Category: Daily Life

Ryan Holiday is the author of Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising. This month he stopped in to Marketing Over Coffee (if you’d prefer to listen to the audio) to talk about his new book and his previous book, Trust Me, I’m Lying.

John:  Give us the elevator pitch on growth hacking. What’s the idea here?

Ryan:  The idea was one morning I was going about my day as a traditional marketer and I sit down, I read this article and the headline is, “Growth Hackers are the New VPs of Marketing.” I’m a VP of Marketing. I’m director of Marketing at American Apparel and I’ve never heard of a growth hacker. I have no idea what it is. But I look at the companies that growth hackers are responsible for – Groupon, Airbnb, DropBox, Facebook, Twitter – a handful of billion dollar brands that were built right in front of us in the last five years, and they didn’t do any traditional marketing. They used a strategy they call growth hacking.

I thought, “What does it mean that these people build billion dollar brands using none of the services that I provide or I pride myself in being good at? Maybe they’re better marketers than me.” I sat down to study what growth hacking is and how it works. The book is a result of those interviews, that research, and trying it myself.

John:  One interesting point – I was talking more about what it isn’t than what it is. Like you said, you were doing VP of Marketing so you have the book of business that you provided, but really it came down to stuff that was testable, tractable, scalable. That was a big three that you threw out there. Basically, the case studies, everything that you’re talking about in the book are people that have taken this minimalist approach. Is that right?

Ryan:  I think so. What growth hacking is at its essence is, let’s say you’re an engineer in the Silicon Valley. Your whole life is designed around rules and languages, and “what you see is what you get” sort of coding mentality – this right brain mentality. Don Draper is not a hero to them. That’s the opposite of what they do, but they still have things they have to promote and they still have to launch startups and get millions of users.

What I think they did right in front of us is basically re-invent marketing because they didn’t like the things that marketing held to be dear, and it turns out that the way of doing it that they came up with may in fact be more effective, more tractable, more efficient, and better than what people like me were trained to do.

John:  That’s true. I noticed at the front of the book you quoted David Ogilvy. For folks that are into marketing, I’m sure that they get that whole idea. Even Ogilvy back in the day was like, “It’s all about sales and it’s about driving the numbers.” He was so huge on direct marketing as being where the future was. I think that’s because like everyone else, he had no idea of what was going to happen with the web and the fact that we’d be applying all this stuff in e-mail and where we go there. You really focus the argument because I think myself – and like yourself as a VP of Marketing – when we hear this growth hacking phrase we think it’s a buzz word. Finally, you put your finger right on it, which is the fact that it ties into product marketing because you have to have product fit for it to work.

The buzz word and the hatred came from the fact that I’ve seen all these people saying, “Oh yeah, what we really need is a growth hacker.” But you know with these companies, they’re never going to change the product. In fact, they would never be doing some of the stunts you talk about especially in “Trust Me, I’m Lying” of setting up fake profiles or really getting to the edge of marketing. They’re just way too conservative for that. It has a stigma and a buzz around it, but again, like I said, by hitting on product marketing you grab me immediately as you were right on the mark with that. So talk about that a little bit, about product fit and how that gets into it.

Ryan:  I think marketers see themselves as being only responsible for marketing. My job is to take your product once it’s finished and get attention for it. That’s how the relationship works. But growth hacking – often case, the designer who made the product is now responsible for launching it. That’s sort of the startup mentality.

There’s no job title. Everyone works. Everyone tries to make this thing a success. They came to it from the other side of the table and I think they were able to realize something that I experienced over the course of my marketing career too many times which is: you can’t market a broken product, and that often times the best marketing decision that you can make is a product development decision.
Instagram is an amazing example of this. It launches as a social network on a geolocation social network called Burbn that you happen to be able to add some photos with filters to. It turned out that that one tiny feature got the overwhelming response.

It wasn’t the social network that anyone liked. They liked this feature, and so they pivoted. They changed the entire company to zoom in on this one feature and that’s what made them a billion dollar company, not what their marketers did.
I think what a growth hacker does is instead of trying to do all this external stuff, what if the best marketing we can do is change, improve, and iterate our product until it has that explosive potential.

