I’ve seen it time and time again.
And it drives me nuts!
Entrepreneurs and marketers are making the same mistakes over and over:
- Obsessing over the next big tool they think will save them
- Fixating on having the best-looking landing pages or website
- Whether or not a blue button works better than a red one
- Spending way too much time on their “brand” and logo
- Debating whether putting that one single emoji in the subject line will get better reads…
I’ve seen it all.
And if this sounds like you, I have some bad news.
Focusing on these kinds of things are why your business is going to fail.
It’s why so many businesses don’t make it.
Thankfully its quite an easy fix.
Whilst everyone is focusing on these business killers, there’s one simple thing you should be doing that they aren’t.
And when you do, not only do you avoid becoming another statistic, but its how you’ll build a base of raving fans, have customers lining out of the door, and ultimately the business you’ve always dreamed of.
So, what should you be focusing on instead?
Read on to find out…
REVEALED: The One Thing You Need To Focus On To Succeed
Everything you publish is underpinned by ideas ?
That podcast episode, your social media post, that Instagram live, your next YouTube video… all of it.
And those ideas are what gets people to ravenously consume your content, or to flat out ignore it and scroll past it like it never even existed in the first place.
The thing is, it costs exactly the same to put out an average idea as it does to put out a good one.
So many people don’t get this.
Average ideas are the kind of things you see in your social media feeds all the time and just scroll right past, but good ideas, oh boy that’s where the money is.
Good ideas are the holy grail!
Good ideas are the reason why you stop scrolling, why you simply have to read an article, why you can’t help yourself from watching a video, and why you ultimately consume something.
They’re pattern interrupters, thumb stoppers, conversation starters.
We call these “big ideas”, and if you don’t learn to obsess over finding and using them you can expect years of:
- “Why is nobody reading my blog”
- “I never have any traffic to my website”
- “No-one is opening my emails”
- “Why aren’t I making enough money?”
- “Nobody knows who I am / we are”
Big ideas change all of that.
“One idea properly exploited is worth 100 lifetimes of hard work” Gary Halbert
You have to think of big ideas as the ‘what’ (bear with me here).
The best way I can explain it is like this: You’re in the ‘what’ business, not the ‘why’ business.
It’s about figuring out what ideas work, not why it works, because the faster you can get there the faster you’ll find success ?
In most cases you don’t know why something works, and that’s why you need to get to that ‘what’ as fast as possible (rather than spending weeks and months pontificating on the ‘why’).
But how exactly do you get to the ‘what’, how do you find your big ideas?
You fail.
And you fail fast and cheap.
Since you don’t know precisely where success lies (IE which ideas work best), you want to work through as many failures as possible so you can find success as quickly and cheaply as possible.
This process of working through fast and cheap failures is called ‘Accelerated Failure’.
You do this, so that by the time it comes to you spending significant time & money on big campaigns you know you’re armed with the best ideas that a lot of people are going to engage with.
This is what accelerated failure is all about.
“If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness” Jeff Bezos
Imagine plotting a ship but you don’t know where north is?
This is what most entrepreneurs are doing when they publish content and spend money on ads.
They “ready, aim, fire” their way to failure ?
What they should be doing is finding out what works, what direction to be pushing ahead in, so that they can find success quicker.
They need to “Ready, FIRE! Aim” their way to success.
That means finding out what doesn’t work, so they can redirect themselves, their campaigns, their ad spend, and their focus to what works.
This is what the smart entrepreneurs are doing, and this is how you win ?
Why 9/10 Businesses Will Fail This Year
Focusing on the ‘why’ rather than the ‘what’ is the pitfall so many startups, entrepreneurs and even seasoned marketers fall into.
This is a massive reason why so many products, launches, campaigns, and businesses fail.
Obsessing over tiny, insignificant details distracts you from the stuff you should be focusing on that’ll actually make you money!
Just find what works and hit the repeat button.
Its such a simple formula.
But it means you need to be testing all the time (and this tends to put a lot of people off).
So many entrepreneurs think that the ideas (ads, campaigns, emails etc) that’ll grow their business just have to come from them.
Come on…
Do you think your dream customers care who scratches their itch?
Or to put it better, do you think they care whether or not you were the original source of the idea that solved their problem in the first place?
No, of course not.
That’s precisely why the best don’t always win, but “different” does.
The ‘what’, those big ideas that jolt your prospects and dream customers into action, almost always never look how you think they would.
But they’re always “different”.
That’s why you need to be testing all the time, figuring out the stuff people don’t respond to in order to find the stuff they do respond to.
“A Big Idea instantly drives the prospect toward a foregone conclusion by evoking a useful emotion. A useful emotion is one that makes the prospect want the product [or to take action].” Mark Ford
Don’t be the guy that runs a few Facebook ads, doesn’t uncover any winning ideas, and then walks away saying things like “Facebook doesn’t work for me”, or worse yet “Google ads are too expensive”.
Companies that aren’t perpetually testing will fail like this.
Your success lies not in understanding every single intricate detail of the stuff you’re testing, but rather that you’re coming through the other side with big ideas that people respond to.
Because its that ‘what’ that matters, not the ‘why’.
The Best Source of Big, Money-Making Ideas You Can Tap Into Over & Over Again
The best ideas always win ?
That’s why you need to find them, not necessarily understand them intricately.
The more you can find the more you can test, and the quicker you’ll find the shortcut on your road to success.
Those little gems that give you control campaigns, thousands of customers, and millions in revenue?
Yeah, those are hard to find. Even for people who have been doing this for decades.
That’s why you need to condition yourself to perpetually seek out the “what”, and not get caught in the “why” quicksand.
Use the principles of “Ready, FIRE! Aim” and Accelerated Failure to perpetually test a slew of ideas, so you can find the ones that work.
Your business will be built on those ideas, and it doesn’t matter where they come from.
This is where your blog, newsletter, Instagram account, YouTube channel, TikTok profile, podcast, Facebook group or fan page come into play (or whatever your preferred channels are).
These are your best testing grounds.
Once you start finding winning ‘whats’, and ignore the ‘whys’, everything will change.
This is how you win.
Until then, here’s to your next big ‘what’.
Steve De La Cour
Founder & CEO
Kong
