If you really want something, “no” shouldn’t exist to you. That doesn’t mean you won’t hear a lot of no’s but it does mean that if you’re relentless enough, you’ll eventually hear a “yes.”

I was in Las Vegas a few years ago staying at the Palms with a friend. Days before the trip, another friend told me about “the $20 trick“, which is basically a method of tipping the front desk person $20 upon check-in to receive complimentary benefits.

He had done this several times in the past, at several different Vegas hotels and received room upgrades.

He advised me that upon check-in, when asked for your ID and credit card, fold a $20 between the ID and credit card, with the top of the $20 popping out so it’s clear that it’s a $20… and when handing to the person, say “do you have any complimentary upgrades?”

So when I approached the check-in desk and was asked for my ID and credit card, I did just that.

As I handed it to her, the $20 disappeared and she said “let me see what I can do for you.”

I ended up receiving a room upgrade to their new tower (a room twice as expensive as the one I had reserved), as well as free access and line passes to everything the hotel had to offer.

The next day I learned that the room at the end of our hallway was the Hugh Hefner suite. I googled “hugh hefner suite” on my phone and came to learn that it cost $10,000,000 to build, and is the second most expensive hotel room in the world at $40,000 per night.

$40,000 a night! Insane.

What does $40,000 a night get you? I wanted to find out… first hand.

Idea #1: Bribe a maid (yes, seriously)

In what was seemingly perfect timing, a maid was cleaning a room right next to the entrance of the suite. I went up to her with a $100 bill in hand. I held it up and said “I was wondering if you could let my friend and I take a walk through the Hugh Hefner suite?”

I thought, who’s going to turn down $100 to let us take a 5 minute tour. $100 was worth the experience to me.

Her response, “I’m sorry, I can’t.”

She went on to say we could knock on the door. There may be someone in the suite who would let us take a look. So I rang the door bell. Moments later, I heard footsteps walking towards the door. Not knowing what to expect, the door opens.

It was a facilities person doing maintenance.

I presented him with the same offer… and was shot down again.

“What is going on?” I’m thinking. How are people walking away from the easiest $100 they will ever make? Obviously the Palms has some strict policies that would have put their jobs in jeopardy.

After two failed attempts to access the suite, I was a bit shocked but not fazed.

I was getting in that suite.

I decided to take a different more direct approach.

I went back to my room, turned on my laptop, bought a domain name for $8, and put up a one page “launching soon” website.

I then called the main number of the hotel and requested to speak with someone regarding reserving the Hugh Hefner suite. After a couple phone transfers, I reached the right person. I informed her I was staying at the property and was contemplating different locations for my company’s launch party.

We had a brief conversation, which included my request to take a walk through of the suite. A few minutes later there was at a knock at the door. She was there to escort my friend and I to view the suite.

Success!

Thank goodness for the room upgrade, as it would have been a bit strange asking her about a $40,000 suite when I’m staying in the cheapest hotel room they offer! :P

The suite… incredible.

I could write a whole post about the details but a quick summary… it was two floors, glass elevator, multiple bedrooms, multiple bathrooms (huge tubs, giant showers), a bar, a gym, a theater, a massage room, a poker table, and more… but my favorite part was the pool that stuck out off the hotel.

It was an awesome experience.

I wanted to share this story to say… anything you want is attainable.

It’s up to you to be resourceful and relentless to get it.

You can’t be scared of failure. You will fail! Likely over and over again, and likely with greater frequency the greater your goal.

But those failures refine you, they sharpen you, so that with each future attempt, the likelihood of you reaching your goal grows.

No one is going to hand you anything. You have to go after it.

Be hungry, create your own path, and remember, “no” is not an option.

1. Keep it short and sweet. Around 30 seconds is ideal. Why make it longer? Your goal is to entertain and bring exposure to X (whatever X might be). That’s easily accomplished in 30 seconds. Make a video any longer and you only exponentially increase the odds that a viewer will become bored and click away.

2. One punch line. Jump right into what’s needed to build up to your climax, anything more and again, you run the risk of viewers losing interest and moving on. The window to capture people’s attention is small. You’ve got to intrigue them in the first few seconds of viewing your video or they’ll never watch it until the end. People love instant gratification, so give it to them!

3. Create a series. You can make your best judgment but you’ll never know for certain how a video will fare until it’s released. By creating a series you increase the number of ponies you have in the proverbial race. On top of that, with a series, someone who views one of your videos and likes it will likely watch the others. So instead of exposing your message to each person once, you expose it 3, 4, 5 times.

A friend of a friend drew this. The photo doesn’t do it justice. It is so vivid in person. It feels so 3 dimensional. He has no background in art. No formal training. I asked him how he’s able to sketch like that. His response:

“I never told myself I couldn’t.”

I love that quote. How many people in this world limit what they can accomplish because they sell themselves short? Because they never take that first step. Because whatever it is, they think it’s beyond them. Beyond their capabilities.

Do daring, audacious things that you think are out of your reach! There will be failures and crap created along the way but mined out of that will be gems of beauty that people will look at it in awe, like I do with this.

