Hey! This is the fifth part of an ongoing series called “How To Be (Internet) Famous. I’m assuming you’ve read the other installments before you’ve read this new one. If you haven’t, don’t worry! This new one isn’t going anywhere. Take a moment to go back and check out the earlier installments here.

As the WWE’s Wade Barrett was fond of saying, before it made him too popular with the crowd, “I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news.” That bad news here is that there are more questions I want you to be able to answer as you move ahead on your journey toward becoming (Internet) famous. In fact, for each step you take, there’s a question that needs to be answered.

Answering the question correctly raises your probability of success. Answering the question incorrectly? Well, you’ll wind up like the bad guy at the end of “Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade” after he didn’t choose wisely. You know what I’m saying?

Today’s question, and the next step on the journey, forms the foundation for everything you’re going to do next. It’ll determine what specific steps you need to be taking in order to promote your product (or yourself or your cause).

That question is: Who are you doing this for?

Sorry, this, and the other questions, aren’t easy to answer. I think a lot of people just want there to be this magic wand that can magically create what they want. *Poof* “You just got everything you ever wanted. And you remember that guy in high school who used to bother you all the time? You know the one I’m talking about. Yeah. Him. He got hit by a truck the other day. I know! Bummer you couldn’t be there to see it, but he’s dead now.”

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Because you’re dealing with raising the probability of your success, and the reality of doing that is that your probability of success can only be raised incrementally with each step you take. Unless, of course, you’re part of The Big Club I mentioned last week. (You went to Stanford or another Ivy League school, you’re famous or know people who are and can call on them to help you, you’re already wealthy or have easy access to funds that other people won’t. Fun fact? You wouldn’t believe how many of today’s multibillion dollar tech companies got funded simply because they made the right connections at Stanford or by going through Y-Combinator.)

That’s all you can really do. Answer the question correctly, take the next step. Rinse. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat.

But now let’s get to the good news. As we answer those questions, your probability increases, and without even realizing it, you’re taking the steps forward that you need to take in order to be successful. Progress is being made!

So the journey that I keep talking about? You’re already on it and making the strides. You just may not see the results just yet. Those will come, but they’re also going to come slowly. This is by design, because whether or not your product is tech-related, I’m going to use a tech-related term here to describe what’s going to happen. You, your product, your message, whatever you’re selling, it needs to be able to scale.

And the only way to scale it is to unveil it slowly, to the right people, and make the appropriate tweaks to make sure it’ll be able to stand up to a larger audience engaging and interacting with it. Wow, that’s a mouthful. We’ll get to that part next week. For now, let’s stick to the question at hand.

Oh, one last thing because this is about to become incredibly relevant again: I mentioned in Part 1 that I’m going to be using a hypothetical case study throughout this series involving my comic, Liberty. (You can check out the free preview comic here.) So as you read this and you’re like, “What is this comic he’s talking about and what does it have to do with anything?” Now you know.

The purpose in using the Liberty case study is to make what I’m telling you a bit more concrete. This way, you have an example you can look at  instead of the typical, hypothetical BS that’s usually trotted out in articles and books like these. It’s one thing to say something when you’re teaching and writing, it’s another thing entirely to show that thing in action. I’m using the comic to illustrate the larger points.

Why Are You Doing This?

This question seems really simple, but like a lot of things when it comes to becoming (Internet) famous, it’s not. If we break down the question more, it looks like this: “Are you doing this (your project) for you, or are you doing it to make money or achieve a specific goal?”

Those two things can be one and the same (which is good), but more often, they’re not. In the ideal scenario, the thing you want to do will also make you a lot of money, but without knowing the specifics of your project, we’ll assume the two don’t overlap here. Remember: What works for you won’t work for the person sitting next to you. The answer will be different every time, which is why I’m using this hypothetical case study.

Here’s the difference in things based on how you answer that question: If you’re making a product for yourself and because it’s a passion project, or something you’ve always wanted to promote, then you’re going to need to lean more heavily on advertising and public relations (PR) then you would on word of mouth marketing and other marketing strategies. There may also be more sunk costs (money spent that you ain’t making back).

The theory being that something made for you might not readily have a lot of people, that you know of at the start anyway, interested in buying it. An additional step is created: You have to find and identify those people. This step does not exist in the other scenario (see below).

Whereas if you were to do something because you’re looking to make money, then right from the start the product you create will be tweaked and optimized for a specific community that you can then drop it in front of and, if they like it, watch it take off from there.

And to be clear: This is totally ok. There is nothing wrong with wanting to do something that you want to do without it having a readily identifiable audience. There’s terrible, terrible advice out there that says everything has to be made and customized for other people. No. You can do whatever the fuck you want, you just have to be aware of the consequences.

And those consequences usually entail more prep work and money spent on things like advertising. That’s all. Nobody’s going to pop out of your bathroom in the dead of night and hack off your thumb or anything crazy like that. “Consequences” here just means more work and more money that needs to be spent.

Nobody ever says this, but this is because the people giving marketing advice aren’t trying to give YOU advice in the first place, they’re looking to target large corporations and advertising agencies with big budgets.

So because Liberty (my comic book) is a hypothetical, I’ll give you an example for each answer to this question and show you how your answer changes your next step in this process.

