How to Thrive as a Category of 1 with Chris Taylor

0:28Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation! of their programs. And today, Foundation, we'll talk about the pros and cons of competition. We'll talk about momentum, how to get clients to buy something for the first time, short attention spans, what do we do to get people's attention and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Chris and our sponsors. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer, hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lanz, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Matt and Nathan are leading AI creators in your guiding light in the AI and technology frontier.

1:02AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented. The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. Chris, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. John and Fire Nation thank you so much for having me it's been 10 years almost to the day since I was last on the show so how's that good timing John well done um what's the uh something I believe about becoming successful so uh that a lot of people disagree with I used to believe that you needed some special angle special insight something that was just so radically outside of the box in order to break through the noise and be you know wildly successful and you don't.

1:55What I have found through my own experience and through the successful people around me is that you need a sound, simple business model and you need persistence, which talking to the guy who's been running the show for what, 12 years? Consistency compounds, right? This is how we get our wins. It does. And you being episode 4 ,386 definitely does help with a consistency factor. But Fire Nation, we're here to talk about you becoming a category of one and thriving in that category? Because a lot of people, Chris, let's just be frank, they're scared of competition. They're like, oh my God, competition is so scary.

2:32Look at that person. They're doing this better than me. They're doing that better than me. What are the pros and cons of actually not having direct competitors? It's an interesting space because on the one hand, you're right, right? We don't have competitors. We feel bulletproof as a result. The challenge with it though, I think, is that you don't have a stalking horse. You don't have someone who's gone before you, who's a little bit further down the path that you can model and take some of the best from and sprinkle on your own flavor. And so what I found early on in building Actionable was that we needed to create an enemy.

3:03We needed to identify something that we could rally against. And if it wasn't going to be another company, what was it going to be? And so for us, it became about status quo and, you know, wasted energy and training investment, et cetera, et cetera. But whatever it is, That's one of the big cons is that when you don't have a stalking horse, we don't have someone who's gone before. It's hard to sort of focus or it could be or was for me. Now, the advantages are that if you move fast enough, you get to associate your brand with the category. You get to become synonymous like, you know, Salesforce and cloud based CRM's became right.

3:40And that's that's the big win is if you are persistent and moving fast enough, you can be the brand or at least be the leader in the brand. And Fire Nation, don't you want to be the leader in that brand? And I mean, you know, as far as competition goes too, like we push each other. Like my fellow podcasters, when they're doing something new, like it's exciting to me. It opens up new doors, gives me new ideas and inspiration and like keeps me working hard and keeps me in the game now for 12 years doing a daily episode with inspiring entrepreneurs like Chris here. But let's be honest, that first bit of momentum, Chris, it is so hard.

4:16So let's talk about how we can get clients to actually buy something, to take action for the first time. This is the interesting bit. If you're truly creating a new category, your clients don't have a line item for that thing. You're not replacing an incumbent provider. You are asking them to consider the value of investing in something net new. And that can be daunting and overwhelming. but it doesn't have to be because just like any business, it's about aligning to a specific pain. And this is a lesson that I missed for a long time in the early days of actionable. I was very enthusiastic about my vision and I was sharing that and I got a lot of nodding heads, but it wasn't as dialed in on their pain.

4:59If they have a pain and it's real enough, they're going to have budget to address that pain. They just may be addressing it in a completely different way. So it's not necessarily about manifesting money out of thin air. It's about figuring out how they're currently going about solving that problem or the cost of inaction for them, which sort of surfaces the money they're spending not solving that problem. And we need to get into that. I think, though, because it is a new category, you really, my experience, we need to focus on de-risking the solution because there's no track record. There's no experience for them and maybe for you if you're doing something that new.

5:41So the question becomes, how do you de-risk it, maybe to an unscalable point at the beginning, to be able to build enough proof points, enough case studies, et cetera, that those clients evangelize for you and you can start to ramp up by saying, yes, I know you haven't done this before, but here's a whole bunch of other people that have and the outcomes that it created for them. I love that cost of inaction. I think that's not an angle that a lot of people think about often. So Fire Nation, think about that. Give it a chance to kind of simmer for a little bit, see if it causes some idea, some aha moments to prop up.

