Creation

How To Guarantee Your Product Will Be A Hit

How To Guarantee Your Product Will Be A Hit

Garth Beyer

Inventor At Work / Product Hit Guarantee

In the old days (I’m referring to just a few years ago) we would create a project or service and then try to sell it. We would develop a product and try to convince people they had the problem our product was the solution for.

Now we have to create a remarkable product or service that solves an existing problem.

The first step in any marketing or creation plan (after seeking out an existing problem, of course) is to not just write why our product is the remarkable solution, but show that it is.

In the past we could stay in our dark rooms, write a book, give it to a publisher, and then rely on the publisher to market the book and hope it hits the NYT bestseller list.

In the past we could dream up an awesome product at our desks, contact manufacturers in China, have them build it, send it to us and then hope people would buy it.

Now the publisher doesn’t do the marketing. Now few go knocking on doors.

We can’t stay in our quiet dark room anymore.

Now books gets sold before their written. Now we have a preorder list of 1,200 before we build the product.

The way to guarantee your product will be a hit once it reaches the market is to guarantee your product will be a hit before you build it. You do that by building a tribe of believers, of backers, of supporters.

Instead of putting a book out there and hoping people bite, you can blog about the book before it’s written, create a network centered around the message of your book, then you get a book proposal based on the feedback and impact you already have. You are able to show it will be a bestseller.

Kickstarter works because people have a tribe of supporters that will pay to have them build their inventions because one of their perks is that they will get weekly updates, exclusive promos, and special thank-yous. Not to mention, they simply believe in the maker, the artist, (you?). But those artists have worked hard for their trust, not just hard on the product.

We’re no longer in an age when we can rely on others to sell what we create. Sure, create for the sake of creating, because it’s fun, because there’s no better opportunity we have in life. But if you are looking to make an income off your creation,  doesn’t it make sense to guarantee your product will be a hit before you create it?

 

Stay Positive & We Have The Tools, Now Use’m

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PR Freelancers Don’t Neglect The Last Phase

Garth Beyer

Public Relations Phase

A PR strategy can be broken down into three phases. The last, the most important and often neglected.

1) Ideation

Write down everything. Brainstorm. Read about other products’ PR strategies (not just similar brands to the one you’re working with). Talk with a different person each day and ask for help. You can do it alone, but you can do it better with others’ help. Here’s a site I read a lot when brainstorming.

2) Evaluation

No one loves to redo something because they forgot a piece. Nor does anyone enjoy scrapping work they’ve spent hours on because while it may be good work, it doesn’t fit the overall strategy. Evaluation is easy, but dealing with the criticism may prove difficult to handle. You can get attached once you start creating, not before.

3) Creation

Here’s the spot a lot of PR freelancers neglect before pitching their strategy. It’s easy to suggest a business sends out a newsletter. It’s much more difficult to write that newsletter yourself. It’s easy to suggest how to use Twitter and Facebook, but much harder to think of 30 tweets or 24 Facebook posts they can use. It’s easy to suggest building a clock a bird pops out of each hour and sings, but … you get the idea. No business wants to hear what they should do they want to see it. After all, they are hiring you to do it, not just think about doing it.

 

Stay Positive & Go Create Something Special

A Fair Place To Find Passion

Garth Beyer

You can write and talk about a lot of things you like, but it’s difficult to do so without sounding like you are promoting it.

When searching for passion (in writing, in creating, in art), find something that makes you angry.

I’ve noticed hundreds of exceptional products made because the inventor was angry that things were the way they were.

Sure, you can find something you love and add to it so that you love it more, but I can’t sense the passion when you do that.

If you communicate to me that you added more frosting to the middle of an oreo, great, I’m sure some people will like that. But, if you get frustrated that they don’t offer enough variety in terms of the flavor of frosting and then go out and create a new frosting, you will certainly get a lot more attention.

(Now is a good time to read about Cheez-Its.)

Remarkable change and creation stem from passion, and who is to say that anger is not a fair place to find passion?

 

Stay Positive & Count To 10, Then Do Something About It

Garth E. Beyer

It’s Not Your Art

Garth Beyer

So what that you put hundreds of hours into creating what you did? Just because you went through all the pain of developing what you did, doesn’t make it yours. Even if you searched for every single piece of your creation and sold your sentimental belongings to afford what you made – it still doesn’t make it yours and it definitely doesn’t make it art.

Art is only art when it’s shared.

It’s the same with genius. Einstein wouldn’t have been a genius if he never shared everything he studied, ruminated, and experimented with. Or, a person can write a novel a year, but they will never be a writer unless they share it.

People might shout,

“This is not the time for metaphor! This is not the time for art! And this is certainly not the time for art about you!” But once you’ve shared your art and it’s resonated with a single person, it’s no longer about you — once you share it, it’s about everybody. And if your art is found by a single soul, shared with a friend who links it to a friend, and the response is whatever it is, you start to see how art becomes about everybody — just through the act of being shared.” – Amanda Palmer

I am stating that art becomes about everybody the same as it becomes everyones.

When I buy your art, I don’t see it the way you do. I don’t know how much money, time, sweat, blood, relationships, tears, mental exhaustion, late nights, and broken prototypes went into it.

When your art is in my hands – no, even when I see your art – it becomes mine too. It’s part of me. I put my emotions, my thoughts, my personality in and around it.

