Make Your Mark

Make Your Mark is a business book for creatives, telling them how to get started on turning their creative energy into a profitable business with simple, actionable ideas taken from 20 leading entrepreneurs and designers, who lead successful creative businesses.

When Steve Jobs started Apple, how many lines of computers did he and Steve Wozniak build? Zero! They built one single unit of their first computer – the Apple I.

Then they released it and started collecting feedback so they could improve it. Once it began to sell well and they were seeing some profits, then, and only then, did they begin working on the Apple II.

Jocelyn says that’s exactly how it works. You don’t need 100 ideas. You need one, and only one (although it might take you 100 ideas to come up with one good one).

Then it’s your turn to execute on that idea like a madman, make it great and develop it as far as you possibly can.

Spreading yourself too thin will only lead you to a ton of “nearly there products”, which consumed a lot of time, attention, energy and potentially even money, but never made it to the finish line.

Take Bonobos, for example. They offer a wide range of clothing for men, including golf pants, swimming shorts, sweat pants, chinos, shirts and suits.

But they started with a single pair of pants, which had a great fit. They only sold those in several colors for the first year, until they reached $2 million in sales.

That’s when they slowly started thinking about other products.

The reason you won’t have enough time to work on 10 products at once is because you’ll be so busy going above and beyond for your first customers – if you’re building a great company, that is.

You know what makes a mark? Doing things that don’t scale.

For example, how can you top a personal video message from the company founder to Joe, customer number 23? You can’t.

Because it’s more custom-tailored than even the best pair of pants. When you go all out to make a difference in a single person’s life, and you do that for your first, second, third, and the next 100 customers, people will tell the world about you.

When AirBnB started, people were skeptic about having strangers sleep in their home.

So the founders organized meet ups, answered questions and even stayed with their customers during their trip – now that’s commitment!

And if you want to see another example of someone who does things that don’t scale, just look at what Gary Vaynerchuk’s doing.

He’s living proof that this works.