Follow Your Resonance in Your Business
Your body knows the right note to hit.
How I Achieved Entrepreneurial Success by Ignoring the “Experts”
“We’re not competitor obsessed, we’re customer obsessed. We start with what the customer needs and we work backwards.”
Also…
“People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research.”
For every accepted business truism, like “the customer is always right,” there’s an equal and opposite rule of thumb.
Think of Henry Ford’s famous statement, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Whether or not he actually said those words, it’s clear that there are equally strong arguments to be made for Customer-Centricity as well as Product-Centricity.
As a general rule, if you’re in a maturing market with high competitive threats and commodification, you should be highly customer centric. On the other hand, if you’re running an innovation-led business in the early stages of your product life cycle, you’re better off rapidly innovating and getting your awesome new product MVP to market without customer feedback, like Walt Disney and Steve Jobs.
On the other hand, Jeff Bezos did the opposite. One could argue he was the first mover in a brand new market and yet he obsessed about customer-centricity.
(I’ll get into more detailed strategic planning frameworks in future posts. Subscribe for notification.)
Customer orientation is only one of many "accepted" rules for launching and running a successful business that are practically gospel at this point.
Have you heard this advice before?
Find a mentor in your industry
Get strategic investors
Get advice from an advisory board
Do in depth research on the industry you're getting into before launching
Hire a great Accountant
Forget all that. I didn’t follow any of those rules.
And guess what? I didn't need to.
My conclusion: Best Practices Suck.
Well, except for the Accountant point. I learned the hard way that it’s worth paying for good financial and legal professionals.
However, I also learned how to get better results by managing Accountants and Lawyers to achieve the goals I want rather than acting on their advice carte blanche. I could write a whole article about how to get the best results from Accountants and Lawyers. Maybe I’ll add that to this series if people request it.
I also didn't have a mentor, which everyone seemed to find important. Instead, I created my own “shadow mentorship program.” I considered the world’s greatest thinkers to be my mentors—not whoever I could find nearby. I devoured hundreds of books, constantly learning more than anyone around me. I read 50 or more books each year and asked their imaginary advice whenever I felt stuck. That was my mentorship method.
Consuming this many books showed me how often authors on the same subject held wildly different opinions. This taught me not to mindlessly follow their “expert” advice either. Every author writes from their own experience, and let's face it, they're each wrong about something, including me! (Yes, I get the irony of my writing about this).
So, I approached learning differently: I extracted concepts that resonated with me and then built experiments to test them quickly.
I'm not obsessed with memorizing every detail or even finishing books when they lose my interest. I'm after ideas I can test in my life. I look for concepts that surprise me or offer counterintuitive insights. I want to be informed both philosophically and practically. I'm weaving together a tapestry of understanding that reveals a more nuanced, harmonious way of seeing the world.
And, by harmonious, I’m talking about acquiring multi-tonal knowledge notes. Gaining a multi-dimensional view of things.
Using the Power of Resonance to Find Your Own Way
Did you know that if you hold two similar tuning forks next to each other and strike one, the other will start to hum too?
I love science!
Something similar happens in bathroom stalls. Next time you're in one, try humming from a low note and slowly scale up to higher notes. At some point, you'll hit a note that seems significantly louder. You've found the frequency that matches a multiple of the distance between the stall walls—they're amplifying the sound.
That's Resonance.
A resonant idea feels like that. It hits a frequency inside me, and that amplified feeling pushes me to dig deeper and test it out.
You could think of your instinct as a tuning fork. When an idea makes it vibrate at the right note, that’s telling you to follow it deeper.
There's too much content in the world to absorb, let alone analyze. You can't read it all, and you can't follow it all. So, I decided to trust my own resonance as a first filter—always followed by testing and validation.
When it came to writing a business plan, I skipped it too.
Business plans are often outdated the moment they're written. Instead, I focused on building, testing, and iterating in real time.
I didn't chase strategic investors or assemble an advisory board filled with industry veterans. I wanted to build something authentic to me, not something designed by committee.
As for industry knowledge, sometimes not knowing is an advantage.
When I started Widerfunnel, there wasn't another company offering the service I was designing. I couldn't ask anyone how to structure a conversion optimization business because it didn't exist in the way I wanted to build it. Fortunately, I was naive enough to believe I could figure it out. So, I built the company by adapting what resonated from others and inventing the rest.
Being an outsider allowed me to see possibilities that insiders couldn't.
I wasn't constrained by “the way things are done.” I questioned everything, and if the standard practices didn't make sense to me, I ignored them.
This was a really important advantage.
I came to realize that almost all of our competitors came from highly analytical backgrounds, usually in data science or search engine marketing. They had great data capabilities, but totally lacked the artistic creativity I’d built into Widerfunnel to design great user experience.
We were also displacing a lot of ad agencies that had zero analytical or testing capability (or interest!) They were heavy on creativity but lacked any rigorous analysis to prove what actually worked and why.
And pure user experience design firms were more committed to following “best practices” than testing and discovering that many of their rules didn’t work in real life.
We were naive enough to build a methodology that combined both creative solution-finding with analytical testing. We built a service at the intersection of Art and Science that relied on one outcome—measurable results.
This made us totally unique in the industry.
Does that mean you should ignore everyone’s advice?
I certainly don’t want you to take that conclusion from my experience. I was constantly seeking out advice from the best people I could find and filtering it through my resonance and testing lenses. See my reading commitment, above.
What you should take from this is the freedom to carve your own path. Do it your way. Find what resonates and stick with it, until your data shows you that it’s not working.
One of the writers I’ve been reading for many years is Shane Parrish of Farnam Street. I live by the same principle he shares called “Thoughtful Opinions Held Loosely.” I want to gather as many perspectives from many great thinkers so I feel confident in my judgement, while also being totally open to changing quickly when I see new information.
Why do best practices suck?
I’m making the claim “best practices suck” because they encourage conformity. They promote a false sense of security that if you just follow the steps you’re told, success is guaranteed. But, if success was a step-by-step process, everyone would be doing it.
Innovation and differentiation doesn't come from following the beaten path; it comes from forging your own.
So, here's my advice: Trust your own Resonance.
Consume knowledge voraciously, but don't be a slave to it. Extract what resonates, discard what doesn't, and don't be afraid to be a contrarian sometimes.
The world doesn't need more followers of best practices; it needs more innovators willing to question them.
