The Discovery Process: a Case Study

No matter where you do it, selling things involves certain common elements.

There's a pitch: Here's my thing! Here's why you want it! There's a call to action: Click here! Buy now! And there's a certain—let's be gentle—sleight-of-hand: Supplies are limited! You're missing out! This is the most important (deal, opportunity, election) in your lifetime!

Selling things on the Internet involves all of these, too, but automation expands the scope and reach of every sales technique to industrial scales. Some of us once worried about robots replacing humans on the factory floor, but their numbers are dwarfed by the armies of software agents manning the ramparts of our e-mail inboxes. We are like reeds before the storm.

Once upon a time, the promise of the Internet—one of them, anyway—was that great ideas would be free to find an audience, that the magic of PageRank guaranteed every seeker a direct, noise-free connection with the objects of his desire; every ideator a main line to his tribe. Reality turned out a little different: highly motivated hucksters and pitchmen quickly figured out how to subvert every new medium—social ones included—to suit their own purposes.

As a creator, it is tempting to ask: when did great ideas lose the ability to attract an audience on their own merits? Never! The pitchmen just figured out how to buy a bigger megaphone. The answer isn't to out-megaphone the pitchmen, but to create a space where your ideas are welcome and megaphones are not.

An Art Project

One day in 2013 a guy asked me if I could think of a literary form that could fit entirely inside a single tweet (140 characters back then).

Sure... a haiku! And to prove it, I opened a Twitter account and posted this:

ever notice that
seventeen syllables make
a tweet-shaped haiku?

Oy. They got better, I promise!

By late 2017 this had become something I cared about. I had a couple hundred followers and enough of a backlog to justify the use of a scheduling tool. My engineering monkey-mind wondered: how would people react to these things if they weren't already following me?

So I launched a Twitter Ads engagement campaign to find out.

A Data Project

It turns out that, when you are using it to share things instead of sell things, Twitter Ads is a highly efficient engagement sensor.

I'm a people-pleaser: I quickly learned what my growing audience liked, and how to produce more of it. More importantly, I learned to use third-party analytic tools to discern the key influencers of my followership, and to target my campaigns at the people who follow them.

After two years of procedural trial and error, that little haiku account has well over 11,000 followers. I was able to bootstrap my ad engagement rates (read: the fit between my tiny poems and my chosen audience) from a pretty good 1-3% to a frankly unbelievable 30-40%. That's a 12-month running average, folks... and my rates are still rising!

This year I'm publishing an illustrated book of haiku.

Why not?

I now have millions of impressions—and hundreds of thousands of engagements—that tell me precisely which of hundreds of pieces to include in the project. I'll use a similar technique to drive the illustration process, with an art contest where the most engaging submissions collectively receive half the revenue from the book.

The cost of all this? By the time the book goes to print—three years of data collection—less than $4,000.

If it is at all possible in 2020 to make money on a poetry book made of dead trees, that's what I'm going to do.

The Discovery Process

A few weeks ago, some folks asked me to give a talk on the Twitter Ads technique I'd developed for my haiku project. As is often the case, organizing this talk forced me to think more deeply about just what I had accomplished.

I call it the Discovery Process: a highly practical method for nuking your dumb ideas, refining your good ones, and building a tribe around them.

Maybe you're a creative pro with an existing body of work: a book, a blog, a YouTube channel, a great big Insty. You're a grown-up. You get that most of what you have to say is worthless. But you also suspect that some of what you have to say is of extreme value... to somebody.

Maybe you're just getting started: no existing body of work. You need an alternative to wandering around in the dark, hoping against hope to step into a big steaming pile of fame.

That's what the Discovery process is for: finding the golden needles in your giant stack of rusty needles, and building around them a tribe of people who are excited about your work and committed to your success... at a cost of just a couple of dollars a day!

Discovery is fundamentally different from selling stuff on the internet:

• When you’re selling stuff, you want a conversion so you can profit. It's expensive because that’s what ad platforms are for. When you engage in Discovery, you want a reaction so you can learn and grow. It costs almost nothing, because that is not what ad platforms are for.
• There’s no call to action! No buy my thing, no visit my page, watch my video. None of that. Your content stands on its own, and people either engage with it or they don’t.
• You aren’t promoting anything. There’s nothing for sale. Instead, you are sharing an idea: a quote from your blog. A passage from your book. An interesting stat. It’s a gift, not an ask.

When you sell something, you share your pitch. When you engage in Discovery, you share your truth.

Next Steps

Discovery is a new concept. The procedure is well developed, but so far there are few case studies. As a career engineer, I am wary of technology that makes promises it hasn't delivered on more than a handful of times.

Having said that: the experience from the inside of running the Discovery process has been much more pleasant, way less work, and far less expensive than any other method I have tried to triage my ideas and find a committed audience for the good ones.

If you care more about great ideas than you do about selling worthless junk to people who never asked for it, then whether you have an existing body of work or are just getting started, I'd like to help.

Just reach out to @TribifyMe on Twitter or Facebook, and let's find your tribe!

every good idea
carries within it the seed
of a better one

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