The Business Concept That Made THE BRO CODE a Bestseller

In 2008, I created a New York Times bestselling book that, to date, has sold over 300,000 copies.

And its first line? Bro’s before ho’s.

That’s right, I’m the mind behind The Bro Code. Not the whole code, but the book version. At the time, I was an editorial assistant at Simon & Schuster. My roommate and I loved the show How I Met Your Mother and one day, the character Barney Stinson (played by Neil Patrick Harris) mentioned a book supposedly written in the 18th Century by an ancestor to his friend Marshall (played by Jason Segel). I thought, “That should be a book.”

I had to do a lot of convincing, but the publisher let me call Twentieth Century Fox, the show’s production company, and strike a deal. As it turns out, that was an excellent business decision.

Because The Bro Code? Is a great example of product-market fit.

Product-market fit is why great products and services, including books, sell. There is a ton to learn about this topic. However, to be simple — product-market fit is achieved when you take the opportunity to create a solution that doesn’t exist yet for a specific market.

At the time, I’d heard guy friends and exes talk about “the Code.”