Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success | E82
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What are the early struggles and startup failures Seth Godin faced?
Seth Godin is the author of 22 worldwide bestseller that has been translated into 40 languages. You are an incredible entrepreneur at heart, plus one of the most prolific bloggers on the internet.
I started my first business in 74, sold ice cream sandwiches and posters. I started a book packaging company, got rejected 800 times. It was a slog of inventing things that people didn't want to buy. The key learning from the 800 rejections is... I totally understand that there's a desire to leap.
How did Seth Godin turn 800 rejections into a breakthrough?
But if you are picking a path that is crowded, that is easy to get on, and only has one or a few winners, you have made a bad strategic decision.
What are the strategies that will help you rise above the noise?
The first one is...
Seth Godin is the author of 22 worldwide bestseller that has been translated into 40 languages. Seth, you love teaching. You are an incredible entrepreneur at heart, plus one of the most prolific bloggers on the internet. I even bought your chocolate. And I know you almost never talk about yourself because you want to give so much to others, but I do want to take you for a second to starting your first company, YoYo Dine, which was acquired by Yahoo. Can you share a little bit about that story?
What strategic insights did Seth gain from rejections?
Sure. It's great to be here. I would say that YoYo Dine was my seventh company, not my first company. And One of the challenges that we have when we seek to lead and to show up is this sensation that we have to get it all right and have the big launch and everything's got to be smooth sailing after that. But that's almost never what actually happens. What usually happens is first we look in the mirror and see somebody who wants to build something. And that thing we build might be solo. That thing we build might be freelance and it might be entrepreneurial, something bigger than ourselves. So, you know, I think I started my first business in 74. I built businesses that sold ice cream sandwiches and posters.
When I was in college, Steve Dennis and I co-founded one of the largest student-run businesses in the world. Each one of them had value being created for people and none of them was a household name. And in 86, I started a book packaging company, got rejected 800 times in a row after selling my first book. And it was a slog of inventing things that people didn't want to buy or inventing things that they bought them, but it was tricky. And what I saw was a company called Prodigy coming along. And Prodigy and then AOL and CompuServe were the thing before the internet. And I'm a game designer from way back, and I designed a game that we ran on Prodigy, and it was extremely successful. The thing that I discovered, though, is that building software in the 80s or 90s, the 90s by then, was very expensive and difficult to do over and over again. And nobody knew who was going to win, Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL, whatever. But what they all had in common was email. And so we invented email marketing.
And Yo-Yo Dine, which I ran out of my pocket from the book business, incrementally built up by finding clients who wanted to pay us for the next project and the next project until eventually... The web showed up and I thought the web made absolutely no sense. I thought the worldwide web was a scam and it wasn't going to work. That cost me, I don't know, $50 billion. But eventually we grew to be the largest email marketer in the world. And then I sold the company to Yahoo in 1998.
How does Seth Godin view change and resistance in business?
When you get 800 rejections, that's usually where people stop, right? I mean, they stop by the fifth one.
They usually stop at 20.
So what makes you, and you talk also about the fact that you're never going to be ready, and you talk a lot about the perseverance of these things, but what made you continue when you get no's? What makes you continue even now?
In my book, This is Strategy, I talk about the key questions we need to ask ourselves. And they are, who's it for? What's it for? What is the change we're here to make? And if you're hassling people to change their mind, to like what you do, you're never going to get to where you want to go. And so the key learning from the 800 rejections is they weren't all the same.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What are the early struggles and startup failures Seth Godin faced?
0:07–0:43
2
How did Seth Godin turn 800 rejections into a breakthrough?
0:43–1:45
3
What strategic insights did Seth gain from rejections?
1:45–4:15
4
How does Seth Godin view change and resistance in business?
4:15–7:26
5
Why does Seth believe commitment beats passion in achieving success?
7:26–10:31
6
What is 'The Dip' and how do you know when to stay or quit?
10:31–16:26
7
How can you create value in niche markets?
16:26–24:18
8
What strategies can help you rise above the noise in marketing?
24:18–37:02
Speakers
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