John:  You start with a product fit right there. In the book, you jumped to “step two is finding the growth hack,” which is what you’re talking about – finding the thing that makes it spark.

So there is no recipe for this. It’s interesting in that in the past you could just get a marketing professional and you’d be all set, whereas now you need somebody that understands the product and the audience and maybe can code around what needs to be done. It seems like it’s a lot more difficult to find people who can do this now, maybe you can talk about that.

Ryan:  I would say the old model was make a thing, hire a marketer or publicist to get attention for that thing, hope that it’s successful. Rinse and repeat until it is. But the growth hacker mindset I go through these steps in the book, it’s tweak and iterate your product until it has explosive potential. Instead of some major blow-the-doors-off blockbuster launch, it’s “How can we find the core early adopters for this product?”

Uber is a great example of a company that said, “We’re not going to launch nationwide. Let’s start small. Let’s start in San Francisco. Let’s launch it at south by southwest where we brand our core customers.” It’s, “how do you find a small contained group of people or a platform that you can use to bring those people in?”

Another great example of this is PayPal. They didn’t say, “How can we replace credit cards or become the dominant online payments platform?” They said, “A lot of people are using eBay to sell things. What if we insert ourselves into that transaction and add value?” They took advantage of that platform.

Upworthy is another great startup that’s doing millions and millions of pages because they figured out how to master Facebook and the Facebook feed. It’s all about figuring out the platform or the initial trick. By trick I don’t mean deceive people; I just mean the unexpected or unusual way to bring people through the front door.
From there, with your other things – if you’ve built in viral features like a good referral program – you have a way that encourages the network effect. So if your product is better, the more people use it. If you bring in people through a growth hack, then the product is going to get bigger virally because those people are going to want to bring more people in.

The final step that I talk about in the book is the idea of focus on retention rather than acquisition. It’s like saying, “I brought in 1000 people but only 100 of them signed up and became customers. What’s wrong with my landing page? What’s wrong with my product? Why are my users leaving? How do you improve or iterate and tweak the product until that problem goes away?” That four-step cycle is the way that growth hackers think about the world, and I think that’s so much more effective and efficient than just hoping that an article in the New York Times makes you a success, or hoping that ten New York articles in the New York Times will finally make you a success.

John:  They’re going to land TechCrunch and they’ll be great for the first month, and then dry up and go. It’s like any technology shift that people feel is threatening, but the reality is that if you’re doing this right now it’s going to tie you right into both customer service and product marketing and sales. It actually makes you a lot more valuable as a marketer in the mix here.

One question, a throwback. You were talking about at a certain scale, awareness and brand building makes sense, but the first year or two it’s a waste of money. I think there was a quote that was in the book talking about how it’s all about this acquisition and making that happen as a repeatable process. But do you ever feel now that there’s a point where brand awareness does make sense?

Ryan:  Yes, of course. I guess what I’m saying is so much of the marketing advice that people get and study is for whatever reason designed for really big companies. You read something like “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing,” which is a fantastic book and I definitely recommend it, it’s like giving you advice on how one airline beat out another airline. But that’s so far from the reality of where most of us live.
Even in my first book I’m talking about getting attention in doing marketing stunts. For a company that did $700 million in sales and has stores all over the world, it’s not hard for us to be newsworthy because we’re a big company.

But growth hacking is designed for a startup to go from zero users to 10 users to 100 to 100,000. It’s designed to take a project from nothing to something and that’s so much more similar, or more like the situation that most people come in to marketing are in. We’re trying to launch a restaurant, or a podcast, or a blog, or a book, or a startup. We’re trying to just get more attention for ourselves or our personal brand or whatever. We’re trying to go from nothing to something just like these startups are, although the startups try to do it on a much larger scale than we do, but I think their lessons and their innovations are what we should focus on because there’s a lot of value there.

John:  That’s funny. I’ve often said that the biggest mistake a lot of companies make is trying to ape Coca Cola or, like you said, an airline. That’s perfect. Those are not the decisions you need to be making. You’re playing in a different arena completely.

