How I Built This

The first step is building buzz, which is somewhat self-explanatory.* It’s about getting a nontrivial number of people talking about your product out in the culture. It’s about creating a general awareness that your company exists and that there’s something cool or interesting or new (or all of the above) about what you’re doing.

But what set them apart, and what made their success so remarkable, was Jeni’s almost maniacal focus on quality. She was obsessive about how and where she sourced ingredients. She spent countless hours experimenting with the molecular structure of the milk proteins to make sure her ice cream had a very specific mouthfeel.

The purpose of building buzz is to convert it into product demand, to generate sales. The media, both mainstream and social, are a big part of that conversion process.

By making Five Guys harder to find, Jerry had actually set up the conditions to more accurately determine whether or not the word was spreading, and if so, how fast.

That seems to be the recipe for every successful pivot—not just the recognition that you can’t keep doing what you’re doing if you want to grow or survive, but also identifying something else to do and/or some other place to do it.

Someone goes looking for something that they are sure already exists—a product, a service, a TV show, even a video game, it doesn’t really matter—only to discover that it is nowhere to be found. So they start talking about it in casual conversation to whoever will listen—friends, family, Uber drivers, baristas, professional acquaintances—and they l

When your lips are dry, you apply ChapStick, not lip balm. They have become such a part of our daily lives that a lot of people don’t even realize they are brands. Inevitably, we forget that at some point in the past, someone actually created these things and put them out into a world that had never heard of them before and had no idea what they we