Marketing

The 5-part 30×500 Taste Test

The Product Revolution is Coming!

Hey there, sexy.

As you probably know, I’ve got a launch on right now for the 4th round of my 30×500 Launch Class — aka, the coolest, most bullshit-free, most hilarious, most systematic way ever to start & launch your first product.

You also probably know that I’m not just into all this *waves hand at entrepreneurship stuff* for the money. I’m on a mission.

So, when I think about how I should market 30×500, I ask myself:

How can I market and reach my ideal audience, while also furthering my mission in general? How can I market in such a way that even just my marketing will help smart, creative people learn how to create products? How can I use my marketing alone to help folks break free from being used to create wealth for the people with money — bosses, clients — and use those crazy skills to create wealth for themselves?

The answer is obvious:

Give some of the awesomeness away. Give it to the world — for free.

Which, I’m gonna be honest with you, is fucking scary. On several levels.

But I didn’t go through everything I’ve gone through to create my business, and my life, just to shy away from doing something good just because it’s scary. If I lived every day just to maximize every penny, I would be a miserable, miserable girl. Luckily, in my experience, doing what I love (helping people!) with a mindset of “I can afford to give” makes everything better.

Now, there’s so much of 30×500 that I can’t give away. 30×500 is an intense project.

I spend a huge amount of time each class helping you, my student, personally with your product concepts — and the pitches you’ll use to sell ‘em. (And occasionally dispensing a corrective kick in the pants.)

That level of personal attention simply doesn’t scale beyond the folks actually in my class.

But what I can do is give away a few lessons. In the hopes that you’ll find them useful even without the structure of a regularly scheduled class, group chats, and lively mailing list.

So here they are! Free stuff abounds.

Your Tasting Menu: 5 lessons, 1 video

First, start with what the Austrians call “a greeting from the kitchen” — a little pre-appetizer appetizer. Then the appetizers. Followed by the first main course, second main course, and dessert.

Taste away:

Setting the Stage: the first 3 lessons from 30×500 (a manifesto, if you will)
Worldviews Rule, Niches Drool: why marketing is sooo much more than niches, and a workbook that’ll help you bake that understanding into every aspect of your future product (words, colors, design, features)
Pain Killers: an intense workbook to help you identify rich opportunities to “mine the pain” — to figure out where your customer hurts, and how to help him
Stacking the Bricks: can ruthless pragmatism rev you up? this video will prove it to you — the premise is that 8 years ago, 37signals had no products, & now they have millions in revenue (a month!). This video’s about the path they took, and how you can apply that to your path.

Yummm.

One Last Word: Before You Dive In…

Don’t just right-click this stuff and let it rot in your Downloads folder.

Oh yeah. I know you do that. I do that too. Get all excited for the smorgasbord of delicious content. So excited you gorge on it like a hyperactive hummingbird, jumping around from PDF to PDF without ever settling down long enough to absorb & use it.

That’s a huge part of why, when you take 30×500, the lessons are metered — they come out on a schedule, and there are deadlines for homework, and regular group discussions.

But seriously. Don’t waste this stuff.

Download it, and take the time to carefully read it. Ideally more than once. Print the workbooks out. Actually do them. Actually watch the video, in its entirety.

These lessons will help you kick total ass, if you’ll just give yourself the time.

Finally: The Goodies!

Download away, friend! I’ve broken the goodies up into the sections (appetizers, first main course, second main course, and dessert) I joked about above.

Enjoy.

Appetizers: Get Psyched, Get Your Head Screwed On Right

First, the first three lessons from 30×500. They’re all about the mistakes & missteps & suffering that we all suffer on the rocky path to profitable-product-owner-hood.

You know, that whole cycle: you wake up energized, eureka! You’ve found your great idea. It has such promise. You know that this time, it’ll work. You’ll make money. You’ll achieve your financial goals. You’ll be able to build the life you want.

But it never works out.

Why not?

Read these lessons — and you’ll slap yourself in the forehead and wonder why you didn’t think of it before:

It’s kinda obvious in retrospect, isn’t it?

Worldviews: Everybody’s Got One & You Need to Know Em

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

What the hell’s up with that?

Obviously you know what a niche is: a group of people defined by slots and numbers, like 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. Blah blah blah.

And there’s the problem. Those people may share a demographic, but they don’t think the same. They don’t value the same things. They don’t look at the world the same way. They don’t buy the same way.

Niches-ism doesn’t respect the way people actually buy.

