When you are in the business of marketing and selling products, you want to be a trendsetter. You want to always be the one setting the pace for your industry. So how do create products that are constantly better than the competition?
One way is by building a better mousetrap. It’s been around since the beginning of time. Someone develops a product, and then you purchase and use the product. You see all the mistakes that were made in creating this product. You see that the product could be better if the developers had done this, this and this.
Eventually you develop a product along that line, meaning you develop a product that’s a better mousetrap.
I’ve done it. The thing to remember is that you don’t want to position it necessarily as, “don’t buy that person’s product, buy my product because mine’s better.”
I actually purchased a product that helped people write sales letters when I created SaleLetterGenerator™. The product I purchased was a good product, but it didn’t do all the things that I was looking for.
I wanted to develop a piece of software that wrote a sales letter and that allowed you to use the files created by eCoverGenerator™ and HeaderGenerator™, which are two other pieces of software that I had created.
If I could get people to create a header graphic and an eCover graphic that could be combined with their sales letter, it would increase the sales for my sales letter software. I also added the ability to create the sales letter as a web page.
So, I wasn’t copying someone else’s product, I was making a similar product with some major advances. It was innovative.
You want to be innovative and use that as your stepping stone in order to make it better.
Armand Morin
Some time later, I started seeing other products pop up that were similar to mine. I bought one or two to see what they were about. You know what? They copied the formatting of my SaleLetterGenerator™ to a T. Did it tick me off? Yes, it did because it wasn’t innovative.
Quite honestly, they stole my exact formula for writing a sales letter and didn’t even change the words on it. There are many products out there right now using that sales letter formula that was a derivative of my SaleLetterGenerator™ formula.
They tried to duplicate rather than innovate. You don’t want to clone somebody. You want to be innovative and use that as your stepping stone in order to make it better. Don’t make it just a little bit better — make it a lot better, so you’re not even in the same category any more.
The hardest part for people to understand is that when you are using this particular method in order to create a product or software, you don’t just use it as a stepping stone, you use it as a launching point, meaning you jump so high off the previous innovation that they can’t even think about catching you.
You want to make it very difficult for anyone that preceded you to even catch up to where you currently are. When they are trying to work to make their product as good as your new product, you’re already creating new advances and changes with alterations to make it even better based upon the market’s reaction.
In doing that, you will stay ahead of the market which will allow you to be the leader. You can come out of left field and be the trendsetter. You can be the new market leader and essentially take over, create and dominate a specific niche in your marketplace. All you have to do is become an innovator, not a duplicator.
