I spent my birthday this year changing planes at the airport in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. I celebrated by buying myself a box of chocolates from Duty Free and watching the Yankees.
But before my crazy celebration, I had work to do. I had a new client who, to make a complex topic simple, coaches beauty founders to make their brands more exclusive.
I knew nothing about the beauty business, so the first step was to look at her onboarding survey. When you hire me to write for you, I send you a Typeform where I ask you a bunch of questions about your business.
One of those questions is “what’s the best way to learn about your industry?” Most of my clients link to a blog or a YouTube channel, and I’ll spend 20-30 minutes poking around it. That’s usually enough for me to see how your world works.
So imagine my horror when my new client told me to read not 1, not 2, but 3 entire books!
(My reaction: “I have to read THREE WHOLE BOOKS?”)
But — the more I worked with her, the more I realized that the beauty industry is way more interesting than I thought.
I ALSO realized that there are tons of parallels between marketing beauty products and marketing info products.
The way you build your brand, the way you create hype and exclusivity, the way you create scarcity… they have way more in common than you think.
So I went back and actually bought the books she recommended. I just read the first one. It’s called Glossy and it’s a biography of Emily Weiss, the founder of Glossier.
(If you know nothing about makeup, like I did 6 months ago, Glossy basically took over the beauty industry over the past 10 years. It went from being a blog to being a billion-dollar company.)
I’m glad I read it! There’s tons of great marketing lessons in here.
For example. Glossier started out as a blog. Emily Weiss wasn’t selling any of her own products yet. She was just interviewing famous people and asking them how they did their makeup. And she built a huge audience doing it.
Most people who start a business start by making product. They decide what they want to sell. And then they ask, “who should I sell this to?”
Emily Weiss took the opposite approach. She started by building an audience of people she could sell stuff to. And then once she had a huge audience, she asked herself, “what do these people want to buy?”
Pretty much everybody in the direct response marketing world — including Gary Halbert in The Boron Letters and Brian Kurtz in Overdeliver — will tell you that Emily Weiss’s approach is usually better. Find the starving crowd first, and then decide what to feed them.
So what does your audience want to buy? Sell them that!
-Theo
P.S. Glossier took off because Emily Weiss wrote.
And you can grow your business by writing, too. (Or by hiring me to do it for you.)
I’m not promising that your business will be worth a billion dollars, like Glossier. But I can get your audience to like and trust you a lot more, without you having to do the work.
I can also remind them that you have stuff for sale, and that if they’ve got big problems that you can solve, they should hire you.
You can learn about that here: