Seth Godins best tactics for building remarkable products, strategies, brands and more

Brand and Strategy Tension in the AI Age

Lenny Rachitsky: Before you came on, I asked on Twitter, what should I ask Seth Godin? The most recurring theme actually had to do with AI. How do you think all these new AI companies build brands to distinguish and differentiate themselves?

Seth Godin: AI very soon is going to stop being a feature the same way electricity is not a feature. What AI companies and all companies need to do is say, what’s in this for the user? What promise do I want to make a difficult promise, a remarkable promise, and then how do I keep it?

Guest Intro and Episode Preview

Lenny Rachitsky: You wrote a new book. You basically talk about how a great strategy has tension at the center of it.

Seth Godin: Tension is at the heart of every art form and every innovation. What we do when we launch a new product, we say, we have this thing that can do X, and now the person is imagining what their life might be like if that were true. If they fall in love with that possibility, now there’s tension. Did you tell the truth? Is it going to work for them?

Cultivating Good Taste and High Standards

Lenny Rachitsky: There’s the section that stuck out to me, these four insights that basically determine what your life is going to be like outside of actually building the product.

Seth Godin: For a product person, these are the critical choices and you probably have glossed over them.

Finding Meaning in Any Job

Lenny Rachitsky: Today my guest is Seth Godin. Seth is an absolute legend. He’s published 21 books, including 18 international bestsellers. He’s been blogging every single day for almost 10,000 days in a row now. His writing and his advice have inspired me and so many people all over the world for the past few decades. He shares wisdom and advice around stuff that everyone can benefit from, including how ideas spread, when to quit, how to lead, how to stand out, and most of all how to change everything. In addition to his writing and speaking, Seth has founded several companies, including Yoyodyne and Squidoo. He also started the altMBA program, and as you’ll hear in our conversation, he actually started his career as a product manager. In our conversation, Seth shares advice on how to know if you have good taste and how to build your taste, how to build a brand in an increasingly crowded world of AI startups and AI content, his thoughts on the Jaguar rebrand and also the Tesla Cybertruck.

We also delve into his new book, This is Strategy, including why every great strategy has tension at its center, why you need to understand the systems within which you operate in order to build a great strategy and how choosing your customers, your distribution strategy, and how you validate your idea will inform the product you build and the life that you live. We also talk about how he used Claude as a writing assistant in developing this new book.

This episode is short and packed with insights, which I know is what you all love. If you enjoy this podcast, don’t forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It’s the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Seth Godin.

Seth, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

The Product Manager Origin Story

Seth Godin: What a treat, Lenny. Thank you for having me. Lenny was my late mom’s nickname, so it’s good to say that out loud.

Lenny Rachitsky: That’s so cool. I’ve never heard it used for a woman, and every Lenny out there I’ve met is wonderful, so I imagine she’s wonderful. First, I just want to say how honored I am to have you on this podcast. When I actually started this podcast, I was like, and I was listening to you on Tim Ferriss at that point, and I was like, man, what if one day I get Seth Godin on my podcast? How cool would that be? I’ve read so many of your books. I have a bunch of them in the bookshelf back there. I reference your stuff all the time, so thank you again for doing this.

Launch Thrills and Surprise Calls

Seth Godin: Well, thank you. It’s a treat to talk to you.

What Product Builders Overlook Most

Lenny Rachitsky:

I want to start by asking a question that one of your former colleagues suggested I ask you. Wes Kao. I imagine you remember Wes?

Seth Godin: Of course. Wes and I sat in a room just the two of us for years.

Brand Building for AI Companies

Lenny Rachitsky: So what she suggested I ask you, and this question I love, is she… I asked her, what did you learn most from Seth Godin working with him? And she immediately said, it’s helping her build better taste and increase her standards, having really high standards. So I want to ask you first of all, just how do you know if you have good taste and high standards and then how do you build good taste and higher standards?

Writing with Claude

Seth Godin: Great question. Thank you, Wes. I define good taste as knowing what other people want just before they do. So if you’re the only person who wants peanut butter covered licorice, you’re entitled to eat peanut butter covered licorice, but you don’t have good taste because everyone else thinks that’s weird. And people, whether they’re jazz musicians or fabric designers are seen as having good taste when they bring something to the world that the world didn’t necessarily expect but is glad to see.

