Seth Godin: Marketing god, Blogger, and Author

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The show today, I have an exciting announcement at this very moment. Right here, right now. You're listening to Remarkable People's 100th episode. And to mark this remarkable milestone, I'm announcing that Remarkable People is now officially part of the HubSpot Podcast Network family. Something that I love about the HubSpot Podcast Network is all the shows and hosts dedicated to inspiring professionals like you to dent the universe. You see the world a little differently and want to make the world a better place. If you love Remarkable People and are looking for other shows like mine, I recommend checking out My first million I Digress, the Salesman and Entrepreneurs on Fire. You can check out all these shows and more@HubSpot.com podcastnetwork. I'm Guy Kawasaki and I'm very excited about this episode for four reasons. First, this is the 100th episode of remarkable People. Holy cow. We've been doing this for more than two years. Time flies when you're doing the best work of your life. I was born to podcast. Second, we're excited that We've joined the HubSpot podcast network. This network is for professionals who want to grow their businesses. More about this later. Third, the Chief Design Officer of our sponsor, the Remarkable Tablet Company, is joining us to explain the genesis of the company and its future directions. We've truly enjoyed sharing their cool product with the world. And last but not least, our guest is the one and only Purple Cow of Promotion, Master of Marketing. Drum roll please. Seth Godin. Seth is a marketing pioneer, speaker, entrepreneur, teacher, and podcaster. He is the founder of one of the most popular blogs in the world, more than 7,000 posts and more than a million readers. It comes out every day. If that's not enough, he's the author of 19 books. Seth studied computer science at Tufts University, followed by obtaining his Master's in Business Administration at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. As a champion of talent, Seth is the ultimate advocate for global conversation on business and marketing. Seth leads the marketing conversation and pushes it forward with his ideas. Finally, I'd like to thank you, the listener. Whether you joined me during the first episode with Dr. Jane Goodall or or this episode with marketing legend Seth Godin, we've got lots more coming in the future. Thank you for listening, reviewing and sharing the podcast with your friends. It means the world to me. Here's to another 100 episodes. Now on to the interview with the remarkable Seth Godin. 2021. How do you define marketing anymore?

Marketing is not advertising. That's the place to begin. You figured that out a long time ago, but only in the 80s did they start to diverge. Before that they were the same thing. And now marketing is the generous work of doing work that matters for people who care and making a change for them and with them. And it's the products we make, the way we make them, the communities that people are involved in when they use our product, the network effects, the side effects. All of that is a story about who we think we are when we engage with you and your product.

That's kind of an all encompassing definition of marketing. It's. Well, so way back when, Philip Kotler would say marketing is four Ps, you know, price, promotion, people in place or whatever. So throw that whole definition of P's away. Or are we adding P's or we just.

We.

Phil does good work, is a nice guy, but he certainly lucked into having a textbook that stuck around for a very long time. I added a P when I did Permission Marketing, and then I added another P when I did Purple Cow. Now there are so many P's, it doesn't really make sense. But I will tell you that if you read Kotler, what you will see is that the vast majority of that book is about advertising. And that is because the marketing department, before Steve said to you, go do this thing, was supposed to take average products for average people and slap some hype on them. That was the job of the market. You didn't get to see the thing before it came out. They just gave you a barrel of money and some stuff. And now pick an example like Volkswagen. The marketing department forgot to speak up and say, hey, if you guys keep committing felonies and faking the pollution output, that would be a really bad marketing idea. But instead they were just making commercials. And I just think that it's very clear. The Internet is not about banner ads or YouTube ads. The Internet is about what people say when they talk about you.

So is there a place at all for advertising?

Well, let's think about most of the great brands that have been built in the last 15 years. Name a Google Ad. Name a Facebook ad. Name an Amazon ad. Can't. You can't. That the network effect is so much more powerful than the advertising effect that you also can't launch a new kind of ketchup and make it really work. Because Heinz was built on distribution and advertising, neither one of which matters so much anymore. So you're going to build a great brand with the network effect and with innovation and with community.

And does your definition of the network effect include an ad in Facebook that can truly target the customer? Is Facebook advertising part of this irrelevant advertising? Because Facebook makes a shitload of money, Seth.

They do. So let's be clear. There's two kinds of advertising. There's brand advertising and there's direct advertising. Brand advertising is unmeasurable, but it sticks with people for a very long time. And direct advertising is more of an announcement to go to the right person, knock on their door and say, I know I'm interrupting you, but when you and you alone see my announcement, you'll be interested. So what Facebook has figured out how to do through masses and masses of hyper targeting and stripping away people's privacy, is make announcements to the right people in the right way. But the vast majority of Facebook advertising is terrible. It doesn't pay for itself because the people who are doing it are greedy. They're interrupting the wrong people and they're not being truthful about the announcements they're making.

Then why do people keep doing it if it's not paying off for them?

So there's this button on Facebook that says boost. And if you are a small company and you have discovered that you're no longer allowed to talk to your friends and fans, and you are struggling with your average stuff for average people, and there's a little button you can press and pay 20 or 50 bucks and maybe, just maybe, you'll reach that next circle that will change everything. It's sort of hard to not press the button. And then if you're a company that's used to spending money on advertising and when you run an ad in a magazine, your phone doesn't ring once you move that money over to places like Facebook. But they're not good at it. That doesn't mean they won't get good at it. But what's missing is most organizations still make average stuff for average people. They try to go right down the middle. And there's no room for the middle anymore because no one's going to pay attention to something that's sort of boring. They're going to seek out something that they see themselves in that matters to them. And if you start by making that product, what you really will benefit from is not your Facebook ads, but other people talking about you on those channels.