6:15But the reality is, man, I mean, humans have such short attention spans. I mean, like microseconds. I mean, goldfish make us look silly. how do we get the attention to market something new to a client of ours, to a potential client, to a potential customer? Yeah, I'm going to probably start to sound like a broken record here. I'm like a windup toy. I've got, you know, pull the string. I've got three things. But I'm going to blend two things I said earlier. One is that consistency compounds. They may not see you or hear you the first time you land in their inbox or they scan you on social. They're I don't encourage people to get too caught up on that.

6:57I'm trying to catch people the first time they see you, but instead keep evangelizing, keep putting out the great content that is anchored to their pain and the momentum will build, particularly if they see you and then go, oh, wow, there's two years worth of fabulous insight and content here. This person knows what they're talking about. I should come back. So I think potentially counter to what most people I think the marketing something new and getting people's attention is starts from a place of, are you willing to commit to this for the long game? Do you have, you know, two, five, 10, 15 years in you around solving this pain for people?

7:36Because if it's just about the money, the likely of you likelihood of you breaking into that new category, I would suggest is very, very low. And from a tactical standpoint, again, the second part of my broken record, We need to stay laser focused on the pain that you're solving, not the features that you include to solve it. We're all excited about our own stuff. Our clients are not. We might be priority 12 on their list, and that's if they're paying attention to us. So we need to just continue the message around the pain that we're solving. And when they come to us and start asking questions, then sure, we can get into the how.

8:11But even then, hammer the pain. Don't worry about sounding like a little wind-up doll that's getting the string pulled over and over again because Fire Nation is well used to me saying very similar things very often. Like, use the word focus. I'm always saying Fire Nation, my favorite word, it's focus. Follow one course until success. You need to focus. The bright, shiny object syndrome will kill you. It will crush you. And Chris, I can tell you like that. Give me credit twice, and then it's yours forever. It's yours forever. And then the other thing that I say over and over again, and it's just so gosh darn true, which is become the number one solution to a real problem.

8:50If you become the number one solution to a real problem, people will be a path to your doorstep to get that solution because people want the number one solution to a real problem that they have. And we have a lot more to talk about on this topic, Fire Nation, when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Being a small business owner comes with a lot of challenges, especially now. It seems like everyone is working with smaller budgets, shorter timelines, and sky-high expectations, and that can make growing a business feel pretty painful. Thankfully, HubSpot can help. HubSpot just announced dozens of major product updates that'll make impossible growth feel impossibly easy, like Breeze, a suite of new AI-powered tools that deliver personalized insights to level up your work, plus AI agents designed to automate your work for you.

9:39Sounds pretty great, right? And Breeze Intelligence, which gives you the richest, most comprehensive picture of your prospects and customers, allowing you to serve them at a whole new level. Add to all this, re-imagine marketing and content hubs with new ways to create breakthrough content, updated features to generate better leads, and support to help up-level your marketing and revenue forecast. And you've got HubSpot's all-on-one customer platform. Get ready for growth without the growing pains. Visit hubspot.com slash spotlight to see all the updates. Chris, we're back. And I personally love learning from other people's mistakes.

10:16In fact, the first 2000 episodes of Entrepreneurs on Fire, my question, which you got back in 2014, was what is your biggest entrepreneurial failure? The biggest mistake you made as a business individual? And you told that story. So we love learning from other people's mistakes. What pitfalls did you experience that we can learn from, that we can now avoid? Yeah, I think, you know, in the attempt to launch a category of one, we tried to be special and tried to be smart across all the things. And what I mean by that is we tried to reinvent every aspect of the business and of the solution and of the pain.

11:01And, and it was such a mistake because sure, there's a time and a place for education for your clients of teaching them something that new, but most of the time, what's gone before has worked well enough. They wouldn't exist if it didn't. And so what we really need to do and what I really struggled with for a really long time is figuring out the 5 % that could have my special sauce on it and building on the 95 % that came before me to say, we don't need to reinvent everything. We need to add this unique layer. And I think this is important for two reasons. One, it's crazy making if you're trying to reinvent everything because you end up spending way too much money and too much time on it, which is a conversation for another day.

11:44But the second part with it is that you make it really hard for your clients or potential clients to anchor to the known. And this became really important to me is that if I'm going to show them something new, I need to help them get really cemented in what they already know to be true, and then show them how this is a little bit more or a little bit less or a little bit of a departure from. But going back to the comments about reducing the risk, if we can show them that, hey, 95 % of this is what you've done before, here's the twist and here's the disproportionate value it creates, then it starts to become a no-brainer where it doesn't feel as risky because the entire thing is not net new.

