Seth Godin: commitment

Transcript context

…I love how natural of a product manager you were in these things you shared of just thinking everyone deflecting credit and all these things. It's sign of a great PM. Along these lines, I wanted to ask actually, so you're a PM early on. Now, you obviously spend a lot of time marketing. I know you're saying there's obviously a strong connection between the two, but is there anything you find that people building the product most often miss or misunderstand that just annoys you or do you think they need to hear? Maybe I got seven, but I'll try to do them off the top of my head. The first one is this, empathy is not about kindness and empathy is not an option. This is something that you are making for other people. So the whole idea of RTFM, read the manual, I'm angry at you. If you're saying that to your customers, you made a mistake, they did not make a mistake. The second one is that the thing about projects is when you run out of time and you run out of money, the project is over. Don't run out of time, don't run out of money. Good intentions are no reason for an extension. The professional doesn't ask for an extension because the professional understands that things you didn't expect are going to happen. That's part of the deal. And I guess the third one would be for software, particularly software as a service, if you don't build the network effect into what you are making, you are almost certainly going to fail. You cannot hope that Apple's going to pick you, promote you, and magically have you be successful. The question is, will this work better for my users if they tell other people about it? And if the answer is no, then why would they tell other people about it? And if they don't tell other people about it, no one's going to hear about it. But if the answer is yes, then your marketing problems pretty much solved. I feel like each of these is its own book that we could talk through. And I want to come back to this last point and how it relates to the purple cow. I want to spend a little time there, but first I'm going to ask a marketing question. So before you came on, I asked on Twitter, what should I ask Seth Godin? He's coming on my podcast. I got a flood of suggestions. The most recurring theme actually had to do with AI. Actually the co-founder of Intercom asked this question and it echoes what many people are wondering. So his question is how do you think all these new AI companies build brands to distinguish and differentiate themselves in a world that's increasingly filled with AI companies, AI products, AI content?…

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