionaire. Well, this is really, really problematic. If everyone is your market, no one is your market. And particularly with first versions of your product or service, it is better to have a thousand people who love you, even if that means many hate you, than a hundred thousand who think you're kind of sort of cool. A. Number two, we already
Starting point is 00:12:22 talked about the cost constraints. If you're trying to target everyone and boil the ocean, you're going to run out of money. And the number one reason that startups fail, they run out of fucking money. So number one, don't spend all your money. And coming back to the previous point though, great. Like this is great. This is exactly what I've been looking for to a thousand edge case and nerds, for instance, beats good. Yeah, it's all right to a hundred thousand of anything else every time. And I already mentioned how diehard fans become your strongest marketing force, which does not cost you money in a social sharing driven world. Although that's not the end all be all cultivating the intense few instead of the lukewarm many pays a hundred fold. All rightall cultivating the intense few instead of the lukewarm many pays a hundredfold all right so cultivate the intense few instead of the lukewarm many at least
Starting point is 00:13:10 when you are dealing with v1 v2 and gaining a foothold before you have the cash flow to then do more speculative testing all right uh and i should point out also that there's a real bias, these days especially, there's a very sensitive, I suppose, environment around talking about, say, the affluent, all right? The 1%, serving the 1%. It's important to realize that in many cases, if you are launching a product, it makes sense to sell a high-priced product to the affluent in some fashion in the beginning why does this make sense because a it gives you a larger margin for error you have better margins you're not trying to cost compete with say other people who could bleed you of your chips just by lowering their prices temporarily. So if you choose a
Starting point is 00:14:05 new category or a customer and solve a pain point that hasn't been solved, then you charge a premium for a, whether it's a premium or luxury product, that enables you to be very cost-effective in your targeting and gives you a margin of safety slash margin for error. And this is how in a sense, although it wasn't a business necessarily, this is how recycling started. Keep in mind, this is how Tesla in many ways financed developing cars that are then more affordable for a wider audience. This is a very conservative in some respects, safe path to then developing lower priced models, services, products for a broader audience. But for your safety and for the survival of your business or a new line or division that you're launching, don't make a product for everyone. And when in
Starting point is 00:14:58 doubt, go high end is my recommendation. And I should also point out, this is number three, forget branding. Pretty much forget branding altogether. And I'm going to give you some alternative tools and tactics that you can use. And I'm going to borrow from a few folks I've found influential personally. Forget about this word branding. It is extremely distracting. And that doesn't mean you should dissuade other people from obsessing on personal brand. If your competitors are spending a lot of time on personal brand, fantastic. They're probably doing it on a network, whether it's Facebook or otherwise, that with one algorithm change can be the greatest bait and switch in the history of their digital identity lives. And then they are out of at least communicating that supposedly
Starting point is 00:15:52 valuable personal brand to 90% of their audience or their fans. Forget about it is my general recommendation. And if you still feel compelled to do personal branding, I don't think about it at all because I view it as a side effect of doing the right things, not a causal factor. I don't believe that unless you are a personality, a celebrity on say Instagram, I don't view personal brand as a valuable true north or calibration criteria. However, what I would say is you should let as many people do that as possible because then your ability to single task on a few simple things will give you a huge competitive advantage. For instance, think about consistently over-delivering one or two benefits to your
Starting point is 00:16:43 customers slash users slash fans. I view branding as a side effect of consistent association. So what do people think of if they've had two drinks and you say, hey, what do you think of when you think Tesla? What do you think of when you think blah? What do you think of when you think Tim Ferriss show? The first few words that come to mind, the first few sentences, that's your brand. Don't make it more complicated. So don't put the cart before the horse. Put good business first and then good brand will follow. So how do you put good business first? Well, if you look at, say, Bezos, you look at jobs, you look at any of the founders I know, and you can check out my portfolio. I've been involved with a lot of fast-growing companies, about 70 now.
