Get Started Fast And Cheap
(Excerpt from The Big Moo compiled by Seth Godin)
The ubiquitous, pocket-width, burgundy-colored restaurant guide the Zagat Survey – called by The New York Time “a necessity second only to a valid credit card” -seems like the kind of big idea that started with a substantial financial investment, a major marketing move, and the unbridled support of restaurant industry folks. It didn’t, though.
Creators Tim and Nina Zagat started collecting insight from their foodie friends in 1979 and, a few years later, began selling the collective advice in the form of the first New York City Zagat Survey from their station wagon. (Not every company has roots in the garage!)
The Zagats, both practicing corporate lawyers, had no agent, no publisher, and no money to spend on advertising. Relying on a unique idea (rating a restaurant on the basis of thousands of experiences, not one reviewer), word-of-mouth marketing, and some good free publicity (after a 1985 cover story in New York magazine sales jumped from 40,000 a year to more than 75,000 a month), the Zagats grew their enterprise from a New York-based food guide with a cult following into the world’s best-selling publisher of restaurant guides.
Zagat now offers guides to dining in cities from San Francisco to Shanghai and has expanded to survey hotels, airlines, golf courses, and more. The guide is now available on the Web and voting has moved online, attracting more than 250,000 voters worldwide. And even now, with proven success and deeper pockets, Zagat continues to use fast, inexpensive, and scalable ways to help it grow, such as not investing in pricey back-end systems, but using new, cheaper, and simpler Web-based services instead.
Fast and cheap doesn’t mean chintzy or short-term. It just means you make your mistakes quickly and inexpensively and get them over with.
