“You Can’t Make Things Look Hard”

This past weekend CNBC aired a special about television infomercials. I found the program very interesting and suggest that you watch it as well. From what I can tell the show isn’t available online but here’s a list of times for CNBC outlets around the world. I am half ashamed to admit this, but I actually watch some infomercials and pop into QVC once in a while. I use the shows as research for how direct-response companies market their products to the mainstream.

The show looks at current hot products like the ShamWow and the Snuggie. Can you believe that the PedEgg (the thing that scrapes dead skin off your feet) was the #1 SKU at Walgreens – even passing Snickers candy bars! The show also provides the story of Ginsu knives and how they picked the name and why it was so important for the product’s chance for success.

The host also interviews Ron Popeil and Billy Mays. Popeil has sold over $1 billion in products and Inc. magazine has a worth-reading interview with him from back in January. Popeil is the king of “set it and forget it” and “but wait there’s more”. Mays is the new pitch man for nearly every product out there – I even saw him pitching health insurance last week.

So you might be wondering why I am sharing a recap of a show about television infomercials. Simple – because many of the lessons they spend millions of dollars to figure out, we can use for our startups.

My favorite line from the show came from Mays who said, “you can’t make things look hard“. Think about that for a minute. Now think about it with regards to your startup. Does your startup “look hard”? In my travels and conversations with entrepreneurs, I find that many times their startups do look hard.

Here’s your assignment for tomorrow – make your startup look “less hard”. Twitter gets a ton of signups (even though it appears many leave) because it doesn’t look hard. You signup, and you write simple messages. Compare that to say Friendfeed where you signup and then have to setup loads of accounts, etc. I’d love to see Friendfeed look less hard. Frankly FriendFeed’s ability to grow past the early adopters is based 100% on looking less hard. At a minimum FriendFeed could add a simple wizard to make account setup easy – and instead of their default list, ask their new users for 2-3 interests and match to users based on the interests. Why would I want to follow say a techie if I am really only interested in food or health topics?

Whether it’s your pitch, your content, signup process, functionality, sharing capabilities, etc., there are definitely places that all of us can make our startups less hard. So get to it – it could mean big gains!