Mel,
A Roundtable member recently asked me what he would need to do for me to be interested in taking equity in his company.
So we started talking about his competitive advantage.
Right now his edge is:
He's a more diligent direct marketer and business manager than his competitors.
20 years ago that was enough.
As the late great Gary Halbert once said, "There's no business problem that can't be solved by a superior sales letter."
Do 1% better than anyone else at turning clicks into customers, and you were unstoppable.
The game has changed.
I told him, "Now you need to provide a decisively different customer experience based on a fundamental improvement you've made to the business process."
In other words, you can't simply dress it up the way marketers are wont to do.
He has to build something sustainably, demonstrably different.
He can; he knows more or less exactly what needs to be done; and it is doable. I believe he will do it.
Frankly, if he doesn't... somebody else will.
The most important thing about the iPad and the iPhone isn't the devices themselves. Nor is it even the fact that Apple has commercialized the most addictive product in the history of man—surpassing even cigarettes and heroin.
(At best, the drug dealers could only interest a tiny percentage of citizens in shooting smack. Apple has a million customers who, in theory, could not possibly afford an $800 telephone.)
No, the most important thing about the iPad and the iPhone is that they dramatically reduce peoples' patience for any kind of complexity or bureaucracy.
If it's possible to make something push-button simple, then the marketplace will not long tolerate anything less.
That's why Uber is making "road pizza" out of the taxi industry.
It's why Amazon is dismantling retail brick by brick.
And it's the reason why in Roundtable we ask questions like:
What is the nasty, messy, bleeding-neck problem in YOUR market that you're uniquely equipped to solve?
And how can you take that hideous complexity and whisk it behind the curtain of a "push-button simple" solution... one that's so beautiful and elegant that your customers can't imagine their lives without it?
Gary Halbert was wrong—superior sales letters don't fix these kinds of problems.
What does?
Wolverine entrepreneurs with the courage to sink their teeth into the tough hide of their market's most unsolvable problems—and with the help and support of their peers, bring those problems to their knees.
The entrepreneurs who make buying cars or hiring gardeners or boarding cruise ships in Antarctica as easy as tapping a button—those entrepreneurs will make bloody fortunes.
They will be the 10% who own 90% of the money.
These are the sorts of reasons why people will pay $60 million to buy your company.
Better marketing only goes so far.
Fix problems at their core and you will be wealthy indeed.
Carpe Diem,
Perry Marshall
PS: If you think you've got what it takes to be a part of Roundtable, we're now accepting applications for Roundtable 2, which begins in just a few months. Contact Tiffany@PerryMarshall.com to get started.
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