How do people become ultra-successful?

 

Why most ultra-successful entrepreneurs started their companies

“Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected.” – Mark Zuckerberg

Great entrepreneurs rarely if ever set out to make money. There’s a common stereotype about ultra-successful people. People think they’re greedy and power hungry. To the contrary, most people who make billions do it by helping millions of people.

Uber allows people to get rides. It prevents drunk driving. It also helps people with suspended licenses and people who don’t own cars. Facebook allows people to connect with distant friends and old relatives. It allows us to connect with the world around us.
Brian Chesky spoke about the early days of Airbnb at Y-Combinator’s Startup School. He mentioned how one of their first users told him Airbnb saved their lives. It was a couple that was struggling to make rent. Renting out a room with Airbnb allowed them to make enough money to keep their home.

Brian Chesky spoke about the early days of Airbnb at Y-Combinator’s Startup School. He mentioned how one of their first users told him Airbnb saved their lives. It was a couple that was struggling to make rent. Renting out a room with Airbnb allowed them to make enough money to keep their home.

Brian Chesky spoke about the early days of Airbnb at Y-Combinator’s Startup School. He mentioned how one of their first users told him Airbnb saved their lives. It was a couple that was struggling to make rent. Renting out a room with Airbnb allowed them to make enough money to keep their home.

The purpose of business is to solve problems. Money is like the gas that allow a business to continue running.
Elon Musk is a billionaire. When people see him roll out new products they assume his goal is making money. Why would anyone money-motivated take on challenges like electric luxury cars or home batteries? There are plenty ways someone like Elon could make money that wouldn’t be as challenging.

Those projects are not money-motivated ventures as much as “monetized social missions”. Elon Musk is driving an initiative to prevent climate change. He’s taking on the monopolies that have protected the status quo for a long time.

The track record of cause-driven entrepreneurs reaching ultra-high levels of success says a lot. Good karma seems to play a major role in catapulting little guys to big things. Likely because social media making is making everything transparent to everyone. It may soon become impossible to succeed without a positive social mission.

Critical questions to ask yourself:

1. What’s your positive social mission that can change the world?

2. What’s a problem that you have a personal connection to that also affects others?

3. Who is the one customer that will love your product?

4. Why will they love it?

5. How can you deliver an amazing experience to them every time?

You need definite and specific answers to these questions. They need to be your primary motives from the beginning.

“My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There’s a lot of that in Silicon Valley.” – Mark Zuckerberg

Creative Monopoly — How companies that started in garages have scaled to world dominance

“There are still many large white spaces on the map of human knowledge. You can go discover them. So do it. Get out there and fill in the blank spaces. Every single moment is a possibility to go to these new places and explore them.” – Peter Thiel
In the beginning, Amazon was just an online bookstore that started in a garage. At a glance, you wouldn’t think Jeff Bezos had ambitions of dominating online retail. Amazon would soon grow to be the largest online bookstore. They had a bigger selection than any of their rivals.
After dominating the online bookstore niche, they began scaling to adjacent markets as well. They began moving into CDs, videos & software. These days, we know Amazon as the go-to place for just about anything you can think of.

According to Peter Thiel, Author of “Zero To One”, co-founder of Paypal, and an early investor in Facebook. The conventional business wisdom that encourages entrepreneurs to go for big markets is wrong. There’s always been an assumption that a bigger market means more money. This idea is sending startups to dive head first into a losing battle. Why? Going after big markets forces you to compete with large companies for the attention of millions. This strategy is both challenging and expensive.

The strategy Peter recommends is bringing a breakthrough innovation to a smaller niche market. Once you own a small market you can scale up by innovating within similar markets. For example; Google, is a search engine, that’s also an advertising company. It’s also a tech conglomerate that makes mobile software, web browsers, and self-driving cars.

