To have lasting influence, aim to create works that will stand the test of time, lasting for decades instead of months.
The most important requirement is to create a product that is so good it spreads by word of mouth.
Works that speak to universal, timeless truths last longer. They don’t chase trends.
First, examine your motivation for creating. It should be because you have something you desperately need to say or are burning to solve a problem. You can’t not do this.
Next, you actually need to do it.
Creation takes place over long periods of time and require dozens of iterations to polish. Don’t fall for the myth that great works are done spontaneously in one sitting.
When creating and marketing, define your audience and purpose carefully. “This is a that does for __ (target user).”
(Shortform note: Perennial Seller is light on how to actually do the core thing of creating a good product. This is likely too domain-specific and taste-based to really codify into rules.)
Marketing is then about finding your target users and ways to reach them.
Every new user has an activation barrier to trying your product - money, time, energy, mental, opportunity, social cost. Your goal is to lower this barrier as much as possible, so they try your product and have a chance to see the value.
Assume: “Nobody cares about what I’ve made. They don’t know what it is. They can easily do without my work.” Humility works harder than ego.
When trying to reach users/influencers/journalists, always think, “what’s in it for them?”
Once you create one great work, what do you do? Create another.
The ideal situation to have is a loyal following of people who love your work and will buy every single thing you produce.
How do you create something that lasts for 10 years? This is a question most advice today don’t dare to ask. The Top “thought leaders” and experts are focused on shortcuts to success - social media marketing, raising capital, hacking bestseller lists, chasing today’s trends.
As a creator, longevity is worth aiming for. Having a perennial seller maintains your influence over years, possibly decades.
Perennial sellers are the kinds of products we return to over and over again; that we recommend to others, even if they’re no longer trendy.
The book gives these examples as perennial sellers:
Every day something lasts, the chances that it will continue to last increase (this is known as the Lindy effect).
Perennial Seller is an attempt to codify the process of creating things that stand the test of time. Is there a common creative mindset? How does it differ from work that’s popular one day and gone the next? How do you capture an audience, build a platform, and develop marketing channels that endure?
Perennial Seller begins with qualities of an effective creative process, and expectations to have as a creator.
Examine your motivation for creating. Ideally, it should be because you’re burning to solve a problem; have something you desperately need to say; believe the world will be better for it; seeing someone else take and enjoy your work; to do something meaningful. It should be your calling. You should need to do this - you can’t not.
Why is this important? Creating inevitably brings setbacks and crushed expectations. You will have existential crises: “Is this even worth it anymore?” Wanting to be rich or famous aren’t enough to push you out of the valley of despair. Other people competing against you are driven by a need to create, and they will push past you if you don’t feel the same way.
Making great work is incredibly hard. It must be your primary focus. You will have to endure sacrifices. But from sacrifice comes meaning.
Continuing to produce good work is like a marathon in which you cross the finish line, then you get picked up and walked back to the starting line and you have to do the whole thing over again.
If this isn’t the kind of drive you feel you have, or it sounds unpleasant, then it might make sense to quit right now. Not everyone is destined for creating timeless works. It’s better to realize now that you don’t want to do it and close off that path, than to spend years pining for it and incorrectly wishing for what could have been.
Creating a perennial seller is about creating an amazing product, NOT about marketing. To create an enduring work, you have to love the process of creating a great product, not just focus on marketing and sales.
There was a quip from an author about spending 20% on the product and 80% on marketing. To the author, this is absurd. Even the best admen know they can only peddle mediocre products so far. Enduring products don’t rely on hype or deceptive sales tactics. Crappy products don’t survive.
The goal is to create a product so good that people share it with their friends. This word-of-mouth is the only way that works continue to survive for decades.
Phil Libin, the creator of Evernote: “People thinking about things other than making the best product never make the best product.”
Now that you understand your motivations, you need to figure out what to create that can be enduring. Here are a few tips.
Chasing trends is problematic because 1) it’s fiercely competitive (partially because it’s strategically easier just to copy others); 2) the hype around a trend obscures its long-term potential (it’s hard to tell early on if the new thing is an enduring innovation, or just a temporary flash in the pan).
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says something similar: “Focus on the things that don’t change.”
Examples:
Ask: “who is this thing for?”
Think about one specific person you’re trying to please (other than yourself - otherwise it might be too niche). This will help you know when you’ve hit the mark.
Don’t think about a generic theater of people - it’s too hard to focus and create something distinctive.
Be OK with polarizing the population. It’s better for half to love and half to hate, than for everyone to be just OK with it. People want things that are really passionate. The best art is not for everybody.
Be as clear about what you’re NOT doing as what you are doing. You can only differentiate by doing things that others are not. If you do what everyone else is doing, it’s hard to stand for something unique.
