Transcription
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company was 90 days away from bankruptcy. Steve stood in front of a massive crowd, his black turtleneck, his insane stage presence, and charted out a new direction for Apple. It would go on to not only revolutionize that company, but revolutionize humanity and how we would use tools for the next 20 plus years.
Steve uses five core elements throughout his career to sell anything to anyone. And in this video, I'm going to break down those blueprints, frameworks, and key aspects so you can go and apply it in your business today. These are the same strategies I personally use to build businesses that became profitable for me while staying true to the lifestyle I wanted. These strategies are powerful as hell, and in this video, I'm going to unlock them for you.
All right, let's get into Steve's secret number one: value-based selling. To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world. It's a very noisy world. We're not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. You know, people don't care about what you have to sell. They care about what you can do for them. What's the biggest question you think in most people's minds when they're listening to your sales presentation? They're wondering, why should I even care?
When it comes to your values, you need to get clear on what is it that you really believe in at your core. For me at Founder OS, as an example, some of our core values include things like elevated design, where we're always crafting experiences that blow founders' minds. We really believe in dazzling founders, going above and beyond to cultivate an experience that's based on unreasonable standards to make sure that every single step along the founder's journey is clear, it's systemized, and we're helping level them up. Similarly, you know, we have the value of really going and creating exceptional experiences and communities. You know, we are aiming to create the greatest founder community of the 21st century.
And Steve was really big on this and his, you know, "Think Different" campaign and, you know, ads like "The Crazy Ones." It was all about showing people not just the benefits of a product, not the features, but what are the values of this brand? And if the heart and the soul of the brand can deeply connect with the core identity of the person you're trying to go and attract to it, it magnetizes people. And it's not just about, you know, your mission, your values, your vision, but it's much more about the soul of the brand and what it's all about.
So, what are your values? What are five core values that your brand stands for that when you're selling people, you can connect deeply with those values first? Because there's a big opportunity that most entrepreneurs miss. They miss the opportunity to talk about, you know, what they really believe in. You know, I know that when I am selling someone, often times the thing that stands out most is that people can tell that I deeply care. And this is something that I learned from Steve Jobs.
You know, there's a famous clip of Steve. You can probably check it out right here.
"What's it like to get rich?"
"It's very interesting. I was worth about over a million dollars when I was 23 and over $10 million when I was 24 and over $100 million when I was 25. It's it wasn't that important uh because I never did it for the money. It was about making an impact for humanity."
Now, Steve never cared about being the richest guy in the graveyard. It was about creating something that stood for beauty, for simplicity, for sophistication, and could generally make an impact in millions of people's lives. You know, I think Steve is super underrated, actually. You know, there's all this talk these days about entrepreneurs like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, but meanwhile, I think that Steve is basically still the one majorly responsible for the market cap of Apple, which is now over a trillion dollars. They're still benefiting from Steve's innovations 20 plus years ago, like the iPhone and iPad. And to think that someone who's now passed for over 20 years is still having that big of an impact 20 years later, helping build a trillion-dollar-plus market cap company when he didn't even care about the money is insane.
Imagine the impact you could have not just on your bank account, but on the movement you're creating if you focused on developing your beliefs, your values, and also a key point of view. Because what happens when you go and you market and you sell like this is you create resonance. People can deeply resonate with what you're saying. And it's not just about the words. It's that they can connect with what you care about. And in a world filled with AI and everyone just being like everyone and a world of sameness, you can stand out amidst that noise by really caring about your values.
For me, it's things like obsessing over quality. You know, it's things like elevated design. It's being insanely simple with everything we do with Founder OS and helping founders build these systemized empires. And the more we show we care, the more that we put these values out to the world, the more that people with similar values are attracted to us.
Now, it's all good to have, you know, all your value-based selling and all your values nailed down, but it's nothing if you don't have this next secret nailed. And the next secret is Steve's secret number two: insanely simple.
"Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication." This is a quote from Leonardo da Vinci. I know it's something that had a massive impact on Steve's approach to products. You know, from Steve's study of things like, you know, Zen, you know, he came to learn that keeping experiences as simple as possible was what was going to help Apple stand out long term.
Now you can see this when Steve was developing the iPhone. At one point, you know, it had, you know, one button on the screen, and at that point, Jony Ive and the team at design there thought that they had done it. They had created a phone so simple it was ready to go. But Steve encouraged them to even remove that button so that the screen was buttonless. And at the time, this was insane. This is a time where Blackberry existed. You had your Razer Motorola phones with buttons on it. Shout out, you know, Razer, such a great phone. And Steve was like, "Yo, no buttons."
And this is just one of many examples of Steve getting down to simplicity. And it wasn't just in his thinking towards products. It was in his approach to selling as well. Now, you can see this in the ads like "Think Different," right? where it's just two words but inspired a generation, or in ads like "The Crazy Ones," where the simple concept of just showing people over history that had reinvented their given areas and were crazy enough to change the world, and then associating these people with Apple, the same way that, you know, Nike used athletes to inspire people to "Just Do It." It was a simple concept and delivered magnificently.
