Awesome is Not a Business Model

I hate you. Being linked to microsoft is almost as bad as being rick rolled. That REQUIRES a warning FFR.

If you want to be successful, you have to set your goal because thinking won't make you get better. You have to make initiative for your plans and the dreams for it to come true.

If you want to be successful, you have to set your goal because thinking won't make you get better. You have to make initiative for your plans and the dreams for it to come true.

I just talked about our product from this perspective on my blog: http://thinklinkllc.com/blog?st=lj

http://twitter.com/KathySierra/status/5047252510 "Don't try to convince me your product/co is awesome. Make ME a bit more awesome, & my brain will do all the "positioning" you could want."

http://twitter.com/KathySierra/status/5047252510 "Don't try to convince me your product/co is awesome. Make ME a bit more awesome, & my brain will do all the "positioning" you could want."

I'd love to hear it Eric. Get after it!

I'd love to hear it Eric. Get after it!

I actually love this article, but part of me that loves to create things and see what works has this nagging disagreement with it. If you always go after a set business model, than where does the innovation come from. I dont disagree - but perhaps I can formulate a more coherent counter point...

I actually love this article, but part of me that loves to create things and see what works has this nagging disagreement with it. If you always go after a set business model, than where does the innovation come from. I dont disagree - but perhaps I can formulate a more coherent counter point...

Reddit is the answer. Used to use Digg a lot, then gave up on it. With Reddit there's a good community and sub-reddits let you filter out noise (to a certain extent). And oddly enough, Reddit is owned by a corporation while Digg is not.

The real issue, I think, is that people don't want to do the hard work--the hard work of taking a hard look at who they are and what they have to offer, the hard work of constantly learning and improving, the hard work of building and maintaining relationships, the hard work of putting yourself out there and doggedly pursuing it. You can believe in sunshine and rainbows, but that isn't what puts them in the sky. You can believe in yourself, too, but belief is the first step--not the only step. But here's the real lesson: life isn't fair. Yes there's ability, yes there's hard work, yes there's access--but there's also pure, dumb luck. We all know people who have succeeded with virtually nothing, and plenty of people who seem to have everything BUT success. You have to be ready for when luck falls your way, but also prepared to find another path when it doesn't.

I'd love to hear it Eric. Get after it!

I actually love this article, but part of me that loves to create things and see what works has this nagging disagreement with it. If you always go after a set business model, than where does the innovation come from. I dont disagree - but perhaps I can formulate a more coherent counter point...

Reddit is the answer. Used to use Digg a lot, then gave up on it. With Reddit there's a good community and sub-reddits let you filter out noise (to a certain extent). And oddly enough, Reddit is owned by a corporation while Digg is not.

The real issue, I think, is that people don't want to do the hard work--the hard work of taking a hard look at who they are and what they have to offer, the hard work of constantly learning and improving, the hard work of building and maintaining relationships, the hard work of putting yourself out there and doggedly pursuing it. You can believe in sunshine and rainbows, but that isn't what puts them in the sky. You can believe in yourself, too, but belief is the first step--not the only step. But here's the real lesson: life isn't fair. Yes there's ability, yes there's hard work, yes there's access--but there's also pure, dumb luck. We all know people who have succeeded with virtually nothing, and plenty of people who seem to have everything BUT success. You have to be ready for when luck falls your way, but also prepared to find another path when it doesn't.

Scary how much people DON'T write about this isn't it?

Not everyone gets business anymore. Some of the stuff people are ranting about here in SM is so basic. It's like driver's ed on the Autoban. Strategy - A-fucking-men. Nothing happens without it. Nothing. Literally.

I heart your use of strategery there Jackie.

Freemium works. Consulting and offering clear packages that provide a need? Even better.

Exactly. People are generally down for providing money if you fulfill their needs. They are even more likely to throw down if that product that solves a need is awesome.

You bring up some great points. In traditional media, if someone has an "awesome" commercial (it's really fun and/or really makes an impact), but isn't strategically relevant in any way (it doesn't really promote a product, doesn't provide a call to action, doesn't include a website--you name it), then you might as well have just spent that money on buying an HDTV for every employee in your office (yes please). Hopefully that analogy works... Same for social media. There's different strategery involved, but you need to find a way to make your efforts affect the bottom line. Once you have your strategery (nope, not mispelled), then you can make it awesome. Speaking of awesome, that picture is awesome in so many ways.

Couldn't have said it better...well I would have capitalized "Kathy Sierra" but that's really just semantics.

It's one hell of a lot easier to make things awesome then to make things out of awesome. As marketers we inherently try to do this all the time...we've got to be better than that moving forward.

It's the reason that I am shifting over to a new format for TLJ.com. I am having a dedicated blog...but the landing page will have business offerings. Very very excited about the potential there.

You make me look humble. That's freakin' hard dude. Props.

Amen. Value is only sustainable if you have something to offer besides the initial layer of awesome. You need to be a fully realized business in order to actually do ANYTHING. Still... People are convinced that sunshine and rainbows are the way to go.

The more I learn about marketing (and practice it) the more convinced I am that it is the product that really makes the difference between success and failure. I can put a turd in tinfoil...but it will still be a turd. Marketers need to get more honest about fixing a product first and then moving forward.

Nice analogy here Chris. That actually explained it better than I did :).

You are absolutely correct. Awesome is not a business model in the same way that gasoline is not an automobile. Gasoline has no wheels or seats, and can never take you anywhere. Similarly, your business can exist without awesome. Your car can exist without awesome, but... ... your car will go much farther with gasoline... ... and your business will go much farther with awesome.