Four Choices from This Is Strategy

Lenny Rachitsky: What do you find helps? So Wes learned from watching you that she realized, okay, my standards are not nearly as high as they could be. Other than working with you, maybe that’s the answer is work with people like you that have really high standards. Just what do you find is most helpful in helping people build taste and also just increase their standards?

Seth Godin: Standards, it’s worth understanding what quality is and the people who listen to this podcast know better than most. Quality is not luxury. Quality is not perfection. Quality means meeting spec, and if you meet spec, you’re done. If you don’t think the spec is good enough, make a better spec. But if you meet spec, you’re done. And so what it means to have high standards is that you relentlessly improve the spec in service of the people you’re working with and for.

And what it doesn’t mean is that you take something that meets spec and refuse to ship it because you’re a perfectionist. That’s hiding. And so what I learned at Spinnaker where I had my first job, real job as a product manager, was this idea that we weren’t there to make perfect for us. We were there to delight the person who was buying the software. And our standards were untouchable. We said, “If that person, the one we’re describing is delighted with what we shipped, it’s good. And if they’re not, it doesn’t matter what kind of excuses we have.” This is the opposite of what most people in this job do, which is they say, how do I please my boss? And if you’re just doing your job, then don’t expect to get rewarded for more than just doing your job because we can find lots of people who can just do your job.

Tension in Strategy

Lenny Rachitsky: That reminds me of one of your other really powerful pieces of advice about how no matter your job, this is a tangent, but it really stuck with me once I read your advice here is no matter what job you have, you couldn’t love it, enjoy it, be amazing at it, even if you’re just like a waitress or whatever. Can you just talk through that? Because that’s so powerful.

Seth Godin: Well, I think I got it from the late Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., and the idea is there’s no perfect job. A friend of mine, Tim, is a famous jazz saxophonist and he’s got to schlep from city to city, and he’s got to play to half empty rooms and he is got to deal with this and deal with this. So you’re never going to have unlimited artistic freedom. But what we all have is the ability to understand where the boundaries of our work lie and go there.

And if you’re a barista and you’ve chosen to be a barista, maybe because it’s the best thing you could get, well you’re not going to get the next hour over again. So what would it be like to be the best barista in the world for an hour? Would that be worth it for you? Because I’ve had menial jobs in food service and I got to tell you, when the boss forces you to be mediocre and bored, there’s no amount of money they can pay you to do that job. But if you’re there and you have a chance to add delight to someone’s day, you’re doing that for you, not because you’re getting paid.

Purple Cows and Being Remarkable

Lenny Rachitsky: And you could totally tell these people in the world when you go to a barista that just you can tell, just loves their job. I know imagine she knows this is not her career long-term, but she just embraces it and just has fun with it. There’s so much power to that. On a different note, you mentioned that you were product manager, which I did not know. That’s amazing. So most of the people listening to this podcast are product managers. They’re either product managers, founders, people that want to be founders, and then people that work with product managers. So first of all, I guess could you just share that part of your life? Because I don’t think people know that.

Being Remarkable and Word of Mouth

Seth Godin: All right. So the origin story could take all day, but I’m not going to tell the whole thing. I’m going to tell the part that I thought was normal that turned out to be the luckiest thing in the world. The summers between the two years of business school are very important to establish your career arc. I got a job at Spinnaker Software. Spinnaker invented educational computer games. I was the 30th employee. And the summer was spent doing assistant brand manager kind of stuff, going to meetings with the ad agency, writing copy. But at the end of the summer, they had a lovely going away party for me, because I was flying back to California. And then at the end, the president of the company, the chairman of the company and the head of marketing bring me into this side when they say, “We have a secret project, we want you to work for us while you’re at business school and we’re all going to pay you almost nothing.”

“Okay, what’s the secret project?” “We’re going to do computer adventure games with illustrations and music based on science fiction novels, and we’ve already acquired the work of Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke.” Now, I had read every science fiction book in the Clearfield Public Library from Asimov to Zelazny. This was a dream come true, but they thought my job was going to be make the packaging and run the ads. And what I discovered, first of all is that I couldn’t really go back to business school. So I showed up hardly at all at Stanford and just took a lot of red eyes. But I discovered that the engineers, the development team, they had a lot of people vying for their time. And if I didn’t figure out how to get them to give me way more than my fair share of development, I wasn’t going to have any products to make next Christmas and then I was going to be out of a job.

