Dan Martell - How To Choose An Idea If The Solution Already Exists

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.

Dan Martell - January 23, 2017

How To Choose An Idea If The Solution Already Exists

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