If I have great content, then people will read it. Isn't that what everyone is teaching me right now? What else do I have to do? I have spoken to many companies who tell me their social media goal is to drive traffic and generate sales. Okay.... well, lets take a look at your site shall we? When I go to their site, their UI and usability is horrible, which means that they're losing sales just because stuff is on the wrong place. Furthermore, many companies want me to build followers for them on Twitter and Fans for them on Facebook. If you don't have a fanbase outside of the internet, what makes you think that just because you put up a FB page you're going to start getting them? I think marketing is important, but if you don't have a great product, then people won't have a reason to come back. Lets hear it for business that rock!

Money--any currency--is a symbol of debts owed and paid. In order to make money, you have to figure out how what you offer creates a debt to or for the person to whom you're selling. In other words, you have to have something of value (the "be awesome" part) and offer it to--here's the kicker--someone who finds it of value. Awesome is nothing without access. It also means nothing if no one else agrees. As Adam points out, if you don't set the terms of the exchange (money for the value you provide), you're SOL. If people aren't willing to pay you for what you do, then you have no choice but to take a hard look at both sides of the equation: either what you're offering is not, in fact, awesome (e.g., new, different, valuable) or there simply aren't enough people who care. Wishing is also not a business model.

This post is insightful, but it doesn't apply to me does it? Because quite frankly every time I walk down the street beautiful women do indeed throw money at me. When interviewed, they also cite that it's because of my "awesomeness." While I can't explain this phenomenon I am trying to document it into an ebook on how this strategy is scalable for the likes of Zac Effron and Channing Tatum. Aside from that, I think that if you aren't an anomaly, social business (what Dachis and others I suspect) are working towards is going to be the future, and as companies start integrating social into their everyday activities we're going to see a lot less campaigns and a lot more conversations (both internally and with customers).

This is perfect timing for me. I've had some mentors try to pound this point into my head, but reading through it here has really reinforced it home. When I first started blogging, I was subscribing to the "If you build it... they will come..." They being money, success, influence, etc... But there is so much more than just building a site. Content is king, but if you are going to run a business, you've got to approach it as a BUSINESS. "Awesome is not a business model" Can't say it any more clearly than that.

Though you claim to be contrasting two things (awesome/success), I think you're working with three things: 1) Awesome 2) Useful 3) Viable. It's unfortunate that you use Twitter and Digg as examples, because they are both Awesome and Useful, if not Viable. They're creating "evangelized advocates," even if they're not making money. Is that a big problem for them? Maybe in the long term, but last time I checked, their valuation was pretty damn high. So clearly someone values eyeballs. . . BTW, to->too in the third paragraph, unless you're trying to split an infinitive and write a fragment =)

Your best point is this: Create solid products…then make them awesome. This is why I believe that the future lies in offline businesses again. We'll go back to the real world. Free dominates the web, those who seek A LOT of profit, will find it really hard to make it online. I think you have to go even further online: Create solid AND awesome products. Be good an viral from the start. Otherwise the love for free will blown your "model" away.

I think it boils down to metrics and not flash for social media to succeed. Having a flashy app that gets some press and having a strategy to integrate tools that result in increased sales, higher conversions and new business are 2 separate entities. Every org and business is going to be different, but how you measure success needs to be defined. What I see for a lot of social biz plans is getting the flash, 24 hour wow (or a write up on Mashable) and saying its a success. The fre model works if you have a back end sales upgrade process. In Internet Marketing it is one of the most effective strategies. Invite someone to a free webinar or something and upgrade the hell out of them. The last thing I wanted to mention is that people in the social space are "scared" to ask for a sale. Things like, "you can donate to the blog" or "click our ads to keep our servers running" are just businesses that do not have enough value with their customer base to ask them to pay for a subscription. Pandora recently rolled out a few paid plans in the last few weeks ranging from $25 a year to $.99 a month and no one barked because their service and value are off the chain. I guess to sum it, you need to define your own definition of success and do everything in your power to meet that definition.

I think kathy sierra would say that the business model is to make your users awesome.

I wonder if part of the problem is that too many people hear "awesome" but see "$$$". I'm an unabashed geek, and I focus on being a power user. When I hear about a new service, I want to learn the ins and outs, and figure out exactly how it can be awesome for me. If I'm convinced, I'm probably then at a stage where I'd consider paying for the service (as I understand this is the "just a taste" strategy behind freemium). Digg used to be awesome... in the closed beta. Obviously, I'm coming at this from the point of view of a geek, but at the time, when most of the users were all motivated geeks (and there was very little interest in self-promotion), it became (briefly) the best geek news site on the web, because subject matter experts were digging up and down as appropriate. I gave up on Digg (with the occasional exception of digging friends' stories on request) because the signal-to-noise ratio for me dropped significantly. I worry that something similar will happen to Twitter, but because I more directly control the content of my "front page", I'm less concerned. Flip that back to your discussion of "awesome", and I think my example gets at the root of the problem - awesome is extremely subjective. There are some things that are widely seen as awesome, it's true, but even within that it is likely seen as awesome by different subgroups for different reasons. Value is still mostly rooted in eyeballs, and that's how we get the transitive property of social media: awesome = eyeballs = value implies awesome = value. The side effect of this is that if you can get sufficient chatter behind your product/service, you can create temporary perceived awesome that artificially inflates your value, while not actually having a business (as you point out) underneath.

Absolutely right. Being awesome doesn't generate money, but selling/teaching awesome does. That's the big problem with a lot of awesome sites, they have no clue how to sell. Twitter and Digg don't even try. Did you know that Wordpress is profitable? I'd say Wordpress is even more awesome than Digg/Twitter, but the key difference is they actually try to sell something (add-ons, hosting, design etc.) whereas Twitter and Digg don't even try. You can't generate money if you don't ask for it.