Getting Started « Unicornfree

Getting Started

Letter to My Struggling Baby Business – Feb, 2009

The date: February 2009. Two months after the (unglorified) launch of Freckle Time Tracking, one month after the surprisingly not bad launch of the JavaScript Performance Rocks! beta. What with all that, the consulting, and the traveling, and the drama with our flakey partners in Freckle, and being newly married and in a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language, and and and… I was having a really, really tough time. So I sat right down and wrote myself a letter. And signed it “with love” the way you do. Wait, that’s a song. Anywayz…

Dear new business,

I know you feel like you’re having a rough time these past couple months. Things seem really swell, and you’re up up up, until suddenly a needle appears, and bursts your little bubble, and crash! Back down to earth again.

Or lower.

Because after the impact—smack!—you realize that while things were feeling so wonderfully amazing and fresh and new, that was probably because you were selectively forgetting about less happy-fun things that “have” to get done.

It’s like hitting the ground all over again. Smack! Smack! Ow!

I know that when this happens—and it’s happened several times—you feel guilty as well as deluded. You end up wondering if the happy stuff can only ever come out of denial.

New Business, I want to tell you something important: Change can be really hard.

I know you’ve experienced a couple of overnight life-changing epiphanies, which seemed effortless at the time, and were just totally awesome.

But that’s not usually how things work. And those lucky, beautiful, awesome breaks have made it unfairly difficult for all the ordinary, long-term slugging-it-out change that has to happen most of the time.

With ordinary, long-term, slugging-it-out change, sometimes there are “casualties.” Sometimes things don’t get done. Sometimes people don’t like you any more. That sucks, but not changing sucks more.

And I think that sometimes you forget that those beautiful overnight changes came from years of not changing at all. They were unacted-upon but desperately needed change, bottled up for years. The change champagne cork just finally exploded, and thank god for that.

Speaking of champagne, don’t forget to celebrate the victories you’ve already won… just because you find yourself looking around and what you see is a lot of stuff you’ve still got to do before you’re really free.

Think about it… you’re already ahead of schedule. You wanted to be in place by January 2010, and yet you’ll be in nearly full force by April 2009, instead.

That’s pretty awesome! And yet you are all angsty and morose that it’s not now, dammit.

I don’t want to say you SHOULD still be high on that, but it’s worth thinking about when you’re feeling in the dumps because not everything is done and perfect yet, and leftover bits of Old Business are still hanging about in in the corners, glaring at you and making you feel tremendously guilty.

I know you feel stressed out, and harried, and overcommitted, and totally overwhelmed right now and pissed at everyone.

But remember: you’re still in transition. You’re fucking up. You’re also kicking ass. At the same time. That is possible, and yes it’s awkward, but that’s where the value lies, doesn’t it? If it were too easy, that’d make you mopey too. I know it would—I know you.

Butterflies look great a couple days after they come out of their cocoon. They really look neat inside the cocoon, too. It’s the bit in the middle, with the squeezing, and the wrenching, and tearing, and wrinkled wings, all damp with cocoon goo, that we don’t tend to think about. It’s amazing and miraculous, but also tough and uncomfortable and really quite gross.

But you can’t have the before & after without the in-between.

As long as you can survive my redonkulous butterfly metaphors, you’ll be all right.

Love and admiration,

February 25, 2009

Horrifying butterfly metaphors aside, I was right. Now, it’s 3 years and one week later. I quit consulting in January 2010 as planned, even though our product income wasn’t quite there yet. It was hard, again. I should have written another letter. But I made it through, and our business is going awesome. All our dreams are coming true.

I am so thankful to the Me of Yesteryear who, for once in my life, broke out of her cycle of short-termism, who for once didn’t give up, and stuck it out through all the hard shit. It was worth it.

What would you put in YOUR letter to yourself?

Getting Started / Selling — 6 Comments
22
Sep 11

Niches Don’t Work – but Worldviews Do

Hi there! This is an excerpt from 30×500 Launch Class, a class designed to help you create & launch your very own paying product.

30x500 Freeview - Worldviews!.pdf (page 5 of 43).png

“Find a Niche”

When you get into business, you can’t swing a cat without being told you have to find a niche.

What the hey?

Well, niches are groups of people. Typically a niche defines a group of people by slots and numbers: middle-aged housewives, young men with disposable income and technical skills between the age of 18 and 35, white Republicans with an income of $70,000 to $100,000, new mothers, cat fanciers, Rails developers, web designers.

