Going Viral Won't Build Your Brand w/ Chris Do | Ep 453

Chris Do (0:00)

If you are clear about who you're serving, the problems that they have, and you speak to that pain point, you provide solutions for that, and you do that consistently enough over a period of time, that ultimately is what people are going to get to know you for. You can also have a moment of serendipity where something you create goes super viral, and then your name becomes associated with that.

I think this is a crass reference, but people can understand this. There's a young lady, she was on the street, and somebody had interviewed her and asked her, what do you do to get the guys to go crazy? She goes, I spit on that thing. She said, Hawk Tuah, and she became known as Hawk Tuah Girl, and that's the one thing. In that case, she didn't build up a whole body of work. She became known for something, it went so viral. There was something really charming and interesting about her and her honesty that was able to build a reputation based on this thing, and she took that to the maximum.

If you don't have something cohesive that people can identify you on, it's probably because you're too busy chasing an algorithm, following quote-unquote best practices, doing some hacks in terms of showing up and trying to get views. I think if you just lean into who you are, what your gift is and who you want to serve in this lifetime, everything becomes very clear.

I'm going to make an analogy here. If you're trying to build a house, you can build it without having a blueprint, without an understanding of construction, and you could just build it.

You will erect some shelter, whether or not it stands the test of time, whether it keeps you warm and dry at night, it's entirely anyone's guess. The chances of it being highly functional or if anything works properly is a giant question mark, unless it's a really basic structure. It's best to have a plan to look at it and to design it, so if there's flow and you understand how people are using it, and understand best practices for building and to learn from someone to be able to do this.

If you find yourself making lots of things, you're probably the former versus the latter. You're just taking spaghetti, you're throwing it on the wall, you're seeing what sticks. That is one way to make content. I'm not sure that's the best way. There's only one time which I think that's a great way to start, which is your first 30 days of content, where you just try lots of things, and then you see what gives you joy, and potentially make some hypothesis about who you might want to be in this world. Then I would say the next 30 days is about you formulating a few small experiments. The first 30 was like do whatever, the next 30 would be like to pick one or two and to go deeper, and then the final 30 days of a 90-day journey is to say now that I know what I want to say, go as deep as possible. I'm going to tie this to a book concept called The Dip written by Seth Godin. There's a simple graph that explains how we approach most things. If you look at it on the x-axis, you can understand time and effort. On the y-axis is result or benefit. Whenever we try something new, there's little time and effort, but there's a lot of benefit. Usually, we're playing a new video game, or playing poker for the first time, so it's really thrilling. We get all this positive feedback. But as you move on and increase the amount of time and effort, you'll start to notice it starts to come down, hence the dip. In this valley is where most people quit, because it's no longer fun, you're not getting the same amount of reward, and you're putting a lot of time and effort, and it doesn't seem like you're benefiting from this. People will quit here, but this is the danger, because here is where if you continue to push, you're going to realize a huge gain. It's that last 80-90 percent of a journey that actually rewards you with what it is that you want. It's difficult, so people quit.

What happens is the people who persevere, who push through the dip, are able to achieve things, they become known, they become recognized, they move from being an expert to an authority, to possibly an influencer. That's where all the rewards and benefit come from.

What I would say is as you experiment and you lock in to something, make sure you follow through and be a deep diver. Don't be a dabbler.