Seth Godin's Workshop for Bootstrappers

Lesson 4 Summary

• Your smallest viable audience forces you to focus on the individual in front of you because the stakes are high. You aren’t trying to serve a million people, so you can’t say forget you, forget you and forget you. Instead you obsess about their dreams and needs because there aren’t that many of them.

• You are a sales force of one and you don’t have time and money to reach everyone. But if you are specific with who you are reaching you actually have the ability to reach everyone.

• Your smallest viable audience knows itself and this can become a powerful engine for spreading the word to serve the audience you seek to serve.

• When finding your smallest viable audience, if you get it wrong, it’s not fatal. You’ll just pick another audience. You have flexibility and freedom to change direction.

Go back to the smallest viable audiences you’ve identified. Thinking about each possible audience, who is the individual inside this audience you could serve? Who are you looking for? Describe them.

• What’s the problem they have?

• Why are they eager for your help?

• Are they open to someone telling them they have problem?

• Are they open to spending money? What’s the story they have about money?

• Are they in a market you seek to serve?

• Do they deserve your effort, your innovation and your generosity? If so, why?

Lesson 5 Summary

• Choose your audience, choose your customer, choose your future. It’s up to you to pick the market you seek to serve, so don’t pick a market you don’t want.

• Don’t bring people your effort, your innovation and your generosity if they don’t deserve it. People that deserve it are open to hearing what you have to offer because they are looking for innovation, for something better and they are eager to pay for it.

• There are lots of areas where people, businesses and companies are eager to pay for something because that thing they’re paying for is worth more than it costs.

Lesson 6 Summary

• Generous doesn’t mean giving everything away for free. It means doing the emotional labor. It means seeing other people for how they want to be seen. It means raising your hand with a new idea. It means doing the work to build the relationship rather than make a transaction.

• At the core of our new economy is focusing on the group of people who want to be served by us. It’s not a big group. It’s 1,000 true fans. The fans who cares about our mission and want to give us an instant yes.

• Find an overlooked group of people who are disconnected and invest the time and energy to care about them. That’s how you build trust and attention.

Lesson 7 Summary

• Tension is what we feel when something might not work and what we feel when we might be left behind or left out.

• Change causes tension, and most people avoid it.

• On the other hand, other people moving forward and leaving us behind creates a risk to our status, which is a form of tension we can avoid by saying yes.

• Selling something important and worthwhile isn’t easy.

• You can find a brand or resource to partner with that can help you be seen by the people you need to reach.

• The goal is to create attention around status roles so you can give people a chance to move up. Because if you can give them a chance to move up for less than they think its costs, they will eagerly ask for what you are offering.

Lesson 10 Summary

• Engage with others to gain a new level of insight, support and connection that makes this freedom likely.

• Embrace the fact that it’s fresh powder. There is open space in front of you and tomorrow is a new day.

• Begin with a sense of possibility and opportunity and loosen your constraints.

• You don’t need reassurance. It’s futile. Because reassurance runs out really fast. Embrace a simple idea: you are not selling at people, you are not doing this to people, you are doing it for them.

• There is a door you can open for other people. You can earn enrollment. And if you can’t serve someone, move on to the next person, the next door.

• Always be wrong. It sounds negative, but it’s positive because it means the market is giving you permission to stop preparing, stop being right and to serve.

• Show up with right heart and right intent: seek to make things better for those who they seek to serve.

• Always being wrong pays off when you take notes and stop making the same mistakes.

• A Bootstrapper works to make things better or make better things.

• Doing this work is scary and rejection helps you learn and see.