Happy Monday
One idea, one quote, one question. 90 seconds.
The Idea
Nobody is going to find you on their own. It doesn’t matter how good you are, how much experience you have, or how much better your thing is than everyone else’s. If people don’t know your name, you don’t exist to them.
Daymond John kept coming back to this when we spoke last week. He started FUBU with a sewing machine in his mother’s house in Queens making wool hats that were fine but nothing that would blow you away. He wasn’t the best designer in New York and he knew it. But he also knew something that most of the better designers didn’t, which is that the person who gets seen first usually wins, and the gap between first and best almost never closes the way people think it will. So instead of perfecting the product, he drove to the Coliseum Mall and handed hats to whoever would take one. He figured out which rappers were coming through the city and got FUBU on them before anyone was paying for that kind of thing. By the time the bigger brands noticed what was happening, FUBU was already the name, and once you own the name it’s almost impossible for someone to take it from you. He turned that into $6 billion in global sales.
There’s a study from 1992 at the University of Pittsburgh that I think explains why this works. Researchers had four women attend a college lecture throughout a semester. One showed up zero times, one five, one ten, one fifteen. They never spoke to a single person, never introduced themselves, just walked in, sat down, and left. At the end of the semester, students rated the woman who showed up fifteen times as more likeable, more attractive, and more similar to them than the woman who never showed up. She just kept showing up.
Psychologists have a name for this, the mere exposure effect, and Daymond was doing this in Queens twenty years before I ever read about it. He got FUBU in front of people before it was anywhere close to finished, and by the time the quality caught up, he already had the name. Now this doesn’t mean you can show up with garbage and win. You can’t. People remember a bad experience just as easily as they remember a familiar face. But the people I talk to who are stuck, the founders and the creators who feel like they’re doing everything right and still not breaking through, they’re almost never stuck because the work isn’t good enough. They’re stuck because they’re invisible. And being invisible with a great product is a worse position than being everywhere with a good one, because the market can’t choose what it doesn’t know exists.
Quote
“The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” — Oscar Wilde
Wilde was arguably the first personal brand. He showed up to parties, gave interviews, made himself impossible to ignore, and he did all of that before most people had read a word he’d written. The reputation came first. The work followed it.
Question
How many people would pay for what you do if they knew you existed?
Listen
Daymond John: If Nobody Knows Your Name You’ve Already Lost. This is where the whole newsletter came from, and there’s a lot in it I couldn’t fit above. Daymond built FUBU from his mom’s house into a $6 billion brand, became one of the original Sharks on Shark Tank, and he talks about what he looks for when entrepreneurs pitch him, why the founders with the best offering often lose to the ones who are just everywhere, and what he’d do if he were starting from zero today with nothing but a phone.
Read
The Power of Broke by Daymond John. Daymond’s argument in this book is that having no money forces a kind of creativity that money actually prevents. FUBU didn’t win because it was the best streetwear on the market. It won because he had no choice but to put it in front of people using the only resource he had, which was himself. If any of this landed for you, this book is what it looks like when someone is actually living it with nothing.
If you love this content (please share it), but also check out my Podcast, and connect with me on YouTube / Twitter.
— Scott