Starting point is 00:17:26 Go to angel.co forward slash Tim. That's AngelList, which I'm also an advisor to. And you can see my portfolio. So there have been TaskRabbit, Blue Bottle Coffee, both of which had acquisitions in the last week, Uber, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera. It's a long list. You can check it out. None of the best founders I know. doesn't mean they're not out there. I'm sure they are,
Starting point is 00:17:49 but none of the best founders I know who have a tiger by the tail and who are trying to grow an already fast growing company or trying to take a small company and turn it into a multi-billion dollar company. Think about personal brand at all. I'm going to draw a delineation here. They might think about crisis comms, crisis communication, how to manage any type of likely problem scenarios, which I think every startup should do. You should have a crisis PR plan and response in place for the if-then scenarios that are likely to come up, even if it's one in a hundred, eventually a lot of these will come up, especially as a company grows and has more touch points with customers, whether it's Airbnb, say having apartments destroyed or damaged in some
Starting point is 00:18:37 way, took an accident to trigger a lot of changes in policies, which they did really effectively, but you can preemptively come up with those. All right. That is not personal brand. That is just intelligent communications and having a proactive as opposed to reactive plan for different events. All right. Those are if then statements. But what do they focus on instead? Very, very simple. What I've seen is value to user, right? Jeff Bezos did a very great interview with Charlie Rose where he talked about the directives of a customer-centric company. You can also look at Amazon's, I suppose you'd call them maxims for hiring if you look at their
Starting point is 00:19:23 jobs page, which is also fascinating to read. But all right, value to user, removing pain points and friction for that customer. Let's just call it customer. And then KPIs. So those are key performance indicators. If you were to look at, say, Y Combinator and how they train their startups for demo day when they pitch investors, they're, I believe, typically looking at one primary KPI that they try to grow, fixate, obsessively focus on growing 10% per week, let's say. As a business becomes larger, that 10% per week is probably not sustainable in many instances, but it can be, say, per month and so on, which would be the case for me looking at the total podcast downloads per month, for instance. That is one of the KPIs that I pay attention to. Removing pain points and friction. Let's talk about this. This is where I'm going to
Starting point is 00:20:19 borrow from two people, W. Chan Kim and Rene Marbon. I don't know how to say that last name. My apologies, Rene. But they are the authors of initially the Blue Ocean Strategy, which I read some time ago, which focuses in effect very precisely on how to create a new category versus competing in a very bloody crowded marketplace for an existing category. And they talk about value innovation as opposed to incremental improvement. And I'm reading currently their new book, Blue Ocean Shift, subtitle Beyond Competing. And then there's more to it. Proven steps to inspire confidence and sees new growth. The book is, I would say, generally positioned for larger companies, companies that have multiple
Starting point is 00:21:10 product lines, multiple divisions. I am not in such a position, but I still find it useful. And I will tell you, for instance, on page 151, they have a buyer utility map. And I'm going to walk you through this in brief because I think it is a really, really useful matrix or journaling exercise for identifying how you can create the best brand possible by not caring about brand at all. And that is by creating that consistent association of benefits that I talked about earlier with your company. And you can do that in a very systematic way. Here's how you do it. So they call it uncovering the blocks to buy utilities on page 151. And I'm going to be spending a lot of time on this in many different capacities. And it starts with recognizing some typical stages of interaction with a product. Airbnb took a very, very intelligent approach to this. And I recommend checking out the Masters
Starting point is 00:22:14 of Scale podcast with Reid Hoffman, episode one with Brian Chesky of Airbnb to hear about how they approach this specifically. But what are the touch points? So how does your customer interact with your product or service indirectly or directly? So here are a few options right off the bat. Purchase, so the purchasing experience. Delivery, the use, let's just call it first use. Supplements, what else do they need to make your product work optimally or work well? Maintenance, so in the case of an app, you have updates and so on, car, obvious, oil, etc. And then disposal. And disposal can be thought of in many different respects, and it might sound like an odd one, but certain things are a huge hassle to get rid of batteries
Starting point is 00:23:06 would be an example let's take packing peanuts as another example i'm sure many people listening have thought why didn't someone think of rollers on luggage before something like 10 years ago it seems like the most obvious thing in the world, and yet it took people forever. Well, I felt the same way when I first saw inflatable packing material. I'm sure many of you have seen this. You find it in a lot of Amazon boxes. But rather than packing peanuts, which are the biggest pain in the ass on multiple levels, to get anything out, you have to spill them all over the floor. And then you have to dispose of them.