And this leads us to the Seth concept of smallest viable market.

Right? So small, viable audience is a big idea that I slipped into my this is marketing book. And I think we're not talking about it enough. What we were trained to do, you and I and others, is, what's the biggest possible market? We spent all this time building this database or this piece of hardware or whatever, go get the largest number of people. And what I'm saying to almost every business, including giant ones, is, can you tell me who the smallest viable audience is? Which are the people? The smallest group you can possibly live with, who this is perfect for, who will be overwhelmed when they hear about it? Who will wait in line in the rain to buy one? And if you can't tell me who's in your smallest viable audience, why do you think you deserve a bigger one? And if you have a smallest viable audience, then just whisper to them. They'll go do it right. I remember standing in the rain. My son wasn't very old. He was in middle school. He took a day off from school. David Pogue was there with his camera, taking pictures. And we waited in front of the Apple store for four hours the day it opened in New York City. And the number of people who were waiting outside that day, that was the smallest viable audience. It was enough.

So walk me through how we go from smallest viable audience to worldwide domination.

Right? So there are two ways. Number one, it's remarkable, and all that word means is your life will get better emotionally if you tell your friends that. I was just reading the article about by the guy who was involved in the Segway book. Now, remember, before the segue came out, it was on the COVID of Time magazine. It was being buzzed about on television. All these people were talking about it, even though the product itself didn't exist. People talked about it because their status would go up if they could say to a friend, they had a theory. So that's one way. And then the other way is your life will actually get better if your friends use it too. Which is why people hear about Twitter, not because they have ad campaigns, but because you want them to follow you on Twitter. So Jack Dorsey isn't calling people up, telling them to do that. You're busy Telling people your handle so that they will follow you. And so if we look at a breakthrough product like Canva, the successes and the failures are both about those two things. Does Canva work better if the people I work with also use it? And certain products, that's certainly true. Like Clubhouse, which I think is a vapid waste of time. But you can't use it by yourself because otherwise you're in the shower alone. Right. And the more the network effect becomes built in to products and services, the more products and services grow really fast or fail because it either catches on or it doesn't. The.

Now, you know I work for Canva, right? So I'm confused.

Of course I know that.

Okay, okay. But I would love to hear your opinion of why Canva took off.

It starts with a G and ends with a K. Like, there's no Guy Kawasaki. There's no Canva, as far as I'm concerned.

Why do you think, like, seriously, why.

The hardest working man in show business that before it caught on, it needed to catch on. And the way that happens is someone who cares deeply, shows up to small communities and introduces something to them that isn't spam that they want to hear about, then what happens? For example, in my case, Taylor, the woman used to work for me, says, here's the thing I just did. Oh, it's in Canva now I have no choice. But I have to use Canva because it's not in a. On a platform I'm using. She sharing it to me, so it works better if I use it too. And that's the hump to get over is how do you make it so that her life gets better if she takes a risk in terms of her status and authority? By demanding that her boss start using a piece of software he doesn't want to use to see the work that she's doing. And so how did Slack do it? Slack did it really beautifully. Only 500 people needed to use Slack who had the right job titles. Who could say to seven other engineers around them were using Slack, they didn't get the IT department's approval, they didn't get the CEO's approval. Seven of them started using it. Well, once seven people are in a conversation, the eighth person sort of got to go along.

Truly the network effect. So that still doesn't explain why you think I'm such a big cause of canvas success.

Because you don't have to do it. You never once have said, I'm just doing my job. Right. You show up with authority and status to Say, I could have picked anything. And I picked this. So this morning I was making a podcast about bad CEOs, so I did a search on Steve Ballmer and found him talking to you on YouTube. Just. He almost hit you over the head with a. With a MacBook. I don't know if you remember that.

That's true.

And so like, you've been there and if you represented a piece of junk, you'd blow it because then the next time we wouldn't look right. The boy who cried wolf and the villagers didn't come. And so part of the problem with this influencer marketing thing is if you're paying people to hype your product, we'll be able to tell. And those people won't be able to hype a product the second time. And it's not sufficient fuel to get a network effect going.

Since you brought up the I word, do you think that influencers really influence people?

Not the way some influencers think. Some influencers would like to think that if they just got a better hat and did some fancy SEO, they'd have more followers so they could charge more money to hype the next brand of pajamas or whatever. And the Kardashians certainly figured out how to do that. But it's not clear. We need another Kardashian. And I'm not sure it's a useful way for somebody to spend time because they tend to try to reach everybody back to the smallest viable audience. So there's I. I've been building canoes from scratch using hand tools.

Canoes?

Canoes. Canoes.

Like paddling canoes?

Yeah.

Do you know who John McPhee is?

The guy who. Oh, the writer. Yeah, yeah, of course.

Do you know his book? Yeah, he wrote a book about birch canoes.

Yeah.

Oh, that's a great book.

