The problem with exponential growth is that everyone thinks mainly about the fun part of the curve, where everything is going straight up, faster and faster with each passing day. In reality, though, the vast majority of your time will be spent in the “lag phase,” that long flat stretch where it doesn’t look like anything is happening. Such is the unavoidable price of an exponential approach.
Many entrepreneurs fail when trying to have the best of both worlds, favoring fast, linear growth in the beginning, and trying convert that to exponential growth later on. This approach overestimates the loyalty and enthusiasm of their initial customers, and attempts to turn a simple transaction into a personal relationship. This tends to be off-putting, and leads to conversations that look like this:
“Buy our products!” Sure, I’ll try anything once. (Note that this interaction is about the customer)
“Tell all your friends and family about us!” Eh, no. (Note that this interaction is not)
Don’t get me wrong, the purely exponential approach really sucks for a long time and there are plenty of businesses succeed with a primarily metrics-based, linear approach. Such businesses don’t care what they sell as long as they make money. Meanwhile, the lag phase looks and feels terrible. But that’s not to say there isn’t any growth taking place at this juncture.
Most of your progress in the lag phase is invisible. Getting clear about your vision, understanding your customer, and establishing a “WHY” that really resonates are all vitally important for your long term success, especially if you want to eventually go exponential. But these things are hard to quantify. In fact, on paper it will look like you’re hardly getting anything done at all. While your peers are building out social media followings, pitching investors, and building a product, most of the work you do occurs inside your own head. When people ask, you say fuzzily, “well, long term, it seems like I wish the world was more this way or that way….” but for a long time, you won’t have the words to crystallize that feeling. Believe me, I’ve lived this for the past two years.
While you’re trying to find that initial, resonant kernel of truth, it can be tempting to abandon your search for meaning, and pursue other, artificial measures of success. Stay strong, though, because purely metrics-driven growth is often a seductive mirage. Chasing it will land you back where you started, but at the cost of precious time and energy. Case in point, here’s where I went wrong with my following on twitter.
For the past month and a half, I’ve been working to build out a twitter following so that I can share my ideas with more people (side note: even this goal turned out to be a poor substitute for intentionality). My metric-driven goal was to increase my number of followers, and I realized I could immediately grow my following in a straight line upwards by exploiting the “follow-back” etiquette of other people also trying to improve their following count. Since then I’ve gone from 30 to a little over 1200 followers.
But, of course, the question is, “does this matter?” When you grow linearly, things look pretty good, and you can usually get some measure of success through brute force, which is what I did. The danger though, is that when you do that, you don’t really have a foundation upon which to scale exponentially. Each additional person you add has to be added in the same, manual way as all the rest before them. And the end result is a lot of people who are vaguely interested in what you do, but who just don’t care enough to help you achieve any kind of virality. Very few of them will become customers, fewer still will become fans. In fact, unless you’re clear on what you you are and what you are not, you won’t have any fans at all. You’ll have wasted so much time and energy appealing to the masses that you’ll have forgone any meaningful connection with the individuals you need to champion your cause. Your numbers are fluff.
And that’s where I’m at. While I’ve gained followers, I suspect I have gained no real audience. Probably, the vast (and I mean vaaaaast) majority of my followers will not show up to any future Why Try events, or even sign up for an email list. They followed me for the same reason I followed them, to inflate an arbitrary number and attempt to appear reputable to the masses before I had something of real value to offer to even a small, select group.
The correct approach, I think, lies in Taylor Pearson’s concept of Jesus Marketing. I should have sought out a small band of apostles and focused on my connection with them. This would have both put me in a better position to help these people, and forced me to develop greater clarity around what I have to offer. In doing so, you create a proposition that really resonates with a small cluster of people. Because of that, they go out and spread the good word on your behalf. Eventually, you’ll have people you’ve never even met advocating for your idea. Until finally you won’t have to push your way to the exponential curve, you’ll be yanked up it!
So as of now, I’ve totally overhauled my twitter marketing strategy. It’s still quantifiable (and may still, therefore, offer a bad set of incentives), but I’ve abandoned “number of followers” as a metric. Instead, I’m focusing on the number of people who care enough to show up to events in person. And I’m only hosting events that align closely with my own “WHY.” This, hopefully, will turn away people who aren’t a good fit, and create the opportunity to create something really awesome for the small minority who believe what I believe.
Finally, I’m organizing a handful of events over the next few months. If you’d like to learn more about these, I encourage you to sign up for the email list below. You can unsubscribe at any time if you don’t find something that interests you, but since you’ve read this far, you might find something you like.