Starting point is 00:23:41 You have to pack them back up, put them into garbage bags, et cetera. And having these inflatable, effectively balloons of air in the boxes instead solve those problems. And that has, I am absolutely sure, become a many, many multi-million dollar business with that product alone. So that's a disposal example. Now, along each of these categories, and you could just create columns, right? Purchase, delivery, use, supplements, which means the things needed to make your thing work well, maintenance, disposal. For each of these, you can assess them, So let's just say for purchase, you can assess each of these, right? For purchasing, acquiring, downloading, whatever it might be, your product or service, signing up. Number one, looking just at the purchase column, customer productivity. What is the biggest block to
Starting point is 00:24:59 customer productivity in each stage? What are the key reasons for this block? All right. And that is really, productivity means anything to do with efficiency, less time, effort, or money, all right, in fulfilling the buyer's needs. Then you have simplicity, all right? So simplicity would be anything that eliminates or minimizes complexity or mental hassle, right? So buying with a thumbprint on an iPhone would be an example of that. How can you simplify it? Podcasting as one example is still stupidly complex or confusing to people who are not accustomed to listening to podcasts. It's absurd how unintegrated most podcast experiences are. Convenience, when and where I or the customer wants something, 24-7, 365.
Starting point is 00:25:48 There are other aspects to convenience, certainly, but in purchasing, convenience, is there anything that could make it simpler, more convenient, requiring less time, effort, or money? Risk reduction, this could be financial, physical, emotional, related to reputation. Is there anything you can do? And don't immediately skip over any of these. I would encourage you to think about how, say, in the instance of books, you might not think that risk reduction has a place, but you could be looking at six book titles and one or two of them, ask yourself, would someone sit on the subway with this flashing on the back of a hardcover or would they try to hide it? So there's some books that have fantastic titles, meaning they're going to get a lot of buzz
Starting point is 00:26:39 and that may be enough. You don't have to take this into consideration. But there are books like, for instance, Mark Manson's book works really well. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck works great. Most people may not be afraid to have that because it has a certain tough connotation or whatever it might be. And the book is done extremely well. Then you might have, on the other hand, a book which I've heard is very good. Actually, I haven't read it, but I love the title, which is The Ethical Slut. Okay. The Ethical Slut, great title. It seems to be a popular book, but there are going to be, you would have the option of risk reduction if you chose something else. It doesn't mean you should take it, but you should at least brainstorm the options. All right. Then there are financial, physical, et cetera. So that could apply to return policies, one of which I made somewhat popular in the four-hour workweek where I talked about how
Starting point is 00:27:32 I was able to dramatically decrease return rate. And I'm not saying this was a single causal factor by offering a 110% money-back guarantee, meaning people wouldn't just get their money back, they would get an additional 10% on top of that. And that gave them the risk reduction, the reassurance that the product was high quality. All right. The next one, again, just going down the column of purchase, you could do this for delivery, use, supplements, maintenance, disposal, fun, and image. All right. Tangible, intangible, aesthetic, look, feel, attitude, and style that an offering conveys. All right. Fantastic. I mean, let's look at Apple, right? If we look at the iMac, we're not talking about mind-blowing technological innovation here. We're talking about putting
Starting point is 00:28:19 something in a hot pink and transparent case so that when you ask grandma what she wants for Christmas, she says, a computer, you say, what kind? She says, a pink one, right? I think I borrowed that example from Tony Robbins. He has a lot of good examples. In any case, so there you have it, all right? And a lot of companies have done a, I shouldn't say a lot of companies. There are a handful of companies who have made design in the most holistic sense possible, a cornerstone of good customer experience, Airbnb being one of them. And I've had some time to speak with Joe, who's one of the co-founders about this specifically. And the last one, won't spend a