But take any group of new mothers, cat fanciers, young men, Rails developers, web designers, or white Republicans with a firmly middle-class income, and you’ll find they vary hugely when it comes to opinions.

And, let’s face it — external attributes don’t matter nearly as much as opinions do. There’s a reason the saying doesn’t go, “External attributes are like assholes: everybody has ‘em, and they all stink.”

Everybody’s obsessed with finding a niche when what they should be doing is expressing a worldview.

Overcome Inertia & Inspire Movement

The best way to use the Laws of Customer Physics [see below!] to your favor is to take a stand. This is more powerful — and easier to implement — than a massive advertising budget.

If you respect the awesome power of worldviews to direct attention and interest, you can use them to lure the Right People to be your customers:

If your plan is to be bland, to make your product middle-of- the-road so you don’t offend anyone (because you think your market is everyone), then everyone will ignore it equally. Your product will exert no gravitational force; extremely few customers will be moved.

If, on the other hand, you have a worldview (or taste) that drives your product, and you let it out, you’ll exert gravity. You’ll pull the Right People in, when they land on your site or pass by your store, and feel OH YEAH! THAT’S FOR ME!

You’ll also repel the Wrong People. Result: everybody’s happy!

This is positioning. It’s messaging. It’s branding. It’s purple cows, and differentiation, and customer segmentation. Those things are all important — but it’s the worldview, the tastes and beliefs, that drive them. If you try to do big, business-y sounding things before determining your worldview (and the worldview of your customers), you’re going to find yourself in deep doo-doo.

Your worldview, and the worldview of your product, have to get in at the ground floor, and make nice with the worldviews of your Audience.

This happy confluence of worldviews should influence everything, from feature choice to the way you write.

This is the way to make a name for yourself… and make sales. Everything else is just struggling against the tide.

Learn More… Free 39-page Guide to Worldviews!

Yup, I’m releasing two whole lessons from my always-sells-out 30×500 Product Launch Class for absolutely free. Yes, zilch, zippo, nada, nil.

(But wait! There’s more! — just kidding! Who do I look like, Ron Popeil?)

If you’re targeting developers, or even Ruby developers, or designers or even web designers who use WordPress, or freelance writers or even freelance writers in the business space… you’re making a mistake, because you’re working off the very ineffective concept of niches.

And you should definitely download my free guide to Worldviews, with a bonus introduction to the 3 Laws of Customer Physics. (Which cannot be denied & must be understood — unless you want your business to fall as fast as a feather OR a bowling ball in a vacuum)

For serious: check out this lesson. If it doesn’t rock your socks, you lose nothing!

But if it does rock your socks — and boy am I hearing a lot of great feedback! — then imagine what it would be like to have 3 full months of this kind of education delivered to your doorstep. Concise. Funny. Effective. Breathtakingly simple, once you read it. Actionable. Yup, that’s 30×500 in a nutshell.

But don’t take my word for it. Try it yourself. And read what some of my students have to say (below).

Case Study – Adam Brault of AndYet

Adam and his team at &Yet are about to launch a new product called &! (“and bang”), which is a remarkably fresh take on team communication.

Here’s what he has to say about 30×500:

So I’ve had dozens of people recommend, ″The Entrepreneurs Guide to Customer Development″ which is a short version of the longer book. And read it, enjoyed it, thought there was a lot of value in it.

But the thing to me that it did not give was the most important piece which is what 30 x 500 did, and that is the right place to start. And to me the right place to start is everything. It’s demonstrated by the class itself and it’s demonstrated by Amy’s success.

If you don’t start in the right place, you can pivot all you want, you’re not going to get there.

Thanks to 30×500, we’ve got our process and we can just keep working the process and keep improving. And that’s just totally awesome And the materials! Honestly, the materials are so great. Amy is such a good writer. And it’s so entertaining, and really to the point in a way that’s very effective.

I just can’t say enough. I’ve told a lot of people like they should take the class.

I would pay ten times the amount I originally paid for the value that I got out of the class.

Take Charge – Take 30×500!

You don’t have to be a wageslave forever. (Or run on the hamster wheel of freelancing forever, either.) You can learn a system that will help you create paying products, that make money from the outset, with the least amount of stress and wasted effort and the highest possible chance for success.

30×500 will help you immensely.

