Book SummaryOversubscribed, by Daniel Priestley

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Oversubscribed

Oversubscribed is a business guide that starts with an unusual premise: Get more people interested in your product or service than you could possibly serve, and don’t start selling it until that happens. In other words, minimize the risk and maximize the profit of running a business by leveraging supply and demand—ensure that there’s always more demand than supply, and you’re practically guaranteed to make a profit. The rest of the book teaches you how to attract that level of demand.

Daniel Priestley is a serial entrepreneur who’s founded several multi-million dollar businesses around the world, as well as...

Oversubscribed Summary Create More Demand Than You Can Meet

In this section, we’ll examine the foundational lesson of Oversubscribed: Attract more customers than you can serve to maximize your profits. We’ll also explore the benefits of word-of-mouth advertising and explain how you can get people talking about your business, as Priestley believes this is the single most effective way to market a product and thus create demand.

(Shortform note: The advice Priestley gives in this book is equally applicable to physical products and services. For brevity’s sake, we’ll refer to these collectively as “products.”)

The Core Message: Exploit the Law of Supply and Demand

As we’ve mentioned, the central idea of Oversubscribed is to maximize your business’s profits by making sure there’s more demand for your product than you can meet.

Priestley explains that the law of supply and demand influences the price of a product—the harder something is to get, the more that thing costs. So, if there’s more demand than supply for a product, you can charge high prices for it, thereby making a significant profit.

(Shortform note: In contrast to Priestley, some business experts believe that the law of supply and demand is becoming outdated....

Oversubscribed Summary Drive Interest With Campaigns

We’ve covered why Priestley wants you to build more demand than you can meet and why he believes that word-of-mouth is the most effective way to do that. But how do you get enough people talking to make your business profitable?

Priestley says that running a successful business—one with more demand than supply—requires you to be a campaign manager rather than a salesperson. In other words, he suggests that you connect with large numbers of people at once through special events and mailing lists rather than trying to draw in one customer at a time like a hawker on the street.

In his book, Priestley organizes his method for running a successful marketing campaign into five phases. Here, we’ve organized Priestley’s method into five steps; the first three steps correspond with Priestley’s first three phases. We’ve broken Priestley’s fourth phase (“Sales Follow-Through”) into Steps 4 and 5 to distinguish between selling products (Step 4) and delivering them (Step 5). We’ve also incorporated ideas from Priestley’s fifth phase (“Celebrate and Innovate”) into Step 5.

Step 1: Determine Your Supply

Before you even begin your campaign, Priestley says that you need to...

Shortform Exercise: Plan Your Marketing Campaign

Now that you know Daniel Priestley’s strategy for building more demand than you can meet, think about how you might put it into practice to sell a product or service of your own.

What product or service would you like to sell?