Starting point is 00:28:57 ton of time on, but environmental friendliness. And I'm reading from this book. This is not my information. This is Blue Ocean Shift. This utility lever is about green matters. Is your offering environmentally friendly or do buyers prefer your offering because your organization's strong reputation for environmental friendliness, et cetera, et cetera. There are others, right? You could have, for instance, corporate responsibility. You could have civic duties or social responsibility. If you look at how Tom's in the beginning, sort of the buy one, give one model did incredibly well. But at this point, it is a crowded market, right? So that particular innovation, value innovation created a blue ocean for them. At this point, it is by virtue of the number of
Starting point is 00:29:47 people who have tried to replicate that, a crowded space. It doesn't mean don't do it. It just means that it will not be enough to differentiate you to the point where you no longer have to combat the noise. All right. And last, I would say, since I'm trying to keep this somewhat short, we're already at 29 minutes. So let me know if you like this, by the way, since I'm trying to keep this somewhat short, we're already at 29 minutes. So let me know if you like this, by the way, and I'll do more of this if you do. Company. So if you have a company, instead of asking yourself, what does this company stand for, which is a very office space type question that will result in office space type manifestos and mission statements,
Starting point is 00:30:23 keep it simple. it concrete what unique benefits does this company deliver and who are your 1000 true fans if you answer that and come back to it repeatedly what unique benefits unique benefits does this company or product deliver? Or what pain points does it uniquely remove? And who are your 1,000 true fans? If you answer those and then secondarily ask, how can I turn casual fans into diehard fans? Which is a question I ask myself a lot. How can I turn my, yeah, every three months I listen to one of Tim's podcasts and they're pretty good.
Starting point is 00:31:06 How can I turn that person into a holy shit, I need to send this to five people right now type of fan? How do I do that? And you don't have to hit everyone at once. When I write blog posts, for instance, I typically write a post that I hope 10% of my audience will love and not that 100% of my audience will like, because I'm not in a rush. And you can play the long game. I suggest you do. And particularly with, say, a blog based on WordPress, which is pretty SEO friendly, the real estate will appreciate over time. So if I create 10 blog posts that over time hit a hundred percent of
Starting point is 00:31:46 my current audience each of which making 10% of that audience rapidly exciting or rapidly exciting maybe exciting to you guys are exciting don't let anyone tell you different excited then you will get a lot further than 10 posts that have a lukewarm reception with 100% of your audience. So forget about what does it stand for? We can come back to that, but I think it's a mediocre question that will get mediocre or poor responses. And what unique benefits does X solve? What pain points does it uniquely remove? Who are your 1,000 true fans because of that? And how can you turn casual fans into diehard fans? If you just do that, it seems so simplistic
Starting point is 00:32:30 and it seems like remedial entrepreneurship 101. But I am telling you, when I look at companies that are now worth billions of dollars that I've been involved with at the very early stages, these are the questions that they asked and answered very, very effectively. So hope that's helpful. Those are my three rules or so with some meandering of branding in quotation marks. And in some, forget about branding, forget about personal
Starting point is 00:33:00 branding, focus on what fucking matters and the rest will take care of itself. So excuse the French. Hope you found that valuable. And I may or may not have show notes for this with links because there aren't many links to include, but if I do, they will be at tim.blog forward slash podcast with show notes for everything else. Thank you for listening and let me know what you thought of this format. Please let me know. Typically on Twitter is where I will see it. That's at T Ferris, T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S. And since I am not going to have any post role sponsors or advertisers, I will repeat, if you dig this, please do me one of two favors. Either pick up the new book, which is tribe of mentors. I'm super proud of it.
Starting point is 00:33:45 And I'm very, very excited about it. So you can see that at Tim dot blog forward slash tribe. It's a answers to some of the most interesting questions I could come up with by 130 incredible people. And, uh, if you've already done that, or if you want to do something else,
Starting point is 00:34:03 you can sign up for the Five Bullet Friday newsletter. I send out the five things that I find coolest or most interesting, most helpful in a given week, and it has an absurdly high open rate, and people really, really dig it. It's free. It'll be free forever. So check that out, Tim.blog forward slash Friday. And that's it for right now, folks.
Starting point is 00:34:25 Big sloppy kiss from where I'm sitting on my chaise lounge. And I will talk to you guys soon. Thanks for listening.

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