Drop your name & email in the box below to qualify for a special pre-launch discount of $250:

Funmail Guarantee: Obv there’s no obligation whatsoever. You can unsubscribe at any time. And I promise to send you nothing but free goodies and samples and discounts and awesome stuff like that!

Digital Goods / Getting Started / Money — 9 Comments
11
Oct 10

Running the Numbers: Your First Infoproduct

If you’re a freelancer, doing creative-y things, then it won’t take but a small push to get you from No Products zomg! to Hey I Gots a Product.

Let’s look at the numbers for Your First Infoproduct.

First up: Your Freelance Income

Say you typically charge $75/hr. Your rate may be higher or lower; adjust as necessary.

I bet you could make and begin to market an infoproduct in 75 hours or fewer. Dave Navarro says you can do one in a weekend. I agree.

That means your infoproduct would have a freelance opportunity cost of $5,625 (75 hours • $75 hourly billing).

Second: Launch Your Product

Price your short, sweet, punchy infoproduct at $19. Sell 75 copies at launch, that nets you $1,425.

Don’t freak. It’s not hard to sell 75 copies. If you have an audience of 200 to 400 people, and you create a product offer that speaks to them, that solves a problem for them, you’ll have no problem at all.

So, $5,625 (Hourly Potential Earnings, an opportunity cost of creating a product) minus $1,425 (Product Launch Earnings) is $4,200. Let’s call that the Wage Slave vs Freedom Gestalt. That’s still a big number, in favor of freelancing.

Or is it?

Ongoing Sales: Not Spectacular

You’ve done a little bit of other marketing: put a banner in your sidebar, blogged about your launch, posted on forums with it in your signature, basically made sure you didn’t commit the criminal mistake of Not Tellin’ Nobody.

So you keep selling copies. Slowly, of course, since you’re no marketing genius. Let’s say you sell another 15 copies per month for the first 2 months. That’s $285 x 2 = $570.

Your total product earnings are now up to $1,995 (hurry, act now!). Gestalt is still big.

Ehhhn: The Sound of a Mild Additional Effort

Now, you’re a smart cookie. You know a product won’t coast forever just on one push. (That’d defy physics, for one thing.)

So you gird your loins and do you a little bit of extra marketing. Take two hours of your time ($150 opportunity cost) and write 3 more blog posts that appeal to the audience for your book, create an infographic, release a bit of open source code, post more on forums, and so on. Update your sales page with some customer quotes. Send a couple review copies out. Your Gestalt increases slightly.

The Magic Formula: Earnings = Reward x Effort

Hey, what’s this you find? That tiny bit of effort was almost like another launch!

Sell 30 copies. $1995 + $570 (30 copies) = $2,565.

You now rest on your well-padded laurels. Your monthly sales are up to 20 copies a month on average, though, because of your extra bit of marketing. For the rest of the year (10 months), you earn an average of $380 a month in sales — $3,800 in total.

$3,800 (10 months’ coasting) plus $2,565 (launch, relaunch, first 2 months’ sales) = $6,365.

Your original Hourly Potential Earnings was $5,625 plus two extra hours of marketing at $150 = $5,775.

Congratulations. You did better than break-even on on the opportunity cost, by 10.2%.

Your Wage Slave vs Freedom Gestalt is a negative number: doing a single freelance job, for the same amount of time, would have been 10.2% less profitable.

The Numbers Again: In Short

You charge $75/hr. You spent 75 hours (+ 2 later) creating and marketing your product.

$75 x 75 hours = $5,625
$75 x 2 hours = $150
Total Hourly Potential Earnings (freelancing): $5,775

You priced your infoproduct at $19, and sold 75 copies at launch. You then sold 15 copies a month for two months (average). You did another mini-launch and sold 30 copies. Your extra marketing paid off with an increase to 20 copies per month for the next 10 months (average).

$19 x 75 copies = $1,425
$19 x 15 copies x 2 months = $570
$19 x 30 copies = $570
$19 x 20 copies x 10 months = $3,800
Total Income from Sales: $6,365

That math is a no-brainer, if you ask me.

Whaddaya say?

Have you been running the numbers?

Oh yeah. Kelly and I are doing a free 90-minute online class on infoproducts on Oct 29th. In preparation for making a full-day workshop on making and selling your very first infoproduct. Interested? Subscribe to my Advanced Discount List for the heads’ up & discounts. Or follow me on Twitter for the heads’ up, but no discounts. Your choice!