Seth Godin has this picture in a post he did recently called the Circles of Marketing:

I was blown away by this representation as I’ve never seen marketing expressed this way before.

As many of you know I’ve been working on a new product that I have not announced yet. We started with an idea over a year and a half ago, spending months and months (part-time since we are funding this new project out of revenues) working through the product. Our goal was to keep you from thinking too much about how the app worked, remaining focused on how you accomplish the tasks desired. We spent countless hours focused on making this magic shine.

Throughout I’ve demonstrated the product to friends and colleagues, talked about it at trade shows and other places we went, refining the story of what it is all about. I’ve sought out voices from financing to design to technology to mathematics to lend their perspective on the product itself. Most importantly, I have talked to many potential users of the product trying to understand the use cases (and there are lots of them), trying to understand potential features and how we organize those features into appropriate pricing and distribution models given what is happening in the market. That’s where we are today.

When I saw this image (and read the article), as I said, I was blown away as this is exactly what we have been working on, from the inside out, all this time without knowing it. I have been obsessed through this process with the steps to building a successful company, trying to understand the repeatable path. I’ve taken advice from smart people I know and those I don’t. I read voraciously in an attempt to do this better.

I have been worried that maybe I haven’t been focused on the right things as our progress has felt so haphazard, that so much of our learning seems to have come by accident. But after seeing this, I have no doubt we are on the right path and have a keen sense of what needs to happen next.