Basecamp → The Principles → Archetypes
Conventional marketing wisdom suggests that to help with audience research, offer creation, and understanding our ideal customers, we should create an empathy map, run some Jobs to Be Done scenarios, and use frameworks like the Value Proposition Canvas and The Mom Test to identify the most powerful needs driving an audience’s behavior.
This works, of course. I’ve done all of these over the years and more.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting these frameworks are ineffective — they are very useful! — only that there’s also another way to “identify” (call out) the right people and repel the wrong.
PastAndré
In around 2012, shortly after birthing Tiny Little Businesses (now rebranded by Shawn to The Modern Marketing System), in an attempt to try and frame who TLB was for and who it wasn’t for, I created two archetypes to represent the broad majority of digital marketers who go on the journey for success and freedom just as I had done.
This process felt intuitive to me, although, in hindsight, I didn’t have the language to (fully) appreciate what I had discovered.
I stumbled on a different way of playing the “self-selecting the best customers” game.
I named one character, Frank (the larger segment), and the other, Matt (the much smaller segment), representing an expression of The Hero’s Journey that marketers and entrepreneurs like us go through. (Here’s one of the original versions from archive.org.)
Frank made little real money, jumping from opportunity to opportunity, shiny object to shiny object, on his quest to earn a living online. He never doubled down on any one thing, FOMO causing him to try to “shortcut” and hack his way to success and wealth.
I started as Frank. Most of us do. I didn’t know better. Yet, deep down, I was being guided by “something” that course-corrected (oriented) me towards a “better” reality that mapped to my values (as my ‘Ordinating Principles‘ across this digital marketing dimension began to reveal themselves to me).
I heard Jordan Peterson recently say, which I’m paraphrasing here:
That negative emotion is an “alarm system” that there is a hole where chaos reigns, that things are happening that you don’t understand or expect. It’s a prerequisite for further exploration (and a “quest” is always for the thing that’s valuable).
Jordan explained it from the perspective of Hero mythology, but as you’ll see shortly, this maps to the Encounter with Paradox and disorientation (and reorientation).
Anyway, Matt represented a version of Frank who eventually recognized a guiding truth: focusing on a longer time horizon and doubling down on building something that matters was the path to success, freedom, and wealth.
Yet, sadly, most people remain as Frank, never transforming into Matt. I had been Matt trapped in Frank’s body until, like a butterfly, I broke free of my limiting exoskeleton and transformed into something altogether different.
PresentAndré
An insight I’ve come to believe is that we’re either born wired a particular way or shaped very early on. Perhaps both are true.
For example, I don’t believe I learned to love learning. Like my skin or eye color, I came wired that way. It’s not something I can change. I’ve always been a lifelong learner. At some point, it emerged, and I recognized the signals.
Our values, ethos, and principles reflect our wiring in many ways.
While PastAndré didn’t have the language to articulate this fully, his intuition guided his orientation to intuit, or recalibrate, a direction that felt correct and made him feel more alive.
PastAndré recognized that people wired to be Frank (perpetually) were not the traits he wanted as customers of TLB. Matt, however, was the customer “wiring” he wanted to do business with (which reflected his journey out of chaos).
People instantly resonated with the narrative when he shared this framing, initially as an email-only campaign and later repurposed for the web (shared earlier).
One problem with the frameworks I mentioned earlier is that they force us to cherry-pick demographics and psychographics based on our preferences or analytical data (from third parties and our own). This approach can easily lead us astray, causing us to intuit connections or make assumptions that aren’t necessarily accurate simply because they appear in the data.
So we, as an example, decide we’re only targeting people between this and that age, with a particular income status, and then build a marketing campaign and messaging around these characteristics and traits.
To the degree this works, it can be more luck than anything else, a constant dance, fiddling with ad managers, fighting the algorithms, and perpetually tweaking website copy.
In Issue 7 of my newsletter (it’s worth rereading for context), I mentioned that in September 2023, I attended a psilocybin retreat in the Netherlands.
There were fifteen attendees, including Anita and me. What I found interesting was the spread and diversity of the attendees. I could point to no discernible pattern representing a meaningful demographic or psychographic characteristic.
The day between my two psilocybin journeys, I wrote a journal entry titled — A Tiny World, copied below (some parts are redacted for privacy):
It dawned on me during dinner last night that Kiyumi.org is a TW. And the TW attracted and curated 15 of us. Looking at the 15, it’s striking how different everyone is demographically. And even psychographically, there are too many ‘traits’ that could throw psychographic targeting off — like income level for one.
I have no idea of the income status of the other 13. █████ I can infer has money b/c he spoke about “my companies” and “teams.” But what about █████? She said to me she likely doesn’t have money to return next year.
I put ages from 30s to 60s. That’s wide. But is it typical for Kiyumi? I have no idea. I see no reason why a 20-something or 70 or 80-something couldn’t attend.
So both demo and psyco are misleading at best, and likely a red herring.
It’s the TW that attracted us across dimensions that can’t be captured within demo/psyco targeting characteristics.
What attracted me? (need to deconstruct)What attracted everyone else? (will ask)
So, I asked the others what caused them to decide on Kiyumi.
It was unsurprising to find a diverse array of reasons behind everyone’s presence there — a non-linear convergence that felt a bit like magic.
Dr. Gabor Maté uses the retreat and is featured on the Kiyumi homepage. While this was a factor for a few people, it certainly wasn’t causal.
Something else was at play, which I recognized after reading What is Orientation? by Werner Stegmaier (2019) and experiencing the 5.3K run in May 2023 (a story I’ll conclude later in the training).
To achieve orientation, we must align ourselves with something. This initial alignment sets the stage for orientation to manifest.
John Vervaeke, who cites Stegmaier’s work as the basis of his understanding, describes orientation as primordial, meaning it precedes all definitions and propositions.
I use the concept of an ‘Ordinating principle‘ to describe this.