by Jason Fried
How do you know if you’re copying someone? If someone else is doing the bulk of the work, you’re copying. Be influenced, but don’t steal.
Decommoditize your product
If you’re successful, people will try to copy what you do. It’s just a fact of life. But there’s a great way to protect yourself from copycats: Make you part of your product or service. Inject what’s unique about the way you think into what you sell. Decommoditize your product. Make it something no one else can offer.
Look at Zappos.com, a billion-dollar online shoe retailer. A pair of sneakers from Zappos is the same as a pair from Foot Locker or any other retailer. But Zappos sets itself apart by injecting CEO Tony Hsieh’s obsession with customer service into everything it does.
At Zappos, customer-service employees don’t use scripts and are allowed to talk at length with customers. The call center and the company’s headquarters are in the same place, not oceans apart. And all Zappos employees—even those who don’t work in customer service or fulfillment—start out by spending four weeks answering phones and working in the warehouse. It’s this devotion to customer service that makes Zappos unique among shoe sellers.*
Another example is Polyface, an environmentally friendly Virginia farm owned by Joel Salatin. Salatin has a strong set of beliefs and runs his business accordingly. Polyface sells the idea that it does things a bigger agribusiness can’t do. Even though it’s more expensive to do so, it feeds cows grass instead of corn and never gives them antibiotics. It never ships food. Anyone is welcome to visit the farm anytime and go anywhere (try that at a typical meat-processing plant). Polyface doesn’t just sell chickens, it sells a way of thinking. And customers love Polyface for it. Some customers routinely drive from 150 miles away to get “clean” meat for their families.*
Pour yourself into your product and everything around your product too: how you sell it, how you support it, how you explain it, and how you deliver it. Competitors can never copy the you in your product.
Pick a fight
If you think a competitor sucks, say so. When you do that, you’ll find that others who agree with you will rally to your side. Being the anti-______ is a great way to differentiate yourself and attract followers.
For example, Dunkin’ Donuts likes to position itself as the anti-Starbucks. Its ads mock Starbucks for using “Fritalian” terms instead of small, medium, and large. Another Dunkin’ campaign is centered on a taste test in which it beat Starbucks. There’s even a site called DunkinBeatStarbucks.com where visitors can send e-cards with statements like “Friends don’t let friends drink Starbucks.”
Audi is another example. It’s been taking on the old guard of car manufacturers. It puts “old luxury” brands like Rolls-Royce and Mercedes “on notice” in ads touting Audi as the fresh luxury alternative. Audi takes on Lexus’s automatic parking systems with ads that say Audi drivers know how to park their own cars. Another ad gives a side-by-side comparison of BMW and Audi owners: The BMW owner uses the rearview mirror to adjust his hair while the Audi driver uses the mirror to see what’s behind him.
Apple jabs at Microsoft with ads that compare Mac and PC owners, and 7UP bills itself as the Uncola. Under Armour positions itself as Nike for a new generation.
All these examples show the power and direction you can gain by having a target in your sights. Who do you want to take a shot at?
You can even pit yourself as the opponent of an entire industry. Dyson’s Airblade starts with the premise that the hand-dryer industry is a failure and then sells itself as faster and more hygienic than the others. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter puts its enemy right there in its product name.
Having an enemy gives you a great story to tell customers, too. Taking a stand always stands out. People get stoked by conflict. They take sides. Passions are ignited. And that’s a good way to get people to take notice.
Underdo your competition
Conventional wisdom says that to beat your competitors, you need to one-up them. If they have four features, you need five (or fifteen, or twenty-five). If they’re spending $20,000, you need to spend $30,000. If they have fifty employees, you need a hundred.
This sort of one-upping, Cold War mentality is a dead end. When you get suckered into an arms race, you wind up in a never-ending battle that costs you massive amounts of money, time, and drive. And it forces you to constantly be on the defensive, too. Defensive companies can’t think ahead; they can only think behind. They don’t lead; they follow.
So what do you do instead? Do less than your competitors to beat them. Solve the simple problems and leave the hairy, difficult, nasty problems to the competition. Instead of one-upping, try one-downing. Instead of outdoing, try underdoing.
The bicycle world provides a great example. For years, major bicycle brands focused on the latest in hightech equipment: mountain bikes with suspension and ultrastrong disc brakes, or lightweight titanium road bikes with carbon-fiber everything. And it was assumed that bikes should have multiple gears: three, ten, or twenty-one.
But recently, fixed-gear bicycles have boomed in popularity, despite being as low-tech as you can get. These bikes have just one gear. Some models don’t have brakes. The advantage: They’re simpler, lighter, cheaper, and don’t require as much maintenance.
