Run up for the free prize
At White Wall Web, we’re in the fortunate position to be able to have a large say in the way we develop our products. This isn’t just reserved for the management level; one of the huge benefits of a flat hierarchy like ours is that anyone in the team can have a say.
When I first joined the company, I noticed this incredible opportunity for team members to make a real change in their day-to-day work life. Ideas can be picked up and used immediately and make their own work so much more enjoyable.
However, I noticed that most people never take this up. This isn’t surprising, most jobs require (or even worse, encourage), little or no thought for the employees involved. Move these crates, make these calls, write this software. Just get it done. It was around this time when I started reading about Seth Godin, Marketer extraordinaire and his book Free Prize Inside! I picked this up for R20 and it was the best investment I’ve made in some time.
The premise of the book is this – the old-school methods of attracting new customers 
no longer apply. Mass advertising of a commodity fails because we get bombarded with advertising constantly. Investing huge amounts in Research & Development to create a new market is a major risk; companies advance and move so quickly that you’ll almost always end up behind – before you know it, your fancy multi-million dollar DRM system has been cracked by a Norwegian teenager and you have to start all over again.
So how do you get the edge in such a fast-flowing market? Godin suggests that it’s the soft-innovations. Those little additions and ideas that can pop-up so frequently during your day-to-day activities. It’s these innovations that make your product stand out and become a Purple Cow (another Godin-ism), something remarkable that stands out from the crowd. They’re called a free prize because the cost of bringing this idea to life is dwarfed by the revenue that it helps to return.
