Among my entrepreneur friends I’ve been the designated ‘namer’ of new products/businesses/mastermind groups… you name it. They’ve come to me for help.

This is how they reel me in:

Then it goes something like this:

Today I’m going to lay out the EXACT process I used to come up with the names and even how to complete logo concepts. I’ll even show you a case study of how I used this same process with Bryan over at Videofruit to come up with a name for a new product in less than 30 mins

(Btw you don’t need to be creative to do this.)

Here’s what we’ll go over:
Choosing the name of your product/service/idea
Create a simple logo (or get a good idea of what you want)
Getting the domain

I’m going to use an actual case study for this that just happened a few days ago to show you how easy this was:

Case Study 1: SlingShot App

Recently, Bryan Harris, asked a small group of us to come up with the name for a new product we’ll be working on as part of a 24-hour challenge. The concept for the product is based around planning and scheduling your product launch.

Before he set us the ‘name challenge’, he set some constraints:

Constraint 1: He didn’t want the word ‘Launch’ in the title.
Constraint 2: He wanted it as short and snappy as possible.

My ‘Find a Name’ process

Here’s the process I use when anyone comes to me with naming challenge. For this process I’m going to use the Bryan Harris product as an example:

1. Write down all the words related to whatever the project is about. In this case here was mine:
   
2. When you have 5–10 words go to Thesaurus.com and start entering in these main keywords and see if you can find another word that sparks ideas.
3. For Bryan’s product I looked up the word launch:
   
4. From here I just kept entering keywords, went down the rabbit hole of related words until I came up with a few ideas I liked.

Name idea: Product Pathfinder – Good start, but too many syllables
…
..
…
Last idea: SlingShot

Short
Snappy
Don’t have to explain how to spell

Winner winner, chicken dinner:

Getting the Domain Name:

Sometimes this process may yield a good product name, but I’ll find that the domain isn’t available. For this project, I wasn’t concerned about that as we ended up with as the domain name was Bryan’s deal, and it could always be out on a subdomain of his existing domain.

However usually with the naming process we’ll also want to ensure the domain is available also. Here’s some resources for using this process in conjunction with getting the domain name:

Lean Domain Search
Lean Domain Search’s domain name generator is uniquely cool in that it finds cool and quirky domain names using prefixes and suffixes. It will also let you know whether the exact domain name is available, as well as the twitter handle, etc.

Impossibility
Another great tool that when you enter your keyword, it will pair it with their carefully selected list of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Then search for unregistered .com domain names and show you the results.

Domainr
Domainr is a cool site that allows you to explore the complete domain name space beyond the standard .com, .net and .org options and discover new and interesting domain names. For example, I got a custom link shortener from there, lttlmg.ht… just ’cause.

Ok now we have a name we like, we want to come up with some branding ideas quickly without having to bring a designer in.

Quick logo creation:

Firstly, any designers reading this, please put down your pitchforks, I’m not trying to make you redundant. However, there’re many cases when we (entrepreneurs, business owners, yadda yada) want to throw together something for a new project without dropping $ to hire a designer.

This process is for those times.

So, this logo creation part of the process can be used to either create a simple logo brand for your product/service/idea, or just create some good reference ideas to hand off to a graphic designer.

Here’s what you do:
1. Download & install the top fonts from these two free font sites:
– DaFont.com
– FontSquirrel.com
– Or just google ‘Best fonts 2015/2016’

Not sure how to install fonts? Check out these quick tutorials:
– Font install for Mac
– Font install for Windows

1. Once installed. Go to Wordmark.it
2. Type in the product name you came up with and click the ‘Load fonts’ button. It will generate previews that look like this:
   
3. Scroll through the previews and select the ones you are interested in by clicking on them.
4. Once you’ve previewed and selected the options you like. Click the ‘Filter selected’ button to isolate selected previews:
   
5. Take a screen cap and note down the names of the selected fonts to be used in your image or text editing software.
6. Note: You can invert the previews, adjust the size and letter spacing as well as having the ability to drag and sort the previews to compare different fonts side by side.Another great website that allows you to review multiple fonts this way is TypeKit.
7. I took this Wordmark concept and moved forward with 1 version with my designer friend Iker. Will share final version later after Friday

The final logo did end up being a variation of one of these choices that was upgraded slightly but it came from this initial process.

Not convinced by the Wordmark logo process?

WellAt Traffic & Conversion Summit 2016 in San Diego I learned in a branding session that Perry Belcher, co-founder of Digital Marketer (and creative genius) used a very similar method with WordMark to come up with these two logos:

Both of these sites are getting millions of hits per month as well as selling $$$’s of products. So if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.

Do you think this post was helpful? Will this name and logo process help with your next idea? If so, drop me a note in the comments.

I’ve been living in the U.S. for four years, the last big election I didn’t pay much attention to as I hadn’t been living here long. However, this time, around, from a marketing point-of-view I’ve been fascinated by the whole thing.

Don’t worry if you don’t follow politics, this isn’t about that. I’m not here to talk about the issues or each candidates political agenda.

I’m here to look at the marketing behind each candidate, what’s working and why.

Part 1:

• Introduction
• Brand vs. Personality
• Social proof
• The Problem Agitate Solve Model
• Trump K.I.S.S.
• Communication
• Digital Marketing Strategies

A few caveats before we start:

Marketing is supposed to be fun, let’s not get too political.
My goal is for you to finish this post thinking “I can do this, this and this” to improve your marketing.
Feel free to mention questions or things for me to cover in part 2

Introduction

In this post, I’m specifically going to dive into the three candidates we’ve all been following the most, Clinton, Sanders and Trump. I’ve signed up for the newsletters of each of these candidates for one reason only – Marketing.

Believe it or not, the presidential race at this point in time (I’m writing this on Super Tuesday) is not about who has the best policies to do the job, that’s to figure out later. Right now it’s about who markets themselves the best to get the nomination.

Behind each candidate is a HUGE team of people that are spending all their time and MILLIONS each day on advertising and paid media figuring out who their market is, how to reach them and how to get them to vote.

We can ave our millions and study what they do (so we can ride their strategy coat tails). Lets jump right in…

Brand vs. Personality

Bernie vs. Clinton: It’s the difference between a corporation and a startup. This is one of the major differences I see between the two Democratic candidates. One is a personality, and the other is a know household brand.

To give you a real-life example, let’s compare Hillary to Gillette and Bernie to Dollar Shave Club:

If you don’t know what I’m talking about check out this video that went viral and launched Dollar Shave Club (DSC) as a company. Beyond the fact that it was a funny video, the reason it resonated is because it struck a nerve. Guys were tired of paying so much money for razors and DSC solved that pain point by messaging directly to their target customer.

“He doesn’t have a chance…”

That’s what they said about Bernie Sanders when he first started his presidential run as a no-recognition name with no following or financial backing.

Now as of March 2016, he has gained significant traction and has become a serious competitor in the race for the Democratic nomination.

How did Bernie do it?

Much like DSC solving the pain of expensive razors, Bernie’s mission and messaging struck a nerve center within voters as he told the story of a revolution against corporations while inspiring a vision for better future.

As it turns out people were tired of big banks running the government and the increasing wealth inequality of the 1%. This messaging and mission has gained him such support that he gets more donations than any other candidate.
Check out some of Bernie’s Ads:

Why do I refer to Hillary as Gillette as compared to Bernie being Dollar Shave Club?

Well look at her ads below compared to Bernie’s. Her messaging is all about HER, the well-recognized Clinton brand and the fact that she’s a woman. Much like Gillette has the brand and the history behind them, so does Hillary Clinton.
Unless you’re living under a rock you already know who she is so she’s just reminding you who she is with her marketing and stands out as the only female candidate:

One of the first things I learned about copywriting was from Neville Medora who said:

“No one cares about you; they only care about themselves.”

Taking this into account, let’s compare the text on each candidates ad’s, Bernie’s team uses words like “we” & “us” while Hillary uses mostly “you” & “her”.

If each candidate had started off on the same footing, without the personal branding of Clinton, which campaign would you lean towards?

My guess?

The one that makes you feel like a part of something bigger and talks about us, we and you collectively.

This is one of the major reasons that Bernie’s campaign skyrocketed in popularity. If you look at their campaign donations you’ll see that Bernie, having appealed to the masses with substance and story has 80% of his contributions from actual voters. Whereas Hillary, the brand, has only 20% of her contributions from individuals and the rest are from corporations and special interest groups:

 source

Bernie’s average donation is just $27

Takeaway: Even if you’re a brand, be human. Share your story and vision. Speak to your readers/customers/clients at their level to create a deeper relationship.

If Clinton and Bernie’s Marketing Teams Spawned:

If Clinton and Sanders marketing teams had a baby, it would look something like what Trump is doing. He’s taking his already existing powerful brand (Trump) and combining it with the “anti-establishment” of Bernie Sanders.

Takeaway:  How can you take the best parts of your competitors marketing to make a super-marketing baby of your own?

Social Proof

Over 70% of Americans say they look at product reviews before making a purchase. source.In this case product reviews = social proof.

Smart campaign marketers realize the importance of showing some social proof to ease the mind of voters. A past study exposed Oprah’s endorsement of Obama in 2008 significantly increased the chances that her magazine subscribers would vote for him

Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have demonstrated social proof in two different ways which fall in line with the Gillette vs. Dollar Shave Club metaphor from earlier.

Hillary has used her position as a political powerhouse to have celebrities endorse her to their fans. The majority of celebrity endorsements seem to be from female celebrities, further driving home her unique selling point of being a woman:

Check out this email-drop from Christina Aquilera:

source

Other famous names that dropped emails were Anna Wintour, Drew Barrymore, Salma Hayek and Ricky Martin. Check out the subject lines and how they appealed to different demographics:

You think they wrote these themselves or were Hillary and her marketing team behind it? I’d put money on the latter. If you’re looking for the material in these newsletters, check them out here.

Sanders A-Team:

I haven’t stumbled across as many celebrity endorsements from Sanders team, however upon researching I find a good number on his star power team. From Steve Wozniak to Danny DeVito to Sarah Silverman, Sanders is boosting his appeal through social proof.

Check out more names on the “Artists for Bernie” list. Additionally, Bernie Sanders team have followed his “we” and “us” messaging by using these animated gifs in their email marketing to show contributions from people just like you and me:

By knowing his overall average contribution is just $27 you’ll see from the gif above that the presented contributions vary from $5 to $50 which aligns with his target voting demographic. They also show their names, because Jennifer, Eleanor, Steve, etc. are people just like us.

Takeaway: How are you targeting different demographics with your marketing? Can you use “celebrities” in your marketing that align with you brand? How do you show social proof of other customers or supporters?  

The Problem Agitate Solve Model:

The two candidates in the running that have risen in the polls quickly, Sanders and Trump, have hit the success they have due to knowing their audience.

They each know where the pain points are for their core supporters, and they press where it hurts before offering themselves as the solution. In copywriting it’s known as the classic Problem-Agitate-Solve formula and works like this:

• Identify a problem
• Agitate that problem
• Present the solution

    Here’s some examples from the news of how they’re using it:

Trump Talk = K.I.S.S

Donald Trump takes it one step further, not only does he follow this Problem, Agitate, Solve formula, but he also talks at a level his core supporters will understand.

