The Stupidly Simple Way To Create Products That People Want To Buy

The lean startup movement has screwed entrepreneurs over.

It told wannabe entrepreneurs that they need to validate their product ideas by gauging interest in it by speaking to potential customers, creating landing pages, collecting email addresses etc.

The problem is, this is a big fat waste of time.

How many times do founders validate their business ideas by collecting email addresses and speaking to people who tell them they love it, only to find out months later come launch day that nobody wants to buy?

All of the time!

It happens with depressing regularity.

Thankfully there is no need to waste time trying to validate your product ideas.

There's a MUCH more effective way to guarantee that the product that you build is one that your target audience WILL BUY.

Create A Product With Existing Demand

There's a much simpler way to go about this whole entrepreneurship business.

Instead of trying to come up with a brand new product idea for a brand new problem (which results in failure 99.9% of the time), just copy existing product ideas and problems.

These products have existing demand - people are already buying them.

As such, they are already validated.

Instead of having to waste time trying to validate whether or not there is demand for a product, you can now just jump straight into actually building and growing a business.

"But Copying Is Wrong"

You need to drop this mentality if you want to succeed.

Literally every single successful product you see in the world is derived from some other successful product.

Take Apple for example - the most successful and profitable company in history.

It is lauded as an innovator and a category creator.

But that's BS.

Every product that Apple built already had existing demand.

Apple wasn’t the first to create and sell computers to mass- market consumers.

Nor was it the first business to create and sell smartphones – the very popular Blackberry existed long before the iPhone.

iTunes was not the first digital music store – Napster beat them to that.

Same for the App Store – Club Nokia was very popular before the App Store was invented.

Nor was the Apple iWatch the first smartwatch. Samsung, Sony and many other companies beat them to it.

Copying Correctly

Of course there's a right way and a wrong way to go about this.

Blindly copying a product/business is not going to get you anywhere.

You need to find some way of convincing the target audience that they should buy your solution instead of the existing ones that you copied.

The traditional way to do this is to build a better version of the product that you copy.

If you've already created a product, then this is probably what you have done.

But "better" is often completely subjective.

And super difficult to achieve... as the old saying goes - to do this it needs to be 10x better than the alternatives.

But very few founders are able to make a product that is 10x better/cheaper/faster/easier etc.

It's why 90% of startups fail.

What's more, even if you are able to create a far superior solution, it won't be very long before competitors copy it and nullify that competitive advantage.

Thankfully there's actually a far easier way to do this.

Not Better - Different

Don't try to create a better solution.

Create a different one - put your own unique spin on the product you're copying.

This is a hell of a lot easier and doable than trying to make a product 10X better/cheaper/faster etc.

However, there's a right and wrong way to do this.

Just randomly picking a way to differentiate your product without any idea of how it will convince potential customers to buy is useless.

This kind of approach leads to founders doing silly things like picking a fox as their mascot and thinking that it makes their business and product different because they are "fun". (Yes, this is a real example).

Nobody is buying a solution from one company and not its competitors (especially in a B2B context) because it is a "fun" brand.

No, you need to differentiate your product in a meaningful way - in a way that your target audience finds valuable enough to buy.

But how?

Asking them what features are missing from existing solution SEEMS like the best approach but it rarely works out.

Why?

For the simple reason that existing companies selling that product aren't stupid - they've already done that and made the improvements.

As a result, it's going to be very difficult to find a meaningful differentiation that existing competitors haven't already added to their product and business.

However, there's one area that you can ALWAYS differentiate your business and product with.

And that is the WAY that your target audience is going about achieving their most desirable outcome.

You see, your target audience will be all taking a similar approach to reaching their most desirable outcome and they will be buying solutions that help them to do that.

And your competitors will almost always ALL be aligned with this approach - meaning that they support and agree with it.

And this gives you, regardless of what industry you are in and who you are selling to, an opportunity to differentiate your business and product.

By creating a brand new approach to achieve their most desirable outcome, and then specifically adapting your product to being a tool to help them implement that new approach, you'll have created meaningful differentiation for your business and product - differentiation that competitors cannot copy.

Let's look at an example to demonstrate what I mean.