And so I started a newsletter internally, I was one of the first people in the world to have desktop publishing because I was a beta tester for the Mac, and in it I would mention anybody in the engineering team who had worked on my project and I would say something good about them. And then I would print it out and put it in every single person’s inner office mailbox. And within three months, four months, partly because the project was really good, 40 engineers were working for me and no one was reporting to me. And so I became the de facto product manager and that is when I learned marketing is the product. You don’t make a product and then hand it to some marketing yahoo and say, go put a logo on this. That the product we made, and five in a row went gold, saved the company. Though product is why it worked.

And so I was supposed to know how to code but I didn’t, but I could be in the room. The last month, RadioShack had bought how many units? 3000 stores times five times five, a lot of units. And if we had missed a date, they were going to cancel the order and the company would go bankrupt, and the software wasn’t even close to done. And we didn’t have any source control like we do now. There was no cloud, so it was all in my head. So I did not leave the office. I’m not exaggerating this, I did not leave the office for the last 22 days, slept for four hours a night upstairs, and if anyone had a question, I could tell them who to talk to.

That was so thrilling. It was so thrilling to make those decisions, to cajole this team, none of whom were in it for the money, to make something we were proud of. And then the stuff ships, everyone else goes home to sleep for a month, but I am the project manager and the marketing guy, so I got to stay at work. And the next day the phone rings and it’s Herbie Hancock on the phone, the great jazz musician, and Herbie says, “The receptionist said you’re the person in charge of Fahrenheit 451.” And I said, “Herbie? I’m 24 years old, man. Herbie?” And he went on and on about how he had stayed up all night to play it and that he loved it.

Tension, Safety, and Systems

Lenny Rachitsky: I love how natural of a product manager you were in these things you shared of just thinking everyone deflecting credit and all these things. It’s sign of a great PM. Along these lines, I wanted to ask actually, so you’re a PM early on. Now, you obviously spend a lot of time marketing. I know you’re saying there’s obviously a strong connection between the two, but is there anything you find that people building the product most often miss or misunderstand that just annoys you or do you think they need to hear?

Seth Godin: Maybe I got seven, but I’ll try to do them off the top of my head. The first one is this, empathy is not about kindness and empathy is not an option. This is something that you are making for other people. So the whole idea of RTFM, read the manual, I’m angry at you. If you’re saying that to your customers, you made a mistake, they did not make a mistake.

The second one is that the thing about projects is when you run out of time and you run out of money, the project is over. Don’t run out of time, don’t run out of money. Good intentions are no reason for an extension. The professional doesn’t ask for an extension because the professional understands that things you didn’t expect are going to happen. That’s part of the deal.

And I guess the third one would be for software, particularly software as a service, if you don’t build the network effect into what you are making, you are almost certainly going to fail. You cannot hope that Apple’s going to pick you, promote you, and magically have you be successful. The question is, will this work better for my users if they tell other people about it? And if the answer is no, then why would they tell other people about it? And if they don’t tell other people about it, no one’s going to hear about it. But if the answer is yes, then your marketing problems pretty much solved.

Strategic Thinking and Seeing Systems

Lenny Rachitsky: I feel like each of these is its own book that we could talk through. And I want to come back to this last point and how it relates to the purple cow. I want to spend a little time there, but first I’m going to ask a marketing question. So before you came on, I asked on Twitter, what should I ask Seth Godin? He’s coming on my podcast. I got a flood of suggestions. The most recurring theme actually had to do with AI. Actually the co-founder of Intercom asked this question and it echoes what many people are wondering. So his question is how do you think all these new AI companies build brands to distinguish and differentiate themselves in a world that’s increasingly filled with AI companies, AI products, AI content?

