Dan Martell - January 23, 2017


How To Choose An Idea If The Solution Already Exists


Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

201.04562

Word count

1,269

Sentence count

75

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

If you think you can t start a company because it exists, but you're passionate about it, this episode is for you. In this episode, learn why you should choose an idea that already exists and how to compete in an existing market.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
00:00:00.000 Name me a company, name me a big company.
00:00:03.500 Boom, Dropbox. 0.99
00:00:05.000 First company to have online file storage?
00:00:07.200 Nope.
00:00:08.300 Name me a company.
00:00:09.500 Yahoo.
00:00:10.500 Yahoo, first company to do search online?
00:00:12.800 Nope.
00:00:14.300 I mean, there's like every, there's literally
00:00:17.200 from car rental companies to airlines to whatever
00:00:20.800 and why do you stop yourself from getting started?
00:00:25.000 Just, oh somebody's already doing this,
00:00:26.700 so I'm just gonna, I'm gonna sit back.
00:00:28.200 No, no, that's what I want to share today.
00:00:39.440 How to choose an idea that already exists
00:00:42.140 if you are an entrepreneur starting off
00:00:44.620 or maybe you've built a bunch of companies
00:00:46.360 and you're now ready to look at different ideas
00:00:48.520 that you have around your passion
00:00:50.220 and you went out to the market and you did some research
00:00:52.600 and you came back and realized that,
00:00:54.120 oh, there's somebody already doing this.
00:00:55.560 This video is for you.
00:00:56.960 Do not stop watching this.
00:00:58.520 I need to solve, it's not even gonna solve.
00:01:00.760 I need to answer this question finally for all.
00:01:04.000 It's going down, all right?
00:01:06.240 Here's the deal.
00:01:07.780 If you approach business where you believe
00:01:11.040 that if something already exists that you can't start it, 0.94
00:01:13.920 that is the worst ridiculous idea. 0.75
00:01:15.840 And I'm gonna prove it to you. 0.99
00:01:16.820 I have several companies that you use every day
00:01:20.560 that when you think about it,
00:01:21.920 there was already an existing solution out there
00:01:24.060 kinda like theirs, you know?
00:01:25.320 When I started Flowtown, it was a social media email
00:01:28.220 marketing tool, there was a company called Rapleaf
00:01:30.660 that already exists that had the technology that was doing 0.79
00:01:34.100 the one aspect of what we were doing and if we would have
00:01:37.200 just stopped and said, oh, Rapleaf's doing it.
00:01:39.040 We can't build a company around that.
00:01:40.240 We would have never built Flowtown.
00:01:41.540 That is just crazy.
00:01:42.840 You know what's funny is we ended up raising money
00:01:45.500 from investors and Oren, the founder of Rapleaf,
00:01:48.480 actually invested in Flowtown.
00:01:50.080 So the possibilities are crazy.
00:01:52.680 I mean, even Clarity.fm, my previous company,
00:01:55.480 was an expert network for entrepreneurs
00:01:56.880 to get advice over the phone.
00:01:58.780 Were there other people already doing this?
00:02:00.680 Absolutely, Cora was doing this with chat.
00:02:02.780 There was people doing this with video.
00:02:04.580 I mean, I literally have an Evernote file.
00:02:06.980 When we launched the company, people were like,
00:02:08.280 have you heard of this company?
00:02:09.080 Have you heard of this company?
00:02:10.080 I have 150 different companies over the last seven years
00:02:13.880 that had started, failed, were existing, et cetera.
00:02:16.580 Just Answers.com, come on, guys.
00:02:19.080 This is, if you think you can't start a company
00:02:21.380 because it exists, but you're passionate about it,
00:02:23.440 that's what I wanna share with you in this video.
00:02:25.260 Think about this, Stripe.com, transactions.
00:02:28.280 I don't know if you know about them,
00:02:29.460 but there was PayPal, there was Braintree,
00:02:31.620 there was a ton of other companies, Authorize.net,
00:02:34.460 that existed way before Stripe,
00:02:36.320 but the two brothers came together,
00:02:38.460 the Collision brothers, and approached the business
00:02:41.400 in the way I'm gonna share with you guys today.
00:02:43.100 Same thing, I mean, Airbnb, have you ever heard of VRBO?
00:02:46.500 Have you ever heard of HomeAway?
00:02:47.640 Have you ever heard of Craigslist?
00:02:49.640 All of these solutions existed before airbedandbreakfast.com.
00:02:53.740 Yeah, that was the full name
00:02:55.240 when Joe O'Brien started the company.
00:02:57.020 It existed, but they decided to approach it anyway.
00:02:59.420 So, now that I put that to rest,
00:03:01.780 I'm gonna share with you guys how to compete
00:03:03.320 in an existing market.
00:03:04.260 Here's the deal, you need to have a unique product hook.
