Be Less Boring: How to Create Winning Products By Spotting Remarkable Problems

What do you do when no one’s listening? Yell louder? Nope. To create a winning product, you first need to find a problem worth solving.

Screw climbing Mount Everest, training for a marathon, and getting into Harvard. Do you know what the hardest challenge in the world really is? It’s starting a small business — i.e., getting people to care about your idea and pay you for it (without losing your soul in the process).

Even if you’re among the lucky 50% of business owners who make it past the five-year mark, you can’t just flip on cruise control. Your customers will gradually lose interest…at which point you will be eaten alive by a flock of hungry competitors.

The longterm solution isn’t advertising more, writing new marketing campaigns, or tinkering with your pricing. Nope, if you want to thrive in a stuffed-to-the-gills marketplace, you need to become a whiz at creating remarkable products. Don’t worry, it’s not as hard as you think.

Here, I’ll prove it.

Part 1: The Cow Strikes Back

Depending on when you first run across one of Seth Godin’s books, you’re going to conclude that he’s either a marketing genius or a scam artist selling empty calories. I originally read…