If you are doing the product for yourself …

In the case of Liberty and doing it for myself and not specifically for financial gain (which, is actually the case in real life), knowing that there may not be an easy answer to the question of “Who is going to buy this?” is going to cost me some money. This is because I need to find out who is going to read the thing when I self-publish it.

Now, no matter how you answer the question, you need to produce a Minimum Viable Product. This has become a heavily abused term that more often than not refers to shit that someone might later spin into gold if that shit attracts flies. The thing is, that’s not at all what the MVP should be regardless of what situation you find yourself in.

I want to be really clear on this point: If you put out a product, regardless of what the goal is for it, and that product is going to touch a consumer in some way, it better not be shit. First impressions last, and the Internet does not forget. Got it? (How you know if something is shit or not is something we’ll get into as this series goes on.)

So under the (very real) scenario with Liberty where I’m doing it for myself, I have to get the first issue together. The script is already done for the twenty-two-page comic. I already have the artist. Now I just have to pay to get the thing drawn and then printed. From there, my plan is to go to a few comic conventions (New York, Chicago, and LA) and distribute the comic for free.

Why for free? Why eat the $5,000 cost it’s going to take to do this and not sell the comic to make my money back? (Did I forget to mention comics are expensive? They totally are.)

I need to find the audience.

I need to know who SPECIFICALLY is going to read this thing, if anyone. There is ALWAYS a very real chance that you don’t find an audience. It happens. It’s rare, but it happens. But in this scenario, I can’t charge customers until I know exactly who the customers are. (This is the Product Market Fit thing you might have heard talked about along with the MVP business. We will also get to this soon.)

This is especially true for a comic that’s trying to fit comfortably into two genres (supernatural / horror as one genre and Marvel / DC style superheroes for the other).

Liberty is basically Captain America if Captain America was also inhabited by DC Comic’s The Spectre.

People who don’t read comics will have no idea what I’m talking about, so to translate from Nerd: Liberty is patriotic themed superhero who dies, gets resurrected by a being commonly confused with God, given supernatural powers that she doesn’t fully understand, and is tasked with killing that supreme being’s evil siblings as well as all these monsters those siblings create. So, zombies, ghosts, people who watch E!. You get the idea.

I’ll talk about gathering feedback and making tweaks in this series soon, but before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s look at the other scenario: Are you doing this to make money?

If you are doing the product to make money …

This is way easier. Like, waaaaay easier. Because the product itself (the Liberty comic) is totally different in this scenario and thus easier to sell than it would be if I was writing it because it was the story I felt like telling.

In this scenario, you basically find what someone else is doing, re-work your product to mimic it, and then launch to that audience. After you gain a foothold, and if the audience approves, you can then start to push your product in the direction you meant to go in originally.

Now! That does NOT mean steal. It does not mean ripoff. It does not mean borrow, or clone, or whatever other funny way you want to describe what I’m suggesting here. I’m simply suggesting that your starting point here is different than it is in the other scenario. Because here, if you’re looking to mimic something that’s already successful, you already have an idea of who exactly the customer is, the problems they may have with the current product, the media and mediums they use to engage and talk about the product, and how to reach them.

The path is way more clear and direct.

You don’t know that information in the first scenario, which is why it takes longer and costs you more money.

One isn’t better than the other, but if you’re budget conscious, you might want to keep this in mind. Especially because you will fail every single time if you don’t know (or eventually find out) who your customers are.

Here’s the example when it comes to Liberty, and please do not take this for bragging: I can write a Deadpool comic in my sleep. It’s Recap-setup-joke-action-joke-action-reference to popular thing-action-joke–action-cliffhanger for twenty-pages. It has a very basic, very simple formula the way most TV shows do. If you remember the TV show House, I used to use that as an example.

In any episode of House, you know that House is going to show up, be a dick, not be interested in the patient, find something interesting about the patient and take them on, thinks he cures the problem, be a dick to Wilson, doesn’t cure his patient, patient almost dies, and at the last minute he figures something out based on what was said earlier in the episode. Then the patient goes home happy (except in the once-in-a-season or so exception where the patient dies and House learns a lesson).

Everything has a formula and a pattern it follows. Everything. History totally does. Comic books do. The life and death of tech companies. All of it. It’s your job to figure out that formula and pattern and then exploit it in a way that benefits the project / person you’re looking to promote.

In the case of the Liberty example here, if I just wanted to make money, I’d just make Liberty a Deadpool knock off in terms of how many jokes she cracks and the style and pacing of the story.

I’d do away with all the supernatural elements and just focus on her being an Army officer with a cool suit of armor saying funny things and killing bad guys. Then I’d go to where all the Deadpool fans are and pitch the comic to them. As long as I’m not pitching it obnoxiously or in a spammy way, it’ll gain traction, and if the community likes it, they’ll start to talk about it and share it amongst themselves. (Assuming the product isn’t total shit, of course.)

Then you make sure you get their info (emails, Twitter handles, whatever) and build a database so you know how to reach your new customers for the next issue. If you do it right, you’ll make your money back from that $5k investment and then some, and as a bonus, you’ll attract the attention of an Image Comics, Marvel, or DC.

It sure does sound easy, doesn’t it? ;-)

Image Credit: Deadpool and Cinderella (with Fairy Godmother) appears courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Psycho Dan appears courtesy of Emily Bauch (CartoonLover159) on DeviantArt.