Donald Trump is not a simpleton; he’s a master of negotiation and persuasion, yet when his speeches and responses are run through the Donald Trump is not a simpleton; he’s a master of negotiation and persuasion, yet when his speeches and responses are run through the Flesch-Kincaid grade-level test, he scores at the 4th-grade reading level.
Why?
Because he’s purposefully appealing to the masses and using words that his core supporters will understand, whereas other politicians are talking over the public’s head.
Bryan Harris pointed this out cleverly after this victory speech by Trump:   

Also…and I think this is KEY…he talks like they do. Example: “We’re going to beat the hell out of Isis” as opposed to “Fight Isis” — Bryan Harris (@Harris_Bryan) February 10, 2016

Takeaway: Talk to your customers using the same words they use. What did we learn earlier from Neville?

“No one cares about you, they only care about themselves.”

People resonate with people like themselves. Therefore, if you talk the same talk they do it’s, going to be easier to persuade them to do what you want, Jedi style.

Curious to learn more about Trump and his persuasion tactics? Dilbert creator Scott Adams has dug into the Trump campaign and his use of persuasion techniques and NLP to dominate the politics landscape. You can check out his essay about it here.

Digital Marketing Strategies:

On the Democratic side, young voters are overwhelmingly in favor of Bernie Sanders and much like Obama did in 2008, Sanders team have been much more aggressive in online marketing. This is likely due to his relatively unknown name and lack of following.

One of the biggest focus points in the Obama 2008 campaign was increasing their online donations by split-testing conversions. This table below shows only one of the split tests used:

Knowing this, let’s check out the home page for the 2016 candidates.

Call-To-Action:

When you visit BernieSanders.com you see a landing page that is focused on one thing, to get you to contribute to the campaign. In fact the word contribute or contribution is spelled out 8 times in that one page:

Hillary does have a pop-up soon after you land on the site which helps, however if you have pop-ups blocked then you’ll miss out on it:

Takeaway: For your site, what is the main action you want your visitors to take? Have you slit-tested it for conversion? Are you confusing people with too many options?

Creating opt-in forms with purpose that convert:

Bernie Sanders team are leading the pack as far as opt-in strategies on his website feelthebern.org, because not only do they have forms showing but they also show different versions depending on one page of the site you’re on.

“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.”
– Simon Sinek, Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

We’re not done. Once you subscribe they give you another call-to-action:

Takeaway: Rather than taking a shotgun approach with one general opt-in, how can you create opt-ins that serve their unique purpose? By being intentional with a sniper-style opt-in approach you will increase your conversion rate ten-fold.

Once they subscribe, what’s the next action you want them to take? Right now you have their attention (which in 2016 is the greatest currency available) how do you multiply this? SumoMe is an amazing tool that lets you do this easily.

Unsubscribe page:

Check out the unsubscribe pages for each candidate:

Takeaway: How can you win your subscribers back on your unsubscribe page? Either through humor, compelling video or offering another option for emailing.

P.S. I couldn’t find Trump’s unsubscribe page, but I assume it looks something like this:

Alright, I’m at over 2,500 words into this post and feel like I’m only halfway through with everything I need to say, so we’re going to break this up into parts.

In Part 2 we’re going to talk about:

• A more in-depth look at email-marketing strategies used by candidates (including how they use events to drive contributions)
• How Trump has overtaken the media without spending $
• How candidates are using incentives and giveaways to build a following
• A cheat sheet of all the tools you need to do this for yourselves
• … Other stuff I find

Drop a note in the comments if you’ve noticed any of the strategies I’ve pointed out, as well as what should be included for part 2.

I recently visited a friend who was setting up their home office and I was giving them some recommendations of what they needed to get setup right away. Between layout, apps, chrome extensions, online services – I’ve tried everything (I nerd-out on this stuff) and have found the diamonds in the rough.

Before we get to tools, it’s important that you have a good layout for your office. I recently did a quick study of some Feng Shui tips so I could improve the layout of my office. Here’s what I learned:

Before:

A few things I learned were an issue right away:

• My back was facing the door (in a horror movie this would mean I’d be attacked first)
• I was facing a wall on two sides which meant I was boxed in and not fully using desk space
• My back was to the windows which meant for videos my face was always in darkness

After:

Improvements:

1. Now I have my back to the wall which symbolically gives me support
2. I am facing the door, which for a home office matters as business comes to your through the door so we don’t want to turn our back to it.
3. I have natural light at my face now rather than my back which helps throughout the day when I do video calls with my team
4. I’ve free’d up space at the end of my desk that I can use creatively.

(did I mention I used to be an architect… hence the drawings)

A video posted by Cathryn lavery (@cathryn_lavery) on Mar 13, 2016 at 8:19am PDT

Alright now you know a few tips on how to layout your space better, let’s get onto all the tools, apps and gadgets I use to stay productive and run multiple businesses.

Workspace Tools:

When you optimize you start with the things you use everyday so you can start improving the tasks that will make the biggest difference. I use a Macbook Pro 13″ Retina laptop, fully loaded and these tools to optimize my workspace:

Roost Stand – Transforms your laptop into an ergonomic desktop workstation. It’s height Adjustable and Portable, I bring mine everywhere.

SELF Journal – My daily journal

Apple Time Capsule – WiFi base station and a no-hassle backup solution

Humanscale Float Table – This is the desk I use, it’s BIG at 72″ W x 30″ D. It’s height adjustable, however I use as a standing desk for 80% of the time.

Anti-Fatigue Floor Mat – Makes working at my standing desk much for comfortable

Computer apps:

Alfred – Will put your Mac on steroids. I save WEEKS of my life because of this app with all the built in shortcuts and workflows.

aText – Text expander I use to create shortcuts for things I type regularly. Huge timesaver!

ByWord – This is what I write every article in (yes including this one).

Evernote – External brain for files, notes, images. Syncs across devices.

F.Lux – Adjusts your display’s color temp, according to location & time of day

LastPass – Password manager, can create shared password folders

Skitch – I use this every day for screenshots and mockups. It’s quickest and easiest way to relay ideas to virtual team members.

Slack – Messaging app for teams, Allen and I live on this with BestSelf.

ScreenFlow – For screen recordings and video editing

Sunrise – Awesome calendar app, the ‘Meet’ features makes booking meetings seamless

RescueTime – Stay accountable of your time; app runs in the background and tracks your productivity

Transmission – Best way to download torrent files

VLC – Best way to watch movies on your computer

Chrome Extensions:

Momentum – Nice clean web dashboard

What Font – Ever see a cool font on a website and wonder what it was? Think no more, this extension will tell you.

ListGoal – Real-time email statistics dashboard

News Feed Eradicator – Procrastination killer. Removes your FB newsfeed. Install it.

The Great Suspender – Saves computer power by turning off tabs you haven’t used in awhile

ColorZilla – Choose any specific color from a screen

Online Services:

ConvertKit – Powerful email marketing. I use for LittleMight and CalmTheHam emails (get 1st Month Free if you use this link )

WP Engine – WordPress hosting. It’s fast, secure and has amazing customer service.

WP Curve – Never deal with a wordpress headache again… seriously love this.

Dropbox – Save files and access anywhere. This has saved my ass a few times

Grammarly – Makes writing easier by keeping your spelling & grammar in-check.

Marketers Delight – Best & easiest wordpress blog theme I’ve ever used.

Shoeboxed – Scan, track and organize receipts. Makes tax time a breeze.

Shopify – Set up a store within mere hours. I use it on both BestSelf.co and Calm The Ham.

What other tools make your life better? I’d love to know what I’m missing out on.

Creating systems and processes are the key to freedom in both life and business … yikes, it sounds bloody boring doesn’t it?

That’s what I thought until I realized what a lifesaver they are. Systems are the difference between having a successful business you work on, and having created a job for yourself that you can’t escape.

This was what my days looked like before creating processes:

Today I’m going to share with you:

• What they are and why you NEED processes to scale, grow or sell your business
• How to decide what to delegate first
• How to create a process in less than 10 minutes
• The free tool I use to manage my business systems

A process is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks that produce a specific service or product. Think of it as a recipe for a part of your business.

Global businesses like Starbucks and McDonalds are run on systems. This is why wherever you go in the world you have relatively the same experience at each place. Every coffee in Starbucks follows specific instructions, from the amount of ice in a grande iced coffee to the foam-to-steamed milk ratio in a cappuccino.

Nothing is left to chance; it’s a carefully curated process that has been documented and given out each time a new staff member is hired. Not only does this save time for training but it also reduces the chance of making a mistake because they have a rulebook to follow and don’t have to re-invent the wheel each time.

Documenting your processes allows you to scale quickly, hire people to replace you and control your customer experience.

If I could go back five years ago and teach myself one thing it would be how to create systems in my life. Even during university when I studied Architecture there’s so many ways I could have been much more efficient – and essentially less stressed if I had even known what they were. Oh, wells… in my next life!

Not only does creating systems help us save time, but it also free’s up our mental space so we can be on top of our game. Every day we all waste so much time on small meaningless decisions that will affect our decision-making skills for the remainder of the day.

The first year of Calm The Ham I had basically created a job for myself rather than a business. I couldn’t leave for more than a few days at a time or orders wouldn’t go out. I was the bottleneck for everything. Despite repeating the same tasks over and over, I hadn’t created a system so that I could hand low-leverage tasks off. Big mistake… Huge. Cue Pretty Woman reference

“If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!” – Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited

Cut to now where I have three businesses that I can work on from anywhere in the world. My goal now with any business I work on is to make myself obsolete in the day-to-day operation of the business, so I focus my time and energy on high-level, high-leverage tasks.

When do you need to create systems?

• When you find yourself repeating the same tasks every day/week or month
• When you find yourself being reactive rather than proactive. If you wake up in the morning and have to check your email in case there are fires to put you, you should use systems to deal with this.
• When you struggle to plan the long-term strategy for the business because you’re too busy working on the day-to-day.
• If you ever want to sell your business

A business is only sellable if you have documented procedures in place that can be taken on by someone else. If you are your business and without you it doesn’t run, it’s a job. An excellent book I read on this is Built to Sell that teaches the process of going from having a “job” to creating a sellable business.

It takes time to put the systems into place but it’s worth it because you are essentially buying yourself time in the future. If everyone on your team has a document to find all of the instructions on what exactly to do, which answers their questions before they ever have to come to you – imagine how much more time you’ll have.

Anytime I recognize that I’ve had to repeat the same process a few times over I create a system/process out of it so I can hand it off to someone else, like my assistant or project manager. This works especially well for recurring tasks that are done at the same time each week or month.

The Desert Island Formula

If you were to get stuck on a desert island and could only send short videos back to your team that was 5 minutes or less, what would they be?

For the next week, start writing down everything you have to do in a day. Many times you’re doing much more than you think you are and if you start being conscious of all the small tasks that take up time in a day this process will be much more beneficial.

1. Record all your activities and tasks for 1–2 weeks (and any recurring weekly/monthly tasks)
2. Take a page and create two columns with these headers:
   – Things I hate doing
   – Things I like doing
3. Beside each task, write next to it either an A or B.
   A: Things only I can do
   B: Things others can do

Drop the superhero complex here; you can’t do everything yourself – be ruthless with yourself and only choose high-leverage tasks for the A column.