Regardless of what you make, your work should always be in service of a purpose. You want what you’re making to do something for people, to help them do something, and have that be why they’ll tell others about it.
Great work rarely starts as a solution or technology in search of a problem. This risks building a product that people don’t actually want. People don’t care about how cool the technology or innovation is - they care about how well it solves their problem.
It’s easy to get distracted by weak purposes. Here are bad questions to ask in pursuit of purpose: “Is this making us look good? Does it fit our brand? Is this fulfilling our vision?”
Nonfiction work should be either “very entertaining or extremely practical.”
The more important, universal, and timeless the problem, the better the chance the work will be important and perennial.
Create something new and important, instead of something anyone else could have made.
Pursue the best of your ideas that only you could have (otherwise, you’re dealing with a commodity that anyone else can produce).
90% of users are happy with the dominant player in the space. They won’t get excited about a moderate improvement.
Be wary of any description like “It’s like __ but with __.” These are just incremental improvements over what currently exists. To a user, this is too little improvement to overcome the switching costs.
Be bold, brash, and brave. Stuff that’s boring now is probably going to be boring in 20 years.
Useful guiding questions: What sacred cows am I slaying? What dominant groups am I displacing? Who am I pissing off?
But don’t question EVERY convention - Game of Thrones is still an hour long per episode. Questioning too many conventions is confusing.
Think about why you create.
What is your reason for creating? What do you want to achieve at the end of it? What would you do if you weren’t creating?
Think about one specific person you’re trying to please. Who is it?
What sets your work apart that makes it new and important? What will make users who use competing products to switch over to yours?
Now that you know why you need to create and what to create, you actually need to do it. This is a deceptively hard barrier for many. If great work were so easy to create, then a lot more people would do it.
Don’t dream about it or talk about it. Actually do it.
There are oceans of people who know they could be entrepreneurs/writers/musicians, who have brilliant ideas, if only this one thing weren’t in the way. They think that the wanting, instead of the work, is what matters. These are people who don’t want to write a book - they want to have a book. (Pity them - they’ll never get what their ego wants.)
Casey Neistat, to someone pitching an idea: “I don’t want to hear your idea. The idea is the easy part.” Executing is the hard part.
Want to avoid a lot of hard work and just be “the idea person?” Too bad. There is no assistant or investor or editor who will take care of the things you need to handle.
You need to take control of your fate. You need to be the one who cares about the painstaking details that separate the memorable from the mediocre. You need to be the one who articulates how your creation is going to change people’s lives. You need to stand up for integrity.
Don’t fear the burden of responsibility. Don’t delegate to other people, merely so you can blame them when things go wrong. Take ownership over your work, because you are the only one who can produce what you want to produce.
Don’t fall for the myth that great works are done spontaneously in one sitting.
Great work requires a reverence for the craft, a respect for the medium, and patience for the process.
Examples:
Creative ideas evolve over time, colliding disparate ideas organically. It builds layers into the work.
People who think they can rush to the finish line will disappear. There are no shortcuts to greatness.
Creating something better than anyone has ever done it is scary. What if people don’t like it? What if someone forces you to change it? What if it’s not ready?
Embrace your nervousness. This is a normal part of the process. Fear will make you diligent. Let the feeling guide you, and honor it.
Only impostors are wildly self-confident. The real innovators are scared to death.
Don’t worry about others stealing your ideas. If your work is truly original, you’ll have to ram it down people’s throats. You’ll have to pay them to pay attention, or to work alongside you.
Don’t worry about falling short compared to other people. The best you can do is all that matters. There is no competition. There is no objective benchmark to hit.
If you’re feeling stuck, take a drawdown period - a time of quiet reflection when you sit and wrestle with your project.
After you’ve made progress creating your work, now you need to take your idea and polish it. The process of receiving feedback and improving your work will elevate your work from mediocre to great.
Don’t push your project prematurely toward marketing, if you haven’t polished and received feedback on your work. It’s not ready yet to compete for your users’ attention.
Don’t get feedback a week before your launch. Once you set a deadline for releasing your work, you commit to this date, and you psychologically close yourself off to feedback.
Don’t feel that you have to create a perfect work the first time around. Even the world’s leading creators don’t magically produce perfect drafts.
Just when you think you’re done, you’ll often find you’re not even close. Don’t fret about this - it’s normal.
Why is producing high-quality work important? With competition nowadays being so high, no consumer wants the hassle of cultivating a diamond in the rough. For your users, using alternatives to your product is so easy. Your product has to seem as good as or better than all the others.
To polish your work, it’s critical to get feedback from someone other than yourself. Often this comes from either from an editor who can point out things you don’t see, or your target users who will be consuming your work.
Find an editor who can be more objective than you. This might be someone who has less of a personal stake in the work’s success, or has seen more works like yours and can credibly evaluate it.