I will share video with you. I've been paddling on the Hudson river almost every morning. I've taught thousands of people how to paddle an old fashioned canoe up in Canada. Anyway, neither here nor there. There are people, if you look on YouTube, not hard to find, who have a hundred thousand followers who do videos to teach you how to do a thing. Make a dovetail. If one of those people says this little tool makes making a dovetail easier, going to buy the dovetail machine. And so are 4,000 other people. That sort of influencer can change the way a product shows up in the market. Where we people get into trouble is in an area like cosmetics or sports nutrition where they're hard to tell apart. No one's really an expert. And everyone's going for this sort of messy middle. You can't. You don't own an asset. There's. Because your trust runs out really fast. And certain people have made it work for a long time. Martha Stewart or Oprah. But it's not as juicy a category as some people think.

So you don't think that Matthew McConaughey really drives a Lincoln? Like, if we went to his house and say, matthew, let's go out for a drive. Let's go. Let's go to in and out. We're not going to jump in his Lincoln.

Maybe, maybe. I mean, I don't. I. When I would. You did a thing about Audi once, I think, and I was trying to guess if you really had an Audi or not. I couldn't.

Well, I was a Mercedes Benz brand ambassador for Mercedes. But that's. That is some testimony. But honestly, when you sign up to be a Mercedes Benz brand ambassador, you cannot use anybody else's card.

So the Mercedes CMO was quoted as saying, it takes four years for me to get somebody to buy a Mercedes. And he had no idea which brick in the wall got somebody to say, yes, it was me. So it was. Could have been you. But my point is, Mercedes probably buys Facebook ads, but a Facebook ad never got anybody to buy a Mercedes. What it might do is be that last knock on the door to get somebody who's in it because there was enough of a cultural environment. This is back to brand advertising. Right. Paying you to be a Mercedes brand ambassador. It doesn't make sense for them to also sponsor this podcast and have you say mercedes.com guy because the number of people who will be driving a car here, you say that URL. Pull over, write down the URL, and then remember to type in the URL tomorrow is zero. And so what they're doing is they're measuring something that's not worth measuring. And that's the peril of when amateurs do direct marketing. When amateurs do direct marketing, they measure the wrong stuff. So as long as I'm ranting, Lester Wonderman invented the term direct marketing, and he was on the board of my Internet company, Yo Yodine. We invented online direct mail. And Lester also invented the Columbia Record Club and part of the American Express card. He was way back there. Columbia Record Club had this problem. They would run these ads in the Sunday magazine, in the Parade magazine, and it said, pick any 12 records. You can have them all for a penny. You remember these, right? Yep. And when you mailed in the coupon, they could tell which magazine the coupon had been in. So they would run that ad in that magazine again. Well, Lester got the idea to put the ads on television with Dick Clark and some wise guy at Columbia said, we can't do that because we can't put a coupon on television. And so Lester came up with this great idea. And the idea was Dick said, on Sunday, check your newspaper because there'll be a little gold box on the coupon. It doesn't say what the box is for. If you Write in a 13th code there, you can get another record for free. So all they had to do was see if they were getting people to write in the gold code. And if they were, it made sense to be on television. But stuff like that is really hard to find. Up next on Remarkable People. Mediocre stuff is really hard to charge a premium for. Make something that the right people don't think is mediocre. Make something that comes with a story or, or a community or a network effect or a conversation that I am willing to wait in line to get.

The sponsor for the Remarkable People podcast has been the Remarkable Tablet company. This is the final episode that it's sponsoring. My theory is that the product is so successful it doesn't need the exposure anymore. We are parting as great friends and we remain big fans of the tablet. I use one during interviews and for design projects around my house, such as a surfboard shed, recording studio and custom made tables and beds. Here is Mat Herting Solberg. He is the chief design officer of the Remarkable Tablet company. He's going to explain the genesis of the company.

The actual genesis of Remarkable was Magnus Wamberg, our founder. He started finding the early, early signs of what he wanted to do while in university in Trondheim, seeing as the way he was working when studying was all based on paper. So you had this desk at university where you had all your printouts, you had your books, you had your notes, you had all of that. That was his way of working. That was the founding idea. The fact that paper is not necessarily only the paper itself, but it's a method of thinking. So he saw that there was a possibility of doing a respectful take on how to combine paper with digital technology. We saw that there were some products that were testing it, but they didn't do it properly. I was not respectful of paper, seeing the early E Ink products, then having paper displays, but not really nailing the written experience. He spent three years basically sitting now in firstly his basement, then sitting in his apartment for three years, kind of slowly moving towards finding an early proof of concept.

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You'Re listening to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki.

We talked about the four P's and Kotler. How about the product life cycle pioneers, early adopters, middle of the road, you know all that. Is that still a good theory?

There's no more important theory that I can think of that folks who need to understand it need to understand. Politicians, people at the Centers for Disease Control, folks who are trying to get us to pay attention to climate change, all of it. It's missing from their vocabulary because they think, like most marketers, that everyone's as interested as they are and that people are making rational decisions based on rational inputs. And that's not true. So you got the early adopters, the geeks and the nerds. They're the ones who have a Newton, right? They're the ones who bought something the first day it came out.

Nobody, nobody listens to this podcast knows what the hell is he talking about.

Well, they should look it up because it's worth it.

Yeah, right after they bought a Palm.