One of the main ideas of Peter Thiel’s work is that competition is for losers. You don’t want to be in a competitive market. In hyper-competitive markets, companies race to the bottom by cutting prices to compete. You need to be in a market where you have little to no competition. These situations let you control price allowing you to have high profits for years. There are two ways to do this:

  • Create a new market by creating a completely new and unique product.
  • Make something that has an existing global market, but create a better version.
Another big idea of Peter’s is that all good businesses keep secrets. Secrets are innovations that give companies an unfair advantage over would-be competitors. Google has it’s search algorithm. Apple employee’s can get fired for discussing R&D outside of work. To own a market, you need similar secret advantages that the competition can’t copy.
Critical Questions:
1. Is your product completely new and unique? If it’s a product that already exists, how is your version better?
2. How does your product bring innovation to your market?
3. What secret advantage do you have that people can’t copy?
4. What’s the end game?  How does this make money for decades?

How obscure start-ups create products that make billions out of nowhere

Drew Houston had no idea he was creating what would become a startup with a $10 billion valuation when he began working on Dropbox. The 32-year-old billionaire had this to say about how and why he took on this project:
“I was on a bus from Boston to New York and I had a big list of things I wanted to get done. I fished around in my pockets only to find out I’d forgotten my thumb drive, I was like: ‘I never want to have this problem again.”
— Drew Houston
Houston was a computer science student at MIT at the time. Having nothing to do for the next few hours, he began coding Dropbox. A product that would later reach 300 million users, catch the attention of Steve Jobs, and make him a billionaire.
The Qualities of A Billion Dollar Product:
  • They solve the creators problem better than any of the current alternatives. Normal people solving their own problems is how these stories usually start. If you’re a normal person and you fix your own problem, you may have also solved a problem for millions of others (or 300 million in the case of Drew Houston).
  • The creator has a personal connection to the product, the problem it solves, and the people it solves the problem for. This way, the creator can understand the dynamics of the user experience better than anyone else. This allows them to optimize the product for it’s users in a way that the market wants.
They have some sort of (usually secret) unfair advantage over the rest of the market. This prevents competition from slowing down the companies growth.
How The Founders of Airbnb Used This Formula to Go From Living on Cereal to A $20 Billion Valuation:
“When you start a company, it’s more an art than a science because it’s totally unknown. Instead of solving high-profile problems, try to solve something that’s deeply personal to you. Ideally, if you’re an ordinary person and you’ve just solved your problem, you might have solved the problem for millions of people.”
— Brian Chesky
Having A Personal Connection to Your Product:
“I was trying to convince all these men to try to make a product that they didn’t even wear! Or if they did wear them, they were not admitting it! There was the problem right there. No wonder their hosiery was so uncomfortable.” — Sara Blakely
Sara Blakely, now the youngest (completely self-financed) female billionaire was a door to door office supply saleswoman with $5000 to her name. She discovered a creative way to solve a problem that was personal to her. She didn’t like how she looked in white pants, so one day she decided to cut the feet off of a pair of pantyhose and wear them under her white pants. She discovered that they made perfect shapewear, and Spanx was born.
Products With Built-in Unfair Advantages:
Uber leveraged technology to make a product that’s 10x faster, more convenient, cooler, and easier than a traditional taxi service. They’ve made regular taxi’s obsolete by designing a better experience for the customer.
Creating products that have monopolistic advantages is a strategy companies have used to achieve massive success. When was the last time you willingly used a search engine other than Google? I personally get annoyed when the default browser is set to Bing on my work computer that still runs on internet explorer. I tend to use chrome whenever possible just because I know it searches on google by default.
Google’s efficient algorithm and user-friendly layout gave them an unfair advantage over Yahoo that set Google on a course to dominate search for decades. Native advertising allowed them to monetize their searches in a way that was more efficient and user-friendly than the banner ads Yahoo was using pre-Google.
Finding creative ways to solve your own problems is a winning strategy. It’s a common way companies create a successful product that changes the world by impacting millions. You can take it a step further by building clever nuances into your product that give it unfair advantages. This makes for a product that’s easy to adopt and hard to compete against.