Now you have basically 4 task lists:

1. Things you hate doing that others can do
2. Things you like doing that others can do
3. Things you hate doing that only you can do
4. Things you like doing that only you can do

From here you start with the things that you dislike doing and others can do, schedule out time to create processes around these and get them handed off.

Make a plan of a date you want each task handed off, even if it’s only one process every two weeks.

It’s very simple to create a process once you get started. However, it can be tricky the first time because you’re not sure exactly what you need to share. The best thing I’ve found is using video to create the processes rather than writing out instructions yourself. With a video recording someone can watch you do it and if they ever get stuck, they can go back and watch the video.

How To Create a Process in 5 Steps:

1. Get a screen-recording software. I use Screenflow for this. Another free option is Jing. However, it’s limited to 5 minutes (which can be better as it forces you to be concise).
2. Record your screen of you doing a process or task. Explaining what you’re doing and why as you go through the various steps of whatever you’re doing.
3. Upload it to Wistia, Youtube or a Dropbox folder. Alternatively, you can put in dropbox (however by being on video sites it can be streamed from anywhere in the world and not need to be downloaded.)
4. Have your virtual assistant/ person taking over the task watch the video and then write out instructions on how to do it. Essentially creating an instruction manual for you based on the video.
5. Depending on the complexity of the task you can either sit down with this person / get on a Skype call and watch them go through the task, watching their screen as you go or have them do it on their own time and record the screen for you to watch later. This way you can ensure they’re doing it right and correct any issues.
6. Finalize instructions based on feedback and add to a Standard Operating Procedures document. Use Google Docs or Process St.

Process.St, is a free tool to manage recurring checklists and procedures. For example, for BestSelf.co, we recently hired a Customer Support person, Melody. This is what the onboarding process looked like:

Now lets move onto part 3, the tasks your hate that you think only you can do.

From there we can ask ourselves the following:

• How do you simplify this task and minimize your involvement to only the crucial parts?
• What part of these tasks do you hate specifically, can these become sub-tasks to be delegated to someone else?
• Can you find someone that can replace you on these all together?

By creating processes around these tasks, you will be left with only the tasks you like to do. Magic! For me, this list is writing, design, content, product development.

Guess how much more in flow I am now that I’m only working on the things I like doing?

Know how to create a process for your team now?

Congratulations, you just bought back your time…

Now go do it!

Have you ever tried to create something and it didn’t seem to work?

A book? An App? A Course? A Physical product?

You released it to the world, and it just didn’t sell. You figured it was because your idea wasn’t very good after all.

Today I’m going to share with you how to validate your idea before creating it. I’m a big fan of proving and idea before building; it’s what I did for a SaaS, with Kickstarter and now on Facebook.

Firstly, let’s get into what this post is not:

I’m not about to teach you how to run Facebook ads for your idea

The Challenge:

In December 2015, I challenged myself to presell ten people on a Kickstarter course I wanted to create, not from emailing to a list, but from a Facebook post.

In less than 24 hours, here are the results:

Today I’m going to show you everything I did which includes:

• Picking the product or service to validate
• The formula for writing the Facebook post copy
• How to respond to leads
• How to accept payment

Why did I choose to do the 24-hour validation on Facebook rather than creating the course first and then getting sales?

Well here’s how I pictured it:

Option 1:
I spend the next few months putting a course together and then try to get customers.

Option 2:
I pre-sell the idea for the workshop, see if I could get some validation and only if people are willing to validate it in advance do I spend the time working on.

I can picture it now, had I chosen option 1 I would have been gung-ho on creating content for about a few weeks week and then the initial excitement would wear off, and I’d let it fall by the wayside because there’s no one to keep me accountable.

Whereas with option two if I presold the workshop to people that knew, liked and trusted me if I didn’t give them something in return, well I’d be a real scumbag, right?

^^ That right there is built in accountability.

So how does this whole zero to customer thing look:

Feature Download: My Copy, Message and Email Scripts

Step 1: Pick the product or service you’re offering

Not sure what product to offer?

A good way to know what would be a good idea or product for you is to pick something that you already get asked about. Look through your email or messages, what do people email or message you wanting to know about?

Over the past two years as I’ve launched three successful Kickstarter projects I’ve gotten many requests from people to help them with theirs. It’s now gotten to the point where every few days I was getting emails or messages from people asking me to get on calls to help with them.

Here are just a few of the many emails and messages I’ve gotten over the year around the topic I chosen to dig into:

It’s one of the reasons I wrote these in-depth Kickstarter articles, so I could guide people to them if they needed help. However, there’s so much more to it than I’ve even written about which is why a course teaching everything makes sense.

Step 2: Craft the Facebook post

Like I said, I’m not validating the idea by running Facebook ads but with a post, AKA status update. This means no pictures or graphics, just some copy to explain my idea and what I’m trying to do.

It is important to structure the Facebook post in a way that grabs people’s attention, gives the necessary information about your offer and then asks them to take an action.

Here’s the structure of the post:

The Title: what are you offering
Credibility: what experience do you have with this product/service?
Testimonial: If you’ve helped others with this, what have they said
Content: What the product will be/ service will cover
Urgency: How many presell will you offer? What’s the deadline?
Call to Action: What Action do you want people to take?

This is how it looks in action (my actual Facebook post):

If you are part of any Facebook groups that are aligned with your message you could share in there. However be careful not to spam. I didn’t post in any groups myself. However, a friend did share my post in their personal group around physical products which led to a few sales.

Step 3: Respond to Leads:

Make sure you have blocked out time to respond to leads. This isn’t a time when you post on Facebook and then go out to lunch for 3 hours. You want to be available so that when anyone likes or comments you can reach out.

I like to have my script pretty much ready for when someone replies.

Essentially people want to know two things:

• What do I get?
• How much does it cost?

With the script I had, I dive into a little more detail about what it entails. I also give a guarantee if they aren’t happy, this is essentially giving them the product at no-risk to them if I don’t deliver.

Feature Download: My Copy, Message and Email Scripts

Step 4: Take payment and make it easy

Ensure that you have an easy way for people to send you money. I used Paypal for this as it’s quick and easy. You can even send a custom link with the prefilled information that looks like this:

Custom pre-filled link:
PayPal.me/USERNAME/AMOUNT   PayPal.me/cathrynlavery/197 (feel free to send money anytime)

Other options:

• Gumroad
• Venmo
• Stripe

Step 5: Send an intro email:

Once they’re paid, you’ll want to send an email to the people that buy-in and let them know what the next steps are. The reason for this is that once that buyer high runs dry, you don’t want people confused about what happens next.

You can send this manually or through an email service.

Since I knew, I would be sending out email updates to these people I put them on my list right away. I use ConvertKit for my email service (I love it), so as I added people to my list it sent out an autoresponder to let people know what the next steps were.

… and that’s how you validate and sell an idea on Facebook before ever creating anything.

Biggest takeaways:

Money upfront is the biggest validation

Money is also huge for accountability, now you have to create something

These presales will help you create your course by telling you exactly what they want to learn about.

Curious what the next steps are? Join my list here to get notified on the next part which is the creation and fulfillment of the product you offered.

A few years ago the idea of selling a product before it existed would have seemed like a pipedream or a scam to me. Why would someone buy something that didn’t exist?

(My dad asked me that the first time I mentioned pre-selling a product)

However when if you look around you’ll start recognizing that many companies are already preselling products every day and no one thinks twice about it.

Let me explain.

Here’s a real-world example of validating the demand for a product by collecting money up front from a large group of people before delivering on a promise.

Have you ever bought a concert ticket? If so you probably paid ahead of time (with a “convenience” fee I’m sure) for a show that wasn’t happening until months later. I bet you didn’t think anything strange about it at the time, but this is an example of pre-selling a product and validating the market. Guess what happens if not enough people buy tickets? They either cancel the concert, or they move it to a smaller venue.

The concert organizer is mitigating their risk up front, as should you.

Another example I saw recently was Tesla, who opened up pre-orders for their Model 3 car, an all-electric vehicle that doesn’t yet exist. They pre-sold $276 million in the first weekend from pre-sales on downpayments alone. These payments are refundable up to the point they start building your car. The cars are set to start delivering in late 2017 and into 2018.

That braingasm you have when you pre-sell a billion dollar car…

Have you ever had an idea for an app, product, an event, something you wanted to do but weren’t sure how to make it happen?

Here’re 7 reasons you should consider crowdfunding it:

1. Validation of your idea

There’s no better validation for your product than having someone take their wallet out and pay for something that doesn’t yet exist yet. If they are willing to do this then you know you’ve created something that solves a real problem in the world.

2. Low financial risk

It can cost a lot of time and money to launch a new product into the marketplace. Rather than putting up your money or getting a bank loan, crowdfunding gives you a way to access capital for bringing your idea to life without putting your personal life at risk or giving up equity. It also ensures that if people don’t want or need your product that you don’t end up with a garage full of junk you can’t sell and a hole in your bank account.

3. Build a tribe

Crowdfunding is an excellent opportunity to build a community around your idea. The people who support you and fund your idea before it even exists are the champions that will make your product a success. They will support you, hold you accountable and push you to ensure it gets delivered. Then they’ll share it with their friends as early adopters.

4. Tell your story

“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it” – Simon Sinek. Watch this video to understand what he means. Crowdfunding is the perfect place to tell your story; who you are, what you want to create and why it will be beneficial to the world. Unlike a regular e-commerce or a retail store, the crowdfunding platform is your opportunity to connect with people who would otherwise never have found you.

5. Urgency

With a funding goal and a time limit your project is running against the clock which creates a sense of urgency and scarcity for visitors, making them less likely to procrastinate on buying. It also brings up a feeling of competition as once someone supports you they are financially (and sometimes emotionally) invested in you succeeding so that they don’t miss out on their reward. In decision theory, loss aversion refers to people’s tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains.

6. Promotion & Marketing

Kickstarter and Indiegogo are ideal platforms for promotion as they have a rabid community of people that browse their website on an almost daily basis to support cool projects. This is organic traffic that you do not have to generate yourself as they are already on the lookout for cool stuff. FYI, for each of my projects, I received 30% of all funding through organic traffic on Kickstarter.

7. Crowdsourced Development

Your crowdfunding backers are a great source for product feedback. With each of the projects I have run on Kickstarter, the product at the end of the campaign has been improved through feedback from the backer community throughout. If you do it right, many of these people become passionate about the product and want to help however they can to make it the best possible.

Don’t get me wrong; crowdfunding is not the silver bullet or fast path to cash. If your only interest is in making money, or you’re not interested in putting the work in up front, then it’s not for you. However if you have a workable product idea that you want to validate and fund into potential future business then crowdfunding is the way to go. It’s the only way we were able to launch and scale BestSelf.co the way we have.

Last note, Not only is crowdfunding incredible for all the aspects I mentioned above, but it’s also really FUN.

What do you think?

In an ever increasing digital world, despite the advance in technologies, there seems to be a movement back toward the world of physical products. It could be the Amazon opportunities available now, the globalization that makes importing from overseas easy or simply just the love of the tangible goods.

The difference between the world of digital products and physical products is HUGE. To put it simply, for digital products the main cost is your time, for physical products there’s time as well as manufacturing, production, shipping, packaging, storage… you get the idea.