Yeah, and then there's a chasm. And Jeff Moore has written about this brilliantly. The chasm is the hole that so many products fall into before they are adopted by the masses. The masses don't want it because it's new. The masses want it because it works. And then there's a last group and they go last. They don't want it because it works. They want it because everyone else has it. And they're going to be in trouble if they don't get it. They're the ones who have a 12 flashing on their VCR because they just do not want to shift what they believe in.

What's a vcr?

Exactly. So if we think about the politician who stands up and has a lot of people at their rallies at the beginning and then can't figure out why they're polling so poorly, it's because the people who come at the beginning, they're nerds. They're into politics. They understand all the insides and the outsides, but they're not telling their friends. And their friends aren't showing up because it doesn't feel normal and safe. And if we look at the adoption of vaccination or if we look at when people start paying attention to health concerns or how people quit smoking, it's always the same thing. The geeks and the nerds go first. Then there's a chasm. It's takes a lot of effort to get across it to the other side. Right. And then eventually maybe you clean up the last few folks. And if we can go back to Apple again. The second super bowl commercial was a disaster because the Lemmings ad made fun of the people in the middle of the market. It should have been the opposite of that. And so it cost Apple at least two years of adoption because Apple doubled down on saying this is just for cool people, for early adopters, for people who get the joke. And if we look at the iPhone, I think Tim has eviscerated innovation at Apple. But he's made more money. How come? Because he has the patience to ride the iPhone all the way to grandma's. Right. Grandmas are the ones who are buying it now because it's not only safe, but. But everyone else has one too.

Why does that mean he eviscerated innovation? Because he's not making something that obsoletes the iPhone.

Correct. They're not. Apple hasn't made a product for me in a really long time. Something that early adopters will wait in line for because it changes the game. And it hasn't been that. There haven't been technical innovations everywhere else in the world. It's just that if you are making a luxury brand company that sells a high margin product with a long life cycle of subscription based revenue, the single best way to increase shareholder value is to stick with it. And to stick with it. It worked for Hermes and Louis Vuitton for 150 years. Right? That Hermes doesn't announce that there's a new technology that's going to make handbags obsolete. They just sell a Birkin bag for $30,000. And Apple is the most profitable luxury brand in the history of the world. And they stopped being a daring innovator because it wasn't in the shareholders interest.

Or because Steve died, basically. So.

Well, but lots of people know how to make innovations. But if you are undermined in your ability to ship them out the door, then the public never finds out about them.

So while we're on the Apple topic, maybe you can explain this to people, which is. By any chance, did you buy any Apple tags?

No, sir. I'm a tile guy.

Okay, this may help you explain this even better. So I have tiles and I have Apple tags. Now, what do you think went on in the meeting where Phil Schiller or Tim Cook or somebody said, we are not going to put a hole. We're going to make people buy a $29 piece of leather to put it on their keychain? They obviously looked at every tile. Every tile has a keychain hole. So do you think it's just corporate greed? Let's screw these people. Let's get 29 bucks out of them. By what standard of intelligence would someone say, we cannot put a keychain hole in an Apple tag?

So there are two problems with superhero comics. The second problem is the hostage problem, which they always skip over. Like, the easiest way to win over Superman is just abduct Jimmy Olsen, and then the whole thing falls apart. But the first problem is when you are immortal and cannot be defeated, your life gets really weird and I would imagine leads to a bunch of existential crises. When they're sitting there looking at these things, they're not saying, oh, tile will beat us on functionality. They're saying, what's the lifetime value, the net present value of us using this square foot of shelf space and some meeting time to bring this to market. Should we do this or should we do that? My hunch is, is that someone two levels down from Phil has a spreadsheet and was able to show that the net present value of leaving out that hole was probably $1 billion. And they're like, yeah, so it's going to be a hassle, but it's okay. It's worth a billion dollars now. I mean, they make a lot of choices that true blue people like you and I are disappointed by, because they're not doing it for us. We are not the customer. The customer is the stock market market.

If I were Apple, I would invest in dongle companies, because who has a Mac who doesn't have a Dongle. It's just I think they secretly own anchor must be I have a 14.

Port one on this side, a 5 port one on this side. It's because we're not the customer. They need people to see high resolution squad cast stream yard examples of what people who have tech chops are doing. But those people are buying a closed end system. If you've ever been on a zoom call with some 75 year olds who are holding iPads, which I have, it's not a pleasant experience because the guest of honor is broadcasting her lap as she drops the thing and it's not organized for functionality, it's organized to be a luxury good. And it took an understanding of human behavior to realize people are way more likely to play Scrabble on their iPad than they are to devise the next breakthrough technology because it's not what it's for.

So would you make the statement that you and I and people like us are no longer the smallest viable market for Apple? We're not viable anymore for sure.

There's no question about it. These are not stupid people. They are making rational decisions. And what they said is locking in to the luxury standard for phones and computers is a 10, 20 year run. And one of the things that would distract us is figuring out how to entertain Guy and Seth, like putting in.

A SD card reader and putting in more than two USB C ports. That's too much to ask.

Yeah it is.

And at some point does it catch up with them? Maybe it's after we're dead, but at some point does the Marques Brownlee no longer say buy a MacBook Air because there's only two frickin ports and you really need 12?