When you're going and selling people, you've got to keep it insanely simple. If you go and you're talking about all these benefits, all these different features, you end up just confusing people. And when people get confused, they close their wallets. But when you give people clarity, you help them understand exactly how you can help them. And as much as we like to think of humans being rational when it comes to purchases, most purchases are actually just deeply emotional. And so when you're simple, you can tap into the core emotions that people have and inspire them to take massive action.
And so, how do you go and apply insane simplicity to how you sell? That's where the next secret comes in. Steve's secret number three is the rule of three.
"Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life. And the first thing is it's dramatically faster. Two, thinner. Three, it's lighter as well."
So you want to go and sell someone. And when you think about your product, you can think of 20 ways and 20 reasons that people should go and buy it. So what do you do? Do you go and create a sales pitch that intricately weaves all the 20 benefits of what you do and packs your sales script or packs an ad or packs your content with as much of those benefits as possible? Well, no. That's probably exactly what Steve would advise you not to do.
You know, even when he was going, as an example, and selling the benefits of the iPhone, he distilled it down to three things. Three things: a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device, right? Three things. Keeping it simple, and using the rule of three.
We live in an age where people have so many different ways they can go in any given moment. And you can't go and get people to remember everything about what you do. You can help them remember what you care about. You can instill some sort of feeling in them and drive an emotion, and then you've got to keep it simple in terms of the rule of three as to what the core aspects of what you do are.
You know, at Founder OS, you know, my mission is to inspire 100 million founders to accomplish their dreams with proven systems. And when I think about the big promise of what we're looking to do, we are here put on earth to dazzle founders with amazing community, extraordinary support, and simple systems. Everything that we do at Founder comes down to these three pieces.
And so when you go and you're thinking about your product, what are the three core aspects of your product that people need to know, they need to remember, and they should deeply care about? When you go and you've gone and synthesized those three core benefits, and you've stacked that along with keeping it insanely simple, and then stacking that with your values and why these matter and why you care about them so much, you're now beginning to sell like Steve.
And so you've got that all stacked up now. And you know, you think you're really actually hitting the ground running here. Things are moving. But you're missing one core secret that I've learned is Steve's probably most powerful weapon. Steve's secret number four: energy matters.
Steve was notorious when he was going and unveiling any of his products for rehearsing those presentations hundreds of times. You know, "I didn't sleep a wink last night." They actually began with just pen and paper, sketching out not just what the benefits of the thing were, but what's the story? Why should people care? And he was deeply involved with every detail of the presentation, of the product development, and everything in between.
Your founder energy matters. There's this big concept that people have been talking about recently, but I think has existed for hundreds of years, which is founder mode. You know, founder energy. Inevitably, when you're building a company, no one's going to care as much as you. And that's just the hard truth of it all. And so you've got to infuse your product, your brand, your team with your energy.
When I've gone and surveyed people and asked them, "Okay, what caused you to go and convert to Founder OS?" 63% of people that I've gone and surveyed have told me that, "Matt, it was you. It was your energy, your vibe. It helped build trust. I knew that you cared. I could sense it through the video I watched, or the ex thread that I had read from you, or the LinkedIn post, or the Instagram reel. It's your energy, Matt."
And I'm here to tell you that it was the same for Steve. You know, John Scully took over after he booted Steve out of Apple. And this was some seasoned executive came from Pepsi. Everyone thought it was time to bring in a professional CEO. But Scully didn't last. Why? Because he didn't have that founder energy. This was some suit, some corporate dude that didn't understand the soul, the values, the intricacies of Apple that made it a shining star. He brought other company modalities, other ways of doing things and slowly eroded the company and nearly drove it to bankruptcy.
"Over a three-month period, Apple's profits plunged by more than $50 million."
Now, Steve's energy, I would distill it down to he cared a ton. He was a visionary. He thought in centuries, not decades, and not years. And he viewed building a product as a work of art, a work of service. It was something that he poured every morsel of his being into to build something that when people opened up that box, they unpackaged that Apple product, they felt something. They felt the love. They felt the care. And that was something that mattered.
You know, I love this talk that Steve did at Stanford and he's asking people, you know, "Where, where's everyone working here from?" And he asks, "How many of you are from manufacturing companies?" "Oh, excellent. Where, where are the rest of you from?" And then he asks, "How many people here, you know, what is everyone else doing here?" And it appears that there's a bunch of consultants. "How many from consulting?" "Oh, that's bad. Yeah. My mind is too important to waste."
