The Art of Evangelism

Oh, my goodness. Hi, it's Guy Kawasaki, and today I'm going to talk about the art of evangelism. And as all things Murphy's Law, I was set to use my desktop, and I tried three times, and three times the video stopped. So now you see me futzing with my phone to make this all level and stuff, and I'm trying to figure out which camera it's using. So apparently it's that one. So not the smoothest start I've ever had, but, you know, anybody can deal with live video when everything is perfect, picks a real evangelist to do it when it's not. So let's just look at the background here. That looks fairly clean. So I am in Santa Cruz, California, and the first thing I'd love to know is where are you watching from? So post the comment about where you're watching from. Also, because I was trying to use my desktop, and it. It sort of aborted three times. Why don't you post a comment to tell me that things are working okay on your end, both sound and video. Okay. So, yeah. Yes. Now I'm not Santa Cruz. Oh, you're in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Carmel, California. A lot of Californians here. Colleen is on. All right, so I. I'm going to talk to you today about the art of evangelism. This is tied into a course that I recently released at Udemy, and we're running a special. And in the comments section, you'll see a special pricing for this. So let me tell you about evangelism. I first became aware of the term in a secular sense in the Macintosh division. I was Apple's second software evangelist. So my job was to convince Macintosh developers of both hardware and software to create Macintosh products. We used fervor and zeal, but never, ever money to convince people to write software and create hardware. The word evangelism comes from Greek roots meaning bringing the good news. So what I did was I brought the good news of Macintosh to developers. And by good news, we meant that Macintosh would empower people, make them more creative, would dent the universe, and you, Steve Jobs terms, to make the world a better place. So rather than saying that we're selling a new personal computer, we were evangelizing a new personal computer because Macintosh was good news. It was good news for consumers because it would make them more creative and productive. It was good news for developers because it would enable them to create software they never could have created before because of the richness of the Macintosh roms. And it enabled developers to reach an entirely new Market back then it was only Apple II and Ms. Dos. So we thought that Macintosh, the computer would reach a different kind of person. And the more people we reached, and the more different kind of people we reached, the larger the market for developers. So that was the theory. And Mike Boich, who was the first software evangelist, what we would do is we'd grab our little Macintosh prototype and we'd hit the road and we would meet with developers, typically under a non disclosure, and we would show the Macintosh, we would talk about the technology of Macintosh, the marketing of Macintosh, and you know, people either got it or they didn't. So let me give you some quick principles about evangelism. So lots of people ask me what is like the most important point for evangelism. And I'll tell you, this is called Guy's golden touch. And Guy's golden touch is not whatever I touch turns to gold. I wish that was true. Guy's golden touch is whatever is gold guy touches. And so what I'm trying to tell you is that the key to great evangelism is that you affiliate with a great product because it is much easier to evangelize a great product than it is to evangelize crap. Trust me when I tell you this, because I've tried to do it both ways. So, you know, it's very easy to evangelize Macintosh. Right now I'm the chief evangelist of a company called Canva out of Sydney, Australia, online graphics design service. And it's very easy to evangelize Canva because it's so great. So lesson number one is if you want to be a great evangelist, find or create a great product or service. Okay? So that's the baseline. Now next thing you need to do is you need to understand that you're bringing good news. You're not simply schlepping some kind of new computer, schlepping some kind of, you know, web based design service. This is good news that you're making people more creative and more productive. You have to believe that if you don't believe that, it's going to be very hard to evangelize anything you don't believe in. So you need to believe that it's good news. The third thing I'll tell you is that you really need to have great deal of respect for your prospective customer. Which is to say you don't believe that you can bludgeon them into becoming a customer. That using promotion and advertising, you're just going to pound them into submission. Evangelism isn't like that at all so the key to evangelism is that you have respect for these people, you have this great product. And then what I would try to do is enable people to test drive your product or service. Basically you're saying to them, I think you're smart. And because I think you're smart, I'm going to enable you to try my product, try my service, and then you decide. And if you do that and you have a great product, then people embrace it and they will turn into evangelists. And that is a beautiful thing because evangelists become evangelism becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, an upward spiral. And so, you know, you have