Time is the new currency
Don’t tell me what you do—show me.
We have short attention spans these days. Anyone selling anything—ideas, services, shitty poetry, whatever—should be less concerned with the money being acquired and more concerned with whether or not the audience/users/clients will want to invest more than 30 seconds in what’s being offered.
Time is more valuable than anything else these days—especially since technology has allowed us to do more in less time.
If you’re planning on killing your career or your product—whatever it is—do the following: list out what you can do or tease me with a vague description of what you offer. Boring.
Instead, give us your 30-second schpeel in video or photograph form. Visually walk me through the highlighted features—perhaps showing what you can do that other don’t or won’t do. I don’t care if you don’t know a lot of name-dropping worthy people or that you’re doing everything out of your own pocket. I want to know why I should give you my time and energy instead of giving it to someone else.
And if you’re trying to conquer the world with a wide breadth of offerings (e.g. Google), you’d better spend some of your time making your current products more robust. It’s spectacular that you have the brain power and talent pool to crank out innovation like no tomorrow, but if you aren’t doing anything to make what you have now BETTER I’m going to start shopping around for other service providers.
Time is the real currency of the post-modern world. If no one is willing to give you a little bit of theirs, you will never go anywhere.
