My Gimmicky Business
I spent over $80,000 trying to build a gimmicky crowdfunding company a few years back. My brain loves gimmicks that are designed to get people to behave in the way I want them to. My gimmick was to take the model that many retailers follow and reverse it and combine it with crowdfunding. See, it’s already confusing. The idea was that I would take a product that had a factory minimum order quantity of 1000 to 2000 and then the first few hundred units I would sell at or below cost and then continue raising the price at various intervals. No one would get the product unless we hit our minimum needed to “fund” the project.
The intention of the rising price was to create a race to buy the product. My thought was that if I could get a few hundred people to get an amazing deal if we hit our goal those people would help me push the project past the finish line. Once you got your deal you wanted my project to succeed. The reality is that only the right people have the power to truly influence behavior but I loved my gimmick so much I chose to ignore that obvious information.
In another article I discussed some of the problems with crowdfunding, and all of those problems were inherent with my idea but I decided to add even more complexity to it! Because the business was complex the software needed was complex. The whole thing fizzled out and the main problem was that the products I was trying to sell weren’t hitting a nerve with the customer. I should have skipped the gimmick and spent $80k hiring someone with a history of creating awesome products in my niche.
Gimmicky Consumer Product Company
A few years ago a company called Brandless launched. Their branding was simple and they catered to selling products that a typical crunchy mom might buy. So think organic peanut butter, organic Matcha Green Tea Powder, organic vitamins, etc. I liked the branding and I think the products were probably decent. But for some reason they had a gimmick that everything would cost $3. There’s no reason you should expect to pay $3 for everything. It just meant that you’d be getting a smaller container of peanut butter than you wanted. It was the worst kind of gimmick in that it had no reason to exist. It’s easy to pick apart a business that has already failed, so I won’t beat the dead horse except to say that the gimmick of $3 per item didn’t help a business that was trying to pull off the nearly impossible task of launching a standalone multi-consumer product company.
Gimmicky Streaming Entertainment Company
Finally the most recent gimmicky business making news as of the time of this post is an entertainment site called Quibi. Quibi has big names (Meg Whitman and Jeffrey Katzenberg) and huge funding (raised over a billion dollars) and way too many gimmicks:
video can be viewed in landscape or portrait mode on your phone
video player offers the ability to shift controls to be better for one handed viewing in right or left hand
episodes are 10 minutes or less
episodes come out one per day on weekdays
it only works on their mobile app, it doesn’t have a web viewer or apps on smart tvs
they even have a horror series that is available to watch only when it is dark outside
Despite the laundry list of gimmicks the only thing that matters is if people like the shows? I don’t mind the short episode gimmick if it serves the consumer. But if we are taking a regular movie and breaking it up into short segments does that serve the consumer? I’ve watched a few things and I think the answer is that it does not.
Quibi may succeed, but if it succeeds it will do so not because of the gimmicks but because they have a product that consumers like and the consumers confirm that by subscribing to their service.
All of the above is my way of saying that concentrating on a gimmick is a bad idea. Concentrate on having an awesome product and getting it in front of people.
Update: After only a week of release Quibi is planning to make the shows viewable on smart TVs due to consumer demand. On the plus side they are responding to consumer wishes, but I think it was insane to limit this in the first place.