respect for them, you have this great product service, you say, test drive it, and they love it, and then they buy it, and then they tell more people to buy it and love it. And that's sort of the perfect case of evangelism. But again, you know, it starts with a great product. Next thing is that there's a principle that I call plant many seeds, which means that, you know, typically sales, which is all about your own quota and your own income, you target people. You have this, like, very intellectual basis of who exactly you should reach. And my experience with evangelism is that too much targeting is not a good thing, that you should let a hundred flowers blossom. Which means that you put your product, your service out there and you see where it takes root. And if it takes root in places you didn't anticipate, you don't freak out, you don't go crazy, you don't say, wow, you know, the wrong people are buying our product or service and they're using it in the wrong way. There is no wrong consumption of your product. So let 100 flowers blossom. If people want to buy your Macintosh not to do spreadsheet, database or word processing, but they want to buy it for desktop publishing. Hallelujah, man. Declare victory. If you are Avon and you create a product called Skin so Soft, whose obvious purpose is to make your skin soft, but then you find that moms are buying Skin so Soft in order to prevent insect bites on their children. You know, let 100 flowers blossom. Hallelujah, declare victory. You know, one of the keys to Silicon Valley success is you need to know how to declare victory. Because the way it works in Silicon Valley is we throw a lot of stuff up against the wall, some of it sticks. Then we go up to the wall and we paint the bullseye around it. So this guarantees you hit the target. So let a hundred flowers blossom, then plant many seeds. The next principle of Evangelism is you need to provide a safe first step, which is to say that you don't want to make people have a very heavy decision, a very risky decision. This is a mistake that we made with the Macintosh division. We tried to get companies to just convert all their computing to Macintosh. And that's too heavy a step. It's too big a step. And so you need to give them a small step, an easy step. So easy step would be, you know, instead of trying to convert all of your IT infrastructure to Macintosh, how about you just do your graphics with Macintosh? How about you just do your publishing with Macintosh, how about you just create PowerPoints with Macintosh and just let Macintosh get in through the side and the bottom of the company and not try to ram it down the throats from top? That truly, truly never worked. So provide a safe first step. You know, with Canva, we're not trying to tell you to like throw out Photoshop and throw out Lightroom and Illustrator. Just do the graphics that you need right away. You know, start that way. And then if you have a product like Macintosh or Canva, you'll see that, you know, know, more and more people use it, probably not your intended users, and they're going to use it in unintended ways. And again, freaking hallelujah. Declare victory. Okay, so provide a safe first step. The next thing when you try to evangelize a product or service is you basically give it your best pitch. You know, the Macintosh is easier to use. It empower a different kind of person. We're going to bring people to computers that would never brought before. Canva's pitch is, you know, that you don't need to buy an expensive product, you don't need to spend weeks learning. It will enable you to create great graphics here, test drive the product. So basically, you pitch, you shut up and you listen. And some people will say, well, the reason why I love Macintosh is because it's easy to use. Some people will say the reason we love Macintosh is because we love the graphical user interface. Some people will say we love Macintosh because it's so easy to set up. And some, for example, with developers, you know, some people said, well, we love Macintosh because we can create software we could have never created before. Some people said, yeah, we want to expand our marketing. Other people said, well, we want the financial return of another, you know, different stream. And so the key here is that people will often tell you how to evangelize them. If it's ease of use, if it's expense, if it's data Conversion, if it's alternate market, if it's to screw a competitor or whatever it is, my recommendation is you pitch, you shut up, you listen to what resonates with them, then you regurgitate it. So if a developer told us that the reason why they like Macintosh is because it had very rich roms and a great programming environment, hallelujah, from then on, we talked only about that. Because if that's what their priority is, that works for us too. So shut up, listen, regurgitate. The next thing is you should always localize your efforts when you evangelize something, that there's often a temptation to talk about the fourth paradigm of personal computing or this revolution. And I think that that often is, quite frankly, bullshit. But also, you know, people don't wake up in the morning saying, God, if I could only revolutionize computing, if I could only change the history of graphic design. I suppose some people do get up that way in the morning, but most people just, they just want to make a social media graphic. They want to make a presentation or they want to make a newsletter. And so for those people