999 out of 1,000 marketers have no idea how to create demand.

Have you ever wondered how a brand like Apple can create a brand new product that's never been seen before and yet they will eventually sell millions and millions of units very, very quickly?

The world of marketing, particularly in consumer goods, is full of advice on how to capture existing demand.

This is a particularly dangerous trap to fall into when you're trying to learn about marketing. Most of the examples out there, believe me, I know because I create some of them. They are about products that have an inherent amount of demand.

Examples of this would be if you sell makeup or hair loss treatments or diet pills. Some products just have an insatiable amount of category demand.

But what do you do if you are making a product that doesn't have a huge category?

What do you do when the category is brand new?

We encountered this problem when we launched Lomi.

We were showing the world a product that they had never really seen before. Even though the technology existed in South Korea, in our market, this was brand new.

Being fans of the category pirates, we decided to go with a lightning strike to launch our product.

If you're not familiar with the term, a lightning strike is basically a launch event where you concentrate a disproportionate amount of resources on that single event.

For Lomi, we launched a crowdfunding campaign.

And for Lomi, what we really did was create a world-class 2-minute video that introduced the product to our market.

We focused on showing our customer how their life with trash worked before Lomi and also how it would work after.

We wanted to take them from their past into their future using one video.

This is an important point. When you're creating a brand new category, you have to show people how their life is going to change from using your product.

This has nothing to do with features and functionality. It has everything to do with transformation. You can only convince somebody of a transformation when you intimately understand the current state of things from their perspective.

Like a lot of entrepreneurs, we created Lomi because I had a narrow set of problems that I was very familiar with. I genuinely hated food waste. I found it gross and I found the solutions for it in the world lacking in convenience.

I wanted a Roomba for my trash. That’s why we built Lomi.

This is what allowed us to create a launch campaign that was compelling. I knew there were more people like me in the world. That’s the power of the internet.

I knew exactly how I wanted my own life to transform, it is pretty easy for me to communicate that to my team, and have my team create excellent work to launch this product.

Your homework from this email is also simple. Answer these questions…

1 - What transformation are you selling with your product?

2 - How is it different from anything else in the world? How are you a category of one?

I’ll leave you there.

See you next week!

Onward,

Matt

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P.S. Whenever you’re ready there are 3 ways I can help you…

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