What is a Perennial Seller?
A perennial seller is a product that sells long after its release date.
The movie ‘Shawshank Redemption’ is a perennial seller. It generated fifty-eight million dollars when it was released in 1992, and it’s gone on to make an additional one-hundred million dollars since then.
The Rolling Stones are a perennial seller. The Rolling Stones haven’t made a number one album in decades, but they sell out concerts today.
In 2014, author Ryan Holliday wrote the book ‘The Obstacle is the Way.’ The book only sold a few thousand copies when it was released, but it now sells over five-hundred copies a week without any advertising.
There is one thing all perennial sellers have in common. One thing that allows products to sell year after year. That one thing is ‘word-of-mouth.’
I remember hearing about Star Wars from our friend in elementary school, who heard about Star Wars from his Dad. Star Wars had been out for almost twenty years by that time, but somehow people were still talking about it.
Author Ryan Holiday has studied hundreds of perennial sellers like Star Wars to understand how they are made and why people keep talking about them. He has uncovered methods of making and marketing perennial products. We can use these methods to make videos that are viewed for decades, write articles that are read for years, and build products that generate revenue long after their release date.
Here are three methods to maximize word of mouth and develop a perennial seller:
- Make it timeless.
- Make it specific.
- Make it accessible.
In every industry— from books to movies to restaurants to plays and software— certain creations can be described as “perennial.” By that I mean that, regardless of how well they may have done at their release or the scale of audience they have reached, these products have found continued success and more customers over time. They are the kind of art or products that we return to more than once, that we recommend to others, even if they’re no longer trendy or brand-new.” – Ryan Holiday
If you were to search on Amazon for author Guy Kawasaki, you would find three of his best-selling books:
- The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything
- Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions
- What the Plus! Google+ for the Rest of Us
Which books do you think will keep selling ten years from now?
People will still be wondering how to start a business and how to persuade people several years from now. How long will people be struggling with Google plus?
Consider the perennial selling book ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ by Dale Carnegie. How to Win Friends and Influence People was released in 1936, but people still recommend it to their friends today.
Why?
Author Dale Carnegie’s book solves a timeless problem: social anxiety. People struggle with social anxiety today as they did in 1936. People will continue to struggle with social anxiety for the foreseeable future.
Author Ryan Holiday based his book ‘The Obstacle is the Way’ on a two-thousand-year-old stoic philosophy. If stoicism is still useful today, there is a good chance it will be useful two-thousand years from now.
Focus on a topic or problem that will remain relevant. Avoid technology. Avoid the latest fad. Ignore the most recent trend.
If you want to make a perennial seller ask yourself: why will people still be talking about this ten years from now?
Focus on the things that don’t change.” – Jeff Bezos
The subject of dying and getting old never gets old.” – Albert Brooks
Ask the people who made ‘solutions’ for Y2K how that worked out for them.” – Ryan Holiday
Pretend you went to New York City for the weekend and tried two restaurants. One restaurant specialized in your favorite food, and the other restaurant had a generic menu and seemed to appeal to everyone. Both were great. Which experience would you be more likely to share with your friends and family?
I recently had this exact experience. I went to a specialty Ramen Noodle Bar New York City and a generic American style restaurant. Both restaurants were great, but I found myself only talking about the Ramen noodle experience with friends and family.
The Ramen noodle bar was unique; it said something about my unique interests. The Ramen noodle bar was easier to explain to my friends because it clearly differentiated itself from other restaurants. That noodle bar risked being weird to many people to be loved by a few individuals like me.
Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, the man who helped launch Dropbox, Airbnb, and Reddit once said: “It’s better to make a product that one hundred people love than a product one million people just like.”
The initial goal of every perennial product is to acquire raving fans. Raving fans are people who identify with your product and want to share it with everyone they know. When people are willing to share your product for you, your audience can grow organically over time, and you don’t need to rely on advertising to keep your product alive.
How do we acquire raving fans?
One way to acquire raving fans is to make a product for a specific person in need. When author Tim Ferriss wrote the book ‘The Four-Hour Workweek,’ he wrote the book for two of his friends. His initial goal was to get two of his friends to find the book extremely useful. There happened to be thousands of people like those two friends who found the book useful. The Four-Hour Workweek has gone to sell millions of copies over the last ten years.
When you want to make a perennial seller, ask yourself: Who specifically is going to love this?
People love products that fit their needs, wants, and interests. Therefore, you must narrow your focus and direct your energy on making a product for a specific person (or niche group of people). All perennial products can be described in one sentence: This is a __, that does__ for __.
When you help a specific person solve a specific problem, that person (and people like them) are more likely to fall in love with your product and share it with everyone they know.
Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death, and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person— a real person you know, or an imagined person— and write to that one.” – John Steinbeck
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.” – Kurt Vonnegut
Picking a lane isn’t limiting. It’s the first act of empowerment we take as a creator.” – Ryan Holiday
The rise of TED Talks over the last ten years has been remarkable. TED Talks have been watched over a billion times on YouTube since 2006.
But do you think TED Talks would be so widely known if their videos weren’t free?
Since TED talk videos are free, people can easily share them with friends and colleagues. TED talks are shared so much that organizers of the TED conference can now charge $10,000 a ticket to attend the annual conference.
The ongoing success of Ryan Holiday’s book ‘The Obstacle is the Way’ is partially due to a mistake. Two years ago, he marked down the book from $9.99 to $3.99 for a limited promotion, but he forgot to reset it. Amazon kept his book at $3.99 for months, and it sold more copies than it ever had before.
That low price allowed his book to reach a critical mass of people. The book is now back at $9.99, and it sells better than ever before.
Amazon data shows that lower priced books sell more copies and make more money than books at higher price points.
If you make something of high quality at a shockingly affordable price, or better yet, free, more people will use it and share it.
There are a select few luxury products, like Ferrari, that benefit from high price points and exclusivity, but most perennial products benefit from being cheap in the beginning.
Remember: it’s better to be underpaid than to be unheard of.
I’ve incorporated this principle into my work by spending hours making high-quality content and giving it away for free. I hope that people will talk about it and share it with their friends, who might become raving fans of mine.
What is the right price to create a perennial seller? This is going to be controversial, but my answer is: as cheap as possible without damaging the perception of your product.
As creators we have to get more comfortable with giving people a taste of our work— or, in some cases, giving some people the entire meal for free. That’s how we build an audience and gather momentum.
As a general rule, however, the more accessible you can make your product, the easier it will be to market. You can always raise the price later, after you’ve built an audience.” – Ryan Holiday
In the end, perennial products keep selling because people keep talking about them. And people keep talking about a perennial product because they address a timeless topic or problem, they have a strong base of raving fans who tell everyone about them, and they’re a high-quality product at a shockingly affordable price.