Seth Godin: Well, the first question is what’s a brand? Because it’s not a logo. A brand is a promise. It’s what do I expect from you. It’s would I miss you if you were gone. And Hyatt Hotels has a logo, Nike has a brand. The way we know this is if Nike opened a hotel, we’d know what it would be like. But if Hyatt decided to make sneakers, we have no clue. They might be comfortable, but that’s all we would know. And so if you want to build a brand, you got to stand for something and you got to say what you don’t do. And the second thing is AI very soon is going to stop being a feature the same way electricity is not a feature. That lots and lots of things run on electricity, but they’re not electricity companies. They just happen to use electricity.

So what AI companies and all companies need to do is say, what’s in this for the user? What promise do I want to make? A difficult promise, a remarkable promise. And then how do I keep it? So making absurd promises might work at the VC level, but it doesn’t work when you’re talking to consumers because you can only break that promise one time. And so to wrap up the brand part, airlines don’t have brands and airlines don’t have loyalty. And the way we know this is that the only reason people stick with an airline is for the points, which is bribery. Loyalty is would you pay extra to stick with this? And if you wouldn’t pay extra, then the brand has no value.

Choosing Better Waves

Lenny Rachitsky: I love this phrase, make a promise and keep it. And the AI element, that raises the bar because many more promises are being made, fewer promises are probably being kept. So is the advice there, continue making an ambitious promise and then the key is actually deliver on that and that’s what builds you brand?

Jaguar Rebrand and Gimmick Marketing

Seth Godin: Yeah. I have a very emotional connection to Claude.ai. I think they have a brand. ChatGPT’s reputation with me is not good because it regularly over promises and under delivers and it does it without kindness or humility. Whereas Claude, I don’t know how they did it, at least in my experience, brings kindness and humility. So when it doesn’t know, it’s very clear and it’s not lazy and it’s not angry at me. And so I happily pay extra for Claude because it has a brand. Whereas ChatGPT for me is just a tool that I use if I have no other options.

Pickup Trucks and Crossing the Chasm

Lenny Rachitsky: I love the Anthropic/Claude’s billboards. “We’re the ones without the drama.” The AI company without the drama. I was going to save this to the end, but let’s actually talk about it. So you mentioned somewhere that you actually use Claude to help you write this book and refine the book, which I think is going to increasingly happen. Could you just share that process of how you did that? What did you do that might be helpful to people to help you write this book?

Seth Godin: Well, to be clear about my brand promise, because it’s true, every word that has my name on it, I wrote. Every blog post, every book. I don’t have a team. This is my whole staff is me. What I did with Claude and which I encourage people to do in the book is I would upload a list of four things and say, what did I miss? And it would suggest three things to complete the list. And often they would be things I hadn’t thought of. And then I could go write about that or I would upload a couple chapters and I would say, what are the claims I’m making here that you don’t think that I’m sustaining? And it became this patient editor that is so hard to find in the real world because editors aren’t paid enough and given enough time to do their job right. And what I find is if I have a sentence that doesn’t sound enough like me, I can ask Claude to help me figure out why that’s true.

The Secret to Leadership and Empathy

Lenny Rachitsky: I love that tactic of using it to figure out what you missed. I feel like you agree with this. I find that when I write, part of it is I’m putting an idea out there. I want to see what I got wrong and what I missed. And I like that you basically skip that step and don’t put it out and just make the thing you put out actually better.

Seth Godin: Well, the thing about blogging every day is at first it felt like how am I going to keep up? But once I could build a queue because I didn’t want my streak to end-

Lenny Rachitsky: How long is the streak at this point, by the way?

Seth Godin: Post number 10,000 comes out at the beginning of 2025.

Lenny Rachitsky: Oh my God. In a row.

Seth Godin: In a row. Some days there were two. But what I found as I got a little bit of a queue is that I would feel bad because I had something to say, but I couldn’t because there was already one in the queue. So I shifted from I have to write something to I get to write something. And now because I’ve taken the pressure off, I have time to rewrite it because I don’t have a shortage of ideas for tomorrow. I have extra ones.

