Show Notes:

Seth Godin: The smallest viable audience. “The key is to pick the smallest viable audience. And I wrote about this in This is Marketing. The smallest viable audience is counter to everything we are taught in this country. I will be very clear who this is for, and anybody else I will send to a competitor. And if you tell me that you believe this, and I say, ‘How many people have you sent to other firms in the last two weeks?’ and you can’t think of anybody, then you don’t really believe it.”

Rory Vaden: Personal branding is digitized reputation. “Personal branding today is simply the digitization of your reputation. And the number one way that people are monetizing their personal brand today is they’re just using their personal brand to drive leads into their existing business for the thing they already do. That is the fastest path to cash. It’s the most effective one, and it aligns up with the data.”

Rory Vaden: Reputation precedes revenue. “You’re one year away from a completely different life if you go at it hard for 365 days. Reputation precedes revenue. So that’s a long way of answering, you know, how long does it take? It depends on how fast you want to go. People can move the needle in a year. And that, I think, is true in anything in your life.”

Pat Flynn: The power of 1,000 true fans. “You don’t need a blockbuster hit to do really well. You don’t need a million subscribers. You don’t need a million views on anything. You just need to try to get 1,000 true fans, a true fan being somebody who, if you’re a musician, they’re going to drive eight hours to see your set and wait for you backstage to get your autograph. If you have a thousand of those, for example, and they are paying you $100 a year for your art, your craft, your goods, whatever it might be, that’s already a six-figure business for just a thousand people.”

John Ruhlin: Gifts are delivery vehicles for emotion. “For me, I realized it really wasn’t about the stupid knives. Although to this day, like we’ll sell millions of dollars of knives now, but not because of knives. The knife is a delivery vehicle for an emotion. I started to realize that Paul was a relationship builder, a relationship master.”

Conrad Saam: Strategy before tactics. “The tactics are to get you where you want to go, and the strategy is overall, what are we doing? Are we trying to grow by X percent? Are we trying to minimize our costs? What is the mix of all the different tactics that we can put together to get to where we want to go?”

Gyi Tsakalakis: Discipline over shiny objects. “The whole point of marketing is to stand out, and your first instinct is to go copy somebody. Like, that’s antithetical to standing out, doing what somebody else is doing. Business is the same thing. It’s work. It’s every single day going to the gym. It’s every single day refining that message, analyzing the numbers, looking at the feedback, seeing, is it working?”