Our Attempt to Build a Product that Doesn’t Require “Selling”
This is article #6 of “180 Days to Startup” series documenting my entrepreneur journey. In case you want to start from the beginning, please click HERE to the first article.
I am a terrible salesperson. To be more specific, I am a terrible salesperson when the product I am trying to sell has little to no differentiation with other competitors. I can work with products that have an indirect or replacement advantage (e.g. Facebook vs Twitter), just not a direct competition (e.g. one generic brand vs another generic brand).
One of my all-time favorite business books is Peter Thiel’s “Zero to One”. One of the most impactful quotes for me was…
“If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution.”
I don’t think Peter necessarily means that a great product doesn’t need any advertisement, sales team, or distribution channel. My take is that a truly unique product needs to start by solving a unique problem for a niche market. A product like that just needs to get the word out before it goes viral in the niche. Once a customer understands it’s superiority over existing options, they will come back for more.
This leads me to Peter’s next statements…
“Creative Monopoly means new products that benefit everybody and sustainable profits for the creator. Competition means no profits for anybody, no meaningful differentiation, and a struggle for survival.”
I currently work full time in the construction material industry as a Product Marketing Manager. My highest growth product line is a brand of premium fastener. When I first started, I didn’t immediately understand the value proposition of these screws. I just thought that a screw is a screw. It was during a demonstration for a professional deck builder that my perception started to turn. The moment that this professional guy tried these screws out, his eyes lit up and was surprised at how easy it was to use. This is a guy that uses thousands of screws every week and he commented that our fastener is far superior from what he was using for decades. He took some sample and most likely became a loyal customer like thousands of other contractors. In the past 7 years, the line had double-digit revenue growth year-over-year. It was crazy how many of these premium screws we were selling. We had a robust distribution channel as everyone wanted to sell these. Any new competition just couldn’t match up to us. We didn’t need a crazy sales pitch, making unrealistic promises, or crazy discount to attract new users. We didn’t struggle to survive, we were thriving far beyond our expectation. While the industry is different, but the business concept is the same. We want to build Nodis.io into a product that doesn’t require selling!
This leads to my third favorite quote from the book…
“The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.”
It’s unfortunate that people constantly live in the fear technology will eliminate thousands of jobs. It seems that tech companies constantly over-emphasize the power of technology to make businesses more efficient and profitable (meaning less staff). Truly valuable businesses should aim at the betterment of the society. Profitability should only be one of the bottom line and not the ONLY bottom line. Customers’ needs NEED to be the center of our development.
Nodis.io
The product enables small businesses to post a Challenge on Nodis.io for people to participate. Once completed, participants can submit a proof of completion. The approval process is done by all members on Nodis.io in the form of a vote.
Participants will receive reward tokens for approved submissions. Voters of the majority side will also be rewarded with lesser amount of tokens for contributing. Tokens can exchange for product or service vouchers and redeemable at the store.
This whole process increases awareness, customer engagement, and traffic to the businesses that posted the Challenge. Best of all, business is only required to list vouchers for exchange. This gives utility for the tokens and completes the marketing cycle.
Note that the community voting mechanism is the main reason why we are using the blokchchain as it is perfect for consensus gathering in a transparent and immutable way. See my previous article in more justification of this decision.
By giving small business an interactive way to gain exposure and engage local communities, we can potentially give the Davids of the retail/restaurants/cafe industry a sling-shot type of focused marketing tool to battle against the big franchise Goliaths. The following 3 core principals and goals are baked into our development to help us achieving that:
- Find a problem that no one (or at least very few people) are trying to solve — helping small businesses with little marketing budget and expertise to have consistent and long term online exposure
- A complimentary product that can benefit customers — Nodis.io is not trying to compete with Facebook and other social media giants nor is it competing against Groupon and Ritual-type of services. It simply offers an extra customer engagement channel at practically zero cost to start. A Challenge can actually work in conjunction with the social media sites. For an example, it can be something like “take a selfie in front of my store and share it on our Instagram”.
- Blockchain is a background technology that is core to the product but does not need to be the center of focus — Nope, we do not want to build our product based on hype. We want to utilized the decentralization of blockchain on our voting mechanism. This automates the submission validation process so small business owners don’t have to do it.
I personally took a vacation week from my 9–5 job and visited 150+ small businesses with our prototype. The response was overwhelmingly positive with 60% decision makers saying they would like to try the product out when it’s launched. With the research we did in our past and the positive feedback from real businesses, we believe that we are onto something both unique and valuable.
We also believe we are on track to create a product that doesn’t require selling but just needs to be seen.
In my next article 2 weeks from now, I want to switch gear and talk in more detail about our Nodis token. More specifically, the tokenomics of our product and how we are positioning our cryptocurrency.
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