How To Guarantee Engagement with any Brand with Greg Lansky

0:01Hey guys, Eric Su here. So the following is a clip from the Leveling Up Founders Mastermind that happened in Beverly Hills. And you're going to hear from some amazing founders, some amazing marketers and investors. And this was a private event that happened. So again, you'll get a preview of it. If you want to learn more, you can go to levelingup.com slash founders. Once again, levelingup.com slash founders. And without further ado, enjoy the clip. So I self-founded and I started the company with no investors, no ads, no social media following and no celebrity endorsement. And yet, I was profitable in less than a year, and within 16 months, we were getting 35 million unique visitors monthly.

0:47So I built these companies on three rules I want to offer you guys today. Rule number one is find niches with emotional intensity. Because I had no upfront investors or any of that stuff, I had to be very strategic and precise. In other entrepreneurial lingo, no room for fuck-ups. And at the time, all the big companies were playing a very predictable game. They were buying millions of dollars of ads and producing the cheapest possible content for the broadest possible audience. But what I had figured out was that the broadest possible audience was actually spoiled. Spoiled with choices, including free ones.

1:37And as I'm sure a lot of spoiled people are often difficult, demanding, greedy, and worst of all, comfortable. And it's really difficult to move comfortable people. That was not the kind of market I could afford or even I wanted. To help me in my selection process and finding niches that were worth pursuing, the one thing I looked for is emotional intensity. So what I mean by that is when you look at the places where the people in those niches discuss and gather, you're looking for intensity. You're looking for highly opinionated conversation with very strong emotions, positive or negative or a mix of both.

2:23It doesn't matter. You're looking for that intensity. And where you can catch these things is anywhere from the comments section to social media posts, to specialized forums, or even Reddit. And why it's valuable, the first reason why it's valuable is the engagement's already built in. You don't need to create it. Another reason why it's so valuable is anywhere you will find niches with emotional intensity, you're going to find fanatics. And fanatics are unbelievably valuable for companies, organizations, movement, because they will promote you for free, relentlessly. They will build their whole identity around it.

3:16Another main reason is that anywhere you see online a niche with emotional intensity that's overlooked by big players, you will find a group of people that is chasing a feeling in an emotional loop without ever finding release. And that's where your product comes in. So once you find that right niche with emotional intensity, my second rule is you have to earn their attention. Let me tell you a story. When I moved to LA in my early 20s, my number one goal in life was to date pretty women. That's it. Pretty simple KPIs. I used to go out with these three other guys And we hit the clubs in Hollywood And we had a really bad success rate Matter of fact, terrible And at the end of the night We were really good at gathering and brainstorming together as a team For all the reasons why it wasn't our fault Music was too loud, it wasn't a good night Endless amount of creativity for that But eventually I got tired of this and I did what us entrepreneurs do when we face challenges.

4:37I got creative. I looked at this as a way to learn about human psychology. So next weekend, I went out again, but this time alone. I sat at the bar and I observed the dynamic between men and women all night. And what was crazy was that within a few hours, everything became so predictable. A group of guys coming in from anywhere from 2 to 10 guys, like a horde of hungry animals desperate for female attention. You had a group of girls too, but more in groups for self-preservation than anything else. You had another group of guys that get frustrated about getting ignored, so they drink and get drunk and resort to stealing the girl's attention by being obnoxious or rude.

5:26Another group of guys had a different strategy. They would buy the girl's attention with bottle service, even if it meant they could get that attention just for a few minutes. So that strategy was out of my budget range at the time. And also didn't seem to yield very consistent results because there were plenty of table of guys all sitting next to each other, all sad like a bunch of lonely teenagers without a date for prom. And then on the way back home, it hit me. I started leveraging empathy to feel what a woman would feel, not having seen that predictability for a few hours, but for several years.

6:10And that's when I realized predictability was the enemy. I needed to come up with an unpredictable approach. Best thing I could come up with at the time was, I'm going to go out with three girls instead of three guys. Because one thing I didn't see, group of guys, group of guys, I didn't see a group of girls approaching another group of girls just with one guy. Didn't see that. So to make that happen, I called up my neighbor, Vanessa, who owed me a solid one after I watched her smelly bulldog for an entire week. And asked her to hook me up, and she came through. She brought two of her girlfriend, and we went out that weekend.

6:49And it was like a parallel reality. Every single girl I talked to was receptive, friendly, willing to grab a drink. It was like a live cheat code. I came up with more phone number that night than the entire year. So a few months went by, and I was actually still going out with these same girls, when one night I saw this incredibly beautiful woman. She was walking around, and she completely got my attention by being unpredictable. All the girls in the club were wearing fancy dress, big hair, lots of makeup, and she's walking around with jeans, T-shirt, no makeup. Very unpredictable in that environment.

7:33She was trying to avoid eye contact with all the hungry animals, including me, but I still walked up to her. and earning her attention that night really changed my life

7:51because 14 years later, I'm still earning it, and she became my wife.

7:58Single guys at nightclub are not the only ones fighting for attention. Of course, as entrepreneurs, we heard that stuff a billion times. Oh, there's a fight for attention. Yeah, we were born with it. We're all in that social media era, so it's only reinforced that. We all know that. In my experience, there's three ways you can get attention.

8:26You can buy it. You can steal it. Or you can earn it. Buying it's fine. Ads can be great if you know how to use them. same for celebrity endorsement can be super effective but for young startups with limited means I still rather put the money in creating a product that commands attention if I was to buy attention I would want to do it in a way that doesn't look like I'm buying attention like the bottle service boys

8:58you could steal attention and you see a lot of that stuff online with influencers doing all kinds of ridiculous stuff. And it can work, but only temporarily, because you always start the relationship with deceptions or force, and it can never work in the long run. If you see a pretty woman in the street and you whistle at her, she turns around, you didn't get her attention. You stole it. If you're trying to find a piece of information online and you have an ad specifically obstructing the information you're trying to get, even though how many times you click, the ad stole your attention. and you already fucking hate that company before the relationship even starts.

9:39So what I mean by earning attention, I mean you worked for it. You did your homework. You understand what it feels emotionally to be one of the people in the niche you're trying to pursue. When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I didn't have the tools to help me scale. If only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind the scenes work. Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started. The best part about it, it has everything you could need. Say you're ready to launch your own design studio.

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13:12A great example for that is, imagine a method actor, a high-level one. They're going to play a serial killer. It doesn't mean they command or approve what that killer did, but they don't have disdain for the killer. They study, they do their homework, they gather every single piece of information so that we as the audience can have suspension of disbelief. That's the process that has worked for me countless times.