You can tell from Steve's reaction, he's not big on consultants. And why is that? Because when he's thinking about consultants, he's thinking about people that just give suggestions but don't stick with a product all the way through the life cycle of it, from ideation to shipping, feedback, and then iterating. And he was big on people pouring their energy into every piece of that product development process: the ideation, the creation, the refinement, the distribution, the marketing, the copy. You know, your product has a ton of details that will make it successful. And the best sales strategy is nailing the product. And the product, it comes down to the details. You know, every pixel matters.
Steve was notorious for, you know, not just worrying about what the iMac looked like, but actually it mattering what the inside of an iMac looked like as well. And his team was bewildered. "Why the hell would you even care about this? No one's going to see it." But that's not what it's about, right? People can feel the craftsmanship, the love, the care, and the inside of the iMac did matter to Steve. And it's that level of giving a damn that separates Steve from 99.99% of founders out there. And it's this level of detail, this level of care, this energy that when you bring that to your company, it's the difference between you being another fish in the sea in your industry or redefining a category. And if you're watching this, you're here to do the latter.
And so there's a few questions to ask yourself: What energy am I trying to bring daily to my team, to my product? What is the energy that I will not tolerate in my company? And I think this is an important one, that last one, because there's a lot of stories of Steve being an ass and really hard to work with, but I think that's a load of crap. The reality is is that Steve was well aware that in life you get what you tolerate, and Steve was the last person on earth to go and tolerate mediocrity.
"So somebody's got to say, here's what we can do and we can make it happen, and here's the level of thing we can ship in 16 months."
"And what I hear him saying is, well, anything more than a port of Mac author, forget it. And boy, that just makes me smoke."
And so when he thought about going and building a brand and building something that was timeless and iconic, he could only tolerate extraordinary. And so anything below that, he had to be ruthless about those extraordinary standards.
"Well, George, I can't change the world. You know what? What do you want me to do? What's the solution?"
"You see what we can learn is..."
"What I want is probably irrelevant. I mean, there are certain realities here."
And while for some that may have come across as difficult, ignorant, an ass, to Steve it was about standing for something. It was about building something that mattered. It was about creating something that would stand the test of time. And he did just that.
Now, all of this is awesome. But Steve's secret number five, I think, is the one that when you implement this today, you will surely transform your brand and your business. Steve's secret number five: build a founder-led brand.
Now, when people think about Tesla, they see Elon Musk. When people think about Virgin, they see Richard Branson. And when people think Apple, they think Steve Jobs. There's a reason for this. People follow people, then they follow brands.
When you go and you open up your phone and you go and you look at who you follow on Instagram, take a look. How many brands do you follow versus people? Probably a lot more people. Go and open up your LinkedIn. Go and look at who you follow there. Is it more companies or people? Go and look at your YouTube and who you subscribe to there. Do you subscribe to more companies or people? I'm sure the answer to all three of those questions was, "Matt, of course, people." Exactly. You follow people, and then you follow the brands.
And Steve knew this ages ago. There was a reason that when Steve left, Apple fell apart. And while Apple was falling apart, Steve invented Pixar and revolutionized animation and animation technology. Right? It was him and his brand, his energy that people gravitated towards. And Steve understood the importance of putting himself out there. You know, it was Steve that delivered the presentations. It was Steve that was intricate to each of the marketing campaigns. It was Steve that helped invent the "Think Different" campaign and "Crazy Ones" in 1984. It was Steve.
When you're building your brand, are you putting yourself out there? Are you letting people know what you stand for? Are you crafting the words, the copy, the designs? Are you paying attention to the details? Are you creating content around your brand? Are you sharing what you believe in? Because the key ingredient to building what Steve built, it was Steve, and it was the content that he created. Whether that was through the Apple keynote presentations, or that was through the ads he was intricately involved in, or the speeches of which have millions and millions, if not billions, of views by now. Steve putting himself out there was a massive component along the way.
You know, I think one thing that I really admire about Steve was, you know, his choice of words. You know, even the way they branded things at Apple, right? It was all so intentional. iPad, iPhone, iMac. Even just the nomenclature of naming all their products like that shows a level of intention. And when you're going and building your brand as a founder, are you being intentional about the words you use, how you name your things? I like to call this your content intellectual property. It's how you speak about your product.
At Founder OS, you know, we have YouTube OS, LinkedIn OS, Audience Growth OS. You know, there's also terms we have like your Content GPS or your Personal Media Company. And all of these describe the core systems that are needed to create an amazing, memorable founder-led brand. By doing this, we've attracted a community of over 2,000 founders to Founder OS. A community of people that believe that we are stronger together, that together we can go and create a better future and build movements around what we're doing because as founders, you know, we have the power to go and create movements unlike a lot of other people out there because again, my belief is that the future belongs to the builders, the creators, the dreamers. And I'm passionate about arming the future of founders.
Now, if you're looking to go and market like Steve, I created something special for you. We've gone and created a Reality Distortion Field Playbook, which are 12 secrets for how Steve sold anything. And you can go and get it via the link in the description. Thanks so much. Welcome to the Founder Freedom Movement, and let's win!