Another great example of a product that is succeeding by underdoing the competition: the Flip—an ultrasimple, point-and-shoot, compact camcorder that’s taken a significant percentage of the market in a short time. Look at all the things the Flip does not deliver:
No big screen (and the tiny screen doesn’t swing out for self-portraits either)
No photo-taking ability
No tapes or discs (you have to offload the videos to a computer)
No menus
No settings
No video light
No viewfinder
No special effects
No headphone jack
No lens cap
No memory card
No optical zoom
The Flip wins fans because it only does a few simple things and it does them well. It’s easy and fun to use. It goes places a bigger camera would never go and gets used by people who would never use a fancier camera.
Don’t shy away from the fact that your product or service does less. Highlight it. Be proud of it. Sell it as aggressively as competitors sell their extensive feature lists.
Who cares what they’re doing?
In the end, it’s not worth paying much attention to the competition anyway. Why not? Because worrying about the competition quickly turns into an obsession. What are they doing right now? Where are they going next? How should we react?
Every little move becomes something to be analyzed. And that’s a terrible mind-set. It leads to overwhelming stress and anxiety. That state of mind is bad soil for growing anything.
It’s a pointless exercise anyway. The competitive landscape changes all the time. Your competitor tomorrow may be completely different from your competitor today. It’s out of your control. What’s the point of worrying about things you can’t control?
Focus on yourself instead. What’s going on in here is way more important than what’s going on out there. When you spend time worrying about someone else, you can’t spend that time improving yourself.
Focus on competitors too much and you wind up diluting your own vision. Your chances of coming up with something fresh go way down when you keep feeding your brain other people’s ideas. You become reactionary instead of visionary. You wind up offering your competitor’s products with a different coat of paint.
If you’re planning to build “the iPod killer” or “the next Pokemon,” you’re already dead. You’re allowing the competition to set the parameters. You’re not going to out-Apple Apple. They’re defining the rules of the game. And you can’t beat someone who’s making the rules. You need to redefine the rules, not just build something slightly better.
Don’t ask yourself whether you’re
“beating” Apple (or whoever the big boy is in your industry). That’s the wrong question to ask. It’s not a win-or-lose battle. Their profits and costs are theirs. Yours are yours.
If you’re just going to be like everyone else, why are you even doing this? If you merely replicate competitors, there’s no point to your existence. Even if you wind up losing, it’s better to go down fighting for what you believe in instead of just imitating others.
*“A Shine on Their Shoes,” Business Week, Dec. 5, 2005, www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_49/b3962118.htm
*“The Polyface Story,” www.polyfacefarms.com/story.aspx
CHAPTER
EVOLUTION
Say no by default
If I’d listened to customers,
I’d have given them a faster horse.
—HENRY FORD
It’s so easy to say yes. Yes to another feature, yes to an overly optimistic deadline, yes to a mediocre design. Soon, the stack of things you’ve said yes to grows so tall you can’t even see the things you should really be doing.
Start getting into the habit of saying no—even to many of your best ideas. Use the power of no to get your priorities straight. You rarely regret saying no. But you often wind up regretting saying yes.
People avoid saying no because confrontation makes them uncomfortable. But the alternative is even worse. You drag things out, make things complicated, and work on ideas you don’t believe in.
It’s like a relationship: Breaking one up is hard to do, but staying in it just because you’re too chicken to drop the ax is even worse. Deal with the brief discomfort of confrontation up front and avoid the long-term regret.
Don’t believe that “customer is always right” stuff, either. Let’s say you’re a chef. If enough of your customers say your food is too salty or too hot, you change it. But if a few persnickety patrons tell you to add bananas to your lasagna, you’re going to turn them down, and that’s OK. Making a few vocal customers happy isn’t worth it if it ruins the product for everyone else.
ING Direct has built the fastest-growing bank in America by saying no. When customers ask for a credit card, the answer is no. When they ask for an online brokerage, the answer is no. When they ask if they can open an account with a million dollars in it, the answer is no (the bank has a strict deposit maximum). ING wants to keep things simple. That’s why the bank offers just a few savings accounts, certificates of deposit, and mutual funds—and that’s it.
Don’t be a jerk about saying no, though. Just be honest. If you’re not willing to yield to a customer request, be polite and explain why. People are surprisingly understanding when you take the time to explain your point of view. You may even win them over to your way of thinking. If not, recommend a competitor if you think there’s a better solution out there. It’s better to have people be happy using someone else’s product than disgruntled using yours.
Your goal is to make sure your product stays right for you. You’re the one who has to believe in it most. That way, you can say, “I think you’ll love it because I love it.”
Let your customers outgrow you
Maybe you’ve seen this scenario: There’s a customer that’s paying a company a lot of money. The company tries to please that customer in any way possible. It tweaks and changes the product per this one customer’s requests and starts to alienate its general customer base.
