Apple just became the world’s first trillion dollar company. It just goes to show what can happen when you create the right combination of products, services, and incredible marketing. Hats off to Tim Cook and the rest of the team at Apple. It’s certainly a great day for capitalism. We can all learn a few important lessons from Apple when it comes to achieving huge success.
1.You Don’t Have to be First
Being the innovator is often overrated. What really matters is execution. Apple wasn’t the first to build a portable music player, tablet or cellular phone. They just built the best versions of those products. Apple proved that time spent examining the market and identifying areas for improvement can be a recipe for incredible success. They became the world’s first trillion dollar company largely by focusing on building the best mouse trap they could.
Lesson: Execution is what really matters
2. Integrate Services with Your Products
Once you buy into any part of the Apple ecosystem, you’re entering one of the greatest sales funnels in existence. Apple does an incredible job of integrating their services with their products.
You use an iPhone, iPad, Mac or Apple TV? That means you also have an iCloud account. That account and your credit card grants you access to a huge catalog of applications, music, video and books. Apple created the platform and charges a fee to every vendor that wants to sell on it. Business cash-flow explodes when you’re able to consistently make money on content you didn’t have to produce.
In fact, once your platform becomes recognized as the gateway to over 1 billion eyeballs, you get to demand exclusive content and the rates that go with it.
Lesson: Focus on building platforms
3. Marketing Matters
From product packaging, to their website and TV ads, Apple just screams “clean and premium” as a brand. When I bought my first iPhone, it was amazing to find that no instructions were included with it. That was a totally different experience than the phones I’d owned from Motorola, Samsung and Nokia. Apple’s message was clear. “We build such an amazing product that an instruction manual is unnecessary”. Subliminally the message was that they’d done enough research and testing to know how a phone should work so that whatever the user intuitively did would likely be correct.
Lesson: Research and understand your customer
Love them or hate them, every entrepreneur can learn a lot from how Apple became the world’s first trillion dollar company. Fortunately for all of us, the recipe is actually pretty simple. Who do you think will be next? Let me know in the comments below!
