As I am building my business, one there is one thought I keep running into time and again. It seems very natural to me and yet I rarely hear it from someone else, even from many entrepreneurs here. So I want to express it and get some outside thoughts and feedback.
The initial question is this: how tangible are the results of my business’s work in clients’ lives? Like, when and where and of what impact will it be on them? What percentage of their total lives can I strongly touch and improve?
This questions are strongly impacted by MJ’s notions of magnitude and The commandment of need. And the answers I have for each activity I do form the core of my business, my self-worth as a human being.
Yet when I see what other people are usually try to do, I do not understand it. Like, I am constantly bombarded by marketing agencies which want to charge me either $200 for a single post or $1000 for a structured online campain. But what do those people really do? They take some words, some piles of zeroes and ones which represent pictures. They twist and bend them to better represent me online and do it worse than I do cause they do not understand me or my client. Their work results in virtual numbers in Facebook statistics and that “what percentage of a client life I impacted” is depressingly low.
Same goes in my mint to those legions of app-coders and site-builders. Most HUGE tasks which can be solved with apps are already solved, 80% of results a website can achieve canbe grasped with Wix’s AI constructor. For me the results of those businesses (with some exceptions of cause) seem negligble. And the people who try to get there often look like some bottom-dwellers, fighting en-masse for scraps of food which falls down from more “real” businesses doing tangible stuff. The real impactful result is basically unattainable there.
Yet there are two things those business models bring that make them attractive. Both of them relate not to result (what I make) but to process (what I do daily).
First - they are clean. You sit with a slim laptop in a fashionable cafe. Drive an impecable car. Dress sharp and go to the gym. With very little effort, even if you are nearly broke, you can build a life visually similar to any successful youtuber you see and listen to ranting about their “routines” and “motivations”. When you are cleaning pigeon shit or weld metal in the workshop, your lifestyle is much less glamorous. Your car is dirty and full of tools. Your day is project-driven and does not allow “routines”. You eat hot-dogs in the roadside cafeteria and so on. Tough stuff.
The second advantage is the obscurity of the results. When you work with code, numbers and words, when your impact on a person life is so untangible, no one can evaluate your results. You can do a website in 30 minutes or 30 days and, as one great dwarf said: “It still only counts as one!” The only real metric becomes your own self-belief, what you feel of your work. And this we can boost with one more motivational video.
Why do I write this? Recently I developed a nick for advertising of my services. I do it better than competition, better than self-proclaimed professionals in my area. But whenever I am asked to do some ads for someone else, I feel strong repulsion. I wanted to know why and self-reflected into this model, this explanation - I just need to be able to point to my results with a physical finger, otherwise I am crushed with their low impact, no matter how much money they bring and how less tough my life would be if I just write posts in Starbucks.
What do you think?
The initial question is this: how tangible are the results of my business’s work in clients’ lives? Like, when and where and of what impact will it be on them? What percentage of their total lives can I strongly touch and improve?
This questions are strongly impacted by MJ’s notions of magnitude and The commandment of need. And the answers I have for each activity I do form the core of my business, my self-worth as a human being.
Yet when I see what other people are usually try to do, I do not understand it. Like, I am constantly bombarded by marketing agencies which want to charge me either $200 for a single post or $1000 for a structured online campain. But what do those people really do? They take some words, some piles of zeroes and ones which represent pictures. They twist and bend them to better represent me online and do it worse than I do cause they do not understand me or my client. Their work results in virtual numbers in Facebook statistics and that “what percentage of a client life I impacted” is depressingly low.
Same goes in my mint to those legions of app-coders and site-builders. Most HUGE tasks which can be solved with apps are already solved, 80% of results a website can achieve canbe grasped with Wix’s AI constructor. For me the results of those businesses (with some exceptions of cause) seem negligble. And the people who try to get there often look like some bottom-dwellers, fighting en-masse for scraps of food which falls down from more “real” businesses doing tangible stuff. The real impactful result is basically unattainable there.
Yet there are two things those business models bring that make them attractive. Both of them relate not to result (what I make) but to process (what I do daily).
First - they are clean. You sit with a slim laptop in a fashionable cafe. Drive an impecable car. Dress sharp and go to the gym. With very little effort, even if you are nearly broke, you can build a life visually similar to any successful youtuber you see and listen to ranting about their “routines” and “motivations”. When you are cleaning pigeon shit or weld metal in the workshop, your lifestyle is much less glamorous. Your car is dirty and full of tools. Your day is project-driven and does not allow “routines”. You eat hot-dogs in the roadside cafeteria and so on. Tough stuff.
The second advantage is the obscurity of the results. When you work with code, numbers and words, when your impact on a person life is so untangible, no one can evaluate your results. You can do a website in 30 minutes or 30 days and, as one great dwarf said: “It still only counts as one!” The only real metric becomes your own self-belief, what you feel of your work. And this we can boost with one more motivational video.
Why do I write this? Recently I developed a nick for advertising of my services. I do it better than competition, better than self-proclaimed professionals in my area. But whenever I am asked to do some ads for someone else, I feel strong repulsion. I wanted to know why and self-reflected into this model, this explanation - I just need to be able to point to my results with a physical finger, otherwise I am crushed with their low impact, no matter how much money they bring and how less tough my life would be if I just write posts in Starbucks.
What do you think?
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