On the other hand, Worldviews — and the 3 Laws of Customer Physics — do. Learn to spot Worldviews, and you’ll save yourself so much heartache, like when you try to sell to people whose worldview will prevent them from buying. (So sad!)

And your understanding of Worldviews will also answer that age old question: Does design matter? (The answer is: it depends on what worldviews your potential customers have.)

In short: this lesson is vital. Don’t miss it. Download it now:

Lesson 21 & 22

(This taste test lesson also includes a lot of background on the other stuff you’ll learn in 30×500. As you’ll see, the lessons build on each other.)

Pain Killers: Everybody Hurts… So Make & Sell a Soother

You know that REM song, “Everybody Hurts”?

It’s not that different from that Buddhist saying, “Life is suffering.” Which is, if you ask me, is a sentiment with an unfairly bad rap.

To be human is to hurt. That’s just kinda the way it is.

And one of the best ways to make a profit while helping people is to kill their pain. Either take away the pain, or transform it into enjoyment and even joy.

But… other than just trying to spot a “problem” to solve, how the heck do you know which pains exist? Which pains to tackle? Which pains you can fix most awesomely? Which would be profitable?

That’s what this next lesson is about.

When you take 30×500, there are a bunch of lessons between the beginning 3 I already sent you, and this bad boy.

First off, you learn how to pick an Audience to investigate. Then how to find them, and learn from them. Figure out if they’re your ideal customers — or not. How hard it will be to sell. What they need.

You collect all kinds of crazy raw data.

Then you do THIS lesson, lesson 13. (And lesson 12, which is similar, but about money.)

This lesson guides you through, step-by-step, sifting thru that data and squeezing insight out of it. And what do you get at the end? Delicious juice?

No! An infinite number of potential product concepts. As many as you could ever want.

Lesson 13: Pain Killers

This is part of the awesome process that is 30×500: pick, gather, apply rules, apply a system, apply effort, and BAM!! Results.

Dessert: From Lowly Peon to Rich & Famous

You know 37signals? Of course you do. You know how many products they had when they started out 8 years ago?

Zero.

You know how they got from zero, to millions of dollars of revenue a month? The same way you will get from zero to the income you want.

They did it by Stacking the Bricks. So did just about everybody else you see who’s successful. In this video, I dissect the product career paths of 37signals and 4 other smaller companies (including moi). And turn it into a lesson you can use.

Watch Stacking the Bricks

Other Things You Learn in 30×500

I’m not joking when I call this set of lessons a tasting menu. They are only a taste. There is SO much more.

Take 30×500, and you’ll learn:

how not to fail (based on my outline of 14 failure patterns!)
how to start with an audience
how to find your audience’s watering holes so you can:
understand & analyze them
market to them
how to do guerilla market research — for free
what to look for:
how can you ensure you don’t fail before you even start?
how do you pick an audience that you can easily sell to?
who will be good customers?
and how to mine that raw data for product concepts — as many as you like
and then how to turn those product concepts into persuasive pitches you can use to market your product before you make it
how to pick the best product concept for your needs (AND theirs)
how to flesh out a tiny product concept with great detail
how to break down that concept into a tiny, shippable atom
how to plan to build that atom with the time & resources you ACTUALLY have (you know: on the side, after your day job!)
how to combat & conquer featuritis
how to speak your customer’s language
how to price for value… and conquer pricing fear
how to write your sales letter
how to launch

This is meaty stuff. It’s theory and it’s practice. It’s actionable. It’s in-depth. It’s ways to think about biz that you can use forever, and in many different kinds of projects.

(Alumnus @adambrault recently told me he used 30×500 concepts to organize his first conference! And LOTS of alumni have used the 30×500 principles to improve their freelance or consulting businesses. Yeah! It’s good stuff.)

That’s what you’ll learn in 30×500. And you won’t be alone.

What Else You Get: A Recipe for Kicking Ass

Okay. Take all that stuff above. Think about it. Think about what you want. Do you want to create financial freedom for yourself? Do you want to be able to say “no” to a day job, or client work — possibly even forever? Do you believe that creating value, & selling directly with the folks who benefit from that value, is the way to do that?

Awesome. We’re totally on the same page.

Now ask yourself, What if I could have…

Step-by-step help implementing this system?
Personal advice from someone who’s been there, & done it, over and over? (hint: me! and I don’t pull punches!)
The support of a lively community of nearly 300 people who’ve taken the class before me… and another 64 taking it with you?
Access to all those goodies… fooooreeeeverrr?

Oh yeah. I haven’t really mentioned that last part, have I?

