Make Them Feel Like Heroes

In the first of the three Lord of The Rings (LOTR) movies, we meet Aragorn in a bar, drunk and desolate. At the end of the third and last of the movies, Aragorn is crowned a king and is spectacular in his ascent to the throne.

I look at the LOTR story as a meta story. It seems to be an extraordinary mold for so many other stories. The kind of stories where a seemingly downtrodden human being rises up and fights through the adversity and the naysaying and the daily obstacles on their way of becoming the best version of themselves. 

Think of the movie Rocky. Think of so many other inspiring stories. The little guy type of stories that we eat up and we can’t get enough of. 

Why? Why are we so immersed in such stories? Why are our hearts and minds captured by the ascent of the little guy to the ultimate hero in all of these stories?

Because We All Need To Become Heroes

There are a lot of theories out there about what human beings really need. The famous Maslow pyramid is one such famous and popular framework for putting our needs into a somewhat scientific and digestible context. If you take Maslow for example, he spent a couple of additional decades trying to adjust his famous pyramid by adding a 6th level - but alas, the 5-level pyramid was too engrained in popular culture and his revised version never quite caught on.

But there is a 6th level. Transcendence. 

And when you look at different cultures and different periods of history it certainly comes down to this.

Our ultimate need is not to have, not even to do, but rather to become.

I have. That’s one dimension of our lives. The having dimension. Where we amass stuff. Things. Material possessions. These are certainly necessary for our well being and the well being of our loved ones but the need to have is merely the lowest of the three human dimensions.

I do. We rather spend our time and money experiencing the world. Instead of amassing things, when the right experience arises, we rather do that - experience something new, exciting, thrilling, something worth doing and something worth remembering for a long, long time. The doing dimension is more appealing to us and so when we envelop the stuff of the first dimension of human needs in experiences - well then, we’re in business.

But the ultimate dimension of humans needs is in the realm of being. We hunger and starve for making I am statements. Our identities are infinitely more valuable to us than experiences and material possessions. 

Who we are trumps what we do and what we have.

When we take our highest form of need, the need to be to its logical climax, we do return to Maslow and can’t help but agree - the epitome of the third dimension of needs is to become. 

And more specifically, to become heroes. To go from where we are now, downtrodden, down on our luck, to go from little guy to champion, to king - to hero. Just like Aragorn. Or Rocky. Or countless others.

Solve For Need

To heed the call of the Product Mindset and build successful Digital Products that exhibit the Three Characteristics, we need to Solve For Need. This is the second of the three principles of the Product Mindset and it is the principle that - when applied - yields products that Are Chosen (The 2nd Characteristic). If we want Customers to sign up and pay for the amazing privilege of using the products we deliver - we need to remember that those customers are human beings with human needs. And we need to fulfill those needs.

The higher and more sublime the need that we address - the more traction we achieve, the more passion and loyalty we create within our Tribe of Customers.

Digital Products that solve for that deep human need of becoming a hero - hit the jackpot and never look back. Think of your product as taking a Customer on a journey from where they are now, struggling, wrestling with a difficult problem in their life, and as soon as you come in, they begin their journey with you and your product. A Hero’s Journey towards that blissful day when their problem goes away, the world is beautiful and sunny again and they feel like a hero. 

We can do a lot of things for our Customers. But let’s start with identifying ways to solve for their needs and if you end up creating Digital Products that make them feel like heroes - you know you’re on the right track. How? They’ll tell you. They’ll rave about you and your product. Call it - the Hero Effect.

Get Aragorn crowned - get your Customer to feel like a hero, solve their deepest needs - and the Customer will take care of your business by sticking around, telling all their friends and their entire network about you and your product and by literally energizing and inspiring you - the creator, with that much needed source of inspiration to keep going, and never give up.

Make it happen. Forget secondary worries and focus on solving your Customer’s deepest needs. 

The rest will follow.

Go out there and make people happy. Make them feel like heroes.

Then tell us all about it. We all love to hear yet another Hero Story.

Check out the entire series:

Exploring The Product Mindset

Part 1: Let's Talk Product

Part 2: Focus On Creating Customers

Part 3: What's Your Product Story?

Part 4: Changing Our Minds Is A Good Thing

Part 5: You're Not Superhuman

Part 6: Make Them Feel Like Heroes

Part 7: The World Needs You