The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [60]
This is the essence of quality marketing. The reason most of us hate the word “marketing” is that most of the marketing we experience did not follow this basic idea. Rather, the marketers happen to have something on hand they want (or were hired) to sell, and they try to push it on us, as if by force.
In turn, if the product or service is designed to solve a specific unsolved problem or meet a specific unmet need, and if the message is targeted well, so that you happen to be someone with that unsolved problem or unmet need, you will be happy to hear about the product or service. Think about the last time some product came along that solved a pesky, annoying, painful problem that had been bothering you for years—perhaps some health problem, or technology problem, or home repair problem, or even a psychological or existential problem. Think of how excited you were when you heard that there was finally an effective solution to that problem—that is how good marketing is supposed to feel.
There’s another advantage to starting off by solving an already-existing unsolved problem. Not only does it feel better to the customer, it also feels better to you, the entrepreneur or executive. Sean Parker, who was the founding president of Facebook and did not attend college, was adamant about this point when I spoke with him.
“The people who are most successful, they had a problem that was gnawing at them, and they couldn’t be comfortable unless they did something to solve that problem. It was so clear to them that they needed to do this thing, that every minute they weren’t doing it, they were unhappy. It was about an outcome in the world, more than some romantic notion of making it big as an entrepreneur. It was about solving a problem.”
What problem did Sean want to solve, when he first spotted TheFacebook, before it was Facebook? It wasn’t the problem of how to check out your friends’ friends’ hot roommates and coworkers—though I admit that, when I was single, I did appreciate their solution to that problem.
Sean spoke to me with utter clarity, purpose, and passion about the problem he set out to solve. “There was no global, persistent, legitimate concept of identity that traveled with you from site to site. There was no single sign-in or authentication system. There was no verifiable notion of identity.”
That was the big unsolved problem Sean wanted to solve. “Microsoft tried it with Microsoft Passport. No one trusts Microsoft enough to do that. AOL tried it with Magic Carpet. Sun tried it with Liberty Alliance. They were these big top-down efforts, and I felt like the only way this was going to happen was through a bottom-up movement. But the bottom-up movement was going to have to come through some other application.
“I took one hack at it with [online address book] Plaxo. It was the wrong answer, though. When I saw TheFacebook, it seemed like the right starting point, a piece of clay that could be molded over time to solve the right problem. The founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was the most ambitious and smartest person I’d ever met who had built a social network. He was also the most receptive to my feedback in terms of where I thought we needed to go. If you look at Mark’s actions even after I left the company, in terms of creating Facebook Connect and the authentication network, and getting other websites to use Facebook’s data and trying to take your friend network elsewhere, he’s executing that vision flawlessly. And now that the platform’s built, he’s answering the question ‘How do we integrate it into the fabric of the Internet?’”
Being that thoroughly consumed with solving a problem will carry you through a lot of business ups and downs. When Sean was starting Plaxo, which ultimately failed, he was flat-out broke. But he kept going, fueled by his vision of solving a major problem. He told me: “I lived out of a suitcase, homeless, for the first year I was trying to start Plaxo, pitching venture capitalists. It got to the point where my last sweater had a hole in it. When I was in one of the partner pitches with Mike Moritz