A Short Talk on World Building Businesses

The challenging business of better possible worlds.

Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash

Many of you reading this (some of you are my lovely clients!) are bravely attempting to bring something into being to build a better possible world. You’re working to form a living— a business— from your art/activism/wild imaginations/deep talents.

I’ve been chewing on some of the challenges around these sorts of world building projects. I share here not to discourage you, intrepid creative soul! Rather, I think it’s helpful to understand the particular challenges of these kinds of businesses.

World building?

Imagine you, an expert uni-cyclist, after honing your craft for many many years, have worked out a whole new way to teach unicycling. It’s groundbreaking! You cracked some magic code that turns wobbly-kneed balance-dolts into single wheel spin-demons overnight.

Your rapid unicycle teaching techniques are market innovation born of your mastery of skill and experience. Your task is to figure out how to find the folks already interested in unicycling (circus schools?), and pitch them on your (superior) techniques.

Now, imagine that you also happen to have spent years working in high-stakes international conflict mediation, unicycling ain’t paying the bills, buddy, and you’ve been working on a way to change how communities— say, towns riven by political divides— tranform conflict via your unique unicycling methodology.

You start to shape your offer, and get ready to find your customers. Do you seek out the unicyclers? Or try to pitch the conflict havers that unicycling is the solition they’ve been missing all this time? How do you convince the town that unicycling is the best shot they’ve got?

What I’m getting at with this silly example is the difference between innovation while serving an existing and defined market need, and those that are building a business around a world building idea: that work at ideas around systems change, in ways that don’t clearly exist yet.

Better possible world, meet the market; Market, meet better possible world.

There’s one lovely human who I recently reconnected with— we originally met through eccentric art worlds— whose unique background led her to work on how historic sites, parks, and other public spaces are grappling with and creating narratives around climate change.

She’s early in her journey, dipping her toes into business viability waters.

Reader, this is my favorite type of call, the kind where I learn about something I hadn’t thought much about before (I think about climate change constantly, but I hadn’t considered how historic or public spaces might engage visitors around the issue).

But…this isn’t something that these spaces are really thinking about yet either. They aren’t even problem aware.¹

It’s extremely likely that in the impossibly near future all public spaces will be actively grappling with these issues.

And that’s exciting, but it also means that in the meantime she’ll need to educate a market that they need to explore (aka, fund) these issues, because they aren’t quite there yet. She’s visioned further ahead than the market.

Unique problems.

There’s a common misapprehension that because competition is bad, being unique— not having competitors— could only be a good thing.

The miss there is that competitors show you there is a market. That there are already customers looking for solutions to similar or the same problems.

Positioning describes how your business or idea fits into the landscape and ecosystem of exchange. The particular magic of the thing you do, and the particularly particular people who most benefit from the magic thing.

Cheaper is a position against a more expensive option. Delivered with warmth and human touch is a position against a more transactional solution. The benefit of having neighbors to jostle against is that in a landscape of choice, the person that is looking for warmth will more easily spot that you’re their jam next to your robotic, transactional neighbor.

The challenge of innovation, of bringing a thing into the world that doesn’t already exist, is that you will need to create a market, educate people, and it may take a bit longer to get to a sale.

Which also means that marketing and sales are going to take up a lot of your time.

This is exponentially true for those of you who intend to work with organizations, institutions, non-profits, etc— as lethargic and incurious about change as can be.

Finally, A Note on Feedback

Markets provide very specific forms of feedback.

Telling mega food chains that their ideas are horribly conceived and offensive? Handled.

Communicating that your price, offer structure, or your marketing strategies need adjustment? Markets can also give you feedback on that, albeit usually with less swiftness and more mixed messages than corporate blowback.

Affirming that you’re on the right track with deep systems change?

Er…Good luck with that one…

Our economy’s wheels aren’t greased for systems change, they’re greased for consumption. So if you’re working to change systems or isms via your work, the market very well may provide a whole mess of confusing or negative feedback…none of which is all that trustworthy.

What I want to say to you, person building a better possible world, is that rejection by the market is not necessarily a problem with you. And it’s not foolhardy to attempt to make money from your wild idea.

It’s just that we haven’t built a new economy yet.

We’re not yet caring for basic needs.

We’re not yet supporting weirdos and artists just to be weirdos and artists.

So ideas that might undermine that economy and it’s values? Your path to viability may take a bit more time, a few more twists and turns, and your success may not look like stories we’re used to.

Which is why we need a different framework beyond the binary of success and failure. Because failing at late stage Capitalism (or whatever this economy is), might point to a different sort of success.

1. I’m referencing the Customer Awareness Spectrum (click here for a randomely googled example), a marketing framework to describe both how your work meets the market, and also the kind of journey that someone might travel in becoming your most ardent fan. Before problem aware are the folks that don’t even know they have an issue…and thus are the toughest sell.