30×500: You can check in, but you can never leave! Just kidding.

You get access to the alumni group – forever. The lessons – forever. Free updates to those lessons (and new lessons!) – forever. The custom courseware – forever.

Plus, if you ask nicely, I’ll answer your biz questions even after class is over Just ask @edavis10 how often we’ve talked about his products since he took the first class nearly 3 years ago.

You really can’t beat this package for structure, sense, and support — certainly not at the price of half a class at a serious university.

APPLICATIONS OPEN: Friday the 13th, 3pm Eastern

That’s TODAY! So set your alarms now!

This time around, we’re doing things a lil differently. You have to apply. Here’s why:

In short: I’m selfish. I want more awesome success stories, and that means helping ensure everybody in 30×500 is ready to be there and make the most of it. Thus the application process.

Want to apply? Awesome! Here are the questions so you can prepare in advance. This isn’t a pop quiz, this is real life

Want to know more? This page has ALL the details — dates, prices, how it works, how 30×500 got built to start with.

Oh, and, how about some numbers from my business? I wrote a lil retrospective from 3 years of bootstrapping** — and include a huge list of 30×500 alumni kicking ass. Cuz it ain’t just about me.

Not Sure?

Remember: if you aren’t sure if the class is for you, drop me an email. I’ll do my best to help you decide. And yes, I tell people “No.”

That’s the reason I offer a 100% money-back guarantee: I want you to succeed.

And, thanks

Thanks for sticking with me for all these words. I hope you enjoy the sample lessons. Use them in good health!

I’ll see you in class.

Customers / Marketing — 27 Comments
5
Oct 11

When You Should Ignore Your “Customers”

I do a lot of sales through email marketing — to folks who specifically requested that I email ‘em.

I don’t email all that much; most months, I don’t email at all.

For the past month, I’ve been sending 1-2 emails a week. Not just “buy my shit” emails, but free samples from the class, free advice, true life stories of the lessons I’ve learned. (Plus fat discounts for my 30×500 Product Launch Class.)

In other words: good shit. Good news. Stuff people want.

OMG! A European Is Angry on the Internet!

And yesterday this email appeared in my inbox:

Amy, I really like you and your blog. Really, I mean it. However you’re getting in touch more often than my mum. I’m not sure if it’s how it works in the US, but in Europe people rather get pissed off. I have plenty of e-mails already. I like to read some of your stuff if it’s time to time. I will unsubscribe if you’ll be sending so many e-mails.

No hard feelings, just saying.

Action Required!! …Or is it?

What would you do, if you got this email?

Probably try to stop annoying people, right? After all, you don’t to piss off a bunch of Europeans, do you?

Well… yes. You really, really do.

Pissing people off is actually great for your business. Not just great — but required.

Why I’m Happy to Piss People Off

Here’s what I wrote back:

And that, my friend, is why so many Europeans fail at their businesses.

They think that some imaginary social boundaries are more important than doing what’s necessary — and more important than doing what helps the most people.

The folks who stay on my list are the ones who want to hear from me… and they buy. The folks who unsubscribe are the ones who don’t buy.

Why would I waste my effort & potential income & dilute my message in order to please people who won’t buy?

Being successful means doing what works over & over & over again. And that’s just what I’m doing.

Overly didactic? Snarky? Maybe. But truth.

The folks who are invested are staying on my list — overwhelmingly. Over 90% of them stick around.

You know, I almost don’t even care if those people buy what I’m selling. The invested people who stick around are infinitely more likely to be people I can help. Who’ll take my free advice and put it to use.

Which furthers my mission to create more happy, healthy, thriving indie biz.

Irritated people don’t invest. They don’t listen — even when it’s free. And if they don’t listen, what’s the chance that they’ll implement it?

I can’t help them.

So I’m happy when they get fed up and leave.

The Bottom Line: Aphorisms Edition

The empty can rattles the most. And our immediate, instinctive urge is to try to please them. We want to please people.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease. But it shouldn’t — not when that wheel’s never gonna roll the direction you want.

But we’ve gotta save up our precious energy & focus for our customers who are already pretty happy.

There’s no reward in listening to people who want to change everything about you, your business, or your products.

What do you do?

Do you have a great pissed-off-non-customer story? Have you caved to the loud minority before? (I have — it’s an almost irresistible urge.) Do you have an “action plan” for handling emails like that?

