- Good Morning, Believe Nation.
My name is Evan Carmichael.
My one word is believe
and I believe that
entrepreneurs will solve
all of the world's major problems.
So, to help you on your journey,
today's message is
create the best products.
Over to you, Bill Gates.
(rooster crowing)
♫ I wake up every mornin'
♫ Entspresso keep me goin'
♫ I wake up every mornin'
- Every product we do
is absolutely as capable
as it can possibly be.
There's no holding back.
We are, the people at Microsoft,
come in to work every day,
building the best products they can.
And they're very proud.
You know, you go out, go into schools
and see how kids are using this stuff,
going, ask people about
how their jobs have changed
because of the personal computer.
You know, we're sitting there--
- [Interviewer] Sure.
listening to our customers
saying how they'd like
to make things better.
So, we do absolutely our best job
and, in fact, that's why
we've been successful.
You know, anybody who
holds back in this business
isn't going to be around for long
because this is a business
where you always have to be
moving at a very rapid pace.
- The number one rule about making money
is you need to provide value.
It's one of the most
basic rules in business.
The more value you provide,
the more money you're going to make.
So the better your product
or your service is,
the more it's helping people,
the more it's providing value,
the more your business is
going to grow and flourish.
The challenge is, for a lot of you guys,
your product or service
isn't actually that good.
It's okay.
Maybe you get some results,
maybe it's still early days,
but it isn't actually that good, yet.
And the market is the test.
When you put it out there
and people start using your product,
are they getting their result?
It should be something that,
when they use your product,
or use your service,
it's instantly noticeable,
the value that comes.
And that's how you can turn
somebody who has no brand name,
no recognition, coming out of left field,
nobody's ever heard of this person,
has no reputation in the industry,
can still win because they're providing
so much insane value.
The example I've used is Eminem,
when he called into various radio stations
and he uses a fake name
and he called in on LL Cool J's show.
LL Cool J's doing an interview on a show
and he wanted to rap for him.
And he called in under some fake name
and, as he was rapping,
they didn't know who he was
but they said, "Man you're really good.
"Like, you are really, really good.
"You should be auditioning.
"You should be getting a record deal.
"You should really focus on this talent
"'cause you got something."
And of course, it's Eminem, you know,
one of the best rappers in the world.
But the talent was immediately noticeable,
even though they had
no idea it was Eminem.
And so it's, can you create on that level?
Are you currently making
a product or service
that is on that level so once
somebody immediately uses it,
they see insane value?
I get a lot of people
pitching me all the time
with their products, their
software, their apps,
their tools, their services, all the time.
I get emails every single day
with pitches for different products.
And some of them I'll look
at and I'm not impressed.
It's very early stage.
It doesn't provide me enough value.
I love tools that help save me time.
And if I'm using a tool
that will help save me time,
I'll tell people about it.
I'll tell you guys on YouTube,
I'll tell my entrepreneur friends,
I'll tell people on my network,
you should use this product, this service
because it's doing so much value for me.
The problem is what you're sending me
is not giving me crazy value
and that's okay for now.
It's an opportunity to get better.
This is where you are now.
There's very little market acceptance.
People aren't loving what you're doing.
Improve it.
Make it better.
Listen to feedback.
Put it back into the next version.
At the end of the day, you
have to create a great product.
PR will help you, market will help you.
You know, but at the end
of the day it's going to be
does this thing actually work?
Does this thing actually solve a problem?
And you may love it.
You may think it's the
best thing in the world
but if you have something
that you absolutely love
that is not serving the needs of a market,
you just have a hobby.
You don't have a business.
Success will come from both.
You have to love what you do
and there has to be a market for it.
You love what you do,
you just have a hobby.
If there's just a market
for it, you don't like it,
you're not going to have success.
Because who love that
business will crush you.
Both.
Love what you do, market for it.
Combine those things,
provide insane value,
you've got a winning business.
So the question of the
day today is, I'm curious,
I want to know a product
that you recently bought that you love,
that's providing insane
value to you for some reason.
I want you to share that.
Don't put your own product,
I want to product of
somebody else that you bought
that you absolutely love.
And what I'm hoping we
can do is kind of learn.
Like, look, these are companies
who are creating great products.
What can we learn from them
and apply to our own business?
A concept of modeling success.
Leave it on the comments below,
I'm really curious to find out.
I also want to give a quick
shout out to Devon Triche.
Devon, thank you so much for picking up
the audio version of
my book, Your One Word,
and posting a review on
it on your Instagram page.
I really appreciate it, man.
And I'm so glad you enjoyed my book.
So thank you guys so much for watching.
I believe in you!
I hope you continue to believe in yourself
and whatever your one word is!
Much love and I'll see
you again tomorrow morning
for another shot of Entspresso.
♫ I wake up every mornin'
♫ Entspresso keep me going
- If you look at the companies
that endure over decades,
they tend to win on product.
It is true that it is
critical to get sales
and marketing right.
Because without that you just
don't get the flywheel going.
But, you know, the most valuable
tech company in the world is Apple
and I think they make
just the best products
across the board.
I don't know if Google
is still number two,
but I think Google search
dominates everything else.
And also, like, most of,
like Gmail and Google Maps
dominate their respective products.
I think Airbnb won on product.
I think that Facebook, although
they came late to the game,
had, like, the best product by far
and they've managed to expand that.
So, I think, I don't ever try
to let people off the hook
for sales and marketing.
'Cause if you build the
best product in the world
and don't get anyone to use it,
that still kind of sucks.
But the, I think it is very hard to win
in the long, long term
without the best product.
I think that you can get
acquired two years in
because you had a really good, like,
press or marketing strategy.
But that does not, that
is not how you create
sort of enduring value.
Eventually, sort of,
these things converge.
- The key thing for us was the product.
And our whole focus for the
first ten years of the company
was building a better mouse trap,
having a better running shoe,
having a better basketball shoe,
having more cushioning in different shoes
and innovating like every six months
and spending a lot of money
on research and development,
spending a lot of money on a lab,
and the product process, really,
was developed far in advance
of anything else that we did.
- We don't believe there's a tension
between product and business,
we believe there's a staging.
Which is, in this industry,
you don't have a business
until you have a product.
And in particular, you
don't have a business
until you have a product
that a lot of people want.
We have this concept, we use
the term product market fit,
which is basically you have a
product that the market wants
and you can tell because the
market's pulling the product.
And until you have that time
spent building a business
around the product is pointless.
Because it's not going to go anywhere.
Like, best case, it's
going to be a zombie.
There's a lot of companies in the valley.
There's a lot of companies
in the valley amd elsewhere
that are, you know, 25, 50, 75 people.
They've got a product.
Nobody really wants it.
They sell a few every quarter
and they kind of eke out a living
and they go on for year,
after year, after year,
after year, after year
and they never get anywhere.
They never go public,
they never get bought,
and people just basically
collect salaries.
And that's not what we want
to do and that's not what
super high potential
entrepreneurs want to do.
So what we basically say is
if you want to build a big success,
you got to nail the product.
You got to, like, it's got
to be a killer product.
It's got to be something
that has product market fit.
When you have product market fit,
then you build a company around it, right?
So then you build a sales force,
then you start doing marketing
and then you start doing business deals
and then you start
expanding internationally
and you do all this other stuff.
And it's at that point where
you start to apply a lot of capital
and you big a build board and
you start hiring executives
and doing all this stuff.
But, a full executive
team with a sales force
and all stuff before you
have a killer product
is a complete waste of time.
