Be Patient, and Paranoid
What is the difference between patience and paranoia? They seem to be polar opposite, but in-fact they are not. Patience is waiting long enough to see a particular reward come to light. Paranoia is a feeling where you are suspicious of everything around you. The balance between both these polar opposites is where growth lies.
I run a startup, https://findtxapts.com. We help newcomers to Texas find amazing deals on apartments. I ran into some interesting problems. We were running Adwords for a couple of weeks. It was on and off. Some weeks we were making $3500 in commission, other weeks close to nothing. It was frustrating.
I was paranoid. If we didn’t increase our revenue, we’d be screwed. Another company would come into the space and do a better job. So I started to find different channels Instagram: @beautifultexasapts, Facebook, Youtube. I was paranoid, but I was patient with my channels.
I called up my friend, Kevin Carlson earlier today and I asked him, “how do you get customers?” He said you’ve got to be persistent, and wait; growth looks shitty when you’re starting out. But there was still something that was missing from that equation.
No to win you had to be hungry, it wasn’t just persistence that mattered. It was a paranoia. You have to get out on as many channels as you can manage. That’s the secret to marketing for us at-least. Create great content, market great content.
A great metaphor for this, is fishing. In fishing, you have a fishing line and bait. The bait is the ad. The line is page or the marketing strategy.
The lake is the channel. You can have several fishing-lines in a pond. However, after a while, increasing the number of fishing lines won’t help. So you go to a different lake and saturate it with fishing lines. Occasionally, you have to swap out the bait. Some bait works better than other bait. And sometimes the fish bite, and that’s when you convert.
Paranoia more than Persistent will convert. Always be thinking of new ways to reach your audience. Where does your audience live? Where do your competitors get their customers? How can you one-up your competitors and offer a better experience to your customers? How can you cut down on your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)? The results are important, but most of the time, results come much later down the pipe-line.
Right now we are planting the seeds to growth, and watering them everyday, or every other day is more important than staring at our results. Always think of ways to win, of ways to beat out your competitors, or more effectively reach your customers, and execute. Is it hard? Yeah, us humans aren’t wired that way. We crave feedback, and in an ever-connected world of likes and shares we want to see viral growth. Maybe instead we should be focusing on viral effort. Then we can truly start an epidemic.
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