SXSW

See you there?

TLDR: Happy 10 years Earhoox, and if you’re going to SXSW this week, let me know!

Last month was the 10-year anniversary of Earhoox.

For readers who don’t know me personally, Earhoox is a company that a friend and I started. We wanted to cure the world of loose and uncomfortable earbuds.

Since 2012, we’ve shipped something on the order of 500,000 of those little guys—helping people from nearly every corner of the globe move with their music.

We’re pretty proud of that.

Today, one memory & one idea.

One memory: For me, the PayPal Duel at SXSW in 2015 is one of my favorite memories of the past ten years. We had the chance to pitch Shark Tank’s Daymond John for shot at $30,000.

This morning I’m headed back to Austin, so if you’ll be at SXSW this week, let me know.

One idea: If you want to be the best, you have to be different. This is true in everything, because by definition, “best practices” yield average results.

Talk to the best salespeople in your company. Not the ones who are #1 on the leaderboard one quarter or one year. I’m talking about the ones who have demonstrated they can beat their peers by an embarrassing margin on multiple occasions over multiple years. Those are the real outliers.

In the case of Earhoox, in order to make it to Austin, we had to be one of the top two companies in an online vote across a series of startups. Simply presenting a good idea, a decent brand, and a track record of sales would be average at best.

In the months leading up to the vote we had been asking ourselves, ‘how can we get more virality and attract more customers—how can we be better than average—how can we win the market?’

So we came up with the idea to build a referral engine. We built a custom web experience and offered discounts and free product in exchange for our customers referring their friends. And it worked.

In just three weeks we amassed 300,000 emails subscribers and well over 1,000,000 website visitors.

When it came time for the vote, we asked our new fans for help, and they blew the competition out of the water. Then when it came time for the holidays, those same subscribers placed orders totaling over $250,000.

If we hadn’t gone gone above and beyond, and we had simply left the vote to chance, we never would have had the votes, let alone the opportunity to form a lifelong memory.

Ask yourself if you’re challenging the status quo, if you’re being creative enough, if you’re doing anything to produce outsized results relative to your peers, and if you’re really taking big enough swings.

Chances are (literally), that you’re not.

See you Monday…in Austin.