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Patterns That Work

27 March 2009

Here’s a surprising thing about music: many of the most popular songs use the very same underlying chord structure. Here’s proof…

(Heads up: slight language in both videos.)

In many areas of life – including business – you’ll find a few underlying patterns that appear over and over again when you take a moment to look beneath the surface of what you’re doing. For example, here are few sentences that, combined, describe how the vast majority of businesses make money:

  • Make a physical product, then sell and deliver it for more than it cost.
  • Provide a service, then charge a fee.
  • Create a shared resource that can be used by many people (like a gym), then charge for access.
  • Offer an ongoing subscription, then charge a recurring fee.
  • Offer insurance against something bad happening, collect premium payments, then pay out only when the bad thing happens.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you do something new – choose a core pattern that works, then focus your time and energy on making something people find remarkably useful.

(Hat tip to Drew Tarvin at Humor Works.)

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