Lenny Rachitsky:

So let’s talk about your book. You wrote a new book. It’s called This is Strategy. I’ve been reading it over the past week and I’ve been so into it that I actually left it at my mother-in-law’s house. I don’t have it with me. So it’s called, This is Strategy. It’s about how to build strategy and develop a strategy. There’s a lot to love about the book, but the section in the middle that is what most stuck out to me that I want to spend a little time on. You have this four sequence of advice that I love, so I’m just going to read it real quick. Choose your customers, choose your future. Choose your competition and choose your future. Choose the source of validation and you choose your future. Choose your distribution, and you’re also choosing your future. Can you just talk through these four insights, these four steps that basically determine what your product and life is going to be like outside of actually building the products directly?

Seth Godin: Yeah. And for a product person, these are the critical choices and you probably have glossed over them. You have probably assumed it’s a given and you’ve sacrificed your agency over the four most important things you should be choosing. So the first one is picking your customers. If your motto is you can pick anyone and we’re anyone, if your hope is that you have to win SEO to get anything, you’re not going to succeed. When you choose your smallest viable audience, what language they speak, how much money they have, what problem they’re trying to solve, what their technical facility is, whether they’re short-tempered, whether they’re kind, whether they’re going to stick with you, you have chosen everything that’s going to go into the product and what your future is going to be like. And so the Humane Pin people, whatever it was called, made a mistake when they picked their customers because they showed up like they had a finished Apple-quality product and they were trying to appeal to the kind of people that would buy on pre-order a finished Apple quality product.

When they shipped something that wasn’t that, and they knew it wasn’t that, they’re doomed. Whereas if you say, here we are in Product Hunt, we’re only looking for 400 people. We’re looking for people who like the Raspberry Pi. Who wants to wonk with this thing? Now you can dance and you can have all these other things happen because you picked a different customer. If you decide to be a wedding photographer in the Hamptons, well you better expect to have some very spoiled, cranky brides and grooms, and grooms and grooms, and brides and brides, that you have to deal with because you picked your customers. Okay, so then the second one which comes with that is who’s your competition? Because if you’re competing against Walmart, why are you surprised that they keep lowering their prices? That’s what Walmart does, right? That way you decide which space that you’re going to operate in. You’ve built an enormous set of boundaries around what you do.

The third one is validation. If you are trying to please your boss, that’s what you’re going to do. If on the other hand, you can have one difficult conversation with your boss and say, can we agree that I’m not trying to match your taste, I’m trying to match the taste of these 400 people that we’ve agreed are our customers? Every other meeting is going to go way better from now on because you’ve made it clear who you’re trying to please.

And the last one, choose your distribution matters a lot in the software business. For example, a video game, which is where I started, we were in Target and Lechmere and mass merchants. Our competitors were in Ziploc bags in computer stores. Well, when something like Steam shows up, when something like downloadable shareware shows up, everything about your product changes. So again, these four things are choices, and if you’re glossing over them it’s because you’re afraid.

Lenny Rachitsky: And I think it’s important to note, it’s not like you can just change these at will and just like, okay, cool, we’ll change your distribution. These are intertwined. But the important point here that I hear is just make sure the product you’re building understands this is how you’ll be distributed. This is who you’re selling to.

Seth Godin: Yeah, I mean, so a friend just sent me a business plan. They’re making a food product and they’re saying, we’re going to distribute on Shopify and we’re also going to sell to businesses, airports, hotels, and people who need to sell the food. I’m like, there’s only two of you. No, that’s not what your business… You got to pick, today, before you even turn the page, who are you for and who are you not for?

Lenny Rachitsky: Along the lines of picking your customer reminds me, a friend of mine started a company selling a product to real estate agents and she just warned me, be careful who you’re selling to because you’re going to be spending a lot of time with these people. Make sure you’re ready to be doing that.

Seth Godin: One of my very first books was a advertising supported directory paid for by law firms. This is not something I want to recommend to anybody.

Lenny Rachitsky: Another great nugget from the book that really stood out to me is this idea of tension. The importance of tension. You basically talk about how a great strategy has tension at the center of it. Why is tension so important to a good strategy?

Seth Godin: Okay, so let’s agree that tension and stress aren’t the same thing. Stress is generally not good. Stress is two things at the same time, I want to leave, I need to stay. Right? I hate my boss, but I need this job. That’s stress. Don’t look for stress. Tension is at the heart of every art form and every innovation. Tension is it might not work. Tension is da-da-da-na-na, and the other person says, da-da. Because they need to finish the sentence.