Ryan:  It’s totally apples and oranges, and yet I’m trying to launch this book or do this project and the thinking of the person that’s giving me advice was how to make Visa sales 2% larger, or how Johnson & Johnson can spin off one brand into another brand or whatever. It’s not like they think, “They spent $10 million. I should spend $10,000.” It’s not a matter of scale; it’s a fundamentally different approach. Whereas the startups think, “We’ve got to get people in the door. We didn’t exist yesterday and now we’re open for business. How do I get people to come?”

That’s what I wanted to write this book for. I wanted to take their lessons because look, Facebook went from zero users when it launched in 2004 or 2005, to a billion users in less than ten years. A billion users! That’s insane. And they did it without a marketing team. They had a growth team instead. I wanted this book to be the lessons from those growers and those growth teams. Growth hacking is the philosophy that came out of those experiments.

John:  It’s interesting, too. It’s a Penguin imprint. It’s actually a shorter book, a 50-page read. Is the book itself an experiment? Are you trying anything different with the marketing of this? How’s it all going?

Ryan:  My first book and actually I have another book with Penguin that comes out in May, both of those were sort of the traditionally published book. They’re 300 pages, they took a year to write, and then they took a year to publish after that. That’s how traditional book publishing is done.
But I didn’t want to sit down and write a book about growth hacking which is this thing that’s changing all the time, improving, new factors are introduced, and whatever. I didn’t want to go out into the woods for a year working on this thing. I wanted to get something out quickly. I wanted it to be short. I wanted people to be able to receive it digitally and not have to wait for a printer to spit back many tens of thousands of copies. So what we did with the book was we kept it short. We priced it cheaply, it’s $3. We got it out there fast. Hopefully, if we do do a paperback or if I do an expanded edition or something, I can improve based on their feedback and based on that reader feedback. That is very much the growth hacker mindset, for sure.

John:  That’s cool. Of course, we get the bonus that you were talking about “Trust Me, I’m Lying,” which had come out earlier. We’ve talked for years on this podcast about the way you make arguments, and the shades of meaning, and talking about the difference between persuasion versus manipulation, and that’s a very big deal. But basically, with this book, you just went right to the other side and said, “There’s a whole realm of dirty tricks and interesting things going on here,” and you’ve explained everything that goes on. It’s amazing to read some of the stuff that you’ve done.

The crazy part is I remember seeing some of that stuff that you did in American Apparel go down and now you get the back story on how it all happened and everything that went into that. But set it up for us first. Tell us where that book came from and what it’s done for you.

Ryan:  What I wanted to do in that book is being a marketer for a big, successful company and then a handful of other really controversial clients, that tends to be who I represent, I felt like I was not so much given access, but maybe when I wasn’t supposed to peek behind the curtain and I really saw how the media works, I saw how vicious, competitive, and unscrupulous it really was.

I’m not going to lie. The book is about how I took advantage of that system, thinking that all is fair in love and war, and how I benefited my clients accordingly, but it’s also understanding what the costs are of a media system that will print anything and publish anything and doesn’t care if they’re incorrect, where this self-interest rules the day rather than ethics or the truth.

The book is a very blunt, honest guide to operating in that environment. I wanted it to be a tell-all. I didn’t hold any of my secrets back. Anything that I had done that I thought other people could do or might want to do, I showed exactly how to do it. It was a tell-all, for sure. Naturally that was a big controversey both with marketers who didn’t want me to disclose this information and the media who is fairly embarrassed by a lot of the disclosures that I made.

John:  You never look at the Huffington Post the same way again.

Ryan:  The reality is I haven’t looked at the Huffington Post or Gawker or Business Insider the right way in many years because I’ve seen this stuff before. I just realized “Why am I the only one who was worrying about this? Why am I carrying this burden alone?” I wanted everyone to see it and I hoped that exposing this stuff would lead to some change. I’m not sure that that’s happened, but I feel like I did my duty blowing that whistle.

John:  I would agree. It’s just required reading for anybody in marketing if you’re dealing with a press rumor. You may never want to even be involved in any of this kind of stuff but you’ll greatly benefit from understanding what’s going on behind the scenes and why you are ignored, to be honest. That’s what you’re going to learn from that.
So that’s the books. How about what’s up in the future? What’s in your radar now that you’re looking at and what’s coming next?

Ryan:  I have a marketing company that represents authors and brands. We just worked with Marc Ecko who did a book and IBS Complex Media who we may be advising. I represent a variety of really interesting people that are eager to try new things. It’s going great.

