Only Speak to People Who Already Get The Joke
Way back in 2013 I was writing a weekly newsletter about startups to an email list of maybe 40 people when I got a strange inbound request.
“Hi! I love your newsletter — your writing is so quirky and different. I’d love for you to write something about starting a business while you’ve got a full-time job we can publish at Fast Company.”
I don’t remember how that person stumbled across my newsletter, but I do remember how excited I was. I did a little googling and saw most articles on FC got 10s of thousands of views. This was my shot.
We agreed I’d send a draft of a post by the end of the week, and I cleared three days to write it. I looked at my “post ideas” document for some inspiration, but everything seemed too… specific. I tried to think about who read Fast Company - people with startup ideas? People with startups? I wasn’t really sure.
When I wrote for my little group of 40, I knew everyone was early-stage, hacking away at a startup idea. I knew what obstacles they had and how they tried to navigate them. For the Fast Company article, I had no clue.
So, I landed on something broad that I hoped everyone would like — “10 things that’ll help you start a business.”
My first draft was written the way I wrote my newsletter - funny, lots of examples, irreverent. But when I went to edit it, I started to feel the weight of the stakes. This article was going to be in Fast Company, after-all. It might get 40k views. Was I really going to make silly puns? I removed them all.
About 40 hours of writing and editing later, I submitted my post. Less then 40 minutes after that, I got a reply:
“Sorry, this isn’t the type of post I thought you’d write based on your newsletter. We’re all set — thanks!”
As I write that sentence I remember the feeling of that email — like getting hit in the stomach with a sack of flour.
I sent the post to my Dad to see what he thought, and he responded a few minutes later with his patented gentle touch — “This sucks. Who wrote this? Send them a post from a month or two ago that they probably haven’t read and say you mistakenly sent the wrong one before, because that last one is absolutely awful.”
So, I did. A long, meandering post about running customer interviews while you have a job chock full of anecdotes and specific jokes and references. It was a favorite of my 40 readers, with a few saying they’d read it 20 times over a few weeks as they implemented the strategies.
A half hour later, I got a response:
“Great! Our readers working on early-stage startups will love this. Will post next week.”
During the early days, our job is to speak to who’s already in on the joke. To have a specific person with a specific problem and set of experiences in mind and speak directly to them with everything we do — marketing, pricing, product.
This is easy when you’ve got the equivalent of 40 people reading your newsletter, but it gets harder when the perceived stakes get higher. Higher stakes means we get “safe” which means we broaden out - we mute our differentiator in hopes of getting more people interested. Unfortunately, that’s not how it ever works.
Every bit of progress you make doesn’t give you permission to broaden out - quite the opposite. Each bit of progress gives you permission (and insight) to get narrower. To zoom in tighter to amplify your value to a specific group.
Seth Godin says it well — “Only speak to people who already get the joke.” To be successful we need the first group to love us, and they’ll never love something that’s broad. You love something that’s hyper-specific to you. Something that feels like the person who made it had you in mind at the start. Love comes from the feeling of being chosen, and it’s unlikely something broad will be able to do that.
The counterintuitive thing here is that even if you're blasting something out to a broader audience, positioning it to a specific person is the right strategy. It'll make people who aren't your customer realize the thing isn't for them, but it'll also give them direction — "Oh, this is specifically for my friend working on this business — I'll forward it."
Specific stuff gets shared, even by the people it isn't for. Broad stuff gets ignored. The surest way to grow big is to start with a tiny group that loves you. That group can't be too small — your mistake will always be trying to include too many people, not too few. There’s no other way, so we need to start there.