Gentlemen’s Agreement 🤝🏻

I need a favor from you. Every week I spend several hours crafting this email to give you entirely for free. Banger, after banger. Except it’s not actually free.

I love doing this, but I also love seeing this grow (You might say I’m flawed. But you’re not my therapist). To keep this free it would mean the world to me, and my ego, if you shared this with just 1 person who you think would also like this.

They can subscribe using this link here 🙌🏻

Ok now onto that good good…

Distribution > Product

You can have have a bad product and still sell the shit out of it of you know how to sell it.

Recently I’ve been real interested marketing and growth strategies. It’s the jet fuel behind what enables products to take off. I’ve ended up down some rabbits holes for how things grow and became successful.

Today I’m going to give you a peek down one of those holes (lol).

I’ve had dozens of ideas for products I wanted to make. Some of those mid ideas include:

• AI for medical insurance billing

• App for making friends in a new city

• Cold plunges for corporate retreats

• A yerba mate company

The success of it doesn’t come how to how good or bad of an idea that it is. It can break down into three things

1. How you get it in front of the people that you want to sell to?

2. Can you convince people they need to buy this?

3. Do you have a good product?

3 good ways to launch and grow a product.

1. Find a growth engine and sell where all the eyeballs are already going (ex. TikTok)

2. Create an audience in a niche. Built trust. Understand audience problems. Then, create product for that audience.

3. Creator led businesses

Creator led business is the most interesting and where I see a lot of product strategy shifting to. Let me explain:

Let me ask you… have you heard of:

• Mate Factor

• STYRKR

• Moerie

• Habitify

Didn’t think so. They’re all small companies that sell decent products. They just don’t have the distribution to get to the next level.

You might recognize some of these. The exact same products, but with big figures backing them

• Mateina —> Andrew Huberman

• Divi —> Dani Austin

• Atomic Habits App: Atoms —> James Clear

• Prime Energy —> Logan Paul + KSI

Mateina has been around for over 5 years. Just this year though they announced a partnership with Andrew Huberman.

Divi was started by Dani Austin, an influencer mom who was struggling with hair loss.

James Clear wrote the atomic habits book, started a newsletter, and then launched the atomic habits app.

Prime was started by two influencers, they have 40M followers on instagram, combined. Distribution fixed. There’s already hundreds of energy drinks out there. They already had the eyeballs.

The New Trend

The theme I see here over and over (and over) again is: an unfair advantage for the success if a product is already having large (or valuable) distribution. Then you deliver a product to the audience.

What I’m taking away from this is. In order to successfully kick off a bootstrapped content led business you need to have 3 things:

1. Access to your customers and understand their problems (distribution)

2. Loyalty and trust with those users.

3. Product-content fit

I think this is where things are shifting. The way things used to be was products and companies would partner with people of influence such as athletes, movies starts, and musicians. They would offer some portion of affiliate revenue or lump sum to get them to talk about those products and promote them. I’m seeing a shift away from that and towards a tweaked model.

Now, entrepreneurs or small companies are approaching people of influence. They’re proposing that the create a product together that solves their follower’s problems, OR they have a product that already does that.

Where things are changing is the agreement. Instead of providing a lump sump of sponsorship cash. The creators get equity in the business. They own the success of the product and the upside of their work.

Instead of a $10M business and a $100K partnership. The creator gets 5% of the business and gets to is motivated to grow this to a $300M business. (That’s way more than $100k 😉)

What’s the takeaway here?

Increase your odds of successfully starting a business:

Build an audience, then trust, then a product for that audience.

Let me know where else you have seen this!

You’re Awesome,

Jared

TikTok Bet Update:

Follower Count.

Ellie: 4,685

Me: 1,067

It’s looking like I’m about to have to hike 17 miles across SF.

I Dig So You Don’t Have To

1 Set:

2 IDs:

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