Over the past several years as I’ve started and grown several product companies I have learned a few things about the process that I want to share with you in this article.

Today I’m going to teach you the following:

• Perceived Value; Why Physical Products win and how to use them with digital products to reduce refunds.
• How to find overseas manufacturers through Alibaba without getting ripped off.
• Cost Analysis; How to price your product while staying profitable and competitive
• Wholesale and bulk pricing; How to price accordingly
• Shipping and Fulfillment; Why you’re paying more $$$ by shipping yourself

My goal is for you to finish this post thinking “I can do that.” and then for you to email me in six months with a link to your product in a store

FEATURE DOWNLOAD: Physical Product Blueprint, contains SWIPE files, spreadsheets and a personal directory. Grab it here

Physical Vs. Digital

The perceived value of something is the worth that a product or service has in the mind of the customer. This perceived value they have affects the price that he or she is willing to pay for it. In this regard, physical products always beat out digital products.

How many of you have either bought or been given a PDF or course that is “valued at $297” and you never even look at it?

I know I’m guilty.

How many of you have purchased something physical from a store for $297 but never taken it out of the box?

Probably not many, and if you did that, it probably sat there on the shelf mocking you and making you feel silly for buying something you never actually opened.

(Yes I am, on rare occasion, mocked by unopened boxes)

As you can see from these examples, there’s automatically a value placed on something physical because we can touch and feel it. It’s real. I believe it’s one of the reasons why in the year 2016 Tony Robbins still sends out a physical DVD boxset and books for his personal development courses. There is an experience and responsibility when you get a physical boxset in the mail. Now if you don’t complete this, it will take up space in your home as a physical reminder that you never completed it.

You’re also much less likely to return it, unlike with a digital product which you can ask for a refund on without much more hassle than sending an email.

People’s perception of value is much greater when they have something in their hands which they can hold.

I bought an online course from AppSumo in 2013, and they sent me a small Moleskine notebook in the mail about a week after receipt of purchase. It was awesome and memorable. Of all the digital products I had ever bought they were the first to do this. It created a physical connection to an otherwise digital product.

It created a physical connection to an otherwise intangible digital product.

I would bet money that this small gesture goes a long way towards decreasing buyers remorse and refund rate as you’re creating a physical connection to a customer for an otherwise digital product.

Keys to a great product:

1. Solves a pain / Fulfills a need
2. A great story
3. Great design (and packaging)

With Calm The Ham and now BestSelf Co, I have had my share of good and bad experiences with bringing physical products to life. While most of these have been in the printed realm of (posters, prints, t-shirts, laser cut wood, books, etc.) the necessary process from design to shipment is essentially the same.

So you have a product idea and an idea of how to make it… what now?

Step 1: Idea to Design

Years ago when you had an idea for a product, you would have to put in a lot of time and money to even get to the prototyping phase. Now with the emerging 3D printer market you’ve cut your time and cost down significantly which means it’s become easier to get a product to market than ever before.

Got an idea but not sure of the next steps to prototype, here’re a few resources:

Sculpteo & Shapeways
An on-demand 3D printing company that is great for prototyping. Due to it’s cost effective you can create multiple prototypes without too much hassle or cost with a turnaround time of only ten days.

TechShop
A workshop for prototyping ($100 p/month) where you get access to 3D Printers, laser cutting machines, CNC Mills and a woodshop. They have everything you need to get an idea from a sketch to a physical product.

The complexity of the product has a lot to do with the next steps. Depending on your area of expertise you may want to recruit the following for help:

• An engineer
• A developer
• A designer
• A Manufacturer (we’ll get to that next)

Unlike years ago when you needed to fund the initial manufacturing run yourself, which loads you with some big risks, now we have crowdfunding platforms like Indiegogo or Kickstarter that can help with this. The great thing about these is that you can launch a product with only a prototype! I recently shared with you the 7 Reasons Why You Should Crowdfund Your Idea.

Step 2: Finding a Manufacturer

Finding a good manufacturer or supplier is key to your business. Similar to finding a spouse, you probably shouldn’t jump at the first one you find.

Therefore, you should take your time to ensure you vet them thoroughly.

When finding a quality manufacturer, here’s how I like to play it:

1. Find 4–5 Suppliers that in the product market you’re looking for
2. Ask them to send your samples of their best quality products (preferably that will be of similar grade/material to what you’re looking for)
3. Pair down the best 2–3 product sample suppliers and ask for a prototype of your design (if possible)
4. Choose manufacturer based on sample quality, responsiveness and cost.
5. Make a damn great product.

Here’re the three things you look for in a good manufacturer:

1. Quality

Before I start working with anyone and before I even show them what I want them to make I ask to see examples of past work they’ve done. The quality of the end product is my priority, and I can judge from samples if they have the attention-to-detail that I need.

Consider that whatever they send you is the best they have to offer so you see them in the best light, if the quality is mediocre, you can expect the same or less from your end product.

2. Communication

A manufacturer who takes a week to respond to you is not going to work. That’s why you need to ensure their communication is on point before you begin to work with them. Ask them every and all questions you have about the process and how it will work ahead of time.

The reason to pepper them with questions early on is to check how responsive they are and open to giving you answers when they have no skin in the game yet. Once manufacturing starts, issues can occur and you need to ensure that you can communicate effectively with them before it’s too late.

3. Cost

The reason I put the cost third on the list is that you should never start a relationship with a manufacturer by asking about cost as a starting off point. You may come off as price-sensitive which can scare them off, or even worse, and they will use low-quality materials to offer you a lower price.

Instead, start the conversation with the quality of product and materials, how they compare to competitors on quality and what you’re looking for in a manufacturer. Once you’re happy with answers, you can discuss the cost. Generally, with this approach you will get more respect as a buyer and price negotiation is easier.

Now let’s dig into where you find manufacturers.

If you’re looking for a U.S. based manufacturer, your best bet is google or Maker’s Row for a directory of U.S. manufacturers.

All my Calm The Ham products are U.S. based due to their nature. A great place to find quality printers is InkerLinker where I have sourced many a great printer for letterpress, lithographic and other great stuff.

How to Source Manufactuers through Alibaba

The biggest directory of overseas manufacturers and suppliers is on Alibaba, which is, in fact, the largest eCommerce company in the world and most comprehensive list you’ll find. It’s where I have sourced the majority of my products through.

You can search the site using various filters, typically the most useful I’ve found is through Products and Suppliers:

3 Criteria when choosing a Supplier, ensure they are:

1. Supplier Assessed
2. Gold Supplier
3. Have Trade Assurance

Meeting these criteria for choosing who you work with will save you time in the long run.

For the SELF Journal, we sourced 3–4 different manufacturers at first as we wanted to compare each factory for product quality, pricing and responsiveness before we committed to one. We all know you don’t marry your manufacturer on the first date (or your first 1 am Skype conversation.)

That’s another thing, you need to be available to speak to them in their time, being in New York, this meant staying up late or getting up early. Hello, 5 am!

What you Should Know

There’s some lingo when you start working with manufacturer’s that you need to know, here’re the big things:

– Minimum Order Quantity

The MOQ is the minimum number of units that the manufacturer will allow per order. Usually, this is done for cost purposes, and it’s much more expensive to create 100 of something than 10,000. Most listings include MOQ. However, you want to double-check with them on this first.

As a general rule, as the quantity of units goes up, the price per unit will go down. Therefore, you will need to account for this in your initial costings. I like to ask the manufacturer ahead of time for the MOQ and higher quantity prices to get an idea of what the pricing quantity breaks are.

For example for the SELF Journal, I asked for pricing based on:

• 2,500 units
• 5,000 units
• 10,000 units

– Payment Terms

If you are brand new to Alibaba (and business), chances are you will need to front the entire costs up front to your manufacturer. Commonly they take a percentage up front and the rest before they ship. However, you’re likely not going to get credit until you work with them a few times.

For the SELF Journal we paid a 20% deposit up front, 30% after printing, 30% after binding and the last 20% before shipping. This meant we paid the entire upfront amount over a period of 6–8 weeks, sent via wire transfer.

– Lead/Production Time

Ask how long between approval of sample and final production as you will need to know this to be able to guess how long the process will take and when you can reasonably expect to deliver to customers.

– Samples

Paying for samples can vary from one supplier to the next. At a minimum you will have to cover the shipping costs from the supplier to you, often if you do this, they will send a sample free of charge. However, it’s in their discretion to charge you if they want… so be nice! Once you build up a rapport and a relationship with a supplier they will often waive fees for small charges like this.

– Prototyping

Get a prototype made of your design before going into to final product. It may cost you but it’s worth it. The last thing you want to do is to go into mass production on a flawed product.

For the SELF Journal, we paid for three prototypes from 3 different companies before we moved forward with the final supplier we ended up going with. The price per journal was between $120 – $150 per journal for the one-off print. They also did not come with all the bells and whistles due to it being a one-off. However, we knew they were capable of doing what we needed from the previous samples they’d sent.

Pricing

Now you know how to find a supplier, and you need to figure out how to price your product. When we are beginning with physical products, pricing can be a little tricky due to all the individual costs involved.

The key to pricing for physical products is:

• Knowing all your costs inc labor, packaging, production, shipping, fees, etc
• What is the minimum unit quantity for order
• Review competitor pricing for an overall view of what consumers will pay

When you get the cost per unit, you need to factor in shipping to the U.S. which can get pricey depending on quantity, weight, etc. Our freight shipping costs and trucking to our warehouse was over $10,000. However, this was for 25,000 units which worked out at only 40 cents extra per unit.

Raw cost per unit = Manufactured cost per unit + Shipping cost/# of units

Wholesale Pricing

Another important aspect to consider for pricing is if you’re planning on selling with external retailers you will need to ensure your margins can withstand the 40–50% standard wholesale discount pricing.

Think it’s steep discount? Consider the incurred cost of running a store, the rent, the maintenance, the staff. They need to make money off your products, or they are useless to them. Therefore, this discount is an average across the wholesale industry.

Bulk Pricing

Bulk pricing works a little different than wholesale while these customers will also order at quantity, they are not trying to make up their retail margins. Therefore, I don’t offer this same standard wholesale pricing.

For bulk pricing for BestSelf, we offer quantity price-breaks based on how many units they want to buy. Someone buying 100 of a product will get a better deal than someone buying 15.

Shipping & Fulfillment

When bootstrapping you often follow this path at the beginning:
Ship yourself  Pay someone else to ship  Outsource shipping completely

When I first started selling physical products online, I would do everything myself. The design, production, sales, marketing, shipments. At the beginning shipping was easy because I had so few sales. At the time, I was still working at my architecture job and would bring orders to the post office before work or during my lunch break. Sometimes on the weekends I would even bring my dog:

However once I started doing any volume it got tricky, and that process would not scale, so I pivoted. During the Christmas rush, I would pay a TaskRabbit to come to my apartment, pick up my bags of orders and deliver them to the post office for me.

Also not scalable, but a measurable improvement.

Later after I quit my job, during the busy season, I would pay someone $10 an hour to come to my apartment and pack orders for me.

Then I found myself a fulfillment center. The holy grail.

By shipping myself, in the beginning, I knew exactly how fulfillment needed to go and what the requirements were per order which meant creating a system for them to follow was pretty easy. This is where creating systems and processes come in handy.