And let me tell you something. Art becomes so much more beautiful when it has amassed a variety of emotions, thoughts, and personalities.

 

Stay Positive & Sharing Always Makes It More Valuable

Garth E. Beyer

Too Much Pull

Garth Beyer

To spring forward, you have to be pulled back.

But life is a lot like a rubber band. You pull too much and it snaps.You pull too little and you don’t get anywhere. However, it’s worth noting that by not pulling, you have nothing to show, nothing learned, nothing created.

The point where the analogy ceases is that while you may have one life to live, you do have an extensive supply of rubber bands. It’s better to have a hundred snap than none at all.

Life for most is a lot about finding balance, equivocally, everything in moderation. But you know, life isn’t that simple, so if you’re going to lean towards being someone who stands still or being someone who feels the sting of a snapped rubber band. I think you know the better choice.

The sting is only temporary. The vexation of standing still, that’s eternal.

 

Stay Positive & Remember To Save The Snapped Rubber Bands – it helps

Garth E. Beyer

 

What’s Next For Internet

Garth Beyer

You already know my obsession with questions. (No? click here) So when I was asked a question that I had no immediate answer for, that I had to really sit down and ruminate on, I got excited.

A phenomenal freelancing reporter and great friend of mine, David Douglas, had asked me what I thought was next for Internet. Well, here is my response.

What’s Next For Internet

Better question is what new way can we connect more? People have yet to completely open up.

Since the digital revolution began in the early 90’s, a stigma has grown around face-to-face interaction. Even though we feel more and more connected online, people still have a difficult time connecting in person. Despite this setback, our minds remain open, we’ve become natural learners, and we continue to discover the extent of the simultaneously happening information revolution.

What’s next for the internet is based on our next need, desire, and the demand which I can tell you in a moment. First let’s look at how we started and where we are now.

– We began with individuals creating specific content for small groups.

– Then individuals began creating general content for a general audience.

– Then groups began creating specific content for other similar groups.

– Then we entered the age we are in now – the age of mass: mass groups creating mass content to other mass groups.

With recent years, the internet – side by side with the mass – has developed individuals who are creating specific content to specific groups, essentially connecting, creating tribes.

What’s next for the internet is what will assist us in partnering, grouping, and associating more than ever to create ultimate forms of content. Not just any content – content created for the peculiar, the individualized,  the artists. The internet has provided us unlimited information and it has provided us unlimited connection, but it has yet to harmoniously combine the two.

Of course, it’s not just about creating a medium that synchronizes information and connection, it’s also about creating more new groups to continue the cycle. What comes next won’t be something that can be monopolized when its goal is to continuously reproduce more of its kind.

Internet will have to morph into a medium where small groups get together to build on each others content with the assistance of other groups – not necessarily growing with them because they are focusing on a new idea already, but assisting in their artistic growth. It’s about the associated life in which the goal is to exit, meaning that the goal is to develop a new group, a new tribe.

It’s not just a melting pot of special people and great ideas, it’s artistic alchemy.

 

Stay Positive & What’s Next For Internet Can Be Predicted, What Will Be Produced From It, I Can’t Even Begin To Imagine

Garth E. Beyer

Self-Destruction And The Need For It

Garth Beyer

Unlike most reality shows, Destroy Build Destroy actually sets an extremely positive theme and lesson for those with an open enough mind to see it: monumental creations can be constructed out of the destruction of almost any object.

Take a look at another example: tattooing.

Tattooing, which is a marvelous form of art – yet at the same time, mutilation – is also creation through destruction. The act of being tattooed is destroying your body, your skin. It involves pain, changing an original form, and there is blood (plenty of it) as proof. Yet, after being tattooed, something artistically intrinsic has been printed on your body. Creation through destruction.

We must pay a price for something to be created through destruction. At times it is money, other times it is emotions, personal attachments, relationships, or claimed sentimental objects.

The concept of creation through destruction is clear. If your mind is still open to this theme, can you imagine a way that the destruction of your self could lead to a creation of something greater?

If this concept can be applied to absolutely any object in the world, why wouldn’t it also apply to us, as humans, as people, as moving, being, emotionally thinking living beings.

Can we be destroyed? Yes. But, can we self-destruct? We’re actually pretty good at it.

The real trouble is making it so our self-destruction leads to creation. Most of the time our self-destruction is just that. We will beat ourselves down, criticize our own work, tell ourselves we are not good enough. We will easily toss out our own work, quickly choose someone else before we choose ourselves, we will consciously toss our time away to unproductive matters.

The destroy part, we have that down pat. The creation part though, can use some work. As humans, metaphorically speaking, when our heads get chopped off – or when we chop them off ourselves – we have the ability to grow two back. That involves creation. That involves different perspectives, an open mind, and an incessant need to learn from our mistakes and everything around us.

Contrary to belief, the world is pretty easy on us, especially if we comply, follow orders, and never make a rumpus. In fact, it’s a smooth operation as long as we don’t try to change anything. It’s for this reason that self-destruction is a necessary process for creation, for art, for growth, and most importantly, for experience.

We can let the destruction of our selves ruin us, or we can create something remarkable from it.

 

Stay Positive & Become Part Of The Tribe Of Fireweeds

Garth E. Beyer

For those who don’t know, fireweeds mainly grow only after a forest fire.