I think that there's two competing things going on in the world. The first one, which Google is betting on is that Internet democratization and access trumps hardware. And that's the idea of Android and that's the idea of the browser that if you control that it doesn't matter which device you're using to get access to it. There are more Android phones than iPhones. But the other thing that's been going on is the combination of bigger division in wealth and access to tech, together with a higher resolution of execution in video and sound, both of which play to Apple strength. I think if those two things hadn't happened then Google would have won the hardware war. But because those two things persist and luxury goods are still a signifier, they've got this lock in. But just a simple example, there's very little network effect Going on to keep someone on the Mac. The way it was so huge with when you were trying to get people to switch away from the PC. I can't switch cause all my colleagues have software that's non compatible. That's why the Microsoft deal was so important back when Apple was in so much trouble. But now I'm exchanging stuff every day. The people who are listening to this or watching this, they don't have the same computer you and I have that the exchange. Apple has not done so many things that they could do that would make it so that if I'm talking to someone and I have an iPhone and they don't, it shouldn't work as well as it does. It should work better within the circles. But they didn't embrace any of those opportunities to make the network effect stronger around their hardware. I think that when they decline, and they inevitably will, that will be the reason. They could have had another decade of hegemony if they had built in the network effect and they didn't. Whereas for example, Facebook, you can't do Facebook without Facebook. Right. And so if Facebook wires together 3 billion people, none of whom can leave, they have a totally different amount of market power than a company that replaces all its hardware every three years.

The vast majority of companies and people have a so so product. So then is the solution to fix the product or find a segment that doesn't care if you have a so so product?

I think we got to look at what the word so so means. So if you love wine, you could say cupcake is terrible. It's swill. But it's one of the most popular wines in the United States because the people who drink it don't think it's so so the people who drink it think it's fantastic. If you are a runner, you don't want to wear Uggs. Uggs will hurt your feet. But some people think Uggs are fantastic. So I guess what I would say is, number one, mediocre stuff is really hard to charge a premium for. Number two, make something that the right people don't think is mediocre. Make something that comes with a story or a community or a network effect or a conversation that I'm willing to wait in line to get. So if we think about Warby Parker versus Luxottica. So Luxottica has made billions of dollars in Milano selling almost every famous brand of glasses in the marketplace. They mark them up to 500, 600 bucks. The guys at Warby Parker say we're going to make glasses for a Different group of people sell them in a different way. Are they so. So glasses? Well, it depends. If you really care about cutting edge design and innovation in eyeglass design, they're not as good as what you could get from the Prada line. But that's not who it's for. The people who are waiting in line in front of a Warby Parker know exactly what they're waiting in line for. And they don't want to buy the Prada glasses, they want to buy these glasses. And that's what Neil and his team showed up to do.

It seems to me that you don't really use social media. So why is that? Because of all people, I thought, you know, you're about building community and all that stuff. So, like, why?

Well, I think there are two useful lessons here. The first one is if you're not paying and you're using social media, you're not the customer, you're the product that they are packaging up your emotions and building a habit so that they can make money from someone else by selling you. Right. Number two is all of us only get a certain number of cycles per day. And what I wrote about in the dip is being really good at something is usually underrated. So when Twitter came out, I was paying attention to it long before it got popular. Same with Facebook. And I said I could go do those things, but if I did those things, I would be less good at blogging. And do I want to be pretty good at three things or really good at one thing? And so my philosophy has been, these are great platforms for people to talk to each other, to circles of people, but they're not good broadcast media because as Facebook taught us, as soon as you trusted Facebook, they started throttling who you could reach without paying. And I said, so what I'm going to try to do is create content that people will choose to talk about on those platforms because they want to talk about it. So do I use Twitter and Facebook? No. But do people talk about my work there? Yes. And if you think about a company that makes a mediocre product like Oreos, Oreo has who knows how many people full time tweeting for them. Wendy's tweeting for them, and that amuses the digirati, but I'm not sure it sells hamburgers and cookies. I think they are way more likely to sell hamburgers and cookies if they made hamburgers and cookies that people wanted to talk about. The way you talk about in and out, because in and out stands for something for you.

Okay, but One of your chief tenets is building community. So if you're not using social media, how do you build community?

There is a community of people who, for example, care a lot about Labrador retrievers, but the person who bred and named the laboratory retriever has been dead for 150 years. So you don't have to be there for there to be a community. And what I try to do when I write a book or a blog post or. Or create a course, is to say, the people who will benefit from this, who want to come together with each other, will they be glad I did this? Did I give them something to talk about? But what I don't do is say, and I'll be there because I don't want to be the souvenir of the community. I want the community itself to support the ideas. I'm just setting the table and opening the door.

So you literally don't try to support and grow your community other than the fact that you write good stuff.

That's part of the discipline. It makes me really uncomfortable to be the prize or to show up in real time. And because I don't, I'm not a guru. I just make all this stuff up.

But.

But what I learned. What I learned from Alan and Bill at Fast Company. Alan's now the mayor of Santa Fe, and people in Santa Fe will be there after. He's the mayor, and he was the mayor of Fast Company. But the people who believe in the Fast Company ethos are still there long after he's gone. And the goal for me has never been to be recognized or to have people want me to whisper some magic incantation to them. Not interested. I am super lucky that there are people who have given me permission to whisper to them. But then they go talk to each other, and I'm not part of it, which is great.

So are you saying you're kind of the antithesis of Gary Vee?

