No one cares about you

This was the most important thing I learned from my Kickstarter’s campaign. If you take away nothing else, try to understand this very difficult lesson about marketing ideas online.

While surfing online looking for advice on marketing, I stumbled upon this video featuring Seth Godin. It’s only 1:43 long but it is so powerful.

Seth was interviewed about the explosion of YouTube. “YouTube had five billion videos viewed in July. How could that possibly be?”, says the moderator. “We are all running businesses, how do you put that to work?” Seth cleverly answers the question by explaining that the Internet was not invented to sell ads.

This is SO important. Ready? No one cares about you! They invented television to sell ads to you. They invented radio to sell ads to you. They invented newspapers to sell ads to you. That’s not why they invented YouTube. That’s not why they invented the internet.

The internet doesn’t care about you. People don’t have to watch channel 7 anymore. They can entertain themselves mindlessly for hours by pressing the StumbleUpon button.

So, if someone is going to watch a video, they aren’t going to watch it because they care about you. They are going to watch it because they care about [themselves].

The lesson here is that just because you care about the project doesn’t mean other people will.

I think one of the biggest false assumptions people make about Kickstarter is that it’s going to bring massive amounts of traffic to their idea. Kickstarter is a platform that enables your idea to spread. It does not guarantee that it will.

Don’t assume Kickstarter is going to build your audience. You need to do that. You need to do the homework and find all the people who might be interested in your idea. Then if your pitch is good enough, your idea is interesting enough, and your story is compelling enough, you might build something people will care about.

A Kickstart’s Guide to Kickstarter TOC:

pssst…you can read all of this offline by downloading the e-book.