So what we do when we launch a new product is we say, we have this thing that can do X, and now the person is imagining what their life might be like if that were true. If they fall in love with that possibility, now there’s tension. Did you tell the truth? Is it going to work for them? And when I was a kid, PF Flyers were the sneaker to get, this was before Nike. And the promise of PF Flyers was that they would finally make you fast enough to run away from the bully. And I remember 10 years old walking into that shoe store and there was real tension in my head because I needed to get away from that bully, and I was keeping the PF Flyers people to their promise, and they didn’t tell the truth.

Lenny Rachitsky: It comes back to your point about not delivering on the promise that you make to build-

Seth Godin: Yes.

Lenny Rachitsky: … A great brand, right? Okay, I want to take a little tangent into Purple Cow territory. I have your book right here, by the way. I have many of your books in the back, but I don’t want to make my library… Oh, what is that? A milk carton?

Seth Godin: This is the first 10,000 copies came in milk carton.

Lenny Rachitsky: Oh man, I missed out on that. Was there any purple milk inside? What color is a purple cow’s milk? We’ll never know. We’ll never know. I know you’ve talked about this concept a gazillion times. I feel like still people don’t actually… Many people haven’t heard it. Many people don’t truly understand it, and it’s the thing that I reference most of your piece of advice. Could you spend a little time just chatting about this topic of the Purple Cow, the importance of being remarkable?

Seth Godin: Okay, so let’s start with Steve Blank. I’m sure you’ve talked about his idea of customer traction. The single best way to tell if a startup’s got any hope whatsoever is do the people who engage with you stick around? Do they come back for more? The second piece is, do they tell their friends? And if they tell their friends, what do they say? The word remarkable means worth making a remark about. So I’m not talking about coming up with some viral video that’s ridiculous in its gimmickry. I’m saying if you make something where the person’s life gets better if they talk about you and you know in advance what you want them to say, then they are more likely to say it. So Marissa Mayer probably created more stock market value than any other product manager I can think of. And the way she did it was there weren’t very many people at Google, but she was the one who said, “No, you can’t put another button on the homepage. There are only going to be two buttons on the homepage.” And over and over and again.

At the time I was at Yahoo. Yahoo had the chance to buy Google for $10 million while I was there. That’s a whole interesting story. But Yahoo had 183 links on the homepage and Google had two. And the statement built into that is we are making you a promise, and the promise is we are smart enough to take you where you want to go without you spending a lot of time browsing through 183 links. Tell us what you want and we’ll take you there. And so I was a tech-forward person, and if a friend came to me lost on the internet, confused about something, I’d just send them to Google because I knew they wouldn’t come back to me for more help, because okay, fine, they’re gone. It’s going to work. That’s what to say about Google at its launch is, hey, just type in what you want and you’ll find it. They built that into the product. That makes it remarkable because I wanted to tell other people about that because it would raise my status as a tech innovator.

Lenny Rachitsky: And the implication here, and you talked about this, is that most likely the way you will win is word of mouth. It’s hard to win with paid ads. It’s hard to win with sales teams unless you’re building B2B software. What you need to focus on is how to build something people tell their friends about. And the core of that is being remarkable. And I love just the way you break it down. Being remarkable is being something people remark about.

Seth Godin: Yeah, and if you think it’s just for small companies, that’s how Microsoft beat WordPerfect, because Microsoft Word was the format you needed your coworkers to work in if you were using a modern computer, because if they insisted on using WordPerfect, then you were stuck with WordPerfect. Whereas they had a migration path and once you migrated, you didn’t go back. So again, it’s in my interest to insist you use Word. So I did.

Lenny Rachitsky: This point about Mercer Mayer of doing this thing that was controversial, it comes back to your point of creating tension. It feels like it created tension both with visitors and internally. There’s also these quotes that I have here that are along these lines that you’ve said in the past, I don’t think they’re in this book. If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try. And safety is risky. Is there anything you want to say there?

Seth Godin: Well, so one of the things I talk about in the book is that systems are everywhere we look and they’re largely invisible, taken for granted. I spend time with high school seniors talking about college. They don’t see the college industrial complex. They just think it’s normal, because that’s what it is to grow up in the suburbs. And what systems do to protect themselves is they invent culture. Culture is the way things are around here. And so if you think something is scary, that’s probably because the system wants you to think that.