Fulfillment

Fulfillment centers can vary from one style to the next, for example Amazon FBA wants your products pre-packaged and labeled so they can place it in a box and send it out. No muss no fuss.

However for my Calm The Ham business I needed something more custom due to the nature of the goods. Most customers often buy more than one print at a time, which can be sent in one single tube. In the case of Amazon FBA if each print were in pre-packed tubes, it would have meant someone receiving multiple tubes rather than one that would mean increased shipping and material costs.

If you have a situation where you need something more custom like I did, a good way to figure out how to handle this for yourself (if you’re not sure what to do) is to look at what other people are doing.

1. Find companies that sell similar products
2. Email and ask them how they handle fulfillment (abundant entrepreneurs will likely share).
3. If that doesn’t work, order from them and see what the return address is and how it’s packaged. You’ll be able to tell quickly whether it’s a fulfillment center or not.

Why you’re throwing away money by shipping yourself

(I say this for the solopreneurs like me or small business with very limited staff)

When shipping yourself, you’re doing a very low-leverage job that you could be paying someone else to do it for little money. This free’s yourself up for more important tasks like, growing your business and creating more products. You as a business owner should be focused on revenue-generating activities, of which shipping orders is not one.

Still think you’ll do it yourself?How about if I shared with you that it costs you more money to ship yourself?

Here’s how…In 2013, I did EVERYTHING myself, and because I was using my time for this, my profits at the end of the year were larger. What does this mean?

I paid a crap-load more in taxes. Happy IRS… Sad me.

In 2014, I got a fulfillment center on board to ship out all of my orders. I built systems and a virtual team in the business so that it could run without me. This meant my apartment was my own again (not a shipping warehouse). Once again I had the freedom to travel and even more compelling, I paid much less in taxes despite having made more revenue.

Higher revenue but w/ more business expenses = Pay Less tax
Lower revenue but w/ less business expenses and spending YOUR time = Pay More tax

Crazy right? When you are figuring out your pricing and shipment opportunities, don’t forget to factor in these opportunity costs.

Have you ever thought of launching a physical product? If so, what’s stopping you? Let me know in the comments below.

P.S. Love physical products? I’m giving some of my favorite products away RIGHT NOW. Check it out.

Your crowdfunding campaign page is essentially the website of your project, it’s the sales page you use to convert visitors into backers. Whether you go with Kickstarter or Indiegogo, both platforms give you freedom to brand your page as you like – take advantage!

As such it should be crafted with the same care you would put into a new website or project. these 3 things and you’ll succeed:

You’ll be ahead of the majority of project creators if you do the following:

• Your message should be clear, concise and motivating.
• Your images should be well-lit, crisp and beautiful.
• Your video must be well produced, concise and passionate about your product.

Take a look at some of the top projects of all time, you’ll see that they all have something in common – the project pages are beautifully designed and take you on a journey.

Visitors will unconsciously equate the quality of your product with that of the quality and polish of your project page.

Here are the 3 pitfalls you want to avoid:

1. Bad design
2. Too much text
3. Poorly described rewards

8 Key Elements you NEED for your Project Page:

1. Description:
Under your video you should have a short 2–3 line description to tell visitors exactly what the project is.

2. Problem Solved:
This is where the problem-agitate-solve comes back into play, use this to describe the problem you faced and how your product solves this in a unique way.

 3. Unboxing:
Unboxing videos on YouTube are extremely popular because people always want to know exactly what they’re getting. Show them this through either a GIF or infographic.

 4. Testimonials:
Have people tried out your product? Ensure to show reviews for social proof.

 5. How does it work:
Dig into the nitty gritty details of how the product works, some technical features and elements behind it. The more you can show, the more people will be confident that you have thought everything through and will be confident in your ability to deliver.

 6. Timeline:
Let your backers know the journey behind the project and when you expect to deliver your rewards. A simple graphic shows this best.

 7. FAQ’s:
This will be short prior to starting, the best thing to do is to consider questions your backers may have about the project and go from there. Once you go live you should be updating this as you go.

 8. Risks & Challenges:
What are the hardest parts about bringing this project to life? Be honest and give a glimpse into the depth of the research you’ve done so people understand that you know what you’re talking about. This area is non-optional and allows for text only.

5 Helpful Visual Elements:

Not all of the above need to be text, in fact, I think it’s crucial to ensure you break up your page with visual elements. Nothing is less appealing to a potential backer than a wall of text.

I’m going to share how The Roost project used visual elements perfectly for their project page to perfectly demonstrate their product through imagery.

The project raised $785,724 (and had a funding goal of $475,000).

1. Infographics

Making use of infographics is a much better way to relay information than text, people love these as they are much more likely to understand a clear graphic like these:

2. Animation GIFs:

These simple animation GIFs are great for showing how a product works as short snippets. This works extremely well for complex projects that you will be able to describe much more about in a Gif.

This animation gif is simple, yet is a great visual for demonstrating the pain (literally) that his product solves:

How he demonstrated how product works:

3. Custom graphic headers

Stay on brand and with the same aesthetic for your project page, even with section headers. It’s a little more work but it’s worth it.

You’ll see in the Testimonial image below how The Roost Stand project used this.

4. Testimonial Graphics

Having testimonials are great, although sometimes they get lost if they’re just stuck in the middle with other text. That’s why switching it up with a custom graphic ensures it stand out and makes it less likely to be missed:

5. Rewards Image

Sometimes it’s difficult to understand the rewards structure from the standard sidebar format alone, especially if you have any complexity with what’s included.

That’s why a graphical table to visually represent the reward levels is helpful, again the goal is to make your messaging clear so any potential backers aren’t confused and end up leaving.

I have no affiliation with The Roost, only that it’s one of my favorite products. You can purchase on his site here or on Amazon. (I’m even giving one away here)

Examples of Great Project pages:

• The Minaal Daily and Carry-on 2.0
• The Roost Stand
• Coolest Cooler
• The World’s Best TRAVEL JACKET
• Mars Needs Mechanics
• OUYA: A New Kind of Video Game Console
• The Everyday Messenger: A Bag For Cameras & Essential Carry
• The Micro: The First Truly Consumer 3D Printer
• Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls (a coaching student of mine)

Watch out for a FREE class coming on Monday for how to crowdfund your next idea. Get enrolled below.

“Life begins at the end of your comfort zone” – Neale Donald Walsch

Over the past few years since I’ve left Architecture and exchanged it for Entrepreneurship, many people have asked me what my “secret” was.

If I had to drill it down to one thing it would be simply this, “I made myself uncomfortable”.

What does this mean?

It means I moved beyond doing the things that were comfortable to me so I could expand my horizons. Had I continued doing the same things I had always done, I would get what I had always gotten — which I knew was not what I wanted. This meant meeting new people who were doing the things I wanted to do, learning new skills (specifically around creating and running a business) and overall gaining new experiences.

Pushing our limits

When we’re children our parents play the role of pushing us past our limits, whether it’s learning to walk, ride a bicycle or potty training. As a result, we typically learn and develop new skills quickly.

When we’re older, it is our peers that push us outside of our limits, which is why you need to be conscious about who you spend your time with as these people will shape who you are and how far you go.

“You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” – Jim Rohn

If you are in a group of friends who are overweight due to bad eating and health habits, chances are you will be the same. To push your limits as an adult, you should find a group of people who are always pushing their level of comfort and join them.

Desperation vs. Inspiration

People move beyond their comfort zone for one of two reasons, desperation or inspiration. Desperation is usually when the universe throws you into the thick of it, and you have no choice but to get uncomfortable, for example, if you get laid off and have to find another job, so you start doing the things that you need to.

Another part of the desperation cycle is when the pain of not making a change becomes greater than the fear of being uncomfortable, for example, someone that has been trying to lose weight for years and something finally clicks/snaps and they stick to their diet/workout regime that time.

Inspiration is a better place to come from. However, it can be harder to stick with unless you have a goal you’re striving for. Therefore set a goal for yourself, write affirmations and tell people what you’re working towards.

“Nobody ever died of discomfort, yet living in the name of comfort has killed more ideas, more opportunities, more actions, and more growth than everything else combined. Comfort kills!” — T. Harv Eker

Outside Comfort Zone = Optimal Anxiety

In 1908, Harvard psychologists Robert M. Yerkes and John D. Dodson researched how the state of relative comfort created a constant level of performance. To maximize your performance you need to get into a state of optimal anxiety, which happens right outside your comfort zone. This is the spot where you’re motivated to succeed yet not too far outside your zone of comfort that your anxiety will cause your performance to take a dive.

The thing about getting outside your comfort zone is that once you start doing it, your circle of comfort will expand to these new experiences, this means that over time, what was uncomfortable before will soon become the standard for you as you have increased your circle of comfort.

By continuing to step outside your comfort zone, you’ll constantly be growing and expand your circle of comfort. Like this:

Here are five ways you can use to start expanding your comfort zone:

1. Do one thing every week that scares you

These days if something scares me, I know I have to do it (e.g. running a Spartan race.) It doesn’t have to be skydiving or anything crazy, and it could be complimenting a stranger, being the first in class to ask a question or travel alone to a new place.

2. Create a plan

Make a list of things you’ve always wanted to do or achieve, but haven’t. Create a timeline and rough guide to how you might accomplish this. For example maybe, you want to learn French, you could sign up for DuoLingo and create a daily habit of doing 20 minutes per day. If you want to get really crazy, book a flight to Paris for six months in the future, go alone so that you’re forced to speak French.

3. Make your goals public

Post on social media and tell your friends and family. The accountability of wanting to save face in front of people you admire will ensure you don’t give up or not take action. Experience is worth more than embarrassment.

4. Create negative consequences

Studies have shown that humans tend to be more likely to take action if they fear losing something, rather than gaining something. Therefore set a negative impact for yourself. Something I did at one time was I had to publish a blog post every week or my friend Bryan would charge my credit card $500 to go to charity… guess who didn’t miss a post?

5. Make the uncomfortable choice

With most everyday decisions there’s usually a safe/comfortable choice and a risky/uncomfortable choice. Try to start picking the risky/uncomfortable choice as it is the one that you’ll learn the most from. It could be something as small as trying a new dish at the restaurant, and maybe you’ve always wondered what Octopus tasted like but never had the guts to order it. Risk teaches us more about ourselves than anything else.

The more comfortable you get with exploring new ideas and gaining new experience the more aware you will be of how much you are capable of.

What have I done in the past three months to expand my comfort zone?

1. I signed up and ran a Spartan Race
2. I agreed to speak on stage at this event (public speaking = scary)
3. I volunteered for a political campaign (door-to-door canvassing with strangers, phone banking, etc.)
4. Launched my first digital course, From Zero to Funded
5. Started re-learning French

Would love to hear in the comments what you’ve done to step outside your comfort zone.

Note from Cathryn:
I invited Miguel to the blog to write the first ever guest post to share his answer to a simple question…

“How do you launch a successful product business on Amazon as a newbie?”

It’s not an easy question, I have even struggled with how to do it in the past. However I have seen what Miguel has done and what he has taught some of his students to do, and the results are nothing short of incredible.

Miguel has written this epic helpful post that covers:

– Why Amazon is a great platform (especially for beginners with physical products)
– How he finds great products that he knows people are looking for
– Where he sources these products from
– How he configures the launches so he grows organic sales quickly

This post is nothing short of solid gold. Read it. Bookmark it. Share it.

