The 4 Lessons from Tim Ferriss and Seth Godin

Seth and Tim talk about how most people spend their life in Defense mode just floating their way through hoping and wishing for certain things to happen. Instead they say everyone has the power to do absolutely anything they want in life. The real question is what are they going to do with that power and what impact will they have. What’s crazy is that 95% of the world falls into this space and so few people invest enough time in who they are, why they are that way and what they are going to do in their time on this earth.

When I think of Offense though I think of not just taking life into my own hands but instead why I shouldn’t be waiting around for new customers to hear about my startup. I am taking my life into my own hands by deciding to quit my job and create a business that I am proud of and being on the offense is trying all the different traction strategies to find the right ones that drive traffic. I could focus on putting a solid product out and providing a high level of customer service (which are important to me and I) but as an entrepreneur we never know which growth tactic will drive the most people to your website unless you get after it and just try a bunch. What helped us get our first 100 clients won’t be what will help us get from 100–1000 and 1000–10,000 which places emphasis on the power of continuous learning.

Since I have been focusing a lot on traction the last 2 months these books came right to mind that helped me.

Books

Traction: How any startup can achieve Customer Growth by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares

Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing and Advertising by Ryan Holiday

Launch: An internet Millionaire’s Secret Formula to Sell Almost Anything Online by Jeff Walker

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal

Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel

Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less by Joe Pulizzi

Ask: The Counterintuitive Online Formula to Discover Exactly What Your Customers Want to Buy…Create a Mass of Raving Fans…and Take Any Business to the Next Level by Ryan Levesque

Blogs

There were a lot of marketing/growth blogs I follow but with the drive from this podcast I read a bunch of Andrew Chen’s posts. Living in the Valley and working for Uber gets him as close to the latest tactics as one can get. Ryan Holiday as I mentioned before is just an animal and I grabbed some interesting insight from his posts as well. Plus he had a killer episode on Tim Ferriss’ podcast in 2014 that you should listen to.

Andrew Chen

Ryan Holiday

Additional Resources

Courses

Bryan Harris at VideoFruit has an interesting course around acquiring your first 10,000 subscribers that I just came across. From what the others who have taken the course have said and his background appearing on tons of publications and influencers podcasts it should be solid. I have not done it yet but he has a course opening this May that I may check out. It’s focused on building an email list but I see it as being beneficial for anyone looking to drive new customer/users growth while taking a value first approach.

Ali Mese who many on Medium are aware of and read his articles, is all about growth. He put a course together focused on helping people go from 0 to 1M visitors that I just finished this week. It was very practical and useful for people trying to build acquire users/subscribers etc. With Medium being a platform I am focusing on for building my personal brand I felt he could provide some actionable insight to help me drive traction. His publication #SWLH always has useful articles and is one of the most subscribed publications on Medium.

Additional Resources

Online Communities

I heard about Hackernews prior to this podcast but signed up for all the 4 below after learning where people that share the same passion for growth hangout.

Growth Hackers

Hackernews

Inbound.org

Product Hunt

Tim and Seth jumped into why when something is worth trying that it’s worth failing. Seth talks about trying, trying, trying until you eventually get something right and on that journey the learning is what really counts. He talked about all the different “things” he has put out in the world and how some have a large impact and some don’t. That insight relates very closely to what Adam Grant talks about in his new book, Originals: How Non-Conformists move the World, when he analyzes some of the most successful creators of our time like Mozart and Picasso and how they have created thousands of pieces of art but so few end up being the big impacters. It comes down to trying, trying and trying some more and over time your best work will stick.

This taught me the importance of just trying and removing the potential other stresses like $$ that may put unneeded pressure on me as I work towards building great things. When I quit my job Feb.1st 2016 I ensured I had enough money saved up that I could work on building businesses for the next 2 years without making a dime and not putting stress on my family or our lifestyle. I’ll just keep trying and trying and take failures as learning opportunities.

When pondering this concept Gary Vaynerchuk came to mind immediately. Almost everyday I consume some piece of his content since he crushes so many platforms. I feel like he is always up to try something new and keep trying until something sticks. For him not all work out but trying is worth failing. He is all about hustle and showing the real life of an entrepreneur. I read Jab, Jab, Jab Right Hook recently and bought the Pre-order of his new book, #askgaryvee, listen to his podcast all the time and follow him on snapchat. Take a look at his content because it’s great daily motivation and insight into the life of an entrepreneur. When I do this it reminds me how he is always up for trying and failing.

Books

Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World

Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion

#Askgaryvee: One Entrepreneur’s Take on Leadership, Social Media, and Self-Awareness

Additional Resources

4 hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss

$100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future by Chris Guillebeau

Level Up Your Life: How to Unlock Adventure and Happiness by Becoming the Hero of Your Own Story by Steve Kamb

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

Four Steps to the Epiphany by steve blank

Seth shares a story about his friend Lin in this episode that really resonated with me. He says that his friend was a toy designer that was shot down time and time again by the toy companies. She then came to Seth to ask for his advice and at the time he worked in publishing. He suggested that Lin get into the book business because everyday there are people waiting for the next great idea to come across their desk. 6 months later she created the 52 deck of cards and since has sold 5 million decks.

Why push uphill when you can learn what people actually want and just push your business downhill, Seth and Tim suggest. That got me thinking. Its not the 80’s and I am not Lin trying to sell toy ideas but instead there are tons of tools out there to see what people online care about.

Although I spent 2 months in customer discovery with mybumper to understand if there was a big enough problem our product solved, I decided to analyze our product with Google Trends. This could be a great option for you if you are looking to start a business or sell something new and want a business that pushes downhill rather than uphill. As Seth suggests there are tons of problems that need solving out there so why invent a new one.

Software Tools

Google Trends

Google Trends gives you fantastic insight into what topics are trending, what words are be searched the most, how a topic popularity has gone up or down in the last few years and how it compares to other keywords. You can also use it to determine where those keywords are being searched the most and if you dig into it what are keywords that are searched along with it and which are breaking through recently. Here are a few of the trends I pulled for iPhone battery cases.