00:03:07.700 Like, if you go to the market,
00:03:09.160 if you look at the existing solutions,
00:03:10.600 you gotta figure out what's the angle
00:03:12.820 that I'm gonna take to be able to provide a solution
00:03:15.000 that's differentiated, unique, a little bit different.
00:03:17.740 Doesn't have to be a complete revamp of the whole approach,
00:03:20.780 but you need to figure out what's the hook,
00:03:22.840 what's the feature, how am I gonna approach the problem,
00:03:25.640 solve it in a unique way that's better, faster, cheaper,
00:03:28.960 that will get a small percentage, maybe 5% to 10%
00:03:32.080 of the existing customer base to be willing to take a look
00:03:35.260 and say like, you know what, I have this problem,
00:03:37.160 I'm using this existing company,
00:03:39.360 but I'm interested in innovation.
00:03:41.160 I wanna see what the other companies have out there
00:03:42.900 to help solve my problem.
00:03:44.100 That is the first thing, the unique product hook.
00:03:47.140 Number two, you need to talk to their,
00:03:49.740 their existing customers.
00:03:51.480 I mean, I think, this is the part that excites me the most.
00:03:54.140 If there's an existing market, okay,
00:03:56.040 if it's, let's call it a 10 billion a year market,
00:03:58.720 you know what that tells me?
00:03:59.780 People are spending money, is that a good thing?
00:04:02.020 Yes, okay, so existing market,
00:04:04.960 existing competition equals a good thing.
00:04:07.760 The beauty of that is you can go talk to their customers.
00:04:10.260 You can run Facebook, and I've done all of these,
00:04:12.240 you can run Facebook ads to survey
00:04:14.900 to their customers and their fan pages.
00:04:16.900 Think about that.
00:04:17.860 I mean, if you're trying to do customer research,
00:04:19.660 instead of trying to wonder, like, who has the problem?
00:04:22.180 People that use this product probably have the problem.
00:04:24.780 I mean, email marketing, do you know how many companies
00:04:27.220 there are in email marketing space,
00:04:28.920 and so many entrepreneurs are like,
00:04:29.840 oh, I don't want to touch that, it's complicated.
00:04:32.240 I have a buddy, Nathan Berry, at convertkit.com
00:04:35.180 that is crushing it, multi-million dollar company
00:04:37.920 in the last three to four years,
00:04:39.780 because he decided to go through this process.
00:04:42.160 You need product hook, be aggressive,
00:04:44.120 go to the market, talk to existing customers,
00:04:46.300 That's number two.
00:04:47.300 And then number three is really caring
00:04:49.600 is the ultimate competitive advantage.
00:04:51.440 I can't tell you how important that is.
00:04:53.660 You know, when companies get big,
00:04:56.260 they start building systems and processes and automation
00:04:59.300 and, you know, they start getting disconnected
00:05:01.760 from their core customer.
00:05:03.740 They don't act like they care anymore.
00:05:05.740 I mean, there's only a handful of companies at scale
00:05:08.500 that can retain that culture, that approach, that belief.
00:05:11.860 And to me, that is the ultimate competitive advantage
00:05:14.360 for you and your business.
00:05:15.240 if you wanna get into an existing market,
00:05:16.840 if you have a passion for an idea,
00:05:19.980 and there's companies out there,
00:05:22.120 you just gotta ask yourself,
00:05:23.080 do I care more than those companies
00:05:26.220 about solving my customers' problems?
00:05:27.760 If the answer is yes, then game on, go for it,
00:05:30.560 don't hold back.
00:05:31.760 But if, you know what, if you sit back and say,
00:05:33.200 you know what, I really don't care about this space,
00:05:34.660 then don't do it, right?
00:05:36.020 Don't go, you know, look for a unique product hook.
00:05:38.760 Don't talk to existing customers,
00:05:41.740 and by all means, if you don't, are not passionate about it,
00:05:44.800 then you can't care.
00:05:46.000 You won't have that competitive advantage.
00:05:47.200 But those are the three areas that if you use properly,
00:05:50.480 you can go into any market.
00:05:51.680 Just think about every product you've ever used.
00:05:53.680 There was an existing company gone out there.
00:05:55.480 Maybe they were doing it a little different,
00:05:57.320 but they existed.
00:05:58.380 So as per usual, I wanna challenge you
00:06:00.080 to live a bigger life and a bigger business,
00:06:02.180 and I'll see you next Monday.
00:06:04.220 If you like this video, be sure to subscribe to my channel.
00:06:06.720 I would also encourage you to get on my newsletter
00:06:09.820 where I share exclusive invites to events
00:06:12.120 and also other free training videos.
00:06:14.220 And if you're ready to get going,
00:06:15.220 I got a couple videos queued up for you.
00:06:16.980 I will see you next week.