Are you that Founder?

So you made this product – it’s a good one. It sells well without much hype, and you are growing. In bursts, sometimes a little, other times a lot. No matter how small some days, it’s still growth. You are a long way from product-market fit, but you can see one day it could all happen. You have to be patient and keep creating something beautiful that solves a real problem and that people want to buy. It’s pretty straightforward, right? Right. 

Except...

Every night you go to bed and the same thoughts haunt you- how fast should you grow? If so when, and which route? How do you keep the lights on and make sure you don't dilute your company or ideology? How do you get to the next set of customers and what is the right pace? How do you balance growth with profits? Bigger picture, how ambitious are you for your idea? How do you stay lean and get your idea in front of as many potential customers as possible. If this dilemma sounds familiar, keep reading. 

• Advertising online as a challenger brand is difficult – you need to hand over vast sums of money to Google and Facebook to ‘reach’ potential users. That can include hiring an “advertising specialist” or an agency whose interests are not aligned with maximizing your overall budget, not necessarily your results. I don’t know about you; I get about 50 cold calls a month from such agencies. Personally, I really dislike the fact that you are often promised "instant results". We all know there is no such thing. 
• Facebook and Instagram are fully saturated as media, making it virtually impossible for brands to secure more than a second on someone’s infinite scroll of content. Influencer marketing and affiliates work when there is a genuine brand-creator-audience fit, its painfully obvious when this is forced.
• The amount of paid advertising that large brands now invest in these channels as opposed to in the “nascent years” makes them out of a small brand’s reach in terms of running an effective campaign, let alone being able to stand out. As an aside, we know these platforms can also host some questionable content whilst being designed to be as addictive as possible. 
• Using paid Social media and Google works if you do enough of it- but it also means interrupting thousands of potential consumers as they’re doing something else in the hope of catching them at exactly the right time. It’s not an engagement medium anymore. Consumers have become ad-blind and rightly so. Scroll left, swipe right, skip, delete, total ad blocker, incognito – we are much too sophisticated as human beings to let a Google algorithm control us. Aren’t we? 
• Great brands care about attention, not just reach. They care about adding value to their audiences not making interruptive and sometimes ill-timed sales calls. It's important to think through why some brands have waitlists and a healthy bottom line but then others scale and stay unprofitable for years. Which one do you want to be?
• Sometimes it feels like the brands that have the most money and consequently can shout the loudest win, not the ones that provide the best quality, value, engagement, or customer service. The marketplace is a classic red ocean and everyone’s fighting for their corner. It’s a war to dominate digital and social platforms, but our attention is human beings is finite, static and possibly, our well-being is at stake. The more we scroll, undeniably, the more we want to. 

So what needs to change? We do. Your attention is the most valuable commodity online. It really should be fairly compensated. Yet your data and attention are being taken for granted. Exploited even- with a never-ending supply of “allow cookies” to invade every habit you have, every move you make, and maybe, one day, every thought you have. 

Why give something away that should never have been free –your time, attention, and your preference, and most audaciously, your recommendation. Yet every day, we do give it away for free: likes, shares, views, comments, and upvotes. Worse, we have been conditioned to feel like it’s a fair exchange. It’s time for introspection around these little actions – think through how they are benefiting someone else, who isn’t you. 

 That’s why we are digging Zedosh. 

Zedosh offers brands far more than the Media Ratings Council version of a ‘view’ (50% of the ad on screen for 2 seconds). Its views are to the end of a brand’s content. No exceptions. When attention is being fairly rewarded, brands can create messages that are opted into- no one will scroll past. They are choosing to be there and also are compensated for it. Zedosh also meets all 6 of the principles stated by the Conscious Advertising Network ( CAN) (which as a brand is definitely worth checking out) - anti- fraud and hate speech, diversity, informed consent, actively safeguarding children's well- being and removal of misleading content. Not passing the buck or looking the other way to pursue a dated, "capitalism at all costs" model, like our friends in the Valley. I don't know about you, but from where I am sitting, I feel like something is going to give pretty soon.

If you like the idea of this advertising model, you can download Zedosh now at Zedosh.com and if you want to, check out our new Plenaire brand film that's just gone live there.