Learn how to Build Magical Products

Hi friend, welcome. Where do we find you today? Hopefully the present moment. Today I want to talk to you about something I've been fascinated by my entire life, and that's products. But not just any product— magical products. But what are the properties that these types of products have to make them magical? That's what we'll discuss today. But once you make them magical, you can attract people by the billions. But first, who are we? My name's Sean. I'm a part of an organization called Everett Advisors. We build better products, brands, and systems. Give us a look. We're on the internet. Before we begin, we need to talk about a mindset. It's the way. We're not going to talk about features and doodads and doohickeys and fidgeties and spinners and all of those things. Rather, we're going to talk about something more romantic. Hopes, dreams, the human spirit, magic. And if we've done this correctly, we will approach this problem with beginner's mind, which states that we don't know anything, and so everything we learn is new in each and every moment. Over time, perhaps we earn a little experience on a few things. Today, that little bit of experience that I have is going to be focused on products. Great. So what's the environment that we find ourselves in? Because the environment shapes us and we shape our products. Life's been pretty much a roller coaster for the entire human population the last couple decades, and I doubt it's going to slow down. That's just life. But if we design our products correctly and we build them with the right approach— magic at its core— then perhaps we can get people off the roller coaster and get them into something a little more magical. What are the definitions? What are the properties? This one took 20 years. First, has to be useful. Second, must be usable. Third, must be magical. If you can capture all 3 of these together, you can create an iconic product. An example of that would be the iPhone, the largest-selling consumer product of all time, because it had one small bit of magic called personalization. Everything that comes to you on your phone is for you. TikTok copied it, With a feed, they now have a billion users scrolling through it every month. A clock coordinates a planet of populations. A wheel— turn left, turn right, go forward or back. Magic, hope, dreams, possibilities creates iconic products. Now, what's the other side of the coin that helps balance magic and bad? Well, we call these Frankenstein products, typically the result of design by committee or just feature stuffing. The examples that we show here are actually close to magical products, but they don't quite cross the threshold. They're certainly useful, they're usable, but they're kind of missing something. Great. Let's talk about the product or the properties of a good product. First one, systems. Bitcoin, I believe, is one of the best and most magical systems ever created by a human. The reason is because one or maybe a few people designed Designed a system through nothing more than an idea, published a white paper, some open source code, put it out into the world to a couple influencers, did nothing else for a decade, and it's worth as much as Apple. An industry created that's worth the same as Apple. Took Apple 46 years, took Bitcoin a little over a decade. Crazy. Let's talk about messaging. A great product can't exist on its own. You have to connect with humans, and those who still tell stories rule society. The storytellers, the story artists, the musicians, the movie makers, the filmmakers— these are the magicians of our modern age. Next up, Disney. A video clip we show here from Disney World in the land of enchantment itself. Star Wars. You come around a corner and there's Kylo Ren with his security detail. If your blood didn't start pumping, then you don't have a pulse. Let's talk about memories. That bag you see there, I purchased along with all of those pins, some limited edition, for hundreds of dollars. Never bought any of that stuff before in my life. Why? It's because objects store memories. It's important. And those memories are in the eye of the beholder, the eye of the purchaser. It's not just merch, it's memories, it's magic. Love. It's the strongest force in the universe, stronger than gravity. It can attract people across solar systems, across the entire universe. Jony Ive, arguably the best designer of our modern generation, named his company after it. Entire religions have been built around it. It's the most popular hashtag, the most used emoji. There's a reason, and love creates retention. It's a magical moment. Great. Brain grenades. My buddy Anthony Thompson coined this term, or at least coined it for me, and reminds me of Friedrich Nietzsche. So if we've done our job, we've created a spark in your mind. Maybe it doesn't explode today, but in the future it might, and new ideas can find a place to capture. One more thing before we go, and that's fun. Let's talk about that for a second. The greatest game designers of our time famously can't define the word fun, but we know it when we see it. It's possible to create it. Will Ferrell is an example. Some others on the internet do a pretty good job. Memes do as well. If you can capture it, keep it. It's pretty magical. That's a little bit more about me. You can look me up online, Sean Everett everywhere. And before we go, I want to talk about the final magical aspect, and that's decisions. They compound like interest. So the question is, are your decisions moving you closer or further away from magic? And that's it. The blank piece of paper is yours. What are you going to create? Something magical, I hope. Thanks for being a part of my life today. The end.