Messaging - You can have the best product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, none of it matters. How do you say something that actually gets heard?
Here's something I tell every founder I work with, and it never gets easier to hear. It doesn't matter how brilliant your idea is. It doesn't matter how much you love your product or how many hours you've poured into your service. If nobody knows it exists, none of that matters. I know that sounds harsh, but it's the truth I've built my career around.
To me, this is the hardest part of being an entrepreneur, harder than making or designing product itself. You are stuck living with one question that never fully goes away: how do I get in front of the people who need what I have to offer? I wish I could hand you a clean answer, a formula you could follow and be done with it. But there isn't one. I have never met a business, mine included, that solved its marketing with a single tactic. It's always layers. And whatever is working brilliantly this year has a good chance of falling flat next year.
Years ago, we started running ads in the back pages of airline magazines. Delta, United, American, Southwest, Alaska, all of them. And it worked. Sales jumped in a way we hadn't seen before. Here's why, if you're old enough to remember: back then, when you boarded a plane and the flight attendant started the safety announcement, you had to put your phone away and shut your laptop down. There was nothing to do but sit there, bored, flipping through the seatback magazine. And there we were with our ad for ColsenKeane Leather, waiting on the back page of the airline magazine.
We ran those ads for years and they earned their keep. We haven't advertised in an airline magazine in almost eight years now, mostly because they don't exist anymore. But to this day, people still walk into our store holding a torn out page from one of those old ads, asking for the bag on it. Eight years later. That's how deep those campaigns went.
The lesson isn't "airline magazines work." The lesson is that we found something that worked incredibly well for a stretch of time, and then, like everything, it stopped. The same thing has happened with Facebook, Instagram, Google. Every platform that used to be a reliable well of leads and sales has cooled off from where it once was.
And here's the part I find almost funny. Right now, one of the strongest tools we have for reaching future customers is something old fashioned: staying in consistent conversation through email with our clients and the people who've shown interest in us. It's currently our most effective driver of sales. But I'd be lying if I told you I expect that to last forever. It won't. It will shift and change just like everything before it has.
So if you take one thing from this, let it be this: build a wide net, not a single line. No one channel, no one platform, no one clever trick is going to carry your business by itself. The moment you find something that works, start looking for what comes next, because it's coming whether you're ready or not.
That, to me, is the real work of entrepreneurship. Not just building something worth talking about, but staying willing to keep talking about it in new ways, again and again.
