Mark Organ’s 6 Secrets for Entrepreneurs

Anyone who’s trying to learn what it takes to be an entrepreneur knows who Mark Organ is ?

A serial entrepreneur with many successful ventures under his belt, Mark Organ has created highly specific products for niche target audiences. He is acclaimed for revolutionizing the B2B marketing space with Eloqua, a marketing automation software, the first of its kind.

Here are 6 secrets from Mark Organ himself from our conversation with him:

1. The trick to being successful is to know the secret of the universe ?

Mark Organ has a personal belief that to build a unique business, you need to be contrarian and right. It’s hard to do this and takes a lot of work to find viewpoints that are different but right. This unique viewpoint is your secret to the universe, the key to your successful product.

This unique approach to your product will help you be successful. In the words of Mark Organ—

“The more differentiated your solution is, the more likely you are to be successful.

2. The future of marketing is not about marketing departments but to make customers do the marketing for you ?

Your customers are the proof you need that your product works. As more products are introduced, it’s harder for consumers to find the right ones. Everyone has a marketing strategy in place to nudge these consumers to pick their product. But, what is more powerful than the words of other consumers themselves? 

The future of marketing is customers themselves. By mobilizing your community, you can turn referrals and word of mouth praise into new leads. Mark Organ’s venture, Influitive, is built on this belief. It helps companies mobilize their advocates to provide more referral leads, reference calls, social media advocacy, product reviews. 

Mark Organ also notes that advocate and community marketing space will have thousands of players in the upcoming years, each in their own niche.

3. Tap into new categories to build a niche and successful products ⭐️

If you aren’t familiar with category design, we’ll give you a quick primer. Category design is a business strategy that helps companies create, develop, and dominate new categories of products and services. It allows them to monetize new markets instead of targetting the same audiences and their needs as every other product. In an overcrowded market, category design is crucial to find new solutions that you can build.

Mark Organ believes that really good categories are created by getting out into the world and being almost like an anthropologist or archaeologist and discovering groups of people that think differently and have different attitudes and needs from everybody else in the world.

“Once you have a highly specific target audience and their needs to solve, all you have to do is serve them really well.

4. Focus on understanding your customers ?

Many entrepreneurs fail because they don’t do the work. They don’t understand their most important customers, their most imp users in enough detail. This detail allows you to be contrarian and right. It allows you to do things that everyone else thinks is crazy or useless or stupid but you know is right.

Influitive, Mark’s product, doesn’t look like other product dashboards, it looks like a videogame. No other business product looks like this The reason they built it this way is because they understand their target audience— advocates. They understand that what they want to do during their lunch hour is they want to contribute to a company they care about and have fun.

They had a unique understanding of the group of people they serve and they used it to provide them a positive product experience.

5. Build an audience you understand really well ?

There are 2 kinds of entrepreneurs. The first kind is the one who builds products similar to other successful products. These entrepreneurs find it safer to build a better version of a successful product.

The second kind of entrepreneurs are people to build for people they understand really well. Mark Organ is this type of entrepreneur. He finds it safer to find that niche audience and build for their needs. 

To illustrate this, Mark spoke about a friend who started a business in cosmetic tattooing. Now, this industry is very small, with a very niche target audience that is interested in this. However, because of how specific the solution is, his friend owns 80% of the industry share.

6. Make customers the center of your business ? 

For Mark, the first step in building a product is to build a community. He shares a post on LinkedIn, giving a gist of his idea and asks interested people to reach out to him. From this, he gathers a mini-community on LinkedIn (8 to 25 people). He continuously has conversations with this communication over group chats and calls to better understand their needs.

This helps him design what the product should be, what the content should be. By starting his business with a community, he can get direct insights and use them to design a product built for these needs.

This is just a small part of our highly insightful interview with Mark. There’s a lot more to unpack in our interview with him. If you want to heat more from Mark Organ, watch the complete interview here: