Leveraging the Most Valuable Audiences For Your Brand with Greg Lansky

You're listening to levelling up, where we'll show you how to win at the game of life and business. It's time to power up your skills through life gamification with your host, Eric Sue. Hey guys, Eric Sue here. So the following is a clip from the levelling up founders, a mastermind that happened in Beverly Hills. And you're going to hear from some amazing founders, some amazing marketers and investors. And this was a private event that happened. So again, you'll get a preview of it. If you want to learn more, you can go to levellingup.com/founders, once again, levellingup.com/founders. And without further ado, enjoy the clip. So I self-funded and I started the company with no investors, no ads, no social media following, and no celebrity endorsement. And yet I was profitable in less than a year. And within 16 months, we were getting 35 million unique visitors monthly. So I've built these companies on three rules I want to offer you guys today. Rule number one is find niches with emotional intensity. Because I had no upfront investors or any of that stuff, I had to be very strategic and precise. In other entrepreneurial angle, no room for fuck ups. And at the time, all the big companies were playing a very predictable game. They were buying millions of dollars of ads and producing the cheapest possible content for the broadest possible audience. But what I had figured out was that the broadest possible audience was actually spoiled. spoiled with choices, including free ones. And as I'm sure a lot of spoiled people are often difficult, demanding, greedy and worst of all, comfortable. And it's really difficult to move comfortable people. That was not the kind of market I could afford or even I wanted. To help me in my selection process and finding niches that were worth pursuing, the one thing I looked for is emotional intensity. So what I mean by that is when you look at the places where the people in those niches discuss and gather, you're looking for intensity. You're looking for highly opinionated conversation with very strong emotions, positive or negative or a mix of both, it doesn't matter. You're looking for that intensity. And where you can catch these things is anywhere from the common section to social media post, to specialized forums, or even Reddit. And why it's valuable, the first reason why it's valuable is the engagement is already built in. You don't need to create it. Another reason why it's so valuable is anywhere you will find niches with emotional intensity, you're going to find fanatics. And fanatics are unbelievably valuable for companies, organizations, movement, because they will promote you for free, relentlessly. They will build their whole identity around it. Another main reason is that anywhere you see online a niche with emotional intensity that's overlooked by big players, you will find a group of people that is chasing a feeling in an emotional loop without ever finding release. And that's where your product comes in. So once you find that right niche with emotional intensity, my second rule is you have to earn their attention. Let me tell you a story. When I moved to L.A. in my early 20s, my number one goal in life was to date pretty woman. That's it. Pretty simple KPIs. I used to go out with these three other guys and we hit the clubs in Hollywood. And we had a really bad success rate, matter of fact, terrible. And at the end of the night, we were really good at gathering and brainstorming together as a team for all the reason why it wasn't our fault. Music was too loud, it wasn't a good night, endless amount of creativity for that. But eventually I got tired of this. And I did what us entrepreneur do when we faced challenges. I got creative. I looked at this as a way to learn about human psychology. So next weekend I went out again, but this time alone, side of the bar, and I observed the dynamic between men and women all night. And what was crazy was that within a few hours, everything became so predictable. Group of guys coming in from anywhere to two to ten guys, like a horde of hungry animals, desperate for female attention. You had a group of girls too, but more in groups for self-preservation than anything else. You had another group of guys that get frustrated about getting ignored, so they'd drink and get drunk and resort to stealing the girls' attention by being obnoxious or rude. Another group of guys had a different strategy. They would buy the girls' attention with bottle service. Even if it meant they could get that attention just for a few minutes. So that strategy was out of my budget range at the time. And also things seemed to yield very consistent results, because there were plenty of table of guys all sitting next to each other, all side, like a bunch of lonely teenagers, without a date for prom. And then on the way back home, it hit me. I started leveraging empathy to feel what a woman would feel, not having seen that predictability for a few hours, but for several years. And that's when I realized predictability was the enemy. I needed to come up with an unpredictable approach. Best thing I could come up with at the time was, I'm going to go out with three girls instead of three guys. There's one thing I didn't see, a group of guys, a group of girls approaching another group of girls just with one guy, didn't see that. So to make that happen, I called up a neighbor Vanessa who owed me a solid one after how watched her smelly bulldog for an entire week. And asked her to hook me up, and she came through. She brought two of her girlfriend, and we went out that weekend. And it was like a parallel reality. Every single girl I talked to was receptive, friendly, willing to grab a drink. It was like a live cheat code. I came up with more phone number that night than the entire year. So a few months went by, and I was actually still going out with these same girls. When one night, I saw this incredibly beautiful woman. She was walking around, and she completely got my attention by being unpredictable. All the girls in the club were wearing fancy dress, big hair, lots of makeup, and she's walking around with jeans, t-shirt, no makeup. Very unpredictable in that environment. She was trying to avoid eye contact with all the hungry animals, including me, but I still walked up to her. And earning her attention that night really changed my life. Because 14 years later, I'm still earning it, and she became my wife. Single guys at nightclub are not the only one fighting for attention. Of course, as entrepreneur, we heard that stuff a billion times. Oh, there's a fight for attention, there's a fight for it. Yeah, we were born with it. We're all in that social media era, so it's only reinforced that. We all know that. In my experience, there's three ways you can get attention. You can buy it, you can steal it, or you can earn it. Buying it's fine. Ads can be great if you know how to use them. Being for celebrity endorsement can be super effective. But for young startups with limited means, I still rather put the money in creating a product that commands attention. If I was to buy attention, I would want to do it in a way that doesn't look like I'm buying attention, like the bottle service boys. You could steal attention, and you see a lot of that stuff online with influencers doing all kinds of ridiculous stuff. And it can work, but only temporarily. Because you always start the relationship with deceptions or force, and it can never work on the long run. If you see a pretty woman in the street and you whistle at her, she turns around, you didn't get her attention. You stole it. If you're trying to find a piece of information online and you have an ad specifically obstructing the information you're trying to get, even though how many times you click, that ad stole your attention, and you already fucking hate that company before the relationship even starts. So what I mean by earning attention, I mean you worked for it. You did your homework. You understand what it feels emotionally to be one of the people in the niche you're trying to pursue. Back when I had limited means when I started that Vixen meter groups, the first thing I did is I used software which you can find for free, and you can use yourself if you know how to code. And I scraped the data out of every single place the people in my niche were talking. Forms, comment section, that's a matter. If they were talking there, I scraped that data. It gave me information that would be fairly basic stuff, considered to them. But for instance, the most used keywords seems basic, not basic. That's the language the people in your niche are using. How are you going to approach a group of people if you don't even know their language? It also gives me the emotional landscape of the people. What are the predominant emotion in that niche? When I get that data, that's the intellectual process. When there's an emotional process where you use that data to really feel what it feels to be one of them. A great example for that is imagine a method actor, a high level one. They're going to play a serial killer. It doesn't mean they command or approve what that killer did, but they don't have this day in for the killer. They study. They do their homework. They gather every single piece of information so that we as the audience can have suspension of this belief. That's the process that has worked for me countless times. You may have completed this level, but many more bosses await. If you're looking to level up in marketing or business, just go to singlegrain.com/leveling-up to get access to our individual and team training programs. That's singlegrain.com/leveling-up. [MUSIC]