I have another book with Penguin that comes out in May 2014 that will actually be about stoicism, the Roman philosophy. I try to write every day. I write for my site at www.RyanHoliday.net. I’m the media columnist for the New York Observer and I write for Thought Catalog. Those are all places you can check out my stuff if you want. I look forward to talking to everyone.

John:  That sounds great. Again, the book “Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing and Advertising” is available on Amazon. And of course, “Trust Me, I’m Lying,” you can check that out there also. Ryan, thanks for stopping by and talking to us today.

Ryan:  Thanks for having me. This was great.

I was fortunate enough to have a chance to interview Seth Godin about his new book, The Icarus Deception, last month. I’ve had the interview transcribed, check it out below. Note: I’m trying out a new transcription service so if you notice anything out of order below please leave me a comment (I’ll send you a copy of my new book)!

If you’d rather listen you can hear it at Marketing Over Coffee.

JOHN: Welcome to Marketing Over Coffee. I’m John Wall. We have a special holiday gift for you today, a guest we’ve had on the past. He’s written over a dozen books, many of them best sellers, spoken at TED, and is here today to talk about his new book, The Icarus Deception. I’m very happy to welcome Seth Godin. Seth, thanks for coming on today.

SETH: Thank you, sir. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, John.

JOHN: Great. So, the new book is The Icarus Deception. Give us the elevator pitch. What’s the big idea?

SETH: I think it’s a pretty big idea, which is that we all grew up during the Industrial Age. Everyone knows about the Industrial Revolution. It revolutionized the world, invented jobs, created productivity, made us all rich, and now it’s over. And there’s a Post-Industrial Age here now and growing every day. I’m calling it the connection economy. The connection economy is coming to us via the connection revolution.

The important thing to understand is this: we have been brainwashed by eight generations of propaganda into believing things about the world that don’t have to be true. When we start keeping score of things like permission and trust and reputation and connection, many of the things that used to be part of our life—like scarcity, jobs, a career—start to fade and get replaced by something else. That’s uncomfortable for a lot of people. What I wanted to do was, as vividly as I could, paint a picture of the chance of a lifetime, because it’s right here if we want to take advantage of it.

JOHN: Right. You mentioned that the connection economy is at the heart of this. I thought it was interesting. It’s a very human thing. You talked about the assets that matter—trust, permission, remarkability. Is that a major transition point, the fact that it’s more about what you do as a person? Tell us more about the connection economy.

SETH: Well, if you look at it through the lens of industrialization, then what big companies are doing is just say, “Oh, great! I can grab an email address. I can get a Facebook follower. How do I take these tools and go back to making more crap? How do I take advantage of the new marketing to continue making average stuff for average people?”

It goes so much deeper than this. What it’s doing is saying average stuff for average people is no longer a viable marketing strategy. What it’s saying is that slogans and jingles are not a brand. A brand is a set of promises and expectations that an organization needs to keep or it doesn’t keep. It says that owning a building isn’t nearly as important as earning a reputation. When we start keeping score of something different, suddenly the Internet economy makes a lot more sense.

JOHN: Yes. This is a question I want to ask you, something that’s kind of been rattling around in my head. At first, the fear was that this Internet economy was going to destroy everything. You’re making that point pretty clearly. But the thing that’s kind of surprised me, so you have Psy, this artist who’s done this music video and has exploded globally around the world. The question is, there’s all this fear at the beginning of the Internet economy. It was going to blow everything up and it was going to be worse. But is this actually going to be bigger? As this new connection economy grows and all these new opportunities open up, are we actually even more better off? Are we going into an age of prosperity?

SETH: Well, understand that it doesn’t care whether it’s going to be bigger. It just is. We have to start by understanding it doesn’t matter what our opinion is about whether this is good or not. It’s just true.

If you’re a 58-year-old steel worker and you’ve been trained your whole life to do one thing, it’s pretty clear this is bad. If you live in an underprivileged country where, suddenly, you have access to world markets with one click and don’t have to live on $3 a day, it’s pretty clear this is great. There’s going to be a reshuffling. We’re not going to know for 50 years whether this unbalance was something we would have wished for or not.

