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How To Find Business Ideas That Are Fun And Profitable

We all want to work on cool, exciting ideas.

But it always seems that the ideas that are the most exciting have the least commercial potential. And the most commercially viable ones are those most likely to bore you half to death.

What should you do then? Sacrifice fun for money? Or wait around till you can find that magic combination of commercial viability and fun (something that might never happen)?

Fortunately, you don’t have to do either. You can’t make a non-commercially viable but fun idea profitable, but you can always make a boring but commercially viable idea much more exciting and interesting for both you and your potential customers.

Here's How

If your business is to succeed, you’re going to be spending a lot of time marketing. And here lies the opportunity. You won’t necessarily be able to make the process of building the product fun, but you can definitely make the marketing fun.

And you do that by not selling your product.

In 1999, a startup called Salesforce launched its Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution.

Now, CRM software is boring. At least it would be had Salesforce sold its product - features, benefits, ROI…yawn.

Instead, Salesforce sold what I call a BLUNT belief, a belief made up of five characteristics summed up in the mnemonic BLUNT. That belief? NO SOFTWARE.

For reasons too long to elaborate in this post, this not only made Salesforce’s marketing so much more effective than if they had sold their CRM solution (and is the reason Salesforce went from a small CRM upstart to an industry giant) but also made their marketing & sales so much more fun and interesting to both Benioff and his customers.

How?

Because, instead of talking about the features and benefits of their CRM, Salesforce talked about how traditional software needed to be destroyed. They picketed competitor’s conferences with NO SOFTWARE signs, they ran parties where attendees could destroy traditional software brands with mallets in a game of whack-a-mole.

Now, you don't have to go as far as Salesforce, but the beauty of this approach is that it gives you the ability to have as much fun with it as you want whilst also being extremely effective. And that, ultimately, is the most important thing. It's easy to have fun with marketing, but it has got to be effective too.

And Salesforce isn't the only one...

  • Gym memberships are boring, but CrossFit made it fun by selling a BLUNT belief around a brand-new way to get fit.
  • Internet marketing software is boring but HubSpot made it fun by selling a BLUNT belief about a new way to market called inbound marketing.
  • Computers and printers are boring, but Apple made it fun by selling a BLUNT belief about the need to be creative.

But I'm just a small startup with no product/an MVP

With the exception of Apple, all the companies I’ve just mentioned started selling a BLUNT belief from the very beginning when they were small startups:

Salesforce started selling a BLUNT belief right from day 1 when they were a small startup with zero customers. HubSpot started selling its BLUNT belief after one year with a few customers and a low level of revenue. CrossFit started selling theirs when it was just founder Greg Glassman traveling around local gyms teaching classes.

But I don't want to become a big corporation

Although the companies I’ve just mentioned have, by selling a BLUNT belief, become big corporations with hundreds of millions (and billions in some cases) in revenue, it’s not a necessary or automatic outcome of it.

This strategy, what I call The BLUNT Method, has been used by smaller lifestyle businesses to great success as well. One-man operations like The Bullet Journal (which sells notepads, an online course, and an application) have all used this strategy to great success (both achieving roughly $8 million in annual at the time of writing) whilst maintaining their small size.

I don't have funding/VC money

Neither did CrossFit.

Nor did The Bullet Journal.

Nor have many others.

It works both with and without funding.

Want To Learn More About The BLUNT Method?

  1. Follow me on IndieHackers to be notified when I post more content about selling a BLUNT belief.
  2. Visit www.thebluntmethod.com to pick up a copy of the book that explains this strategy in detail, why it's so effective, and exactly how to implement it in your business (from belief creation to marketing it).
  1. 1

    Because, instead of talking about the features and benefits of their CRM, Salesforce talked about how traditional software needed to be destroyed. They picketed competitor’s conferences with NO SOFTWARE signs, they ran parties where attendees could destroy traditional software brands with mallets in a game of whack-a-mole.

    This is an excellent point. The best marketing is memorable, and to be memorable you need to do something that gets peoples attention, that often involves being controversial in some way. Picking your competitors is hilarious, and I'm sure it was great PR. They probably got a lot of people asking, "whats Salesforce?" after going with that approach. The idea of hosting parties is also underrated, most software companies like to play it safe, but to stand out you need to be bold sometimes, so Marc Beinoff and SFDC deserves their success. They took a risk and it paid off.

    1. 1

      Thanks for the comment. Absolutely, though it's not absolutely necessary to be as aggressively controversial as Salesforce.

      Salesforce was because it was founder Marc Benioff's nature to be like that. However HubSpot's founders (Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan) are not at all like that, hence their marketing was not quite so 'aggressive' so to speak.

      Ultimately the best way to describe it would be contrarian. By selling a BLUNT belief they were taking a contrarian position to the established belief in the marketplace and this got them a lot of attention. The aggressively 'negative' marketing strategy just amplified it :-)

  2. 1

    Nice post, thanks for sharing! What does the mnemonic BLUNT stand for?

    1. 1

      Hey, thanks for reading!

      The mnemonic explanation & more details can be found here: https://thebluntmethod.com/

      But here's the info here anyway :-) :

      Brand New - the belief is brand new to its target audience
      Leading - it leads back to one company's solution only (the company that sells the belief)
      Unfamiliar - it introduces an element of unfamiliarity into the target audience's life
      No Product Required - it doesn't require a product to implement
      Traction - the product the company sells already has existing demand

      Cheers

      Chris

      1. 1

        No Product Required? Ok. So you create a “want” before you develop the product?

        1. 2

          Hi Steve,

          In simple terms yes.

          Essentially it means that the belief can be implemented without needing to buy a product. You can do implement the CrossFit belief in your life (and do the workouts) without ever buying a CrossFit gym membership. You can implement the You Need A Budget belief and methodology without being their solution. You can implement inbound marketing without buying from HubSpot. For reasons I explain in the book, this actually makes it more likely for believers to buy the solution.

          Best

          Chris

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