Well, Gary's a friend, but Gary and I have approached things very differently, and I'm not sure I'm the antithesis. There are other people who have mosh pits who jump into the mosh pit, and people got to touch them. And I really don't want to be that person.

Why?

It's just not what I'm comfortable with. And I also strategically don't think it scales very well. It's good for your ego, but it's not good for making a change in the world.

Am I doing all this stuff wrong, then? Hardly one could say I'm in the mosh pit. Let's suppose that you're advising a young CEO and she asks you, how do I introduce my product, Seth? And let's for the moment postulate that it's good. Now what?

So I'd say, are there 10 people who trust you enough to just because you asked them to see the product the way you want it, to be seen to use it, really and truly? And the answer to that, for every human I've ever met, is yes. There are 10 people who will read your novel. There are 10 people who will try your software. Okay, after they use it, will they be able to go to bed without insisting that one of their friends use it too? Because if your r naught is greater than one, it means that within a short period of time, everyone in the addressable audience will have heard about it and tried it. It's probably not going to be greater than one. That's almost impossible. But it's entirely possible for it to be more than 0.5. It's entirely possible that on average, when 10 people engage in what you do, five of them insist that someone they work with or who's their friend try it. Well, then you're on your way because 10 gets you 15, 15 gets you 17, and the people you got from the beginning come back and tell some more friends, etc. If that's not going to happen, then maybe you made a product for the wrong audience. Or maybe you made a product with an insufficient level of remarkability or network effect. So when I wrote a book called Purple Cow, I had been kicked out of the book publishing industry. Industry. My book before that had failed. It came out right after 9, 11. It didn't sell. I had no publisher and I published it myself. And what the book was about was making remarkable products. And I had a column in Fast Company. And at the end of the column I said, if you want a free copy of my new book, send me five bucks for postage and handling and I'll send you one. Well, five bucks is how much it cost me to print it and mail it. So I broke even. But I only made 10,000 of them. 5,000 people mailed me $5. That's not a big number. And the book came in a milk carton. And it's not easy to put. Not easy to put a book in a milk carton, I'll tell you. But when people got it, they put the milk carton on their desk. But it wasn't a gimmick, it was a flag. It was like the pirate flag that flew, flew in front of The Mac building. Because if you wanted the people you worked with to get the joke to let you make remarkable products, you needed a way to talk about it. And I gave you a totem. Here it is. I gave you a phrase. Tell the story of the purple cow. It won't be your fault if they say no. And if they say yes, you can have all the credit. And those 5,000 copies, there was a little note. It said, if you want a 12 pack, send me 60 bucks. And I sold the next 5,000 three days later in 12 packs. But you get a 12 pack. What are you going to do with it? You already read one, so you give it to 12 other people. And that saved my career as a writer. And it also taught me a lot, because I didn't hype that book. I didn't promote that book. I wasn't even a book publisher. I only had 10,000 copies. I broke even on the whole project. But now there were 10,000 copies in the world that were being handed out, talked about in meetings. Not because people liked me, not because I was on the Internet. There almost was no Internet. It's because their life got better if their boss heard the story. And the very same thing happened with what I think is your best book. Because people bought the book about software evangelism, because they wanted their boss to let them go do that job. And so they said, here, read this, it works. And so they. You weren't selling the book. You weren't hyping the book. They were. And that's how you change the world. That's the way the world has always changed. Not from TV ads, right? Tesla doesn't have any TV ads. How is it that all these people have a Tesla? So there you go. I'm ranting. I'm sorry, you're.

I like when you're at. So my. I cannot pass this opportunity up. So I'll tell you that this podcast, Remarkable People, where I have people like you and Jane Goodall and Was and Wolfram and Angela Duckworth. I think, as I look back, it's the best work I've done in my career. But I will tell you, I also think it's the least appreciated of my work in my career. So what am I doing wrong? Did I not find my smallest viable market? Did I not find 10 people? I think I tell people that my podcast is NPR without the pledge drive. That's my positioning statement. And I put my guest list up against anybody. I'll put my sound design up against anybody. So give me some tough love. Seth, what am I doing wrong?

Here's the most important thing. It's. What day is today? Monday. It's Monday. You have until Wednesday at noon to send $49 and we'll send you the tote back. Send, send Guy. $49 and we'll send. No, that's not going to work. Okay, next best thing. There is a confusion, and it is a confusion that is pushed forward by the equity industrial complex. It is reinforced by the education industrial complex and pushed onto all of us from mass media. And the problem is this. Somewhere along the way, someone said popular and good are related. They're not Some things like Hamilton, popular and good. However, almost no one's ever seen Hamilton. So not that popular. On the other hand, if you really want lots and lots and lots of people to talk about you, like, if you want to have a podcast like Joe Rogan's, you know how to act like Joe Rogan. I hope you don't.

It's not in me, but.

Right. And you wouldn't be proud of it, but you would have more listeners. So is that the goal? So what I'm being really clear about when I talk about marketing is marketing is about making a change in the world. It's on you to decide if you're proud of that change. And I think that when we hear CEOs say, well, I just made the market what it wants, that's the worst form of abdication. How dare you use the leverage. You've got the tools, you've got the time. You've got to pander to people who don't know better. And so can I give you some tips to get more listeners for your podcast? But that's not your question. Your question is why is Joe Rogan have a hundred times more listeners than I do, and it's because your podcast is better. Okay, I. You know, my podcast has fewer listeners than yours. I've made 200 episodes, I've had zero guests, and I am really proud of it. Some of the best work I've ever done, but I don't beat myself up once. I don't look at the stats. I don't know how many people listen. I don't sell any ads because I'm just making it because I want to. And if people appreciate it, I'm proud to share it with them. And you and I are super fortunate, privileged, lucky, benefit of the doubt, beneficiaries, and to do work that we're proud of without someone telling us we can't. I'm giving you big points.