So, without further ado, take it away Miguel!

This is a post is huge, coming in at almost 4000 words. In it, Miguel shares with you everything he did to create and launch millions of dollars worth of product for himself and his students. To download the PDF version, Click Here.

*enter Miguel*

It was a rainy day of November 2013, for the first time in my life I decided to give it a shot to the whole online selling world.

I was about to turn 30-years-old and just had my third son. I couldn’t take it anymore… I was spending more time with “Uncle Sam” than with my three awesome kids and wife. And the worst part was that every time I tried to take a few days off, I had to come back to pick up the pieces of my disastrous job.

My goal was to make enough money to cover my expenses and have freedom to work from wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. To be exponentially rewarded for my efforts and to live a life with less stress.

So I found an idea, created a product and launched it on Amazon.

Fast-forward  4 months later my first product was making around $15,000 per month, and it was the start of a new journey.

Later that year I went to this business conference, where I met Cathryn, to learn more about online marketing and I kept getting the same question:

“Miguel, what do you do?”

And I was like “I sell products through Amazon”,

And the typical answer to that statement was, “Oh, and what’s your day job?”

For the first time of my life, I was able to answer that question with pride “That’s it, I don’t have a day job.”

It felt good in my body, and I was free.

People started asking me about how I was able to build a hands-off 6-figure business with almost no management, so I created a blueprint to teach them the steps I took. (more on that later)

Today I want to share with an overview of what it takes to start an Amazon Business.

Sell as a Professional and FBA

I don’t want to say that it’s the holy grail of online business automation, but it will make things simpler if you are looking to start a business online.

5 reasons why I love the Amazon Marketplace:

1. You don’t have to build a website.
It takes a lot of work to build a site, and after you finish the technical details of it, then you have to build trust. With Amazon, you can take advantage of their easy-to-use platform and with only a few clicks you get to sell your products on their website.

2. You don’t need to drive traffic yourself.You can take advantage of Amazon’s growth and customer base. According to Forbes, Amazon is now the 8th largest retailer in the world, with a yearly revenue of 107 Billion dollars for 2015 alone.

“Meanwhile, e-commerce juggernaut Amazon.com AMZN +1.23% (No. 237) continues to dominate and is now the world’s eighth-largest retailer. The Jeff Bezos-led company is aggressively expanding its delivery network to get packages to Prime members faster”

Forbes.com

And according to Compete.com, more than 100 million people went to Amazon last month. What if they could buy your product instead of any other option on the market?

3. Easy to plug in to their existing infrastructure = less headaches.You can ship your products to Amazon FBA (fulfilled by Amazon) so that every time there is an order of your product, and they will pick the item, pack it, and ship it to your customers. They will even provide the tracking information for your customer and would process returns if necessary.

With easy access to your inventory information. And with fulfillment centers in the USA, Canada, Mexico, Europe, Japan, India and Australia, you can expand your reach globally faster than ever before.

4. No merchant account hassle. Amazon processes the payments for you and takes care of refunds. Not only that, most Amazon customers have their credit cards on file so they can buy with the push of a single button. You get paid every 14 days directly to your bank account even if you are outside of the US.

5. Awesome customer support for both sides, for you as a seller and also for your customers. Amazon customer service agents are there to help you for any reason. And if you ever lose a box, they will refund your money at sale price.

So, how does it work? How much does it cost?

Pretty simple, you just have to open a “Sell as a Professional” account with Amazon. It’s only 39.99 per month and gives you access to their Marketplace and the Fulfilled by Amazon program. And then every time you make a sale they will charge you 15% of the invoice and around 2.65 per every item they ship for you.

Here is a link for more information about the Sell as a Professional program.

Amazon Business Economics Example

Let’s say that you are selling a product for $80.00. Here’s what the general profit-loss might look like.

REVENUE
——————————————————————–
Product Sell Price ……………………………………$80.00
Total Revenue …………………………………………$80.00

EXPENSES
——————————————————————–
Product Manufacturing ……………………………$10.00
Shipping From Manufacturer to FBA …………$ 1.00
Amazon Fees (15% of $80.00) …………………$12.00
Fulfillment …………………………………………………$ 2.67
Total Expenses …………………………………………$25.67
——————————————————————–
PROFIT (revenue minus expenses) …………$54.33

How do you factor advertising cost? If $100 ad budget or $100 in Amazon PPC produces eight sales, my advertising cost per order (CPO) is 12.50 per order. This makes the actual per unit profit $41.83.

But let’s be honest, the Amazon Marketplace is just part of the equation. If you open an account today and send a product to sell, that doesn’t mean you are going to make any money.

How to choose your first profitable product

There are three types of products you can sell, they are:

1. Other people’s product.
Wholesale, drop-shipping or retail arbitrage; if you put a lot of effort into it, then you will do a great favor to the brand owner as you are helping them to build their brand and presence on the market.

2. White label products or unbranded products.
These are really inexpensive to source but as they are unbranded, people have a really low perception of the value of it.

3. Your own brand of products (or private label products).
These are the ones I love the most. You sell your own branded products at a high-profit margin and with time you also build up a name brand and a presence on the market.

In this article, we are going to focus on private label products, and for that, in today’s lesson you are going to learn one of the methods I use to find ideas and how to validate them with data before you commit to them. (You don’t want to invest in a product that you don’t know is going to sell.)

We are going to do a little exercise to help you understand the process.

Let’s start with making a list of product ideas:

Here’s how I begin the process when I want to launch a new product:

1. Think about your hobbies and passions, and the items that relate to that.
2. Think about your pains and problems, and the items that can help you solve them.
3. Get a magazine that relates to a topic that you enjoy and look for product ads.

Try to make a list of 10 to 20 items.

But wait, I want to do an example along with you.

I am going to pick the “Uber” driver niche as more and more people are doing the Uber business as a side job in my area, so it’s relevant right now.

An Uber driver will need two things to operate. A car, and an iPhone. So here is a list of things I believe that can relate to the Uber Drivers:

• iPhone car mount
• iPhone 6 charger
• Car charger
• Coffee cup
• Portable vacuum cleaner
• Air Freshener for Cars.

Then, we want to answer these questions:

1. How big is your market?
2. How many people are looking for your product every month?
3. Is it seasonal?
4. Who are your main competitors?

To look for the answer to our first question, I used Google and found an artlicle on Times.com with the fact.

1. How big is your market?

There were more than 160,000 active Uber drivers by the end of 2014. (“Active” means that a driver gives at least four rides per month.) Some 120,000 of those drivers signed up with Uber in the last 12 months.
– Time.com

So 160,000 Uber drivers is a really good number, and that’s without counting similar services like Lyft.com and regular taxis.

2. How many people are looking for the product per month?

To answer this question, we can use the free tool “Google Keyword Planner” to find how many people are looking for the product on Google every month.

Note: This tool will give us the Google data, not the Amazon search volume, but it’s a good point of reference.

Here is a screenshot of the results for “Car air freshener”.

So more than 140,000 relevant searches per month and a total of 6,600 average searches just for the phrase “car air freshener” alone per month… not bad.

3. Is it seasonal?

It is important to understand how your product behaves during the year to make smart decisions about your inventory and marketing.

For that, we can use the free Google tool “Google Trends” and look for the answer.

Here is a screenshot of the results.

As you can see, since 2007 this search has become more and more popular with a growing trend. So one more point for our product.

4. Who is our main competitor?

For that we can do the search on Amazon to find out.
So the #1 best seller would be Moso Natural Air Purifying Bag, selling at $9.95 on Amazon.com.

Something to remember is that there are more people looking for products on Amazon than on Google, so the Amazon searches might be little higher than Google.
If we click on the product and scroll down to the product details, we can find the Amazon’s Best Sellers rank.

And with this number we can estimate the sales per month of the product using the free “Instant Sales Estimator” tool of Jungle Scout.

So, that means that the “Moso Natural Air Purifying Bag” is selling around 3,988 units per month at $9.95 for an estimated monthly revenue of $39,680. Not bad at all.

Recap: With a niche size of 160,000 members that we can easily target, over 140,000 searches per month on Google, with a growing demand and the main competitor selling almost 4,000 units per month at $9.95, the Car Air Freshener might be an excellent choice to start.

In the Private Label Blueprint training I also learn how to make sure that the market is not too competitive (a key metric for first-time sellers) so you can rest assured that too many big competitors won’t bully you.

This is a post is huge, coming in at almost 4000 words. In it, Miguel shares with you everything he did to create and launch millions of dollars worth of product for himself and his students. To download the PDF version, Click Here.
 

How to source your product supplier

Now that we have a product idea let’s find a supplier that can give us prices and samples of the product so that we can evaluate if it’s the right fit for us.

When you are looking for suppliers you have two main choices;

If your product is ingestible like foods and supplements, or if it’s something that you apply to your skin, like creams and cosmetics then you should source it in the USA.

Everything else, China.

For this the Car Air Freshener example, we are going to use Alibaba.com to search for a supplier.

Alibaba is one of the largest and most trusted company directories in the world, and it’s also the easiest way to find a supplier in China.

I did the search for our product and here is one of the suppliers:

The next steps would be:

1. Contact the supplier for an official quote

Even though they are advertising the product for under 30 cents a piece, you want to contact them directly to verify the price. Also, you want to learn about their delivery times, the cost of samples, the quality inspection process, if they can do they provide custom packaging, how many employees do they have, where is the factory, among other things.

2. Get samples of the product

Request a sample of the product so you can see it in your hands and compare it to other competitors.

Most of the times they will provide you the sample for free or at cost and charge you for shipping.

If you are shipping with DHL expect to pay anywhere from 30 to 60 for a box (consider getting more than 1 sample as the cost of shipping might be the same)

When you receive the sample check the quality of the product. Do a drop test to see if it breaks. Also Compare it to your competitor’s product, what are the pros and cons?

3. Verify the company’s credentials

Make sure you are working with a legit corporation. Google their name, ask for certifications or even hire an inspector to visit the factory for you.

4. Understand the numbers before you commit to the product

Do the math, make sure your business is profitable from day one. But more important, set a goal for your product.

Avoid the 3 biggest mistakes people make when selling on Amazon

A few days ago I went to Walmart to get a bike hook to hang my bike on my garage wall to save some space, and I’m standing in the aisle, and I have two hooks in front of me, one of them priced at 2.99 and the other one priced at 9.99.

The construction of the products looks similar. I think that with the proper installation, both of them could carry the weight of the bike and maybe a little bit more.

But, one of them was priced cheap and looked cheap, and the other one was the bit more than 3X the price of the first one but had superb looking packaging.

Not only that, the words on the packaging where answering the questions I had on my mind.

They were claiming the benefits that I sincerely desired.

It had pictures giving ideas of what else I could hang.

Also, on the back of the product, it had step-by-step instructions on how to install it.

And better yet, it came with two handy-dandy self-drilling screws as a bonus (that you could easily get for like 20 cents each if you went to the hardware department two aisles away).

Which one would you take? Instead of buying one, I ended up buying two of the 9.99 option, one for my bike and the second one for my son’s stroller…

So, let’s talk about the three biggest mistakes people make when selling private label products.