And if you want to get free advice, free goodies, free lessons from my always-sold-out 30×500 Product Launch Class… click here and sign up for the email list

Copywriting / Marketing — 3 Comments
21
Sep 11

Writing the Charm Sales Letter: Backwards Time Lapse Video

I recently spend several days working on a sales page for our new SaaS, Charm, which we’ll be launching this week after over a year of development.

Aaand for your edification, I recorded a backwards time lapse of its development.

It’s 3 minutes long.

Tough Decisions: What Tack to Take?

Charm is a real killer of a support tool… and totally different from the other tools you’ve used. It’s a category buster, like my first SaaS product.

When you do something so different, the challenge becomes: How to talk about it so people will buy?

I’ve learned the hard way that it’s hard to sell something based on 3 or 4 different angles at once. So I’m not going to make that mistake again.

Once we’ve got folks using Charm, they love it. But it works on so many different vectors that it’s hard to pick the one angle to work with.

So I struggled for hours to write this sales letter.

How I Got My Angle

I’m a big believer in the power of funnels: gather a whole bunch of ideas, data, and stories, and then see what common themes you get when you distill them down.

So, to fill the wide mouth of my process funnel, I:

filled many pages writing notes about life before Charm, life after Charm
reviewed what I have sent to our beta customers or prospective beta customers
wrote down everything I’ve told people in person when talking about Charm
wrote a “personal letter” from me, about how & why we designed Charm

Then, to distill, I:

reviewed all that information for common themes
picked what seemed like the most powerful common theme (pain — see below)
started from the headline that promised the opposite of the pain (went thru a lot of iterations)
created an outline of subheadlines based on that single premise, the opposite of the pain: loving talking to your customers again
filled in each subhead with sketchy notes
rewrote & transformed sketchy notes into a narrative

I chose to focus on the pain of doing support, rather than the business intelligence and what we call “360-degree support life cycle” — because everybody feels the pain, but few people are actively looking for biz intelligence.

My plan is to get people in the door on pain, and then sell them on joy & smarts. Once folks start using Charm, they’ll learn how powerful it is to get biz intelligence from what they’re already doing (without any extra work).

I Can Teach You to Write Sales Letters

For this whole process, I used a process I came up with for my 30×500 Product Launch Class. In 30×500, you’ll learn how to use the power of funnels from start to finish: to come up with viable product concepts which will sell from day 1, to turn them into a list of features, to turn those features into an actionable plan, to price, market, and write copy to make it sell. And it’s systems, systems all the way down.

If you’re itching to create & sell your own products, but not sure where to start, you should definitely check it out.

Drop your name & email in the box below to qualify for my 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!

Marketing — 4 Comments
16
Sep 11

The Forehead Slap Test for Sexy Sales

Afraid your idea’s too much sizzle and not enough steak?

The Forehead Slap Test is an awesome copywriter’s trick, originally by a famous, wildly successful old school copywriter named Clayton Makepeace.

(Old school here means direct response marketing — aka mail you receive in your real, physical mailbox. Crayzee!)

The Forehead Slap Test tells you if your product is too anemic and under-endowed to score sales… or if it’ll be the product your customers swoon for.

With the Forehead Slap Test, you’re testing the punch of your pitch. You’re testing for URGENCY and DESIRE, immediacy and obviousness.

Applying the Forehead Slap Test for Fun & Profit

Here’s how you do it:

Imagine your potential customer, leaping out of bed one morning because of an epiphany — the kind that solves itself in your dreams.

She leaps up, slaps herself resoundingly on the forehead, and shouts,

“Holy shit, I …………”

You fill in the blank with what your product does for that customer.

That’s the awesome revelation that your product should be creating, or delivering, for the suddenly awakened customer.

Positive Examples: Yes!

“Holy shit… I gotta stop wasting my time hunting down this damn bug! I can get help!”

“Holy shit… I gotta stop chasing after more traffic, and squeeze more money from the traffic I already have. Cuz I already HAVE it!”

“Holy shit… I can sell something new to my EXISTING customers, cuz I already know where they are!”

“Holy shit… if I could just negotiate a 20% pay raise, I’d pay down all my debt!”

“Holy shit… I should master the crap out of Rails so I can take advantage of all those poor bastards tweeting how they can’t find anyone to hire.”

“Holy shit… I might get more play if my breath wasn’t so funky.”

“Holy shit… I’m sitting on a gold mine of material. I could sell this to other people just like it is!”

The Anti-Slaps that Get No Play

“Holy shit… I should learn proven strategies for hunting down bugs.”

“Holy shit… I could read everything about how to do split-testing on web sites.”

“Holy shit… I could read a book on negotiation and learn how to increase my value to my employer.”

