Watch the Corners

This guest post was written by Jon Beekman, Founder and CEO of ManCrates, the best place to find gifts for men. You can follow him here.

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A friend of mine is a Navy SEAL. He told me they adopted a motto that has been used by vikings for hundreds of years:

"Watch the Corners."

I was reminded of this motto while giving a lecture to the LaunchPad program at Stanford. Telling students about the moment that fundamentally changed ManCrates reminded me how critical “watching the corners” really is, when you’re seeking to build a category-defining business.

In the early days of ManCrates, we were a company "for guys, by guys." We were laser focused on building a product guys would love, which was a fantastic, differentiated point of view in a marketplace cluttered with stuffed animals wearing baseball caps.

We'd take any chance we could to talk with men about their favorite gifts, show them our products, etc. We'd stop men at bus stops and ask for feedback -- that's how consumed we were with understanding them.

One day, while doing user testing at our office, a man who'd responded to a Craigslist post for user testing asked if he could bring his mom with him. "I've got to do some errands with her right after your session." Of course, we said she could tag along. While he gave feedback on our new products, she sat patiently in the corner.

During the testing session, all our teams' eyes were on him, but I couldn't help but notice that his mother was beaming in the corner. She was supposed to be just a "tagalong," outside of our focus as a company, but quickly I realized she was the main story. At some point, I shifted the conversation in her direction and asked, "Why do you look so happy?" She was just watching him open our test crates, after all; as far as I was concerned, she wasn't involved in the test at all.

Her answer floored me. "I haven't seen him like this since he was six years old at Christmas."

All of a sudden, everything changed. Our product didn't change, but everything about the company did: our website, our marketing efforts, everything, really, because the target customer changed. Instead of selling guys gifts we knew they'd love, we realized we needed to be creating opportunities for gift givers -- folks just like this mother, beyond happy to be sitting in the corner, watching -- to make lasting memories with the people they love.

Entrepreneurship is all about focus. But every once in a while, you've got to look out of the corner of your eye, watch the person who's supposedly "not the target user," to see something you hadn't been expecting. Every once in a while, you stumble upon something that completely surprises you, sending the business in a totally new direction.

When exploring, we have to keep one eye open for breakthroughs we hadn’t been looking for.

Related: Welcome Surprises
Related: Expect the Unexpected

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