But the magic here is this: you get to pick about whether you’re going to be defending the status quo in a losing battle, or whether you’re going to jump, shift, and switch sides, that the people who are working at record labels busy suing their biggest fans aren’t going to do as well as Psy is going to do because they’re fighting a rear-guard action that just can’t lead to a happy outcome.

Now, the interesting thing when you bring up Gangnam Style is if his goal is to use this momentary blip to turn around and go back to the old model of selling records, he’s going to fail. What he did was he earned the privilege of talking to a hundred million people. Next time out, what’s he going to do with that? It turns out, if he tries to leverage connection and create abundance through that connection, he can build an entire career on it. But, if he just wants to go back to being this generation’s Monkees, he’s going to fail, because the scarcity that allowed the Monkees to profit for years on television doesn’t exist today.

JOHN: Right, it’s a whole different take. Shifting further, you talked about propaganda and dogma as a big part of this as far as the death of the Industrial Age, that this has been built up around us. You mentioned cottage, cathedral, and castle. Could you talk a little bit about that and propaganda?

SETH: Mythology is the original cultural touchstone. It goes back tens of thousands of years. I took the title “The Icarus Deception” from the story of Icarus. Most of us think we know the story, which is fly too close to the sun and you will get burned, that hubris is a bad thing. But in fact, that’s not what it says if you read the 1850 edition or you go back to what historians said people told each other. In fact, the myth was that Daedalus said to Icarus, “Don’t fly too close to the sun. But also, don’t fly too low. Don’t fly too close to the sea, because if you fly too low, the water in the mist will weigh down your wings and you will surely perish.” Well, that means that someone pushed us to tell our children only half the story. We were pushed to encourage people to fly too low because industrialists want us to fly too low. If the book has only one message that I had to pick, it would be fly closer to the sun.

What we’re doing with the Internet is we’re handing people a microphone. We’re handing them an ability to talk to people who want to be talked to. And yet you’re sitting here doing this generous work of making a podcast, and you’re peers aren’t. They’re just waiting for the phone to ring. And yet, there are 10 million, 20 million active blogs, which means, there are 4 billion people on the Internet who aren’t doing it. And yet, there are millions of people who use Twitter, but the vast majority of Tweeter re-tweets. We’re wasting it. We’re afraid to stand up because we’re afraid that someone’s going to say, “How dare you? What right do you have? What hubris for you to stand up and say you know anything?”

As Brené Brown has talked about, vulnerability then kicks in, which is it is impossible to connect unless you’re open. To be open means being vulnerable to feedback. Vulnerability ignites the enemy of arts and creativity, which is shame. Everyone carries some shame around. We don’t want it activated. We don’t want to be called out for flying too close to the sun. So it’s easier to just hunker down and wait for things to get back to normal.

And so I guess my looping answer to your question is that we need to go back to the original myths, the myths that we passed from one person to another that were basically arguments that we could be like the gods. The only reason myths are interesting to us is that the gods are us. The stories of the gods are stories of what we could do and what we could become.

The Japanese have a term for this, which is “kamiwaza.” “Kamiwaza” means god-like, with no wasted motion, with confidence, and yes, with hubris. And so, when we see a cheetah running through the jungle, we see kamiwaza, because the cheetah could not run any better, any more fluidly, any more perfectly. But when human beings set out to do it, we check ourselves. We hold ourselves back. We imagine that a platform is for other people, not for us, because we haven’t been picked. Oprah didn’t call. Howard Schultz didn’t put us in charge of this steering committee. It turns out that in this new fluid economy, waiting isn’t going to be a particularly productive plan.

JOHN: In the first half of the book, you’re setting up the fact that this opportunity is here. And then you spend a lot of time digging into, okay, so now, what does it take to be an artist and to do this stuff? There’s a whole section talking about grit and what goes into that. It’s kind of funny, I think there’s maybe a generational gap. “Grit” isn’t a term that you hear used as much as maybe a couple of decades back, but I think it’s very relevant. It’s important, especially, talking about perseverance, if you could tell us some more about that.

SETH: Well! You remember that newspaper that they talked about in the comics?

JOHN: Right, exactly! How you could make millions.

