Cumulative Advantage: How to Build Momentum for Your Ideas, Business and Life Against All Odds
by Mark W Schaefer
That requires six considerations: Who are your potential customers? Age, occupation, income, lifestyle, education, etc. What do they buy now? Current buying habits relating to your product or service, including how much they buy, their favored suppliers, most popular features and the predominant price points. What will they buy in the future? Ragy Thomas, founder of Sprinklr, told me: “Paint the picture of what the future can be, then work backwards. The best way to innovate is to think about the future backward, instead of the past forward. Startups often attempt to solve a problem that is occurring right now. Instead, entrepreneurs should build products and services around problems that will happen in the future and work backward to find solutions for those problems.” Why do they buy? This is a tricky but important question because ultimately your marketing depends on this answer. For example, you might be proud of the new functionality of your product, but people really buy it because it’s a pretty color. Don’t confuse what you sell with what people really buy. What will make them buy from you? I encourage my clients to finish this sentence: “Only we …” Answering that is hard work, but if you align your meaningful points of differentiation with underserved customer needs, your probability of success skyrockets. Is our advantage defensible? What competitors exist, and is our singular advantage significant enough to create a seam? Has there been a fracture in the status quo we can leverage? Consider another example, Alberto “Beto” Perez, a dancer from Cali, Colombia. As a teenager, Beto taught step aerobics in the evenings to pay for his dance lessons. It was boring, but it was good money. Then his two interests collided. Beto showed up one night to teach an aerobics class and realized he had forgotten his usual music. He searched his backpack and found a mix tape full of salsa and merengue songs. Rather than cancel class, Beto decided to scrap the normal routine and improvise the entire class by integrating his high-energy dance routines. The class loved it! The intersection of a problem with Beto’s past experience created a flash of inspiration, and Zumba was born.
I once had the opportunity to interview the great writer and historian Walter Isaacson. He has written incredible books on intellectual giants—Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin—and I asked him about his definition of genius. How did these icons receive their inspiration? He told me that insight requires two conditions: endless curiosity and the ability to see patterns.
In 1937, at the height of the Depression, Napoleon Hill wrote Think and Grow Rich, which claimed to distill the principles that had made Andrew Carnegie so wealthy, despite the fact that Hill never actually met Carnegie. A frightened and desperate country was willing to overlook the fact that the man was a complete fraud and elevate him as perhaps the first self-help authority.
Think about the implications of this for your own ideas. What if you hand-select the early reviewers and they’re people who love you and your work? We begin to see the psychological underpinnings of the sonic boom. If the earliest feedback on your idea is positive and shared widely, it’s much more likely to create the momentum needed to take you to the top and keep you there.
Poverty is not destiny. “It doesn’t work to pity kids raised in poverty and assume that their background dooms them to failure,” says Eric Jensen in his landmark book Teaching with Poverty in Mind. “What works is to acknowledge that the human brain is designed to change from experiences and if we design enough high-quality experiences, over time we will get positive change.”
Peter Drucker also discusses the need for “temperamental fit:” “Innovators need to be temperamentally attuned to the innovative opportunity. It must be important to them and make sense to them. Otherwise they will not be willing to put in the persistent, hard, frustrating work that successful innovation always requires.”
"That requires six considerations: Who are your potential customers? Age, occupation, income, lifestyle, education, etc. What do they buy now? Current buying habits relating to your product or service, including how much they buy, their favored suppliers, most popular features and the predominant price points. What will they buy in the future? Ragy Thomas, founder of Sprinklr, told me: “Paint the picture of what the future can be, then work backwards. The best way to innovate is to think about the future backward, instead of the past forward. Startups often attempt to solve a problem that is occurring right now. Instead, entrepreneurs should build products and services around problems that will happen in the future and work backward to find solutions for those problems.” Why do they buy? This is a tricky but important question because ultimately your marketing depends on this answer. For example, you might be proud of the new functionality of your product, but people really buy it because it’s a pretty color. Don’t confuse what you sell with what people really buy. What will make them buy from you? I encourage my clients to finish this sentence: “Only we …” Answering that is hard work, but if you align your meaningful points of differentiation with underserved customer needs, your probability of success skyrockets. Is our advantage defensible? What competitors exist, and is our singular advantage significant enough to create a seam? Has there been a fracture in the status quo we can leverage?"
"Consider another example, Alberto “Beto” Perez, a dancer from Cali, Colombia. As a teenager, Beto taught step aerobics in the evenings to pay for his dance lessons. It was boring, but it was good money. Then his two interests collided. Beto showed up one night to teach an aerobics class and realized he had forgotten his usual music. He searched his backpack and found a mix tape full of salsa and merengue songs. Rather than cancel class, Beto decided to scrap the normal routine and improvise the entire class by integrating his high-energy dance routines. The class loved it! The intersection of a problem with Beto’s past experience created a flash of inspiration, and Zumba was born."
"Columbia University researchers showed that differences in popularity are incredibly sensitive to the Matthew Effect. The rich get richer, or in this case, the popular get more popular. They found that when content like a song, book, or movie is perceived to be even slightly more popular than another, it will build momentum and rise above the competition. Once again, advantage leads to advantage. Even tiny, random fluctuations in early signs of popularity can blow up and go viral, generating potentially enormous long-run differences—even when the competitors might have more advantages than you!"
"“Most publishers at the time were focusing on television interviews,” Tim said. “But that content expires as soon as it comes out. One day … and it’s gone. There’s no lasting benefit to that media exposure. Conversely, evergreen online content can appreciate over time.”4 “My goal in the beginning was to find 20,000 ‘early-vangelists’ (a term coined by Eric Ries). This is a very large and specific number,” he said. “My thinking was that if you have 10,000 sales in a week you have a very good chance to hit a national best-seller list like The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times. “You"
"“I didn’t know what I was doing when I wrote Search. I wasn’t trying to fire a shot to signal a revolution. But I did have an agenda. My agenda was this: I was genuinely, deeply, sincerely, and passionately pissed off! So what’s the point? Just this: Nearly 100 percent of innovation—from business to politics—is inspired not by “market analysis” but by people who are supremely pissed off by the way things are.5“"
"“Everyone thinks our momentum started with a big hit, but it wasn’t that way at all. Music business success comes from cumulative progress. There are two kinds of bands. One kind is the one-hit wonder. You don’t want that. If that happens, you realize it would have been far more profitable to be an accountant instead. What I realized—especially in the country music industry—building momentum is progressive."
"“The most impactful marketing today is about finding the connective tissue between the intersection of brand values and what’s happening in popular culture right now,” he said. “Brands used to try to set ‘bonfires’—multi-year campaigns. But today we’re constantly looking for culturally relevant sparks. Great marketing is about leveraging the ripple effect of those continuous communication sparks.” In"
- →Peter Drucker also discusses the need for “temperamental fit:” “Innovators need to be temperamentally attuned to the innovative opportunity. It must be important to them and make sense to them. Otherwise they will not be willing to put in the persistent, hard, frustrating work that successful innovation always requires.”
- →You might expect that quality would prevail—the very best songs would always rise to the top. But that isn’t what happened. In short, everything hinged on initial popularity. Almost any song could do really well or really poorly depending on what the social proof from others indicated.
- →In this analogy, success doesn’t come from a 50-page document and a two-year plan. Strategy becomes any opportunity that exploits speed, time, and space. And once you break through, you build momentum that will take you as far as you can go, for as long as you can go! A
- →We’d like to believe that exceptional strategy, planning, and leadership are the drivers of success because that’s what is taught in school. All of those things are definitely important. But the truth is, success is far more random than we believe.
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