For that, I think that my podcast will be most fully appreciated after I die. But anyway, so, so give me, give me these tips.

Okay, so the biggest tip is this. Podcasting is generally done with headphones on. Podcasts are generally awkward to talk about unless something really odd is going on, like looking for Richard Simmons or Mystery show episode three. That when someone goes way outside the genre or does something where we can't discharge our discomfort unless we talk about it or raise our status because we were first, we generally don't talk about it. And the second thing is podcasts sometimes make us feel more connected, but often make us more secure in our aloneness because somebody is piping in right into our ears and making us feel a little bit less alone. So the podcasts that can get to the next level have figured out how to be the topic of conversation. So Radiolab became Radiolab because I And you would say to people, did you hear that one about this? Because we needed to say it. We needed to have a conversation because tension was created and we could relieve the tension by talking to someone else about it. Roman Mars has even better sound design than you or I. 99% invisible isn't successful because of his sound design. It's successful because talking about kidney shaped pools made me feel smart and Roman gave me the ability to do that. Right. And so the next step, now that you've earned the attention of a bunch of people, is to say, how do we create a community out of this? How do we make it so your life would get better if you tweeted about something we just did on this podcast? I was talking to Paula Poundstone about her podcast. A lot of people have me on their podcast to find out how to get more people to listen to this.

That's not why, but.

And so that's an IQ test.

I passed the IQ test.

Yeah, you're up there. And I said, so, Paula, what would it mean for somebody to be able to have a private circle live podcast with them and 50 of their best friends and you? Right, because Paula likes to be in the center of a community she's building and she can't go to stand up clubs as often as she used to. So how do you build that in to the followership that the best way to be a good fan of guys is, is to tweet about it and talk about it and organize things. And if you find 50 people who you want to invite to a session with Guy to talk about what you're working on, we can make that happen. If you're in this status filled inner. So now I've got a selfish reason to build a circle of people. Or let's say you decided to say most of my listeners are entrepreneurs. Maybe not Silicon Valley, but people who want to build that. I'm going to do a five part series, the most frequently asked questions and I'm going to get the experts to answer them. But I'm only going to answer your question if you get upvoted with your question. So here's the place online where you can get upvoted and here's how you can build the following. Getting upvoted and suddenly it becomes a game. And suddenly I have an incentive to be part of Guy's community and to show that I can bring the heat. Because I really want Guy to ask Jeffrey Moore about why my product can't cross the chasm. I'm just making this up as we talk.

You're making this up in real time is better than, you know, McKinsey's two year project. To me, just thinking about what we've discussed so far, I think the hook for this podcast is Seth is going to explain why you should look for the smallest viable market, not the biggest one. Because that's very, very contrarian to anything I've ever heard. Go pitch a VC and say, let me tell you about my smallest viable market, Mr. VC.

Well, let's do the VC thing. Because Fred Wilson and Jerry Colonna, when they started their partnership, I was their first investment and I was a voluntary partner at Flatiron. I came up with ideas during the glory days. If you look at the best investments, they made things like Delicious that sold four weeks after they invested in it, or things like Wattpad where they made 40 times or whatever. It was their money. Almost every single time that a VC hits a home run. It's a product that, particularly at the beginning, was perfect for a very, very small number of people. Airbnb, Uber, these are ideal for 100,000 people, a quarter of a million people, not everyone. And that's why at the beginning they got customer traction. And the smart VCs don't talk about this a lot because it's a code. But that's what they're really looking for. They're saying, does this person have raving fans who fit in a barrel? Because if I put a bunch of fish in a barrel, I can make the water that just those fish want and then eventually it'll spread. But first I need to create enormous amounts of customer traction to get to where it works. When VC fails, it's because they put up 50 million bucks and try to go straight to toys.com that just doesn't work.

I want to talk about your. Your work habits. How do you write a book?

Against my better judgment, it depends. So I wrote 120 books. I created 120 books. And I was a book packager. A book a month for 10 years. So that was my job. So every time I looked around, I said, is there a book in this? So you know emojis? Well, someone had to write the smiley dictionary, and it was me. So before anybody knew what an emoji was, I did that book. I came up with the idea on Monday. I sold it on Tuesday. I finished the book on Friday. That was my job. But once I became an author author, I say, is there something in the world that I am seeing that other people don't see, and if they saw it, would it make their life better? That's the calculus. And then I say, is it possible for me to write a blog post about this? Because if I could, then I don't have to write a book. That's the goal. Can I just get the idea in the world for free? And then I don't have to write a book. But every once in a while, an idea comes along where I can't let go of it. And then I say, what sort of package does this book have to go in to make its impact? I did this book called what to Do when it's yous Turn. And I said, I'm gonna have to make this beautiful. And so I taught myself indesign. I designed the whole book as I was writing it. I created the whole thing to layout, stage. And that meant every day for two hours, I was looking for the right pictures, writing around the pictures, or doing the writing and looking for the pictures and laying the thing out. Whereas a book like the Diplomat. It occurred to me that a lot of people didn't understand what it meant to quit. And no one had ever written a book about quitting. And I said, I can write a blog post about this, but it won't work because the people go, yeah, yeah, yeah. I need it to be something they could invest in. And once my editor, Nikki Papadopoulos, and publisher Adrian Zakheim said, oh, yeah, we'll do that, I just sat down and I wrote it, and it was done in three weeks. Other books take a year of research and blah, blah. So it's always different. All I know is it's harder than ever to write a book because people have Decided it's harder than ever to read a book, and so I am finding substitutes. A 25 minute podcast has replaced a book idea for me at least 15 times.

