The End Goal

For many entrepreneurs, including myself, the goal and plan is simple:

I am going to build an enabling product that changes the world and a successful business around it.

The hard part is doing it obviously!

The best way to build a successful product and company is by building a mob following and a community of advocates around your company, not just around your product. There are lots of great ideas around how to accomplish this and why you need to, I am not going to dive into this here

Start a Revolution

Developing a community driven company based on an enabling product is synonymous with sparking and growing a revolution (stay with me here):

• At the center is a visionary that thinks things don’t have to be and should not be how they currently are — and has a vision of how things should be
• The first goal of this visionary is to build his inner circle of passionate followers to spread the word and support the vision
• Then, it is all about building momentum and scaling the mob!
• Not only is the goal of the visionary to break down the current way things work, but also to build something better in its place (like a successful new business)

Start with the Core Torch Bearers

A company that focuses on building an external mob of followers, but doesn’t have full buy-in from its team members will have trouble in the long run. No matter how good the message is, eventually it will be overshadowed by the doubt of the team telling the story.

The first step as a visionary is to grow your inner circle the right way — with passionate believers.

If your team members are your first brand advocates, the feeling and passion will be contagious not only to future team members — but also to customers.

It all Starts with Company Culture

Company culture and your brand personality all starts with the founders and grows through leadership and salesmanship. These things spark the interest and passion in the core team members. Converting this seed of fire into a long burning passion and successful company culture requires transparency, quality team selection, and a distributed equity stake.

Transparency

Everything from the company vision, to fundraising details, to founder compensation should be open. This builds trust and encourages creativity (believe it or not sometimes the design team will have some great insight on marketing positioning, etc). The only place I draw the line is individual team member financial compensation.

Quality Team Selection

I am not going to say ‘hire rockstars’ here. On-board team members that are great at what they do, well rounded, self-managing, and most importantly that are bought into the vision.

Distributed Equity Stake

There is no better way to keep team members motivated than giving them the opportunity to earn a ‘piece of the pie.’ They will naturally want to grow that piece, and therefore the whole pie.

Focus on building your mob within your own team first, then growing the mob to your customers and brand advocates will be natural!

I am cofounder of Spectafy, learn more about me at watsonei.com.

I’d love to hear from you on twitter and also would appreciate a recommend below.