Interview With Our Favorite Snarky Marketer, Naomi Dunford

Written by Dave Navarro on January 7, 2008

Building a successful business isn’t for the faint of heart, and it isn’t easy. But there are a lot of things you can do to make it easier, and one of those is to open your ears to people who can tell you not just what to do, but what they did to make their business grow. Today’s guest on Million Dollar Leverage is Naomi Dunford of IttyBiz, who consistently pulls no punches when it comes to talking about entrepreneurship and marketing (and who recently hit the Digg front page with her snarky advice on both).

Dave: Naomi, why did you decide to start a marketing business?

Naomi: The reason I went into this particular business is that it is the perfect combination of what I know and what I love. I know marketing - it’s just inherent. I’ve always gotten off on why people buy what they buy, even as a little kid. And I love itty bitty businesses. I think everybody should be at home in their pajamas with Regis and Kelly on in the background and their kids fighting over the Fruit Loops. I give out more free advice than I do paid advice — I seriously love it that much. People talk about giving back, about charity. Well, I give back by offering what I know to people who don’t know it and then their business can succeed. (No, I don’t use this as an excuse to avoid giving to charity.) At the end of the day, you can have the best f*cking website in the world - the best product, the best customer service, the best price - but if people don’t know about it, your business fails. The end. You lose. The way you get people to know about you is marketing.

Dave: How do you create really, really good marketing?

Naomi: If we want to talk about actual marketing advice, the thing that people need to know is that at its heart, marketing is only the study and knowledge of people’s brains. If you think like your customers — really, really think like them — you’ll have a pretty hard time failing. Oh, and don’t second guess yourself. No effective decisions — especially not marketing decisions — were ever made by committee, even if the committee consists only of the two warring sides of your own brain.

Dave: You say “think like your customers.” For someone who’s unsure about how to do that, how would you tell them to get started?

Naomi: That’s a hard question. It’s partly one of those things that you either have or you don’t. I’ll give it a shot, though. First, you need to remove the plurality - turn the whole wide world of potential customers into one person. That person is your target demographic. Then pretend that person is the person you love most in the world. What would you want for them?

Let’s use you for an example, Dave. You and I haven’t talked about your demos, but here’s something off the top of my head. You sell time. People say time equals money, which may or may not be true. What is true is that time equals peace.

Somewhere out there, there is a man who is terrified he can’t keep up. He wants to be a good husband but he doesn’t really know what that is. His wife says she’ll leave him if he doesn’t start spending more time with the kids, and God knows, he wants to. But the whole of Western society is telling him he’s a failure if he doesn’t provide. Except he can’t provide because some young jackass with an MBA is about to take his job and he will be jobless and wifeless and homeless if he doesn’t get his shit together very soon.

He gets up in the middle of the night, telling his wife he’s going to answer some emails, but in reality, he’s weeping at the kitchen table, BlackBerry in one hand and scotch in the other. He wants his kids to be able to pick him out of a line-up, he wants his wife to actually want to have sex with him again, he wants his father to still be alive so he could get some advice and a hug.

That is a man who needs time and peace. If you find this man, you won’t need to sell a g*ddamn thing. His Visa will be on the table so fast you’ll both get whiplash.

Dave: I know that you run your business from home, and you have a young son, Jack. What’s that like?

Naomi: I read an article once that showed the pros of starting a business at a bunch of different stages of your child’s life, from birth to, I don’t know, five? Jack was maybe 10 months old at the time. I get to the end of their little list and think, “Hey. There was a mistake there. They went straight from 6-9 months to 18-24 months. Weird.” So I keep reading to the end of the article, and there’s a little star, beside which it says something like this: “You may think that we missed 9-18 months. We did not. There are no pros to starting a business in that stage of your child’s life. It is the worst possible time to start and run a business.”

Dave: So how are you now? Are you able to get a better work-life balance?

Naomi: Now, with a new business (we ditched the offline stuff) and a 16-month-old, I can say, um, yes. That’s true. The concept of work-life balance is a total f*cking joke right now. I went so long without shaving my legs, when I finally got around to it, I broke an electric razor. Not joking. I have four months of back issues of magazines I haven’t even opened. It’s only a phase, and it’s getting better every day, but I want people to stop beating themselves up over not achieving this mystical balance status. Not possible. Just do the best you can.

Dave: Your blog is getting a lot of attention these days. What blog posts are you most proud of?

Naomi: Well, everyone seems to like the one where I get my hand stuck in a box of wine. I like it because I got to say “When you are building your product, think about the stupidest person you’ve ever met. That person is your customer” and it was OK because I was referring to myself.

I like What To Do When You’re Scared Shitless because about 150 people emailed me to say they found it helpful. Obviously it meant something to them, which is why I’m going down this crazy road in the first place.

9 Steps To Rockstar Marketing is good because it’s reasonably succinct, which I’m usually not. It kind of makes me sound like a marketing professional. Rereading it, though, I still say “asshole” at the end. Maybe not so professional after all.

Dave: What advice would you give someone just getting ready to start their own small business?

Naomi: I think the main message I would want to get across is that running your own business just isn’t as hard or unattainable as people make it out to be. When my first husband and I split up, I was 20 and pregnant and in a shelter for homeless and abused women for six months. I started my business with no loan, no capital, and a boatload of student loan debt from a degree program I left after two months. I have zero training. Zero. Less than zero. My training is like my PageRank. Minus one. I just read everything I could get my hands on and realized that there was no way I was going to allow this to fail.

Dave: Any more advice on how to succeed at business?

Keep redefining success until it becomes something you can achieve without outside influence. Lots of people like to talk about goal setting, and that’s important. But it’s a tricky business, and it can become disheartening. The gurus of the world would have you think that if you just think or pray or work or network more, any goal can be achieved. That may be true, but it doesn’t take into consideration the casualties of that kind of an attitude. If you make success something less quantitative and more qualitative, you can’t fail. And if you know you can’t fail, you can be as confident as you want.

Concretely speaking, I wanted to hit 1000 subscribers by Christmas. I didn’t hit it. I did, however, get an astonishing number of people commenting, emailing, and sending gifts from thousands of miles away to my sick nephew. Total strangers, Dave. That is success. 1000 subscribers is nothing compared to that.

Give A Shout Out To Naomi For Giving Us Her Time
Leave a comment below to let Naomi know what you thought of this interview and the three articles she shared with us. Then don’t forget to subscribe to her feed to keep the good stuff coming.