you talking about, a revolution in computing is irrelevant in a sense, or just plain stupid. So why don't you say that one person sitting at one computer without any IT support can create great graphics or can create great documents and bring it back specifically to the person about how it will make their lives better. So, you know, these are one more thing I want to tell you. The best thing in the world for evangelism is social media. Because back when I evangelized MACINTOSH in the mid-80s, you know, the tools we had were copper based foam airplane tickets and, you know, reimbursement of gasoline. And so we were extremely limited on who we could reach and how we could reach them. And today, case in point, we have thousands of people are going to watch this video. It's fast, it's free, it's ubiquitous with Facebook Live and LinkedIn and Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram, with webinars, Skype and all this kind of stuff. Man, it is a great time to be an evangelist because all these things are fast and free and ubiquitous. So social media is the best thing that ever happened to evangelists. If you're not using social media for evangelists, you suck. You're just an idiot. You're a bozo. So those are some overarching principles of evangelism. Let's see, let's see if there's any comments or questions. Again, this is based on a course that I just released at udemy we're running a special right now. I think it's about $25, where over the course of several hours, I truly get into the nuts and bolts of evangelism. So I will post the link, or probably we have post the link. The lovely Peg Fitzpatrick has taken care of that. So you can get the course and what else? That's it. So let's see. Why can Apple not innovate for the last five years? What is missing? Yeah, that is a good question. Well, I would. First of all, I would argue with. Apple has innovated some, but I feel your pain. You know, I use a Macintosh and I use iPhone, and there's stuff that I just. I just can't understand, like why did they take away MagSafe? And why is it that I buy a $4,500 MacBook Pro and there's no SD card reader and I gotta go buy all these dongles to read my camera? I mean, you know, my data card. Probably because Apple doesn't use SLRs, and so everything is on an iPhone, so they never had to stick an SD card in it. But you know what? That ain't the real world. You know, one obvious answer is that Steve Jobs is no longer with us. But one would hope that, you know, you could continue innovating. And I gotta say, I have to scratch my head. I don't understand it. The latest MacBook Pro is not that big a leap. IPhone hasn't had a big leap for a while. I have to say though, the portrait photography of iPhone is very cool. I really like that. But, you know, this is freaking 2017, and you can't charge an iPhone wirelessly yet. I had Motorola phones, you know, years ago, literally years ago that I could just stick on a charging pad. And now I use a Mophie case. So I do have wireless charging. But why I have to buy a Mophie case to wireless charge a phone is Beyond Me in 2017. So I guess the bottom line answer is I share your pain. I don't have an explanation, but I sure hope they, like, get to the next curve. Let's see here. Michael Dean, don't forget the Mac user groups. Yeah, let's talk about Mac user groups. So, you know, back in the 80s and 90s, Apple wasn't doing so well. And there was this group of people that picked up the slack, and it's the Macintosh user groups. And these people were kind of the purest form of evangelism because they weren't getting paid. They weren't hardly getting Supported by Apple. They just loved Macintosh so much that they thought it was a way to increase people's creativity and productivity that they formed these groups and they did a great job, Great job supporting Macintosh. And so, yes, yes, thank you for bringing that up. And the reason why there were Macintosh user groups is of course, because great product, duh. So great products create user groups. Think of all the Harley Davidson owners, you know, with the Hog Harley owners group phenomenon, that kind of thing. This is a beautiful thing. It's a beautiful thing. And just a second here, I think my awesome. Buddy Peg Fitzpatrick, which. I'm going to open up a window here, Peg, because using a phone to do Facebook Live is very difficult to see comments. So why don't you send the questions you want me to answer via text message? So, Benjamin, you. Do you use the information just to change your story or do you get the product guys to change the product too? So Benjamin is alluding to the fact that I'm saying you go out there, you pitch, you listen, you regurgitate. So, yeah, in a perfect world, people tell you how to change products. You go right back to the lab and it would change immediately. But we don't live in a perfect world. I've never worked for a company that changed stuff that fast. So I think a lot of it is that to start, you really have to. You really have to have a great product that has anticipated most of those questions. You know, anybody can evangelize a perfect product. Okay? So it takes someone really skillful to evangelize products with flaws. And all products have flaws. So, yeah, in a perfect world, it would be instant fix, but that's just. It's not a perfect world. And I think it's up to you to convince people why either it can be done in another way, perhaps not perfectly, but it's sufficiently. And why. Yes, there may be a shortcoming, but the strengths