Mistake number 1: Really low-profit margins

There are many reasons why this could happen. Maybe you failed to negotiate with your supplier, or you entered into a crowded market, or maybe you are positioning your product as a cheap option (more on that later).

Having a low-profit margin makes it difficult to recuperate your initial investment and also to have a decent marketing budget.

Even scarier, it’s hard to make any profit due to inventory cost and fees with low-profit margin products.

To fix this issue, you must clearly understand all the costs that are involved in your business and have a profit-oriented business plan.

Let’s say that for this example we have a monthly profit goal of $3000 per month to cover your average living expenses. And let’s estimate a freight cost of 0.8 per unit to ship the goods from the manufacturer in China to the Amazon Warehouses in the USA.

So our profit plan would look something like this:

REVENUE
——————————————————————–
Product Sell Price ……………………………………… $9.97
Total Revenue …………………………………………… $9.97

EXPENSES
——————————————————————–
Product Manufacturing …………………………… $0.30
Shipping From Manufacturer to FBA ………… $0.80
Amazon Fees (15% of $9.97) …………………… $1.49
Fulfillment ………………………………………………… $2.67
Total Expenses ………………………………………… $5.26
——————————————————————–
PROFIT ( revenue minus expenses) ………… $4.71

TOTAL UNITS / MONTH TO REACH THE GOAL…637

So to reach our goal of 3,000 per month in profits we only have to sell 637 units per month, just a fraction of estimated sales of our top competitor.

Also, this is considering that we are selling the same product without any upgrades or premium features.

Mistake number 2:
Positioning your product as a cheap option

It is easy to source a product, pack it on a poly-bag, put a sticker on it and ship it to Amazon, but not necessarily profitable. Also, poorly presented products may result in poor customer experiences, returns, complaints and even bad reviews.

In the Private Label Blueprint, I teach how to pick up products with the right profit margin, products that you can market for 8 to 12 times your manufacturing cost so you can run a business that brings you profits instead of headaches. And also how to pack your product as the premium option so you can create a better customer experience and convert buyers into raving fans (and also charge premium prices).

Mistake number 3:
The “If you build it, they will come” mentality

Poor marketing is the main reason why a TON of small businesses fails every year. The good news is, marketing your product with Amazon is not hard at all. If you do the right steps, then marketing can be easy and even fun.

Now that you have an excellent idea on how to find a product and source it, let’s talk about how to promote it effectively on Amazon.

7 Ways to Market Your Product Effectively on Amazon

1. Starts with your main image

Your main image is one of the most valuable assets of your product page. It is the first thing people will notice about your product as it’s the image Amazon will use to showcase your product on the search results, browse pages and ads.

Make sure to use a high-quality image, easy to understand, clear, with a pure white background, information rich, attractive and zoomable.

Having the right image will increase traffic and sales.

2. Express the benefits of your product

People care about specifications but more important than that, they care about the results they get from those specifications. When writing your bullet points and descriptions, make sure to write them with the result people want from your product in mind.
Avoid being too salesy and fluffy.

Having a highly compelling product description and bullets may increase your conversion rate and sales.

3. Follow up with your customers

One email or a phone call can go a long way. Make sure to prepare a high-value follow-up sequence to create an excellent customer experience. This type of practice may result in repeat buyers, referrals, seller feedback and product reviews.

You can use a software tool like Feedback Genius to automate this process.

4. Get social proof

Ratings are the name of the game. People use ratings as a reference for how good and popular is the product. Also, it will be the main reference point for a buyer looking to see if the product works.

The review system is one of the unique selling points that made Amazon the behemoth online retailer it is today.
Make sure to plan ahead for reviews. You can use techniques like promotions and follow up with your customers to get awesome customer reviews.

Having a constant stream of reviews will make your product stand out from the crowd and may result in an increase of traffic and sales.

5. Optimize for SEO

To optimize your product to show up in the customer’s search results for organic (FREE) traffic on Amazon you will need to monitor three main things.

• Your product relevancy to the customer search terms,
• The conversion rate of your product and
• The Product Rating

Optimize your product title and bullets so it carries relevant customer search terms or keywords without make it look spammy.

6. Network with bloggers

Bloggers, YouTubers, Instagram rockstars, Pinterest Boards,  email newsletter, they are all influencers. Having them on your side will improve your marketing results. Contact influencers to promote your products with high-quality content to their audiences.

You can send then an email offering a free product so they can review it on their channel and also offer them a discount coupon for their audience.  They might do it for free.
If done right, you will have a constant stream of buyers coming from outside of Amazon to your product.

7. Advertise

Most people feel afraid to advertise because it requires paying for the ads. But if you could invest 100 dollars to get 200 dollars back in profits, would you do it?
Amazon Sponsored Ads is the first type of advertising platform you should try if you are selling on Amazon. You will be targeting your ideal customers right there while they are searching for your product, so usually you will see an instant result. Also, it’s measurable and optimizable.

Here’s some questions I get asked whenever I speak with people wanting to get into products on Amazon.

How long would it take to launch a product?

Well, it depends of the product you choose. But let’s do a typical timeline from zero to launch would be around 60 days.

How much money would it cost me to create a product and launch it?

Great question, it depends on the product that you choose.

I recommend starting with at least 500 units to reduce the cost of the product and shipping per unit.

Also, you should consider starting with a product that cost less than 4 dollars per unit.

For our natural air purifying bag example, this will be the estimated cost (*Please note that this priced are based on the example quotes from Alibaba, and we are estimating a high cost for shipping)

Cost of sample with shipping…… $45
Competitors products…………… $25
Branding Design with upwork…… $100
Product Pictures with fiverr……   $50
Cost of production of 500 units  at 0.30/unit…$150
Estimated Cost of Shipping for 500 at 0.80/unit…$ 400

Total Initial investment …………   $770

How much time do I need to invest for this to work?

Well the more the better, but because you are outsourcing most of the hard work (production, graphic design, photography, and selling the amazon) I am comfortable saying that if you spend at least 1 hour a day on your business for the next 60 days, you should be able to have a product available for sell on amazon in the next 2 months.

Do you have to be in the USA to be able to sell on Amazon?

The answer is no. You can ship everything directly to the Amazon FBA warehouses so they can take care of fulfillment and have your payment sent directly to your account in most Countries.

Also, you can sell in other Amazon websites including Canada, Mexico, Australia, Europe, Japan, India, and China by taking advantage of the Amazon fulfillment warehouses in those locations too.

Have you ever thought of launching a product on Amazon? If so, what’s stopping you? Did this post give you ideas of how to start? Let me know in the comments below.

Meeting randomers from the internet can be either scary or fun. In the case of conferences like SumoCon in Austin a couple of weeks ago it was very fun.

What is SumoCon?

It’s a new conference by the guys over at Appsumo to focus on your business. Considering I’ve been following, and buying from them for years, the conference was pretty much a no-brainer. Noah Kagan, the Chief Sumo, shared some wisdom around marketing, building teams, organization, etc.

Here’re the 8 takeaways I got from a breakout with Noah:

1. Become an advisor to your company

How would you handle things differently if you were an advisor to the business rather than an owner? Would you see what mistakes you were making, or would you treat decisions differently if you weren’t so personally involved in the day-to-day?

In the book Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill talks about how he created an internal mastermind for himself of some of the most influential thinkers in the world. By doing this, he would bring decisions to make to them in his mind, thinking ‘what would X do in this situation?’ It helped him expand his focus when making decisions.

Noah mentioned a similar idea except imagining yourself having a different CEO such as Jeff Bezos to go to and consistently asking yourself ‘What would Bezos do?’.

Takeaway: Step away from your business, imagine you were an onlooker – how would you act or make decisions for your company differently?

2. Do More of what WORKS

Look over the past year at everything that worked for your business. Then do more of it. Pretty simple.

• Where have the majority of your new consulting clients come from? Do that more.
• Where have your sales come from? Expand that channel.
• Is one source providing most of your email opt-ins? Double-down on that.

Are you doing something that isn’t working? Either stop it or tweak your approach. Once you’d tried that, if it’s still not producing the results over a set period, STOP. There’s lost opportunity cost with everything.

3. Keep focused on singular goal

Always know what direction you’re going and what milestone you’re working towards at a given time.
– For SumoMe it was reaching 1 billion people.
– For their flagship course, ‘Monthly 1K’ it was $1 Million in revenue.

You (and your team) should know the singular goal you are working towards at all times.

Create an in-depth plan for how you’ll get there. Make a list of everything, prioritize the list and then do it. That’s what we do at BestSelf and why we created the SELF Journal.

4. Build a machine to build a machine

Create a Standard Operating Procedure for EVERYTHING. This way if anyone leaves or gets fired you aren’t starting from the bottom. I shared the process about exactly how to do this here.

When creating documentation or SOP’s, do the job first yourself, then you know how to do it.

5. Step away from the computer

Every time we open our laptop, the big shiny light can zap our creative juices so it’s good to step away from it for a time to think outside the box… literally. Noah talked about his time working at Facebook, as employee #26 he watched how Mark Zuckerberg would always be writing with pen and paper rather than at his computer. If it’s good enough for Zuck, it’s good enough for you.

Book time in your calendar for thinking or it’ll never happen.

6. Hiring: People are everything, Hire rockstars

The best hires are referrals, always be growing your network.

Ask yourself, who would you enthusiastically rehire? By this I mean if you were starting over again tomorrow, which of your team members would you be excited to work with again? Rank your team members and see who would rehire. Fire the one’s you wouldn’t.

Get more feedback within your company for how things are doing internally. Have a 1:1 with each team member once a month to let them know how they’re doing. Set up anonymous feedback if you want to get the absolute truth.

People who start with your company may not be there to finish. That’s ok.

Got a job? Ask your boss what exceptional work would look like to them. Do that. Become a rockstar they would enthusiastically rehire.

7. Find your opposite

If you’re starter, you need a finisher. If you’re a product person, you need a marketing person, much like Apple did at the beginning with Steve Jobs (Marketer) and Steve Wozniak (Product). Find an editor for your stuff, someone to run your stuff by before publishing. Noah has Olman for this.

This was the secret sauce behind BestSelf when Allen and I started working together. I was good at product, and he was good at marketing and when we teamed up is when we have begun seeing real success.

8. Be a gardener, not a hunter

Always be planting seeds that grow, rather than being the creepy hunter stalking its prey.

If you’re trying to make a sale, it’s going to be easier if you provide initial value (plant the seed) rather than hunt a customer down and ask them to buy (hunter). This can be used whether you’re in sales, marketing, etc. Consider how you would like to be approached, or review what you have bought over the last few months. How did they sell you?

“There are moments when life offers you an opportunity. Those moments are rare, and you’re often unprepared for them. But they are the times that offer the chance to grow, fail, change, and thrive. This is one of those moments.” – Shopify

My Journey with Shopify

Shopify has played a huge role in my journey from a 9-5’er to now. In 2012 I used the e-commerce platform to launch Calm The Ham not realizing at the time that I was diving into the world of entrepreneurship. Not too long after I launched the store in 2012 I learned about the Build a Business competition and entered as a contestant.

Back then it would have been the 2nd year of the contest and suffice to say I didn’t even come close to winning. However, as a bystander I loved seeing the contest unfold, between the mentorship videos and the competition it was amazing even back then.