SETH: Yes, they never said you could make a lot of money, but they did say, you could get the radio and the radio-controlled airplane and all that other stuff. Grit, it turns out, is something psychologists have been talking about a lot lately. If you do a Google shopping search, you can actually buy grit by the pound. They sell walnut shells that they used for sand blasting and cleaning up stuff. Grit is, yes, that stuff in the spinach, that when you’re eating it gets stuck in your teeth. It is the stuff in carborundum grinding wheels that grinds down the things that are opposed to it.

What we see in successful people is this sort of generous persistence, when we are faced with the initial no, or the third no, or the fifth thing that doesn’t work, people with grit figure out a different way to move forward—not an obnoxious way to move forward but a way to move forward that demonstrates commitment and tenacity. Over and over again, when we hear the stories of the Richard Bransons, the Oprah Winfreys and the less famous people, it’s almost entirely stories of grit.

One of the reasons that lottery winners end up having such miserable lives after they win the lottery is that coming into a whole bunch of money doesn’t give you grit. The money goes away pretty fast because you don’t know what to do when it doesn’t work out the way you hope it will work out.

Grit is a choice. It’s an attitude. It’s not something you’re born with, nor is it something that is given to you. That really excites me because it means that, unlike the Revolution of 1910 or 1880, where it mattered who your father was, it doesn’t matter who you know. It doesn’t matter where you were born if you at least were in a semi-privileged environment. What matters is that you choose to put yourself into this world as a creator, an actor, an artist, a leader. That’s just a choice.

JOHN: You talked about shame and vulnerability. You already touched upon that a bit, because that’s another part of it. But, again, this whole back section of the book is talking about being an artist and how to pursue your craft and put something out there. You have a whole section about 14 real-life stories from artists. In fact, this section is “Think Like an Artist.” Tell us what you’ve learned on that front and what you’re sharing about being an artist.

SETH: I guess later we’re going to talk about the Kickstarter. One of the things I did in the Kickstarter was I wanted to come up with the most absurd level of prize I could. And so I offered five people the chance to not only get all of the loot that I created but to have a paragraph in my book about them.

I didn’t do it because I was craving and trying to raise an extra couple of thousand bucks. I mean, I ended up losing money on the whole Kickstarter anyway. That wasn’t the point. I did it because I wanted to prove that I could take anybody’s story who was successful enough to raise their hand and make it clear that this art is available to all of us. And so I added nine other people to mix in with the five. What you see there, and that was the 14 people, is everyone from the independent software consultant all the way up to people who are running successful enterprises, what they all have in common is that they don’t have anything in common.

That what they have in common is that they have chosen a path as opposed to being told to follow a path. What still happens—and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised after 25 years of doing this—I still see the look in people’s eyes, because what they’re really hoping I will give them is a map. What they’re really hoping for are step-by-step instructions that include the word “easy” and “straightforward.” Here I am, showing up on a regular basis saying “fuzzy,” “difficult,” “hard work,” “simple but not easy.” That goes against everything your parents and your schools and your bosses taught you. So I’m not a particularly good marketer because I’m not selling people what they want. But I’m trying very hard to tell people what I think they need to hear.

JOHN: You mentioned the Kickstarter project. I’m astounded to hear that you lost money in this project, so this is going to be great to talk about. It ties into so much of the stuff you talked about already with the book. But to give everybody some background, here are a few things: We’ve talked about Kickstarter on this show once or twice before, but the idea is it’s an open exchange. You actually go to this website, and people are offering projects of all kinds of different types, and it actually gets crowdfunded. People buy certain levels of packages. If it hits a certain level, the project actually gets done. There has been all kinds of stuff in there, a lot of tech gadgets, roller skates you could put on a camera tripod so you could make a dolly. These are things that normally would be 500 to 1,000 bucks, you could get it for 30 bucks, and things like that get funded.

So for Icarus Deception, you put one up there. I saw it with a $40,000-goal, and you brought in $287,000. I have to say, this is the newest kind of marketing campaign that I’ve seen. I mean, everything was a surprise right down to a box from you that weighs 25 pounds filled with all kinds of stuff. Tell us about that. What have you learned from this? What brought this whole idea about?