Then one day that big customer winds up leaving and the company is left holding the bag—and the bag is a product that’s ideally suited to someone who’s not there anymore. And now it’s a bad fit for everyone else.
When you stick with your current customers come hell or high water, you wind up cutting yourself off from new ones. Your product or service becomes so tailored to your current customers that it stops appealing to fresh blood. And that’s how your company starts to die.
After our first product had been around for a while, we started getting some heat from folks who had been with us from the beginning. They said they were starting to grow out of the application. Their businesses were changing and they wanted us to change our product to mirror their newfound complexity and requirements.
We said no. Here’s why: We’d rather our customers grow out of our products eventually than never be able to grow into them in the first place. Adding power-user features to satisfy some can intimidate those who aren’t on board yet. Scaring away new customers is worse than losing old customers.
When you let customers outgrow you, you’ll most likely wind up with a product that’s basic—and that’s fine. Small, simple, basic needs are constant. There’s an endless supply of customers who need exactly that.
And there are always more people who are not using your product than people who are. Make sure you make it easy for these people to get on board. That’s where your continued growth potential lies.
People and situations change. You can’t be everything to everyone. Companies need to be true to a type of customer more than a specific individual customer with changing needs.
Don’t confuse enthusiasm with priority
Coming up with a great idea gives you a rush. You start imagining the possibilities and the benefits. And of course, you want all that right away. So you drop everything else you’re working on and begin pursuing your latest, greatest idea.
Bad move. The enthusiasm you have for a new idea is not an accurate indicator of its true worth. What seems like a sure-fire hit right now often gets downgraded to just a “nice to have” by morning. And “nice to have” isn’t worth putting everything else on hold.
We have ideas for new features all the time. On top of that, we get dozens of interesting ideas from customers every day too. Sure, it’d be fun to immediately chase all these ideas to see where they lead. But if we did that, we’d just wind up running on a treadmill and never get anywhere.
So let your latest grand ideas cool off for a while first. By all means, have as many great ideas as you can. Get excited about them. Just don’t act in the heat of the moment. Write them down and park them for a few days. Then, evaluate their actual priority with a calm mind.
Be at-home good
You know what it feels like. You go to a store. You’re comparing a few different products, and you’re sold on the one that sounds like it’s the best deal. It’s got the most features. It looks the coolest. The packaging looks hot. There’s sensational copy on the box. Everything seems great.
But then you get it home, and it doesn’t deliver. It’s not as easy to use as you thought it’d be. It has too many features you don’t need. You end up feeling that you’ve been taken. You didn’t really get what you needed and you realize you spent too much.
You just bought an in-store-good product. That’s a product you’re more excited about in the store than you are after you’ve actually used it.
Smart companies make the opposite: something that’s at-home good. When you get the product home, you’re actually more impressed with it than you were at the store. You live with it and grow to like it more and more. And you tell your friends, too.
When you create an at-home-good product, you may have to sacrifice a bit of in-store sizzle. A product that executes on the basics beautifully may not seem as sexy as competitors loaded with bells and whistles. Being great at a few things often doesn’t look all that flashy from afar. That’s OK. You’re aiming for a long-term relationship, not a one-night stand.
This is as true for advertising as it is for in-store packaging or displays. We’ve all seen a TV ad for some “revolutionary” gadget that will change your life. But when the actual product arrives in the mail, it turns out to be a disappointment. In-media good isn’t nearly as important as at-home good. You can’t paint over a bad experience with good advertising or marketing.
Don’t write it down
How should you keep track of what customers want? Don’t. Listen, but then forget what people said. Seriously.
There’s no need for a spreadsheet, database, or filing s
ystem. The requests that really matter are the ones you’ll hear over and over. After a while, you won’t be able to forget them. Your customers will be your memory. They’ll keep reminding you. They’ll show you which things you truly need to worry about.
If there’s a request that you keep forgetting, that’s a sign that it isn’t very important. The really important stuff doesn’t go away.
CHAPTER
PROMOTION
Welcome obscurity
No one knows who you are right now. And that’s just fine. Being obscure is a great position to be in. Be happy you’re in the shadows.
Use this time to make mistakes without the whole world hearing about them. Keep tweaking. Work out the kinks. Test random ideas. Try new things. No one knows you, so it’s no big deal if you mess up. Obscurity helps protect your ego and preserve your confidence.
Retailers experiment with test markets all the time for this reason. When Dunkin’ Donuts thought about selling pizza, hot dogs, and other hot sandwiches, it test-marketed the products at just ten select locations.
Broadway shows also provide a great example of testing ideas on a small stage first. They routinely do a trial run in a smaller city before coming to New York. Testing out of town lets actors get some reps in front of a live audience before the show goes up in front of harsher critics and tastemakers.