Be humble to feedback; don’t be afraid of someone telling you your darling is a turd. “What are the chances I’m 100% right and everyone else in the world is 100% wrong?” You’re better off considering why other people have concerns - the truth is usually somewhere in the middle.
Define the right test for your work. Align the test with the type of impact you ultimately want to achieve, so the feedback you get points you in the right direction.
Feedback has its limitations.
At the end of the day, you might get so much negative feedback that you have to change your direction. This is OK - creative people produce lots of mediocre works in pursuit of one great one.
If you want to create something great, you actually need to do it.
Do you feel that you spend more time thinking about doing what you want to do, than actually doing it? If yes, what’s holding you back?
Does knowing that the path will be a struggle, and that it’s normal to feel fear, change how you feel about doing it?
It’s important to get feedback on your work. Who is trustworthy and credible that you can use to get feedback on what you’re creating?
Now that you’ve created your work, you need to convince other people to receive it. This consists of two things:
1) Positioning: communicating your work in a compelling way.
2) Marketing: reaching your target audience and gaining customers.
The book has a lot of suggestions for both, so see what resonates with you most.
Beyond creating a great product, you have to communicate it in a compelling way for the world. Audiences don’t know that something inside will change their lives. Someone has to tell them.
Your positioning is how people will introduce it to their friends. Make this as easy as possible to say - do the hard work for them. Don’t make them feel stupid saying it.
Example:
One way to think about positioning is as a combination of genre and use case.
Genres are important. You can’t violate all conventions at once to please everyone. People need to understand what category your work fits into.
Then target a specific use case by filling the sentence: “This is a _ that does _ for _ (target user).”
Once you understand your genre and your use case, you know what you’re trying to accomplish. Then decisions become easier.
Keep reworking the positioning until it’s exciting. People are not going to switch over if their first impression is bad.
To simplify your language, distill your creation into three levels:
Start by targeting a niche to make them love your product, but don’t alienate people outside your niche.
Define your core audience quantitatively. Who is buying the first 1000 copies of this thing? Who are your first ten thousand readers?
Positioning can occur in more than words - doing different things can also differentiate yourself.
Finally, remember why you’re doing this. “I’m making a that does for **because .**” If you define your goal, you’ll make better decisions to achieve that goal.
If you worry about being too commercial or “selling out,” remember that this strategy is required to reach people to have the impact you want.
Don’t compare yourself against people who aren’t aiming for the same thing.
After you know who to target, marketing becomes a matter of finding where those people are and reaching them.
Think about who you’re targeting with your work.
For your work, fill in the blanks: This is a _ that does _ for _ (target user).
How do you want people who use your work to introduce it to their friends?
Think about your core audience. Who is buying the first 1000 of your work?
Marketing is any act that gets or keeps customers.
Marketing isn’t the final goal of your product. The final goal of your product is to be good enough to inspire word of mouth - without this, even with the biggest burst of marketing, your product will die. Think of all the failed products that launched to massive hype - a burst of PR/paid marketing clearly is not sufficient.
But marketing is important because it provides the initial critical mass of people to refer to their friends, adding fuel to the growth fire.
Resist thinking “if it’s a good product, people will come” or “marketing doesn’t matter if in the long run the good product will win.” This is entitled thinking that will sink your product. Instead, working hard where others are entitled or lazy is an opportunity for you to win.
Assume this: Nobody cares about what I’ve made. They don’t know what it is. They can easily do without my work.
You should not outsource marketing. Be your product’s primary salesperson, even if you have salespeople working with you.
Every new user has an activation barrier to trying your product. There are costs in money, time, energy, mental (understanding a new product), opportunity cost (when they try your product, they can’t try others), and possibly social cost (trying your product could risk their social standing). Even if you know it’s the best thing in the world for them, they don’t know that yet.
So the goal of marketing and positioning is to lower the barrier as much as possible to get them to see the benefits.
Whenever targeting someone, always think, “what’s in it for them?”
The core of marketing tactics is to find your target user. From your positioning, you should know who your target user is. Now you need to find out where they are and how to get their attention. “Find your addicts.”
This section covers a range of tactics concerning pricing, launching, influencers, press, and paid advertising
Consider lowering the price of your product, or making it free. Lowering the cost barrier almost always gets more users to try, which gives the product a fighting chance at proving its value. More users also means a bigger base to grow from word of mouth, and a better chance of having a lasting impact.
Consider these pricing models:
If all your competitors use an expensive medium, move to a cheaper medium.
Consider even supporting piracy of your product, if the net benefit is positive.
Word of mouth responds to momentum: people share what seems to be hot. So compress your marketing into a launch period, so that you get additional benefits of what looks like momentum to users.