of the product or the service overcome that shortcoming. But yeah, you're gonna have to, like, learn to deal with it. Let's see, any other question? Question, Joey D. When is a sequel to Art of the Social Media coming out? Yeah, you reached the two perfect people. So two authors, Guy and Peg. I can let Peg answer that. But the Art of Social Media, which is a book that we wrote a few years ago, I think became the de facto standard for social media. Lots has happened in a few years. So, for example, you know, Facebook Live. So, yeah, we do need to revise that book. All it takes is an advanced. So talk to our publisher. But speaking for Myself, as opposed to Peg. I will tell you that as an author, I'm on my 14th book right now, and I have to say you kind of have a psychological break in the sense that you work so long and so hard on a book and you publish it and you just want to cast it off into infinity and beyond and know, get a trail of royalty payments. But I cannot tell you that psychologically you really want to keep revising and revising a book. You kind of just want to get on to the next book. Or at least that's my attitude. So that's a lot of what prevents me from immediately revising a book. It's just, you know, I want to get on with my life. Let's see. Thoughts on a potential Apple I car. Oh my God. I mean, imagine if Apple made a car. Oh my God. First of all, it would take a spectricity and to charge the battery. Now you can use the industry standard battery charging stations around here, but it would have a special dongle, right? So you'd have to buy a $5,000 dongle to make it hook up to the industry standard charging stations all over. Because somehow you know they're gonna, you use. They're gonna. Scratching my head. I just got a warning. They're gonna use some kind of special, you know, USB C2 connector. So listen, I'm a Mercedes Benz brand ambassador and I know how hard it is to make a great car. Well, it's one thing to take your computer to the genius and have it fixed and you know, rebooted and zap parameter ram. It's a whole other ball game boy, in the car business. Because when a car screws up, you die. Yeah, let's see. How can companies evangelize in the modern era when we hit with so much information and so much social media noise? Well, you know, again, I didn't say it was easy. It starts with a great product and it's great messaging. And I still think that yes, there's a lot of noise, but it's kind of obvious what's noise and what's signal. I don't think it's that hard. So if you complain that there's too much noise and you can't break through the noise says something about you. Not necessarily the fact that, you know, woe is me. It's so hard to break through the noise. You have to break. It's just life. Everybody has to break through the noise. A hundred years from now, people will be saying, oh yeah, it was so easy back then. But now there's so much noise. Well, you know, everybody always says that. So just man up. Let's see Amber Mack. Amber Mack says hi. The Amber Mack. Great to see you live from your favorite, from your favorite Canadian ever, Amber Mack. I love Amber Mac. So Amberman, I just got out of the water and I am cold. So I am still in my wetsuit here. So I got out of the water. I'm gonna go back in the water as soon as this finish. Julio and Chetta, your thoughts of robots with AI taking human jobs? I think, you know, robots with AI are going to take human jobs. That's gonna happen. That, that that horse is out of the barn and it's procreating. I don't think there's anything we're going to do to stop that. There are some fears of AI and all that, but you know that that would be like saying, wow, cars are going to take away jobs from horses and wagons. It's going to happen. You just got to deal with it. Let's see. Great to have this time. Jorge, what would be the first step to start with a new product? Something that's a bit disruptive or high to approach products that are more common, good to serve. The first step to start with a new product is to get it out there. This is the concept of mvp minimum viable product, or what I like to say, mvvp. So my additional two Vs are not only viable, but it's valuable, that it's important, it's worth doing and it's validating, that is it's supporting your argument, your perspective, your thesis. It's not simply viable. The phrase I use for this is don't worry, be crappy. Which is when you are innovative, you can't wait for the perfect world, for the perfect product. You gotta ship. I'm not saying ship crap. I'm just saying that sometimes you just have to ship and fix fast. I think the victory goes to the person or the company that fixes fast. Not necessarily the person. Company that ships first. Let's see. So I think we're all caught up with questions here. Again, again, this is based on a Udemy course. You see the link in the comments. Peg says that some people have already bought it right now. So thank you very much. I promise you that this is live video and I'm just giving you the very thought thin crust of what the art of evangelism is all about. And if you really want to get everything, it's in the Udemy course. What can I say? So if you want to learn how to evangelize, how to influence and persuade people. How to change people's hearts and minds and actions. The art of evangelism. Udemy. Okay, so thank you very much, and I hope you've enjoyed this. And if you're in Santa Cruz, near Pleasure Point, I will shortly be in the water. So see you in the water. Bye. Thanks.