| Do you know what Burbn is… or rather, was?
Yeah, it sounds like the drink… It was named after bourbon - the kind of booze that, according to bartenders, shows you know what you’re doing and what you like. (Thank me later.)
But Burbn was an app back in the late 2000s that tried to capitalize on the craze of location-sharing apps, like Foursquare.
On paper, Burbn was an awesome app - it let users check in at particular locations, make plans for future check-ins, earn points for hanging out with friends, and post pictures of the meetups.
Burbn was not successful, however. Essentially only the developers’ friends and family used it. (Out of pity, I presume.)
They wouldn’t even use the main feature of the app.
When looking at how users were interacting with the app, the developers found out that while people weren’t using the check-in features at all… they were crazy about the app's photo-sharing features.
So, developers began looking at competing photo apps back then. One of them was Facebook - which was the 800lbs gorilla even back then, but its photo-sharing features left some things to be desired. Then there was Hipstamatic - all cool, great filters… but again, hard to share your photos.
So they decided to do something drastic.
They cut every feature from the app… except photo sharing.
They rebranded the app, too.
Do you know how they called it?
Instagram.
“It’s about going through false starts,” Kevin Systrom, one of the developers said at a conference in 2012, according to Business Insider. “Burbn was a false start. The best companies in the world have all had predecessors. YouTube was a dating site. You always have to evolve into something else.”
The scale might be different for your online business.
However, you might have had false starts already… and it’s almost guaranteed that you will continue to have them.
Unless you keep on evolving, you’re doomed to mediocrity.
For example, perhaps your first lead magnet doesn’t generate the response you’d like.
The worst thing you can do is to decide that it means you should stop creating lead magnets altogether. The smartest thing? If you have any feedback from your customers, look at it… double down on what they like and edit out the rest. Repeat this process in every area of your business as many times as necessary.
As Kevin Systrom also said, “great ideas are about editing the bad ones out”. Also, “one day on the job is more than one year in a book”.
Here’s one quote I particularly like - and I’d like to end this email with it.
“Learn just enough to be dangerous.”
Systrom - even though he co-created Instagram - is not what you'd call a genius-level coder, by his admission. Instead, he learned just enough to create the minimum viable product… and once he proved the concept, he then hired people who could polish it up, once it was clear the demand was there.
It’s what you should do, too.
Learn enough to be able to put your idea out in the world. If it starts making money, you can scale easily. If it doesn’t, well, if you multiply zero, it’s still zero. Right?
To Your Success, Paul Hanson
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