Dear hackers, I think we need to think about mayors and presidents.
Mayors have won. They’ve won the trust of the city they’re leading. Yes, there’s always a bigger fish and maybe they have bigger plans for their careers.
But for the time being, they’ve won. Now it’s about maintaining this role and only then they might be talking about expansion again.
Tell me this: which one of the two is more likely to become a president:
- A simple who’s just started into politics
- Our before-mentioned mayor
The answer is obvious.
Now here’s the parallel for tech CEOs/founders
The president is the equivalent of dominating a big market.
The mayor is the equivalent of winning an extremely niched but smaller market (the town/city versus the whole country). Some industries (cities) are bigger than others.
We might look up to the mayors of these bigger cities and say “I want to be him” — when we can easily be ourselves and become the leader of a smaller one, perhaps. And then both these mayors can have chances at becoming the president. Can’t say whether the chances would be equal, but both of them proved themselves worthy of leading — thus enabling a road for the bigger dream.
The same story applies to a market. The bigger chunk of founders and entrepreneurs are racing and fighting to become the next [insert big name here]. Despite that, once you’ve proved yourself worthy in an industry, big or small, the road for the even bigger one is ahead.
Your smaller city doesn’t have millions of people in population. But will 20,000 do? If you had become the mayor of the “city” of Harvard people, would that suffice? Not for the rest of your life, but for the next 3 to 5 years, let’s say.
After 3 years you can move on to the bigger thing, which is whatever comes between a mayor and a president. When we put it like this, it might sound calming. A 20,000 user target might sound also very doable. Physically you can reach out to 3,000 people in these years and hope that they’ll tell other friends.
Oh, that’s it, maybe. “Tell other friends” — a reachable goal once we talk about 20,000 and not 200 million people.
Here’s the catch
People want to become presidents (i.e. get 200m customers) from day one. They want to rule nation-wide when they can’t even prove themselves as leaders for a neighbourhood or a city.
Facebook started by doing something for Harvard people.
Tesla started with the roadster — a low-production very-high-cost car that pleased to death the rich techies of San Francisco.
Apple started by pleasing to death the Homebrew club.
None of them tried to become Walmart in their first year. Tesco (UK’s Walmart) sells a jar of jam for £0.30 — it would be outrageous for someone to start a business with the USP of “we’re making the cheapest jam.”
That’s like aiming to be the president within the first year. However, we know what points Apple, Tesla and Facebook have reached. But they started as mayors. Mayors of Harvard, of the SF rich techies and of the Homebrew club.
Reachable audiences.
What’s the lesson here?
You’ve heard what I’m saying before. It’s Kevin Kelly’s idea of 1000 true fans. However, we’ve read that and we said “wow, yes, that’s good!” and off we went trying to become presidents.
We excused ourselves by saying “yes, yes, there could be 1,000 true fans in an ocean of 200 million people! Both 1,000 customers and 100 million customers!”
But that’s once again, aiming for presidency within the first year.
The fact that some of these tech founders have a humble attitude/background is no coincidence. Most of them have in common the intent of not trying to become a president so fast.
They had to adapt eventually and for some the humbleness is lost — but they all started by doing something, by themselves (and some of their friends), for a small group of people. You might hear about how they were trying to change the world, but they were trying to change the world for a small group of people, not for 7 billion people.
The 7 billion figure came later.
Are you aiming to become the mayor of an audience first or aiming straight for presidency?
About Ch Daniel
I run Chagency_, an experiences design agency that specialises on helping tech CEOs reduce user churn. We believe experiences are not only the reason why users choose not to leave but also what generates word of mouth. We’re building a credo around this belief.
If I’ve brought you any kind of value, follow me and get in touch here: LinkedIn | Twitter | Email | Quora | YouTube (same content but in video)
I’ve also created an infinitely-valuable app for sneaker/fashion enthusiasts called Legit Check that impacted hundreds of thousands over millions of times – check it out at chdaniel.com/app
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Illustration Credits: Josh Patterson, Natalia Brondani