And so you shouldn’t do something foolhardy. You shouldn’t be fearless. But what you should do is think about why does it scare me to do this? What system will be offended if I do that? Am I trying to work with the system or am I leveraged enough to help change the system? And so the first people who put up downloadable software, all the feedback was, you can’t do that. It’ll be pirated. You’ll never make a penny. Okay. That might happen, and I can see why that feels scary, but I could also see why the dominant system of software distribution doesn’t want me to even experiment with this. But I only worked on the software for five months, let’s try it, because if it doesn’t work and it gets pirated, I’ll just have to make new software. It’s okay.

Lenny Rachitsky: It’s interesting, the opposite of that was also true with Salesforce. Their whole pitch was no software. It’s all in the cloud. Once that became the system, that became the tension and the risky move.

Seth Godin: Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: So you have this quote, actually. I want to spend more time on the system concept because it’s so core to the book, and so core to your advice for how to be better, you have this actual quote. “What does it mean to be a strategic thinker? It means to see the system.” What else can you share about it just for people that are trying to become better strategically, to understand what you mean when you talk about the system, how to see the system?

Seth Godin: We have to invent systems anytime we engage with other human beings, because interoperability is essential. There’s a system for how we greet other people in our culture. You shake hands, right hand to right hand. And just show up sometime and give the Vulcan salute instead and watch what happens. It’s very awkward because we just needed to get this over with and now that’s part of the system. And so systems serve a valuable function until they don’t, because then the system starts doing things to support itself, to reinforce itself. So for example, there is a system that says we should interview people for jobs. And the most successful interviews are people where they show that they are like us, they look like us, they went to schools like us, they have privilege and background like us. That is toxic, because it diminishes not just diversity, but our ability to put real talent on the team.

And if you don’t see that system and name that system, you’re going to keep doing what you were doing. And I was talking to someone yesterday who said they had been working with a company and the last four people that they had hired had been captain of their Ivy League tennis team. Well, clearly there’s a pattern here and it’s being reinforced by people who don’t want to get in trouble, but the system’s not helping them. And so yes, we need the metric system and we need the zip code system. Those keep working really well. But if you are trying to show up in a place where dominant players don’t want you to succeed, you’re going to have to find something in the system that gives you a chance to change the rules.

Lenny Rachitsky: This metaphor that I love that’s along these lines of better waves make better surfers, that a lot of your success is driven by choosing the wave versus the skills that you have. Can you just talk about that?

Seth Godin: Yeah. So it’s surprisingly profound. I don’t know where I came up with it, but when I see people who are great at surfing, they’re almost always on good waves. And my son who surfs a lot, I have noticed, passes up waves that other people might take waiting for the right wave because he knows he will be able to surf it better. So when you think about which company you’re signing up to bring software from, which people you’re willing to put on the key roles, are you willing to wait for the superstar who’s going to change things or are you in so much of a hurry to make an imaginary deadline that you’re going to ship mediocre work? Because all mediocre means is average. And so if you don’t want to be mediocre, you better do something different than the other people are doing. Otherwise, you’re going to get what the other people are getting.

Lenny Rachitsky: As you talk about this, I’m thinking about, I don’t know if you saw Jaguar’s rebrand and their whole launch. And it feels like it’s been rejected by the system. Any thoughts on that? Maybe what they got wrong or maybe it was genius?

Seth Godin: Okay, so you’ve picked a topic that I really like to talk about. Jaguar did not rebrand, Jaguar re-logo-ed. And the logo might be a sign that they’re trying to rebrand and make a different promise, and they’re switching to all electric, which I’m in favor of. But they made, I think, a very significant error, which is if you’re going to start a car company, a hundred million or a billion dollars are going to get spent earning trust from people who never heard of you. If you’re starting with one of the most iconic and beautiful and beloved car brands that has the luxury of having almost no cars in the world that could undermine what you want it to stand for going forward, it’s perfect. Own that, that’s brilliant. And to walk away from that so that you could please some art director, I don’t understand why you think you’re rebranding when you just put a logo on that undermines many of the awareness assets you already had going for you.