Example - YNAB

You Need A Budget (YNAB) is a personal budgeting software company founded by Jesse Mecham and his wife in 2004.

Even back then, the personal budgeting software category was packed with competitors with deep pockets who had been selling budgeting software for a very long time.

As a result, the improvements to the personal budgeting software had already been made long before YNAB was launched.

Building a 10x better product was therefore virtually impossible.

Of course this doesn't mean that there were no improvements to be made at all, but finding those improvements that consumers were willing to pay for would have been a very difficult task for YNAB.

What's more, if even they had found improvements to make to the product that consumers were willing to pay for, that competitive advantage wouldn't have lasted very long as their competitors (with all the resources available to them) would have quickly copied it.

So, the only way that Jesse had a chance to compete in a competitive market was to build a differentiated solution.

But, again, like product improvements, all of the meaningful ways to differentiate the product had already been done by the existing companies in the market long ago.

However, as already mentioned, nobody thinks to differentiate through approaches and methodologies and this was also the case for the personal budgeting software market.

Consumers all pretty much managed their budgets in the same way and personal budgeting software companies did little to nothing to dissuade them from doing so or challenge the effectiveness of this approach.

In other words, consumers all took one approach to managing their budgets and personal budgeting software allowed them to do this approach (or at least didn't stop them from doing so).

As a result there was an untapped opportunity (as there always is in every industry and for every product) to differentiate a personal budgeting software by creating a whole new approach to managing a personal budget.

And that's exactly what Jesse and his wife did.

They created a new methodology about how best to manage a personal budget - one that used 4 rules that people must follow in order to manage their household budget correctly.

They then built a basic spreadsheet that helped people manage their budget in accordance with these 4 rules.

This was their initial product and they were very quickly making 6 figures selling it and then turned that basic spreadsheet into a fully-fledged SaaS solution that has turned their small startup into a highly successful business.

Functionality wise there is nothing that separates YNAB from solutions like Mint. They do the same thing.

The only difference is that YNAB is specifically designed to help believers in the YNAB methodology to implement it.

And this gives YNAB two levels of meaningful differentiation - not only is their product actually different from everybody else's, but it's different in a way that competitors cannot copy.

Why can it not be copied?

Because YNAB's entire brand identity is based upon the methodology that they sell.

The only people that are going to buy YNAB's product are those that believe in YNAB's four rule approach to personal budgeting.

Other personal budgeting companies could certainly copy YNAB's product and its 4 rule methodology but they will sacrifice their own differentiation to do so.

What's more, it won't work because, by creating this approach themselves, YNAB is now the leading authority on the topic and we buy from those who we see as the leading authority on a topic.

Those who buy from YNAB are not just wanting a tool to help them implement the 4 rules, but also to have access to the company that created those four rules and are therefore best positioned to further help them do so with advice and help.

How To Do This Yourself

This way of differentiating a product in a crowded market can be (and has been) done by all types of businesses of all shapes and sizes.

It can be done when you don't have a product (as we've seen YNAB do) and it can also be done when you already have a product and are looking to differentiate it.

Now, of course, the key to making this work is being able to effectively convince the target audience that they need to adopt the new belief.

YNAB's differentiation would be meaningless if it wasn't able to convince its target audience that it needed to adopt its new approach to managing a budget.

However, YNAB was able to easily convince its target audience to adopt its methodology because its methodology was also a very specific belief system that I call a BLUNT belief.

BLUNT is a mnemonic that sums up the characteristics of this specific belief system.

Brand new - the 4 rules of YNAB's methodology were brand new
Leading - they led back to its solution only
Unfamiliar - tied into an element of unfamiliarity in the target audience's lives
No product required - didn't need to buy YNAB's product to use the 4 rules
Traction - the product YNAB sold had existing demand

All of these characteristics combined make it so that the target audience is easily persuaded to adopt and implement the belief system.

If you want to learn how to create differentiation this way and grow your business then check out www.thebluntmethod.com.

There you'll get access to:

1. A full explanation of this growth strategy, how it works and all the benefits
2. Free case studies of startups companies that have used this approach to grow
3. Details of exactly how to create a BLUNT belief for your business/product/idea regardless of what it is