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- Navigate Mental Models On Entrepreneurship
Quick Summary
Over the past few months, we’ve been focusing on mental models that are particularly powerful for helping you create a product that sells, whether your company is small or large. First, we talked about creating an offer with these models:
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Think Like A Customer/w=1920,quality=90,fit=scale-down)
10,000-Experiment Rule/w=1920,quality=90,fit=scale-down)
Buyer Hot ButtonsHowever, the offer isn’t the only thing that makes something sell. A lot of times, especially in a smaller company or startup, a lot of what people are buying is not just the product — in many ways, they are buying you.
So in this manual, we’re going to talk about selling you.
When I first started out in speaking after college, I remember my mentor said:
People aren’t just buying your product, they are buying you. It’s about 50/50.
That 50/50 split has just been a really good reminder. The overlap of the Venn diagram below is what people are buying:
For those of you who don’t know my background, I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was 16. After I graduated, together with my then-girlfriend (now wife), I created a national road tour of college campuses for which we got a 32-foot RV, wrapped it in our logo, and drove around the country doing half-day conferences. We sold these events for $10,000 to each college, and we had corporate sponsorship for each event as well.
Over the history of the company, we did more than 450 of those half-day conferences, in addition to over a thousand keynotes where we placed other speakers.
So, we had a lot of experience with sales at that higher level, and we saw that when people like you, they’re more likely to buy from you. If they personally like you, they will look for ways to work with you and work you into their budget.
That experience shaped my understanding of the Selling You model.
I’ve also really seen it applied to writing.
When I was 16 years old attending high school in Hopewell, New Jersey, my best friend Cal Newport and I started a web development business.
Cal has since gone on to become famous for his book Deep Work, so when I first started writing for Forbes a few years ago I reached out to him and asked for advice. This is what he said:
Readers are not seeking random clever ideas and interesting links (there are much better sources for that). They want to follow someone who is advancing a cause/point of view that intrigues, upsets, or excites them."—Cal Newport
So you see, people aren’t just influenced by what someone says. They are influenced by who says it.
It’s particularly powerful because often, when entrepreneurs are thinking about their product, they’re ignoring (or not fully taking advantage of) this aspect of selling themselves. If you have a product right now that’s not fully clicking, this might be the missing link.
Now, let’s look at some approaches to selling yourself.
View Ful Mastery Manual
Watch Classes
Masterclass
Coaching Call #1
Coaching Call #2
Other Resources
Slides
Navigate Mental Models On Entrepreneurship
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The rookie mistake many business owners make in their marketing is to just promote themself. Instead, you should work on educating your prospects. Once you educate them on how things work in your domain and what it’s like to work with you, they’re more likely to develop trust in you and buy your products or services.
“Think like a customer” is a simple idea/skill, and it’s also the key skill you need in order to get customers. In order to create a product people want and market it in a way people understand, you first have to understand the customer. This manual will help you understand how.
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How can I get in front of as many eyes as possible and get as many people as I can to know about my work, my projects, and the services or products I offer, all with minimal costs? That’s the challenge this model addresses.
To communicate effectively within someone in a buying state, we need to understand who our buyers are and what makes them unique and identify their #1 specific psychological-emotional motivator. In other words, we want to identify our specific buyers’ hot buttons.
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In many ways, humans are designed for social conformity. Conforming is easier, and it works 99% of the time. An original thinker, however, knows that social and expert authority is often right, but that it can also be incredibly wrong too. So, the original thinker looks for holes in the consensus view and capitalizes on them. This model shows how you can do it too.
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This model aims to help you get published on top sites in your niche, write articles that go viral, build your business completely off of content (if you want), get people knocking on your door to work with you, and scale the number of people you reach.
As we're moving into this increasingly changed future, in which we seem to be living out Ray Kurzweil’s Law Of Accelerating Returns, we’ve noticed that the opportunity follows certain patterns. In this manual, we discuss six principles of opportunity to help you build a model of how it works and how it evolves through time.
When you have a product or you're buying a product, you can look at it through the metaphor of your hiring the person to do a job for you, and that job could have functional aspects and emotional aspects.
When it comes to rapidly changing environments, forget the 10,000-Hour Rule. Thomas Edison, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and other great innovators follow the 10,000-Experiment Rule, and you can start with it with the help of this manual.
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The offer isn’t the only thing that makes something sell. A lot of times, especially in a smaller company or startup, a lot of what people are buying is not just the product — in many ways, they are buying you. So in this manual, we’re going to talk about selling you.
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Why and how you should be reinventing yourself with the customers, your marketing, and your product.
Customer focus is a series of four models rather than a standalone model, and Total Customer Focus model is one of the cornerstones.