Strategy of Disintermediation

thing I want to talk about is disintermediation, which is a high syllable count word that basically means I'm going to insert myself as a brand in between another business and their customers. So let's use an example. First example that comes to mind is an old famous line that Steve Jobs said, which is, I'm going to offer Windows users a glass of ice water and help, which was his way of describing iTunes, the iTunes experience on a Windows machine, which would attract traffic for him from the Windows operating system and drive it to the Apple ecosystem. And so he put, and the company Apple put iTunes on Windows machines. In order to sell more iPods and iTunes music. And so it was a really sharp wedge into that market, and it's still playing out to this day with Apple Music on the iPhone. So what's another example? Well, uh, basically if you can think of anything where a brand puts themselves in front of another brand— another way to think about this is aggregation. So Netflix, right? Netflix is a major entertainment distributor. They sell movies for a subscription price. When they first started, they weren't making original content. They were just purchasing the rights to other movies and putting it on their service. So in the beginning, they just sold, you know, a subscription to rent a DVD for a short period of time. And that's why they called it Netflix. Um, yeah, so it's super interesting, right? So you could potentially do the same thing for your customers, your brand. And, um, it's all about this principle that we've developed at everettadvisors.com, which is very simply to keep it open and curate for quality. So what does that mean? Keeping it open is essentially not gating access to content. So I'm not going to charge you upfront to get access. I'm going to leave it open, and thereby I leave it open to the entire internet. So there's— we're encroaching on 8 billion people on the planet. About 5 billion of those people are on the internet, and about 2 billion, 3 billion are on Facebook. Facebook properties. So the real question is, why would you artificially destroy conversion rates and push away an audience just because they can't pay? Over time, if you keep creating value at any price point or any product or any service, over time those people will convert into subscribers. Sure. Some won't, but if you keep that base number super large, then really what you need to do is you need to curate for quality, right? So keep it open is the first half of that. Curate for quality is the second half of that. So what does it mean to curate for quality? Well, take an example from the talent networks. So these would be places like Toptal, like Braintrust, like Crosslake, um, 10x Management, any place where, uh, the talent, uh, can basically add their profile to, um, a marketplace and then have other people come in and take a look at it. So Toptal, their curation, they say it's like the top 3% of talent. on the internet for, let's say, software-based services. So engineers, product managers, designers, finance folks, etc. Um, you could use another example. So these subscription boxes that became popular over the last decade, essentially what they did is they said, we'll charge you X per month, say $30, and we're going to send you like a BarkBox. Or a box of beauty supplies, um, things for your dog, things for your kitchen, things for home. That turned into meal kits, right? So they essentially would curate ingredients for you to make your own meal at home, and then they would charge you for it. So that became very big. So by virtue of this curation and that sort of quality, you could assume like a music playlist would be a curation of popular music songs. Like, now we have music, right? So go to everettadvisors.com/music. You can see an example of this playing out. Um, and so it becomes super interesting, right? Because once you curate for quality, then you have, uh, like this small group of things that then create disintermediation effect for the underlying service. So the example that I created for Everett Advisors was I created music playlists on top of Apple Music. Apple Music has, gosh, I don't know, 30, 50, 100 million subscribers, right? And probably tens of millions of tracks. So I put a theme around that, either emotion, a task that you wanted to do and grabbed 10 to 30 songs, right? So by doing that, um, I then gave that to you for free, and then now I established a relationship with you in between Apple Music, in between the artists themselves. So I created a new wedge into the market where I have a relationship with you as the customer, you may already be subscribing. Once I do that, then I can start to capture your attention. I can capture your email address. I can capture your phone number, send you text messages. Now I can communicate back and forth to you. And ultimately why that's valuable is I can sell you offers, right? So I now have a relationship with you. I could advertise against you. Now, I'm not necessarily going to do those things. It's more to prove a point. But I think that is very important because what it allows you to do as a business owner is it allows you to create new opportunities, allows you to create new experiences. And I think as we move forward, these experiences become super duper valuable. So I think it was Visa or MasterCard, their CFO. If you read CFO Daily, it's a newsletter. They interview CFOs from some of the biggest brands in the world. You can get an early read on where these big brands are focused, where their attention is. And so the credit card processors, what they've realized is that consumers have sort of stopped purchasing products. So like physical objects, physical goods, and have started purchasing experiences. So you could call them services, right? Like, I'd rather go on a vacation for $1,000 than spend $1,000 on yet another phone, right? So I want that experience, that escape after years spent in lockdown. So you could use experiences as another wedge in relationship with the market. Which then of course takes us to Airbnb, which is a marketplace for homes, right? But essentially they've aggregated a bunch of people's homes, they've curated those with Airbnb Plus, I think it is, for the highest quality, you know, most expensive verified homes, and you then pay more money for that. And then of course, what else did they do? They created experiences. So you see how this kind of plays out as a single brand. You can do that as a— I mean, look, I'm doing it as a professional services agency that also builds products. So you can do it for a service, you can do it for a product, a series of products, anything where you keep the initial wedge open and then curate for quality. That, I believe, is something really cool that you can use to disintermediate existing markets and take control and start to capture market share. When you do that, that's how you create a growing business in a market that already exists where people are already— people and businesses are already spending money. So anyways, that's just a few thoughts. Hope you liked it. And give me a shout on Twitter, Sean M. Everett, and we'll talk to you soon. Alrighty, toodles.