Lenny Rachitsky: It feels like they got very, very controversial. They went against the status quo more maybe than they should. I don’t know. What would you have done if you were them?

Seth Godin: You may recall when the International House of Pancakes decided to falsely announce they were changing their name to the International House of Burgers and made a new logo, because they wanted buzz. This is a Wendy’s Twitter tactic. Buzz does not sell hamburgers. Oreo’s got a lot of buzz when they did that tweet about the Super Bowl blackout. There’s no evidence they sold even one more cookie. They’re not in the business of entertaining us. So Jaguar isn’t going to sell more cars because people like you and I are talking about their re-logoing. What’s going to make them sell cars is customer traction. What they need to do is find 50 people who have authority and get them in a car that changes them somehow, that transforms them.

And it’s interesting if you think about two things that Tesla did right at the beginning with the model S. The first one is, according to someone I know who worked there at the time, the number one thing people would talk about when they saw you in the parking lot of the supermarket was the door handles, because the door handles popped out. They popped out in a way that’s annoying and dangerous, but it was noticeable. So there was a conversation.

And then what would happen is they’d say, what do you think of it? And you’d say, get in the car and you’d switch to ludicrous mode and you’d drive at zero to 60 in 2.4 seconds and they’d start screaming. This was fun for you and told a story to the passenger. This is how customer traction begins because I can’t do that in a different car, right? Compare this to the clown car, the Cybertruck, which was intentionally divisive and most people don’t want to not only drive one but have one on their block because divisiveness is not selling. That what’s selling is being of utility, to help someone get what they want. So here you have a category, the pickup truck, the number one category for all cars in the United States, just sitting there waiting to be taken. You can cross the chasm if you’re someone like Tesla. And instead, they decide to pull a stunt, and that’s not okay. It’s not good product management. It’s not good marketing.

Lenny Rachitsky: Interesting. So you think Cybertruck are not going to be a success?

Seth Godin: Well, I think, compared to what, right? So the Ford F-150 some years has made more than a hundred percent of Ford’s profit, meaning without the Ford 150 pickup truck, there is no Ford. That’s how big a category that is. You have a car with momentum and a public company where you’ve earned the trust of a lot of people. Now you have a category, pickup trucks, that are purchased for a very specific reason to show your neighbors you care about utility. Even if you never use the bed, that’s the story of driving a pickup truck. So now, if you bring people in that category who are inherently skeptical of change and inherently skeptical of design trickery, something that is nothing but change and design trickery, no, they’re not going to adopt it. You could have sold an enormous number of people who might’ve bought a Ford 150 instead. That crossing of the chasm is how you become really significant.

Lenny Rachitsky: I feel like this alone could be its own separate podcast conversation. I wish we had more time. I’m going to ask one last question, and this is a quote that I found of yours that I also love that is reminiscent of Elon Musk, actually, as we were just talking about this. “The secret to leadership is simple. Do what you believe. Paint a picture of the future. Go there. People will follow.” Can you just talk about that?

Seth Godin: I might be a little too glib because what I need to highlight is the painting the picture of the future needs to be based in empathy. You can’t paint a picture of where you want to go. You have to paint a picture of where they want to go, and it’s this non-narcissism that is where professionals do their work. That you are not entitled to raise money, you’re not entitled to have market share, you’re not entitled to get a good price because you worked hard. What we can do is be of service. We can open the door to help people get to where they always wanted to go. It’s very difficult to change what people want, but it’s pretty helpful to offer people a chance to get to where they always wanted to go in the first place.

Lenny Rachitsky: Seth, this was a dream come true. I appreciate you coming on the podcast. I appreciate you saying that. Where can people check out your book? Where should people go to learn more about what you’re up to? Anything you want to share.

Seth Godin: So I’m not active on social media, but I do have a blog at Seths.blog. If you go to Seths.blog/TIS, you’ll find everything you need to know about the book and the strategy deck and the collectible chocolate bar and whatever other thing I’ve dreamed up in the meantime.

Lenny Rachitsky: Chocolate. Seth, thank you so much for being here.

Seth Godin: These were great questions, Lenny, I could talk to you all day. Thank you,

Lenny Rachitsky: I appreciate that. Same. Bye everyone.

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