Billionaire Entrepreneur Jack Dorsey demonstrated his business chops by starting not one, but two multi-billion dollar companies – Twitter and Square.
And in typical “Charlie fashion,” I did a little digging to see what marketing lessons we could learn from this entrepreneurial wizard.
Here we go…
Tip #1 – Solve The Pain
When your product solves a real pain point that isn’t being addressed by anybody else, then marketing becomes much easier…
As a high school student, Jack Dorsey worked at his mother’s coffee shop, and noticed how the shop could have benefited from being able to accept credit card payments.
Later, he noticed the same problem again when he was working for the glass blower Jim McKelvey (later a Square co-founder), who couldn’t accept credit card payments for his works. As Dorsey notes, McKelvey lost out on a $2000 sale as a result of not being able to process credit cards.
This lead to Dorsey to the idea that many other businesses must also be suffering from the same problem. When he investigated the credit card industry, he realized how complicated and expensive it was for small businesses to accept credit cards:
“We went around and asked merchants how much they pay in credit card fees, and the first answer was, ‘I don’t know,’” Dorsey says. “And the second answer, after about a week, was, ‘I looked at my statement and finally figured out 5 percent.’ And once they see that, they’re like, ‘What is going on here?’”
Square was his solution to provide an inexpensive, transparent, and seamless way for businesses to accept credit card payments.
Because Square has a Unique Advantage Point (UAP) that no other company offers and it solves a real pain point, marketing that solution is much simpler.
Find a pain point people want resolved, offer an easy solution, and voila!
Tip #2 – Use The Power of Storytelling
In order to market your product, you must be able to understand your product from your customer’s point of view – and then create a story around it.
With Square, Jack tells the story of a customer in Chicago who goes to purchase a coffee… He then shows how Square fits into that story as an easy and convenient way to make a credit card transaction.
By explaining the UAP of the product as a story, it can be understood by anybody…
Customers don’t need to have a technical or financial background to understand, “Hey, we need this!”
One of the keys to Jack Dorsey’s marketing success is his ability as a storyteller.
Tip #3 – Get Your Customer to The “Aha!” Moment Sooner
In the early days of Twitter, the company was experiencing a problem – they were getting a lot of sign ups, but these weren’t translating into long-term users…
The problem was that people who quickly quit Twitter hadn’t reach the point where they understood the value of the product.
Dorsey studied the users and identified a key difference between those who stayed with Twitter and those who didn’t:
Those who stayed were following five or more other people.
Following at least five other users allowed them to understand the value Twitter offers.
The solution was to streamline the onboarding process so people followed five or more people sooner…
To achieve this goal, Twitter took some of the decisions out of the users’ hands during the sign up process.
Before, users where essentially left alone after registering, and allowed to explore Twitter straight away. Now, when you register a new account you are taken through a process that provides suggestions of people to follow before you proceed…
This gets the user to that “Aha!” moment sooner – this is the moment they realize why they need you.
This is critical for two reasons:
- It means that you will retain more of your existing customers
- Because more people understand your product’s value proposition, they are more likely to share it with their own network, which creates invaluable “word-of-mouth” advertising
What can you do to make sure your customers are getting the greatest advantage and use from your products and services? What pain points might you be overlooking? What story aren’t you telling?
Answering these questions will bring you that much closer to dominating your market…
In your corner,
Charlie
