THE Brand Guru Sent Me an Advance Copy, Here’s The Review

Bestselling business and innovation author (one of my biz innovation heroes) Seth Godin’s hardworking publicist at Penguin sent me an advance proof of Godin’s new book, The Dip, last week. I’m honored to be among the first people to review the book outside of its publisher, Penguin.

The first thing I noticed is it’s size: it’s small. Clocking in at 76 pages, it’s a quick read, concise and always to the point. Godin credits his loyal readers for the departure from his other books’ usual size:

“This book is really short. Short books are hard to write, but you made me do it. My readers are excellent correspondents, and this is something I’ve learned from them along the way: write less.”

Now only if I could learn that — both written and verbal! There’s no excuse not to spend a few hours reading it through. Although the ideas are easy to understand, be ready to read through it again and again, when in a dip.

Without giving away the whole story, Godin’s concept of “The Dip” is knowing when to quit and when to stick it through to the end.

Why didn’t I get this book two years ago? When Steve Rubel predicted that Palopia could overtake Facebook or MySpace back in early 2006, was he right? Citing Seth Godin’s tips and thoughts, Palopia was in both a dip (a stack of challenges between starting out and becoming the category leader) and a cul-de-sac (dead-end: no matter what you do, the future is not promising). Looking back optimistically, we were in a dip given that we got greedy trying to bootstrap (another Godin idea) the venture to the point that we were scrooge with the shares. We settled for sub-par software talent overseas, rather than rockstar coders here at home. We never got the service past alpha after a string of development delays from one outsourced team to another.

Like Rubel said, if we had put our innovation where our mouth was we’d have a shot at becoming industry leader, or at least being a player. Our vision page from two years ago ended up becoming a blueprint for the social networking titans of today (ie: photo and blog aggregation, socially connected calendars…but no one has done our all-in-one inbox and a few other ideas yet). Looking pragmatically, we could have beeen in a cul-de-sac, given that if our goal was “to be the number 1 social network” in terms of regular users, we were fighting two very quickly growing gorillas. When we were first scheduled to launch Facebook had “only” 700,000 users (compared to today’s 10+ million) and MySpace had 7 million users (compared to today’s 167+ million, making it the 11th most populated nation). However, we could have still been wildly successful if we had rethought our original goal of “killing facebook and myspace.”

We have since split the original project into several niched (still stealth) and autonomous spin-outs that are poised to be major players in their own space.

Lesson learned: more shares in an unsuccessful startup is worth less than fewer shares in a successful one — or being scrooge gets you screwed. There’s years of dot-com experience summed up for you — that’s what I call maturity.

He sums up this basic wisdom: if you’re facing a cul-de-sac, you’re screwed — no matter how hard you try to out-think, out-live, or out-work your opposition, the situation is helpless; if you’re in a dip, you might win out big, but it’s going to take a lot of innovation, persistence, and love.

My favorite quote — which in many ways, sums up the whole book and The Dip way of thinking is about the basic law of inertia:

“Convincing one person is like scaling a wall. If you get over the wall the first few tries, you’re in. If you don’t, often you’ll find that the wall gets higher and higher with each attempt. Influencing a market, on the other hand, is more of a hill than a wall. You can make progress, one step at a time, and as you get higher, it actually gets easier … every step gets amplified.”

Never did I expect the Space Shuttle and the Declaration of Independence (both relating to business perseverance) to be mentioned within the same thought. It’s little twists like this that have profound ideas that make Godin’s new work so entertaining and insightful. Plus, Hugh Macleod’s illustrations (of GapingVoid fame) accompany Seth’s written ideas with an irreverent visual element.

You may remember Godin for other greats like Small Is the New Big, Unleashing the Ideavirus, All Marketers Are Liars, Free Prize Inside, Purple Cow, and others.

The Dip by Seth Godin is on pre-order at Amazon, set to be out on book stands and online beginning May 10, 2007. Get it and get out of the dip. And…if you aren’t already reading Seth Godin’s blog, you should be.