Friday, December 3, 2021

The Biggest Mistake I Made in 2021

 I know this year isn't over yet but I'm pretty sure I won't make a bigger mistake between now and January 1st. 

Mike has been selling a software product written in Turbo Pascal & Delphi for 30 years. Mike's software was mentioned on the television show Good Morning America. Mike got very excited. Mike updated his website making the 30-second Good Morning America television segment center stage. Nobody cares Mike's software got mentioned on television (except Mike). Mike turned off potential customers who visited his website. Mike's sales dropped. Mike's a jerk. Don't be like Mike.

This was one of the hardest lessons I learned. 

I was so sure my would-be customers would feel just as excited about my software getting praise on national television as me. So sure in fact, that I posted a video of my software getting mentioned front and center on my website. And not just on the home page... but on every page.

Wrong! 

People don't care about me. People care about themselves.

People don't care about you.
People care about themselves.

It was Saturday morning, August 21, 2021. I was sitting on the couch in my living room watching cartoons with my granddaughter. And my phone dinged. I received an notification of a sale. A few minutes later another ding, another sale. I checked the real-time website stats and to my surprise there were 53 visitors on my site all at the same time.

I started googling trying to figure out what was causing this frenzy of visitors to my website. And by luck I found a video segment that had just aired on the Good Morning America television show. 

The total segment was about 4 minutes long. The last 35-40 seconds is where my software ZilchWorks was mentioned. So I trimmed the video down to the last 40 seconds because that's the part that talked about my software. Proof again that people only care about themselves. Why else would I have trimmed down this video.

I then retooled my entire website and made this "Look what I can do" video front and center. I foolishly thought this would drawn in website visitors.

Lessons Learned:

  • People don't care about you. They care about themselves.
  • Customers want to know what you can do for them.
  • Enjoy the media success. Treat it as validation.
  • This too shall pass applies to both good and bad.

Enjoy!
Semper Fi,
Gunny Mike

1 comment:

  1. Media coverage: nice! I'm sorry to hear it did not work out as expected..

    ReplyDelete