Take inventory of everything you have at your disposal to get your product in people’s hands.
Be willing to hustle. Sell your product however you can, especially in the beginning.
Influencers are people with their own followings who have audiences resembling your target users. Their recommendation carries a lot of weight with their audience.
The most valuable lists are the ones you can’t buy your way into (like Oprah’s favorite things).
Don’t just blindly send to influencers. Think - what’s in it for them?
The answer: influencers want to be known for having good taste and being first to recommend things of genuine value to their followers. Therefore, you have to consider your audience’s audience.
The first step to attract influencers is to make something really awesome that exceeds the expectations of busy, important people with exacting taste. They want to recommend something awesome for their audience, that will in turn feed back to them.
Tactics
When you find an influencer who likes your product, hold on for dear life. Their loyalty will bring you new users many times over.
Generic mass-media press, even in brand names like CNN, is often overrated, if the audience is not targeted or likely to buy.
Don’t let your ego get you distracted. There are likely more specific tastemakers who are better worth reaching out to.
There is one benefit to press - the “featured on” logos are useful for signaling legitimacy to new potential customers.
If you do want to do press - media writers are dying for a scoop on a great story. Give them a unique story to write about. (What’s in it for them?)
Examples
Start with smaller outlets to get buzz going, so that interest seems to bubble up organically. Trade up in reputation and get the big score later.
Paid advertising works better once the product is already in people’s awareness, not for launch. You can then spend a little money to push them over the edge, rather than overcome a huge hurdle to adoption.
The simple math here is to make sure (Customer acquisition cost - Lifetime value of customer) is positive. Because you won’t have data on this, strike a medium - don’t hesitate to experiment, but don’t overextend and waste money.
(Shortform note: remember that there are already big brands paying big money for optimized advertising - so the market rate for advertising will be competitive. Ideally, you have a differentiation in conversion rate or lifetime value, making advertising relatively more profitable for you. Otherwise you can burn a lot of money very quickly without the sales to show for it.)
Try to be more clever and creative with your advertising.
All in all, if you have to choose between spending on paid PR or giving away products to the right early adopters, choose the latter.
After launch, you must persist. Great work is measured over a period of years, not months. Give yourself enough runway to get airborne. Cutting the engines halfway through is going to guarantee failure.
Once you create one great work, what do you do? Create another.
Each additional great work lifts all the other work you’ve created. People who liked your first work have more to enjoy; people who discover you with your new work can enjoy your back catalog.
Steve Jobs: “If you do something and it turns out pretty good, go do something else wonderful. Don’t dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.”
The ideal situation to have is a loyal following of people who love your work and will buy every single thing you produce. This community kickstarts word of mouth for each additional work you produce. This way you don’t start from nothing, like you did with your first work.
Examples:
Any creator needs only “1,000 True Fans” to make a living. If you produce enough regular work, then a thousand true fans will be enough to support your work. (Note: this isn’t enough to become a millionaire and wildly successful - it’s enough to make a living.)
Your relationship with your fans must be more than transactional. It should be for life.
A direct relationship with your audience also lets you learn what they want and target your next creation.
A platform is the combination of tools, relationships, access, and audience to spread your creative work repeatedly over the course of a career.
“Platform is not a stepping stone. It’s the finish line.” - Casey Neistat
Just like creative work, everyone wants a following, but few want to put in the effort to make one.
Ideally, you have a direct relationship with your followers, through a medium you control.
Using gatekeepers like social media or SEO is tenuous. Policies change, companies go bankrupt, consumer preferences change. If you built your following on MySpace and never transitioned to a new service, too bad.
Per the Lindy rule, what has lasted a long time is likely to continue lasting. Thus Ryan Holiday promotes an email list above all.
How do you build an email list?
Cultivate your network. Cheesy line: “Your network is your net worth.”
Suggestions:
Don’t forget to continue updating your previous works. Keep your work fresh and relevant.
Redistribute your previous works onto new media
Reach new audiences by collaborating with people in orthogonal/complementary fields.
Create something novel outside your traditional work. “One for Them, One for Me” strategy.
Find ways of promoting your work through alternative media.
Translate your work into different languages.
Consider doing a new trade that gives you more leverage or accrues surprising value to you.
In creative businesses, much of the money isn’t in the royalties or sales. Someone like Jay Z makes more money from fashion lines/product endorsements/concerts than from selling music. The music becomes a branding device and audience builder for other more profitable works.
Tactics:
Luck inevitably plays a role in success.
The more you produce and the harder you work, the better your chances of the stars aligning. Think about this like climbing a daunting mountain peak. You establish a permanent base camp near the summit, close to the top, within striking distance. Each time you produce, whether it explodes depends on external factors you can’t predict. But with the right preparation and the right conditions, one day you can make it to the summit.