One of the challenges of being an entrepreneur is that you have to be willing to receive advice like, “what you need to do is …”  For some reason, everyone seems to think they have the answer to your business problems.  I’ve been told that all I need to do is:

  1. create a website – once you have a website, customers will find you on Google, and buy everything you have
  2. purchase advertising – you just need to accept that a cost of business is advertising, and when you accept this – people will buy your products
  3. create a remarkable product – make your product something people will remark on, and you will have the Midas touch

I call BS on these and the numerous things that “I need to do…”  Many of them are rooted in solid truth, but the problem comes from the implication that the one suggestion is “all you need to do.”

Now to prove my point, I’d like to test the third one above – a remarkable product.  This one would seem so painfully obvious, that if you can create a remarkable product, truly you’d be succesfful in business, right?  I don’t think so – I actually think the formula (if one exists) is far more complicated then that.

So what is a remarkable product?  It’s fair to say, one that people would remark to others about.  That the value of the product is so great, people will be better off buying this product, then they would be if they didn’t.

How do you create a remarkable product then?  My suggestion is to sell a twenty dollar bill for $10.  This may sound ridiculous, but you can’t argue the value customers would get for this purchase.  Besides, I’ve spent more money on web design, advertising, and product development in my businesses that I wish I could have limited my losses to only $10 per item in some cases.

So where’s the buy button you say?  When I can afford to pay my web developer to build it, I’ll start selling my first remarkable product.