12:23It took me a long time to learn that lesson. Such an important lesson in Fire Nation. The way that I've kind of looked at it in the past, which is basically the same, but just in a different way. So I really like how Chris put this, but I'm always like, hey, you need to come up with your big idea. And that big idea is something that, by the way, a ton of other people have done before you are currently doing right now, because this is a big idea. It's a great idea. Like this 95%, like 95 % of people, like they're already doing this big idea in this world right here that you're looking to potentially compete with.

12:52But then how do you discover the niche? How do you uncover the void? How do you discover what's been ignored for some reason, that 5 %? How do you dig into that niche? And then you discover that right niche that you are able to differentiate yourself with, that you are different, unique, special, and you own that 5%. You own that niche. Like for a lot of people, by the way, way back in the day when this still worked, like when they were saying, I want to create a product on Amazon, what would they do? They would go to a very well-selling product. They would look at the one and two star reviews of what people were complaining about and hated about that product.

13:29And then they would just create that exact same product, but with that one added solving thing that everybody was complaining about. And now they have the exact same thing, except with just the biggest complaint also being solved as well. So if you had a magic genie lamp, Okay, you just have this lamp. Picture you're holding it, you're rubbing it. And it grants you the option to start over and do it all again. Would you do it? It would depend on my goals. There are, in my opinion, a million easier ways to make money than trying to forge a new category. So if someone was looking to build wealth, I would suggest that building a category of one is not the right path to go down.

14:13however if the cause is important to you and and the cause that i'm working in now for 17 years is it matters to me um yeah i would do it again you know being a little bit younger and a couple less kids would make it easier but um but yeah i would i would do it again my my big lesson with it is that it's a long haul there's some really great books on this if you're interested in building a category one there's a group called category pirates uh that's worth reading um the i think he's called behind the cloud. So it's called the anyway, if you Google the Mark Benioff story about building Salesforce, it's fascinating.

14:48You're looking at a 10 plus year journey, right? I'm, like I said, 16, 17 years in, it's really only in the last two to three years that we've really found our traction. So if you're going down a path of creating something that new, it's got to be something that you really believe is an injustice in the world or something that needs to be fixed because otherwise, you know, you're likely going to run out of money, patience, energy, or all three before you realize that outcome. Yeah. And it is behind the cloud. Fantastic read, Fire Nation. Definitely check it out. So Chris, you've talked a lot about a lot today.

15:20We've really dropped some value bombs. There's been a lot of great value here. What would be the one thing out of everything we talked about that you would really want our listeners to walk away with? it? It's sort of woven through the various questions, but when you get excited about something, if you're anything like me, there's a desire to talk about it, which is good and natural, but the value creation is going to come from less talking, more listening. The way we define the pain, the way we find that 5%, the way that we identify the fastest path to the sale is going to come through better questions posed more frequently than it is from you shouting from the rooftops.

16:01So as enthusiastic as you are, it's finding that tension between sharing your enthusiasm and digging through questions to understand the true pain that you're solving for. Chris, give our listeners a call to action. If they want to connect with you, learn more about you, what would you have them do? What is your call to action for Fire Nation today? Yeah, great question. I'm most active on LinkedIn. So if you go to LinkedIn, there's 10 million Chris Taylors, but just search Chris Taylor actionable, you'll find me. I talk a lot about behavior change. I talk about raising kids and I talk about growing a business in a category of one.

16:36Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with CT and JLD today. So keep up that heat. For links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Just type Chris, C-R-I-S in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up. And hey, check out what we were talking about 10 years ago, almost to the day as well. Great conversation was had for sure. Chris, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that, we salute your brother and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thanks, John. That was fun.

17:08Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Chris for sponsoring today's episode and Fire Nation's successful entrepreneurs. They're great at three things, productivity, discipline, and focus. That is why I created The Mastery Journal so that you can master these three things in just 100 days. We're talking step by step. Visit themasteryjournal.com and I will catch you there or on the flip side. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer, hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lanz, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Matt and Nathan are leading AI creators in your guiding light in the AI and technology frontier.

17:44AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented. The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts.