Right now I am in my third year at the school of commerce. Through my college years I have learned the basic ins and outs of marketing and sales, and the biggest shift was learning to build things backwards. Reverse engineering a business means you start with the problem a person already has, not with the product you feel like making. In this blog article I want to share what I’ve learned and how it transformed my life. I hope I can inspire some people to learn more about marketing and sales and learn these new skills. I think these skills complement each other, and in my opinion it is essential to learn both if you have a business or a high paying career.
What marketing actually is
Let’s start with marketing. To describe marketing in a single sentence, it is ‘The process of identifying customer needs and promoting products or services to connect value with the right audience.’ Which means that a person has a certain problem, and you solve that problem with a product or a service. Sometimes the person is not even aware of the problem, until you mention it. The American Marketing Association’s own definition circles the same idea: marketing is about creating and delivering something that has value for customers.
In the production era, businesses manufactured products and services for people without identifying customer needs, which means they plainly pushed people to buy their products, even though there wasn’t a specific need.
Marketing and sales changed that. Now it is more important than ever to step in the role of the customer. To search for opportunities and most importantly to know what the customer wants. This is reverse engineering. Instead of building the product and then selling it to people, you figure out what the people want, sell the solution to them and then build it.
If you want the fundamentals before going further, I broke them down in my introduction to marketing.
Marketing and sales do the same thing at different scales
Both marketing and sales people do this. The difference is the way they do this. Marketing teams spend a lot of time collecting data, doing research and holding interviews. Sales agents have conversations with clients and leads, and build relationships with their clients. Marketing operates at scale, while sales work is more focused on one-on-one conversations.
I mainly do marketing, because it is a great extension of my YouTube channel and my website, but sales is just as important to me. You need to be a great listener if you are a sales agent. Most people describe a sales agent as a chit chatter when they hear it, but that is not true at all. A good one knows how to identify the essential needs when listening to the client.
I am a naturally introverted person. I often describe myself as shy when surrounded by other people — something I’ve written about in the hopeful truth about social anxiety. But when I had to hold a sales conversation with my teacher, I scored very high because I listened carefully, summarized the problem and came up with a very suitable solution.
Reverse engineering a business in a weekend
Right now I am reading a book called Million Dollar Weekend by Noah Kagan, and it is really interesting. It describes how you can start a successful business in a weekend, by focusing on what kind of problem people have, how you can solve it for them and what they want to buy from you. Instead of spending months developing a website, software or building a store, again, you reverse engineer it.
It is the same instinct behind the lean startup method: get something in front of real people early, learn from what they actually do, and let that decide what you build next.
Why validation has to come first
Almost every time we start a new project at school, it begins with interviewing people, collecting real data, sending surveys, or talking to the client we work for. It always starts with some kind of conversation. That is why it is so important to do it right. Rob Fitzpatrick’s The Mom Test is the best guide I know on asking those questions without leading people into telling you what you want to hear.
You can have the best idea in the world, but if nobody is actually interested, if you did not validate your idea, it will not sell. But I see this as a good thing, because it means you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to build a successful business. Communication comes first. It is the same reason I believe you should provide value and gain experience first before you try to sell anything.
What I got wrong with the Creative Asset Map
Now I have not built a business with real products or services based on a problem from a specific audience yet. I haven’t built a product or service, except for The Creative Asset Map. The reason it has not performed very well yet, is because I built the product first before validating the idea, which makes it an example of exactly what not to do.
I did it because I thought it was a cool idea. I really like being creative and having multiple creative outlets, and I still think there’s something there — it’s the same thinking behind building a creative ecosystem. But I figured my audience might want something else, they may not be interested in having multiple creative outlets. I didn’t start with the audience. I started with myself.
The audience is the research phase
But I see my YouTube channel and my blog articles as experiments. I try to discover what people want to watch, which problem they have and how I can help to solve that problem. The reverse-engineering model assumes you already know who your customer is, and a creator starting from zero doesn’t. So the audience becomes the research phase.
I would say I am collecting data at scale. The reason I am doing this, is because I want to build a big audience first before selling something. Next time, I will make sure to collect as much data as I can, have natural conversations with people and really step in the shoes of you, the audience.
I try to work with the feedback I receive, improve my craft, so that later on I can develop real products and services, specifically designed for my target audience. That means publishing before it’s polished, which is its own lesson in embracing imperfection and focusing on the process. Until then, every video is a survey with a view count attached.