SETH: The Kickstarter platform can be used in many different ways. The people who founded the company have a vision of it that I disagree with. They’re changing Kickstarter to make it even more difficult to use than it used to be. The way that most people use, both buyers and sellers, is it’s an interesting new kind of store, the way eBay was an interesting new kind of store. The idea was you can pick a price, whether it’s four dollars got you a four-day preview to read my book, then it would disappear online, all the way up to a thousand bucks, where you would get an LP and eight copies of the book and an illustrated thing, and a signed thing, and a poster thing, et cetera, et cetera.

Most of the successful things on Kickstarter have been people shopping for prizes, funding various levels of stuff, and then, if enough people come through with the funding, the maker is obligated to make and ship it to everyone. And so my friend Amanda Palmer did her record this way. She raised $1.2 million. She broke even on it because she’s basically gave away a year of her life. One of the prizes was that she would come to your house and perform a concert with her band for as many of your friends as you want to invite. Well, you could imagine that if, one day you’re in Munich and then next day you’re in Brazil, that’s a lot of traveling.

With mine, every one of my levels was limited, meaning I wasn’t trying to maximize the revenue from this project. What I was trying to do was maximize the connection. I set out to say, “Can I find 4,000 or 5,000 people who want to come with me on this journey so that I can go about—now this is key—making books for my readers instead of finding readers for my books?” So, once I knew that there were people like you and others who were waiting for me to make something for them, it changes the way you write, and it changes what you build.

I committed from the day we finished it. We basically sold out everything in about six days. My job through the summer was going to be to spend as much money as I could and as much time as I could to make the most delightful package of stuff for my backers that I could, the theory being that, if you’ve got 4,000 or 5,000 people who are delighted, connected, trusting, and in alignment, then the revenue will take care of itself, right? Yes, this project will make money because someone is going to go to a bookstore and buy something. It will make money because my publisher will be delighted. But, I didn’t set out to make a profit from John Wall. I set out to make delight for John Wall.

JOHN: Yes, and you definitely have. Like I said, it was just amazing to see this thing arrive and dig it through. In fact, there’s another book in there, a tome of basically everything, a bunch of stuff rolled up from your blog. I mean, literally, this thing is almost 15 pounds. It’s bigger than a baby. That’s gigantic. And one thing — it’s actually a flipbook, and one side is “this might work,” and then the other side is “this might not work.” That was the one thing that I love. You have a bunch of stories in there about things you’ve done that have failed to spectacular explosions. If you could talk about one or two of those, I think that’s kind of the exciting stuff.

SETH: The book is 850 pages long. We maxed out on the width of the bindery. I would’ve put in more things that failed dismally, but I ran out of space.

Some of the stories I tell in there, I don’t know if actually I put all of these in. I invented the first aquarium that ran on your VHS so that the fish would swim back and forth on your TV, and persuaded the American Airlines to let me run a full-page ad in a magazine. This was when I was 25 years old. They let me run the ad for free, but I had to pay them a commission on every one I sold. I made a deal with myself that if I sold 30 of them at 19.95, I would go ahead and make the video, because I hadn’t filmed that yet. I sold 24, so a deal is a deal. So I sent everyone back their money with a nice note telling them I couldn’t do the project, sorry. And then a month after that, I got 20 more, and then the month — and so I kept sending back the money and disappointing everyone, including American Airlines, because I didn’t have enough gumption to keep going.

I also told a story of — our biggest client was AOL when I had my first Internet company. I will skip most of the details, but the punch line is that in the last conversation I had with the vice president there, when I called to apologize for how completely badly we had screwed up everything and offered to get down on the next plane and fly to Vienna, Virginia to apologize to her face, she said, “If you step foot on this campus, I will have you arrested.” That’s the last time I’ve heard from Audrey.

There’s a long history of funny things in the world, whether they’re blog posts that don’t resonate or books that people don’t want to share. I treasure every one of them, because there is no way I would have been able to touch people the way I’ve touched them if I hadn’t had all these failures along the way.

JOHN: And then a few other books too, one was a project you’ve done with Hugh MacLeod, the V for Vulnerable, formatted like a kid’s book but more for adults.

