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It’s not a product, it’s a platform. When your brand builds something that makes people famous, recognized and part of something cool that matters to them, they will love you forever. Threadless is the perfect example. They reward their designers with significant financial prizes, public kudos and coveted community awards. And as a result, their users are the most engaged in the world, their shirts are the most amazing…

The freemium model is finally working. Give the product away to your tribe for free, let them use it until they’re blue in the face, then, once they realize the value of the product – and the increasingly important role it plays in their lives – you make money via micro transactions along the way like upgrades, paid subscriptions, cheat codes, level walkthoughs, feature unlocks, removing ad content, premium…

Information used to have a supply and demand issue. But now that it’s free, ubiquitous and accessible, its value has plummeted. If you’re a generalist, your competitors are Google and Wikipedia. If you want move people’s eyebrows and catapult their thinking into profitable new directions, your job is to deliver perspective. Here are my latest examples. Don’t forget to read part two! Las Vegas wasn’t built on winners. Are…

The weird thing about the web is, nothing happens if we try. Only when our guard is down, when our intentions are neutral and when we’re operating out of our purest, most instinctual nature, do we see the greatest results. Last year, I wrote my manifesto. I’ve never worked harder on anything in my life. From researching to drafting to writing to editing to marketing, the amount of sweat…

It’s not about getting people to care about your brand. It’s about getting your brand to care about people. Here’s how. Shift the focus. Instead of marketing around what people buy from you, market around their interests. Try not to take your brand so seriously. It’s not because they like your brand, it’s because they love their friends. Enable personal expression. People almost don’t know how to react when…

Profero is a digitally-led, global, marketing & advertising agency. I had the chance to sit down with CEO Aaron Reitkopf to talk about their culture of curiosity, competitiveness and collaboration.   1. You talk about ideas people can belong to. From a culture perspective, why do you think your employees join your company?  We believe our external mission is the same as our internal mission: Creating ideas people can belong…

Your job is to ruin the rest of the real world for people. To interact with them in a manner that is so respectful, so joyful, so honest, so helpful, so loving and so positively memorable, that for the rest of their lives, any time those people interact with anyone else, it’s just not as good. It’s just not the same. Compared to the awesomeness you deliver, the rest…

Customers aren’t going to take the time to tell you what they like. At least, not directly. The problem with focus groups, feedback forms, customer satisfaction surveys, digital suggestion boxes and online questionnaires – besides the fact that they’re tedious and inane and most people only participate out of guilt or bribery – is that the data isn’t organic. People tend to act better when they know they’re being…

If you read enough headlines, and it seems like every idiot with a hoodie and a half an idea is getting a million dollars to try it. But the reality is, less than one percent of entrepreneurs secure funding. Most of them are scrappy as hell, building projects around not waiting for the miracle, spending time, not dimes, working their faces off until their idea gains traction. Which is…

Anyone can make customers happy. But if you really want to be a hero, if you want to wow people’s pants off and get their mouths moving about your brand, you need a way to make the people who aren’t your customers wish they were. Here’s one that pays. Every day, people complain. Publicly. They tweet, blog, review or digitally kvetch about crappy service, disrespectful treatment, failed technology, lack…