“Holy shit… I should evaluate customer retention strategies.”

“Holy shit… I can learn how to build simple CRUD apps in Rails.”

“Holy shit… I gotta brush with twice the flouride.”

“Holy shit… I could learn to monetize pre-existing content.”

Ummmm…

As we say on the mideastern seaboard:

Yeah… no.

Can’t you just feel how badly this second set falls flat?

Successful Slap == Killer Sales

No slap == slow or no sales. It’s that simple.

Without the forehead slap, it’s soooo much harder to motivate people to get off their butts and buy. Not impossible – not always. But much, much harder.

The anti-slaps above are snooze-worthy because they’re riddled with faux benefit-speke.

Theoretically, it’s a benefit that your toothpaste has twice the flouride, or that your screencasts cover EVERYTHING to do with Rails.

But factually? Nobody cares.

There’s no urgency. There’s no burning need. There’s no desire. There’s no clear end result.

Nobody’s going to pop out of bed one morning and slap themselves over it.

The Forehead Slap uncovers weak central pitches… and gives you a mechanism to improve them.

Slap Some Foreheads Today

Try the Forehead Slap today. You can apply it to:

the way you sell an existing product
concepts you’re working on for future products
your blog posts, tweets, & other freebie content

It works on everything.

Holy shit… I could kiss clients goodbye for good!

Yup, that’s right. There’s a slap in here for my 30×500 Launch Class workshop. The workshop that’ll help you learn how to create forehead-slap-approved product concepts, as many as you want, whenever you want.

And the class that’ll teach you how to spec ‘em out, break ‘em down, price ‘em up, and get ‘em shipped and selling. Without giving up your day job.

This blog post is an excerpt from one of the lessons. There’s sooo much more where this came from.

Want more awesome, actionable, slap-worthy biz advice delivered straight to your inbox, for free?

Drop your name and email address in the box riiiiight here:

Killer forehead photo cc maureen lunn.

Marketing — 10 Comments
7
Aug 11

Will Internet Fame Help You Sell Shit?

Unicorn Free FB Stats

Why, hello there. Do you plan to subscribe to Unicorn Free? If so, you might be the one that tips me over the ginormously important 2,000 subscriber mark.

I’m so excited to crest that magical number. Soon I will be awash in riches and cabana boys!

Because it’s nothing at all to sell shit when you’re famous, right? All you have to do is crook your little finger and your 2,000 True Fans come a-runnin’, wallets outstretched.

Ahhh, Not Quite…

Reality, as it turns out, is a little bit more nuanced.

Is it easier to sell things when you have an audience of tens thousands, rather than an audience of tens? Yes. No. Maybe. It depends.

The Weblebrity Litmus Test

As Professor Cosmo has taught us, wherever there is nuance, there are hackneyed quizzes to stamp it out.

Here’s one for you to help you analyze the value of your audience (or potential audience):

What Type of Internet Famewhore are You?

Is your audience a coherent group audience…
…or a group of unique & beautiful snowflakes — the only thing they hold in common is you?
Do they trust you?
Do they follow you for humor value, old-style celebrity (you’re just… famous)…
… or out of interest in your work/skills/thoughts/involvement in things/hobbies?
Are you selling them something they want?
Do they buy things like the thing you’re selling?
Do you have any clue how to sell effectively?
Do you annoy them with your commerciality…
… or do they view your marketing activities as a lovely value-add?

If Your Fame Passes Muster…

Then it’s possible that your internet fame might actually help you sell shit! Hooray!

On the other hand, it might not. Fame is a fickle beast. It’s not pixie dust.

You can’t just sprinkle a thousand followers on your product and expect success.

True story: I’ve known Gary Vee for years now. A few times, he’s done me the favor of pimping one of my products to his audience… of nearly a million followers. And each time, it had no measurable effect whatsoever.

What to Do Instead of Seeking Fame

Fame can help — but only if it’s high quality fame, and under specific circumstances, and used properly. That’s an awful lot of conditionals.

The facts are in: A lack of fame is not the barrier you think it is.

Remember: It’s taken me over nearly 18 months to get to 1,900 subscribers. Folks may call me “internet famous,” but the facts are not quite so expansive. Thing is, even with <2,000 subscribers, I’m still having a grand old time living off income from my products. I’m not Richie Rich, but I’m doing just fine.

So take it from me: stop worrying about fame. Stop fetishizing numbers.

Don’t wait for your 15 minutes. Act now. Get out there and write, teach, share, make and sell awesome stuff.

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