SETH: Right. It’s actually, the last chapter of The Icarus Deception, which — just to clarify, all these books come out on December 31^st. The last chapter of The Icarus Deception, and I looked at it, it was an Abecedary, an ABC book. And I said, “Wow! Why don’t I make this into an illustrated kids’ book?” because I loved Dr. Seuss. I loved Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb. The Jungian connection we have with the books that our mom read us is really important. So I’m going to try to undo what we learned at our mom’s knee. Maybe I could use the same tactic and the same tool that started all the propaganda. And so I wrote it and did a sketch of every letter, and then sent it off to Hugh for him to make it magical. What I love about this book is that every person I have handed it to has read the entire book while I was sitting there. It has never happened to me before.

JOHN: Wow! Yes, yes. You’re talking about making it accessible and easy to get into. That’s a great point. Okay. The Icarus Deception is the book, available at Amazon.com. Seth had mentioned earlier to me before we got on that there is a deal at 800 CEO Read. You can get a four-pack of that. Another thing, too, of course, you have the Squidoo project. It’s still going on. I notice you had some kind of view, some holiday picks up there. I wanted to ask: one of the things you show is a DAC, Digital Audio Controller… basically a sound card. My question is: are you an audiophile? Are you into sound to that degree?

SETH: Yes. Today is Squidoo’s 7^th anniversary, so thank you for mentioning. It’s been a great ride. As I am talking to you, I’m looking over my shoulder. In my office, I have two of Bob Carver’s new all-tube made in the United States, amplifiers hooked up to a coincident phono preamp, meaning Canada hooked up to a VPI turntable which has Ella and Lewis on it. All of that chain connects to these speakers handmade by a 74-year-old guy in California that are about two feet tall. So, yes, I’m an audiophile, analog in the office, digital at home.

JOHN: Oh, yes. You’re a five star then. I mean, I would presume that you’d be way into it, but yes, you’re goingwhole hog.On that note, then we have to… just a quick remembrance for Dave Brubeck, who passed away just a few days ago.

SETH: Yes. I was listening to Dave last night. I almost missed a conference call because I was listening to it in such volume. The thing that I would say about anyone who’s thinking about being an audiophile is there’s a website called Audiogon, A-U-D-I-O-G-O-N, no E at the end. It’s filled with people who have more money than sense. What they do is they buy the latest stereo stuff. And then, six months later, when they want the new stuff, they have to get rid of the old stuff. They sell it at two-thirds less than it costs. So it’s like an eBay for high-end stuff. If you’re careful and good, you can buy stuff one day and sell it for the same price nine months later. And so you can have a stereo habit for free.

JOHN: Oh, that’s a wonderful tip. Yes, I will definitely take you up on that. I have to check that out. There’s a few other audiophile blogs, I’ll throw in a couple of links when we throw the show notes up there.

Okay. And then one thing, I did notice on Amazon, you also have another book coming out, Watcha Gonna Do with That Duck? Now, I get the impression that there’s a smaller version of this behemoth that’s been dropped on me.

SETH: Yes, smaller is an interesting relative term. It’s still the biggest book I’ve ever sold in a bookstore. It’s 650 pages, but it’s 17 pounds lighter than the book I sent you. It doesn’t have colored illustrations, but it has in it hundreds and hundreds of past blog posts.

The reason that it’s worth mentioning is because of the title blog post, “Watcha Gonna Do With that Duck?” It’s one of my favorites. The post is very short. Basically, it says that you probably know lots of people who spend their day getting all their ducks in a row, which is fine, but what I’m really interested in is what are you going to do with that duck? The thing about your work and the work of other people who have been shining a light online for free about what’s going and what’s happening is many of our readers and listeners are waiting to get all their ducks in a row. We’re only, as we record this, a week or two away from New Year, and I guess it’s time to stop collecting ducks and start shipping art. The thing that I most want from my readers is not for them to go buy a lot of books but for them to go make a ruckus. This is the moment. It’s not going to get any easier. It’s not going to get any more leveraged than it is right now. We need to not have another meeting and not to have another planning committee. We need to actually connect and ship.

JOHN: All right. That’s a great message for folks to kick off for the New Year. Seth Godin, we appreciate you coming to take time to talk us today. Thanks for being on the show.

SETH: Thank you, John. It’s always a pleasure.