Wow.

Because I'm just trying to. I'm just trying to make a point. I'm not trying to make a living.

What was the thinking behind the 50 pound book?

Book? You're one of the only people who has one.

Oh, really?

Yes. There aren't. It was never widely sold. When I did my first Kickstarter, my idea was explore Kickstarter, experiment with it, and push Barnes and Noble to pay attention to my book that I wanted to write. Because at the time, Barnes and Noble was. Didn't like our category, and. And it was hard to persuade them to promote something. So the Kickstarter went great, but I needed a prize for the highest level. So at the last minute, I made up this idea, which is the best of my blog. An oversized book of 500,000 words. Best of my blog. Well, the Kickstarter did great, and the highest level really did great. So now Alex Peck, who used to be my design guy, and I had four weeks to make the book. And because it had to get printed in China, because it's too big, no printer in the entire United States was capable of printing a book that big. And I asked my friend Bernard Jiwa, who I had never met, who lived in Australia, I said, here's a million words from my blog. Please send me back 450,000. Delete the ones that don't belong. You have two weeks. And then Peck and I designed the book, shipped it to China, and I loved it. I loved the way it came out. And then a bunch of years went by, and I realized I needed to make volume two, so I made volume two. I think that's the one I sent you. Maybe I sent you volume one. Does yours have all the photos in it? Yeah, and it's just beautiful. But it. I only made 3,000 of them, and I only send it to people I love. So you have one.

Oh, well, thank you. Wow. It is as far from digital reading as you could possibly be. You should have printed it on papyrus. You're gonna go. Go all the way, Seth. Oh, my God. One last question. The last question is, how do you, Seth, do your best and deepest thinking?

Three places in my canoe on the Hudson river at dawn. Because I'm working very hard not to think. And the things that slip through are probably slipping through for a reason. Two, when I see something I don't understand and I need to explain It. I need to explain. Why is that popular? Why did someone build that? Why did that person get any votes at all? And 3.

Could you answer that?

I can. That's why I wrote. This is marketing. If you read the chapters and this is marking about status roles and affiliation, you will see some people want to be part of something and some people simply want to defeat those they think of as their enemies. And professional wrestling is all about status roles. And once you look at the world through status rules, a whole bunch of things begin to make sense. And then the third is if I am in quiet conversation with someone I care deeply about and I can find that space around us, between us and build a bridge that's rare and precious. And I think so much of the trauma for so many of us over the last year and a half has been finding those bridges and finding that chance to build a circle around us. Not to make a profit, but to make a difference.

I covered everything I want to cover.

We should do this every 30 or 40 years, I think so.

You got any closing remarks you want to make?

I just. Do you remember that magazine that David Bunnell did, Mac World? No, it was. It was a different one. It was an industry one. I can't remember what it was called. There was a two page spread in it in 2000 in which he did a not very good illustration of 100 people who were making a difference on the Internet. And most of them were people who were sort of famous. But your picture was on it and so was mine. And I can't believe how lucky I am. I can't believe how much privilege I've been given, most of which I don't deserve. And what an obligation that comes with. And when your note came to me, I just felt like it was a great parenthesis because it's been a long, strange trip and I never take it for granted.

I hope you enjoyed this interview with Seth. He is the man when it comes to digital marketing. There's lots in this interview that you'll be able to apply to your career and to your business. My heartfelt thanks to Peg Fitzpatrick and Jeff C. I would never have made 100 episodes without them. And I couldn't do another 100 episodes without them either. My thanks to the young guns of remarkable people, Alexis Nishimura, Luis Magana and Madison Nismer. Peg, Jeff, Alexis, Luis and Madison. You're all remarkable people. And finally, here is Matt Herding Solberg of the Remarkable Tablet Company explaining the future of the Remarkable Tablet without getting yourself fired. Can you give us a few hints about what the remarkable 3, 4, 5 and on will be.

I would quickly be in risk of getting myself fired if I go too deeply into that. But I think on a more general note, looking at the remarkable vision, we say better paper, better thinking. We have been focusing intensely on better paper. Call that the first part of our vision. Better thinking is something that we've taken quite strong ownership of compared to other companies. We take what I would say are quite active choices on behalf of our users in saying that this is the product. You're not going to do this or that on our product. So looking ahead, I think it's super interesting to dig even deeper into what better thinking actually might entail.

Okay, that's it. This is the end of episode 100 of the remarkable People podcast. Thank you for being with us. Until next time, that is the 101st episode. Be safe and be healthy. Mahalo and aloha. This is remarkable people.