Happy Monday.
I hope you survived Christmas.
Mine was great. My son got $600 of presents and then spent the day playing with a half-eaten dog bone. After cleaning up boxes for an hour, my family came over and exposed us to COVID.
Ah, I love the holidays.
Here’s what I have you this week:
Good media is good marketing
A few weeks ago, I talked about how media is the new marketing. The idea is simple:
- Media companies are good at getting attention but bad at monetizing it
- SaaS companies are good at monetizing attending but at getting it
Forward-thinking companies like ProfitWell and Hubspot realized this and started building media companies within their business.
While they still churn out white papers and SEO-driven content, they realized that smart businesses are trying to connect with prospects on a deeper level.
You can’t build a fast-growing company around vanilla. In almost every market, the boring slot is filled. The product designed to appeal to the largest possible audience already exists, and displacing it is awfully difficult… The real growth comes with products that annoy, offend, don’t appeal, are too expensive, too cheap, too heavy, too complicated, too simple–too something.
Seth Godin
By being small, you have permission to show personality and be remarkable. The dominant player in your niche doesn’t have that luxury. They likely market by committee and churn out stuff that’s boring, bland, and vanilla.
If your marketing isn’t getting attention, it’s probably boring too.
Give yourself permission to be outrageous.
Being too outrageous is better than being ignored.
There is plenty of time to act grown up after you’ve dominated your niche.
Gym World Worldwide
With that in mind, I teamed up with Mark Fisher and Mateo Lopez to pilot an infotainment show about the business of fitness.
Mark runs a unicorn-themed gym that has down over $30M in revenue. Mateo is my co-founder and helped me build and sell 5 gyms around NYC.
Each week we discuss the best and worst stories in the fitness industry.
If you’re a fit pro that’s stuck at home for the holidays, listen to this episode and give me some feedback. I’ll love you forever.
If you want to support the show, subscribe on Youtube and join our mailing list. We’ll be giving away some goodies in the coming months.
Until next week,
John