We’ve traded distribution scarcity for attention scarcity.

We’re far from the days of a handful of tv shows, radio stations, magazines, etc.

We now have a virtually unlimited supply of options.

100,000′s of new videos, songs, and articles hit the web everyday.

100,000′s of new content creators are trying to build audiences.

But we only have so much attention to give.

It’s a zero sum game.

You have to get me to stop reading a current blog I’m reading to make room for your new blog in my “entertainment lineup.”

No easy task.

To do that you can’t be incrementally better… you have to be 10x better.

And the same goes for any product or service.

If your bringing a new product or service to the market, you better be 10x better then what your competitors are offering because that’s what it’s going to take to get people’s time and money.

So how do you thrive in a world where the only scarcity is attention?

Your customers have to be evangelists… they need to be your advocates… they need to be your army of marketers.

People need to be so passionate about your product that they talk about it to their friends.

They need to be proud to associate themselves with your product.

Because they are the ones that have the power to influence countless others.

They are the ones that can break through to new customers… because friends listen to friends. Friends trust friends.

But how do you do this? It starts with “why?”…

What if a company took a large piece of its multi-million dollar ad budget and invested it into itself… into its people?

What if instead of buying a bunch of TV ads, radio ads, magazine ads, billboard ads, and banner ads… the company took that money and paid its front line people… its customer service people better then any other company?

What if more power was put in the hands of the people who actually dealt directly with customers?

What if people were ecstatic to work for a company because of how well they were treated?

And what if because of this… every customer walked away with a great experience?

What would happen?

They’d make a lot more $$$.

Treat customers as best possible and you don’t need to buy a bunch of ads that people will ignore.

Give them a great experience and they’ll endorse you. They’ll vouch for you.

They’ll be your advocates. Your ambassadors.

They’ll be the ones to drive customers to you.

Welcome to the recommendation economy… the customer service economy… that’s where we’re headed… that’s where we are.

Classic piece from Derek Sivers.

Most founders come up with an idea they think is cool / useful and decide to create it. Not until later do they realize, “oh crap, how do I get people to use this?”

I took the opposite approach with my first web venture. I decided who is a group of people I have a clear path to reaching, then figured out something I could sell to them.

The target… real estate agents.

The premise was it’s a very competitive landscape with a lot of choices. I wanted to remove those endless choices and make it easier for people to select an agent.

It was a simple site where agents could subscribe to zip codes of a neighborhood or city to be the sole “expert” agent of that area. Agents would pay a per zip code monthly subscription fee for as many zip codes as they wanted, and a per lead fee.

I reached out to agents pre-launch and offered them an “introductory” lower monthly subscription fee… “reserve you preferred zip codes now before another agent secures them.” Scarcity is a strong motivator.

A few hundred zip codes were subscribed to, which gave me revenue to work with before the site even launched.

The site did fair, but it was a struggle with the real estate market falling through the floor. Ultimately I ended up winding it down in 2008.

So my first internet venture was in the books.

Through the experience, I learned search engine marketing, which lead me to being hired at an agency to manage a multi-million dollar paid search account.

So while my first web venture wasn’t the success I had hoped for. It lead me to a great job, that I would have never otherwise had.

You never know where life will take you but the more effort you put into your journey, the more likely you’ll end up in a place you’re happy, even if it isn’t the place you had in mind.

The summer before my senior year in college, a friend of mine came up with an idea for a video game accessory, which was a padded cover for video game controllers like PlayStation and Xbox to create a more comfortable gaming experience.

Ironically I didn’t play video games but thought it was an interesting idea. I ultimately came to an agreement with the friend, in which he would cover the intellectual property fees and I would develop the product. So I bought a sewing machine and some fabric, thought myself how to sew, developed a prototype, found a manufacturer with ties to factories in China, and had a small order produced. I ended up buying a small space to exhibit at E3, the largest video game conference. Through that, I met the buyer of video game accessories for walmart.com and a few months later secured distribution through walmart.com and later target.com.

With no money to market the product, I sent samples to gaming sites and journalists who covered gaming, which lead to over 30 articles in different media outlets from Entrepreneur Magazine to the New York Times. After working on it for about a year I realized there wasn’t as big a demand for the product as I had thought. It was a big learning experience in the importance of flushing an idea out before pursuing it. Regardless, it was an experience that taught me a lot.

Near the end of my senior year a video game accessory company contacted me, and shortly after that I ended up licensing the product to them. After graduating I moved back to my hometown (Seattle) and leveraged the experience to get into grad school at Seattle Pacific University, where I pursued my MBA for the following two years.

At the beginning of my time at SPU, I began to fall in love with the web. I loved how there was a disconnect between growth and resources needed. With any physical business, you can only grow so fast. You have to secure new locations, purchase equipment, hire/manage people in different cities, etc. but with the web, an additional X users/visitors is not correlated with the need for additional people. There is a disconnect, and that disconnect allows you grow at a much faster rate. Something I absolutely love.