In my little knowledge of successful businesses or institutions.
It seems there are two kinds of people; those who make a wave and those who ride an existing wave.
I'm not sure my wordings really capture what I mean. I hope it does.
Perhaps a narration would, there's this narrative in the Indie Hackers community of the need to build a product and go find out if it's valid. Then it changed to, before you make the product, you need to validate it.
That's a pointer to someone trying to create a wave. Rohan Gilkes made a statement that explains the problem with the above-mentioned style - "Why chase a business that requires validation, instead chase a business that requires execution". That is, instead of going about finding validation for your utopian business idea, find an existing market and get working immediately.
It's funny how "novel" Rohan's statement is. I remember 2017-2018, during my first foray/interest in making a business online. One prominent question then was something like this "Why Make Another Email Service When Yahoo exists?", that is why make X when Y exists? At that time, it seemed to be the biggest question around, Pieter Levels addressed it in his book MAKE. Several articles were written on it, my favourite article on the topic then, was one written by Paul Jarvis he titled it Market needs Competition (it's no longer online).
In retrospect, it's funny how we were all dumb or how I got carried away. Because the definition of Marketing my University Professor drove into our heads in 100 Level was that Marketing starts and ends with the consumer. There's no marketing if you don't understand what the consumer wants or what they are already paying for.
abrahamKim recommended a book Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz, I read the intro and the first chapter today and I'm just so glad it reiterates the fact that the most important thing is understanding your customers' desires and tapping into it.
I'm running out of time now, I hope to share more about the book in the coming days.
Sales, marketing, anything business related starts and ends with the customer. My hardest lesson in business was that the customer you have will always be more important than the hundreds of customers you don't have.
abrahamKim
“The customers you have will always be more important than the hundreds of customers you don’t have”
I’ll never forget that