That store was eventually my vehicle to freedom and allowed me to leave my full-time job in 2014.

The next time the Build a Business contest came into my consciousness was in 2015 when they announced the prize of spending five days on Necker Island with Richard Branson, Daymond John, Tim Ferriss, and Marie Forleo. It looked incredible and I had friends that launched businesses just to enter the contest, but alas I had too much going on at the time to join them.

Fast forward to a year later, Allen and I had just completed our Kickstarter campaign on Sept 22nd 2015. Then on Sept 23rd 2015 I saw an email from Shopify in my inbox announcing the 2016 contest… and it looked EPIC.

I knew this was the right time.

Here was my thinking:

Best case scenario: We win and build an awesome business.
Worst case scenario: We compete and build an awesome business but don’t win.

Allen and I were so focused on competing in the contest that I even made a small poster for each of us to put on our walls by our desk so we would keep it top of mind.

The Backstory of the Competition

The contest was launched as a growth strategy for Shopify to serve as a catalyst for all those people who keep thinking about starting a store but then never do. This competition is for anyone to open a Shopify store, come up with a product or service – and start selling.

During dinner at the Gatsby mansion I learned the story of how the whole contest started.

One evening in San Francisco Tobi Lütke (Shopify Founder & CEO) and Tim Ferris (an early Shopify investor) were discussing the idea of running a contest to entice new customers to join the platform. Originally they had planned on a cash prize before Tim had the idea for creating a once in a lifetime experience.

Why?

If you already have a successful store then money isn’t really a motivating factor. However an experience that money can’t buy is such as ringing the New York Stock Exchange bell or getting to meet and spend time with people like Richard Branson, Tony Robbins, Russell Simmons definitely is.

Here’s the video that got us excited to enter:

It took us 3 months between seeing this video to actually launching our store. Why? We were waiting to get product in hand from the manufacturer, we had Kickstarter backers to fulfill before anyone else and most importantly we want to take some time and build a custom store that was in keeping with the BestSelf branding and experience we wanted to provide.

We used the framework of the SELF Journal to get the store launched by setting a goal and breaking it down to everything we would need to do to get there. Some of things we had on there:

• Store designed and developed
• Packaging designed and manufactured
• Traffic and marketing plan created
• Worldwide fulfillment centers set up

We launched our store on January, 1st 2016.

Unlike my first Shopify store, we were very deliberate and metrics-driven in everything we did to ensure the success of the store on a day-to-day basis. This started with creating a daily dashboard that we would review every morning to check our stats on:

• Sales revenue
• Products sold
• Conversion rate (our goal was to stay above 3.25%)
• Cost per acquired customer
• Total ad spend

158 days later…

On June 7th, we got a call from Harley Finkelstein, COO of Shopify announcing that we had been chosen to compete in the People’s Choice award. This award was a new category and is for the businesses which had just missed the top sales revenue compared with other winners but would compete with the other people in the same category in a vote-off.

Since we were up against some pretty hefty competition, Allen and I spent the next 5 days trying to get as many votes as possible. Since the voting was blind we had no idea how we were doing so we just kept hustling.

It worked — we won.

The Entrepreneurial Experience of a Lifetime

(They weren’t kidding about that)

The itinerary:

Personal Highlights:

The entire week of events was one huge adrenaline rush, Shopify kept surprising us with more and more incredible events. By the end of the week I felt that the whole contest was some sort of elaborate recruitment scheme as I was thinking “wow I’d love to work for Shopify”… true story.

Despite the entire week of amazingness here are some personal moments (in no particular order) that stood out to me and why:

1. Ringing the NYSE Bell:

I think of anything I’ve done both online or offline with entrepreneurship, this was the first thing I could tell my parents about and didn’t need to explain the significance to them. It was pretty cool, I think they even watched the livestream.

2. Our logo on the New York Stock Exchange

I used to walk by this building a lot when I worked in the financial district at my architecture job. I would have never dreamed at the time that I’d be seeing something like this happen.

3. Playing Monopoly with Daymond John

Monopoly is a game I used to play every summer with my brothers and our friends, sometimes games would last DAYS. I’m pretty competitive but I learned where Daymond got his ‘Shark’ name from while playing this game. The game lasted over 6 hours, it came down to me vs him but unfortunately at 2AM I landed on his Boardwalk property and my empire crumbled.

In the picture below please note this is Daymond’s personal $3,000 Monopoly board, it’s leather and weighs an absolute ton. His bodyguard Grimm was our banker and he was the best.

4. Meeting Tony Robbins

Having gone through several seminars of Tony Robbins over the past year, actually getting to meet and speak with him in person was an honor.

As an added bonus, all the winners were invited as guests to Business Mastery with Tony Robbins in January 2017. Despite having already gone last year (I wrote about my experience here) I am super excited to go again so I can review everything I learned and re-apply it all, as well as hang out with the awesome other winners.

Russell Simmons was incredible also, very calm and chilled out. This was one of the best things he said (paraphrased):

“You only get one seat in life. No matter how much money you have you can only ever sit in one seat at a time. Get comfortable and happy with yours” – Russell Simmons

5. Brain picking w/ Tim Ferris & Marie Forleo

Tim Ferris was in the depths of writing his new book Tools of Titans when we were at the mansion so his talk with us was taking many of the learnings from the podcast and in his own experiences and sharing them with us.

We did a 1:1 session with him as well as a group Q & A.

My question:
If you could create an X prize to solve one of the worlds great problems, what problem would you choose to solve?

It turns out he is already involved in an X Prize with Tony Robbins to solve illiteracy throughout the world. Pretty incredible and I had no idea he was involved. You can learn more about it X Prize here.

Marie Forleo hung out at the castle for several days and is one of the most genuine and sweet people you’ll ever meet. On Day 1 we had intimate dinner with her where she had not only had done the research into each company to learn more about us but already came to us with great ideas to consider.

We’re releasing a new edition to the SELF Journal next month and it was directly because of our discussions with Marie over dinner.

6. Meeting the other winners

If I’m honest, prior to the trip I had not given much thought to hanging out with the other winners, mainly because the big draw were the mentors and celebrities. However, meeting the other winners and becoming friends was one of my favorite aspects of the entire event. We all went through the adrenaline rush together, we were all at similar points with our businesses and we all bonded over the week.

There were no walls or false pretenses, everyone was open with sharing. In fact, there was a 2am mastermind happening after the last night party where everyone was sharing all the details with adspend, google adwords, email funnels. What worked and what didn’t.

Happy Trunk Apparel

Happy Trunk, a bohemian jewellery store for a good cause run by couple Emily Wilford and Jon Wed. It turns out Jon is an absolute wizard with Facebook ads after leaving school and learning the craft. He was running 6 Shopify stores (!!) of similar revenue scales but the one that happened to win the contest was the store with the story.

After travelling in Thailand for 3 months and spending time with elephants which Emily loves they set up the store and donate a portion of their revenue to theNature Park in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Carbon 6

Carbon 6 Rings, was comprised of a husband and wife duo, Claire and John who are one of the sweetest couples I’ve ever met, as well as perfectly matched business-wise. John is a total product person and maker, you can tell his passion for the product from a mile away. We would be sitting at breakfast and he would describe every part of the process and how he’s honed it over time.

Claire ran the business side of things and was completely switched on, especially during Q & A’s. In fact during Tony Robbins talk about business and knowing what business you’re in he was asking us to describe our customer.

Paul: Our customer is… 
Claire: That’s our current customer, not our ideal customer. Our ideal customer is…
Tony: Yes, she’s got it!

If you know anyone getting married I would highly recommend you check out these rings.

Nora

Nora was launched on Kickstarter in 2015 and raised a whopping $832,523 for their smart snoring solution. The technology was invented by their father, Ali and the sons Behrouz and Behzad worked with him to bring it to life. Behrouz and Behzad came to the castle with us and were very fun guys,

If you know anyone who has issues with snoring their device is pretty incredible after having seen it in person.

iSwegway

Remember the stories in the news about the hoverboards that blow up? They’re still not allowed on planes and were even removed from the shelves before Christmas last year. Most of us probably heard but didn’t think much of it besides crossing it off our Christmas list. Asad, a aspiring british entrepreneur saw the same story and decided to find a way to create safe hoverboards that don’t blow up.

After working with a manufacturer, poring over safety specs and details he figured it out. iSwegway launched a day or two before Black Friday, solely on Google Adwords, and on Black Friday did over $800K in sales… insanity. Asad came with his wife Faiza who described how she barely saw him for months as he worked on the business and she would be running the customer service for the company while also working a full-time job.

Winner Takeaways

Some commonalities I learned from the winners:

• 3 out of the 5 Shopify winners launched from crowdfunding campaigns. We validated that people actually wanted the product before creating it.
• Winning products solve problems
  Whether it’s snoring with the Nora or creating a hoverboard that doesn’t explode. The more painful the problem you can solve with your product or service the more successful you will be.
• Start before you’re ready
  Before iSwegway started it was a 1 man in his living room who had an idea. Despite never having sold hoverboards before, he launched it and worked like hell to turn it into a success.
• Figure out what works for you and double-down
  For Happy Trunk it was facebook ads, for iSwegway he crushed it on Google Adwords and didn’t use Facebook. Figure out what works for your market and the customer you’re targeting and double-down. Own one channel before moving to the next.
• Pick a partner with complimentary skills
  If you’re a marketer then find a product person. If you’re a product person, find someone who can run the business side of things like Claire and John did.

A fun video of our experience:

They have opened the waitlist for next year if you are interested, go here.

Big props to the Shopify team: Courtney Symons, Roberto Faria, Lauren Brown, Harley Finkelstein, Craig Miller, Tobi Lütke for making this experience so incredible.

I hope you enjoyed this review of the experience, it was fun reminiscing on it again. Drop a comment below and let me know if I missed anything or if you have any questions 🙂

The U.S (and the world) just went through the most surprising and reality-TV seeming presidential campaign of all time in 2016. As someone who volunteered on a presidential campaign during this cycle, I loved getting a glimpse of things from the inside and learned a lot about successful marketing in the process.

You can check out my earlier post during the presidential primaries where I reviewed the marketing strategies of several candidates.

Don’t worry, this is not the 10273628 political post examining what happened and why – It’s all about the Marketing!

Today I’m going to share 5 things about how to run your Product Launch/Crowdfunding campaign like you would a successful political campaign so that you win.

1. GROUND GAME IS KEY!

A great politician has a ground game for months and months before anyone is even able to cast their vote. They are educating the voters on themselves, their policies and how they would govern to have these supporters turn up at the polls.

For you, this means growing an email list of targeted people interested in your product or service. You’re educating them on how you can help, why this product/service should matter to them and you’re listening to their problems / fears so that you can position yourself in the best way possible for your launch.

There are too many people who launch a Kickstarter campaign by sending an email out on launch day or posting on their Facebook page, expecting people to buy. It’s like a politician turning up at your door on election day and asking you to go to the polls and vote for them… It doesn’t work.

Takeaway: Get your ground game sorted before your launch. Work on growing your email list of supporters, warming them up with knowledge about your product, so they know what problem it will solve for them before launch.

2. PROBLEM -> AGGRAVATE -> SOLVE

All great products started from solving a problem in the world. As a politician, they are selling themselves as a product and in order to get your vote. They need to convince you that you have problems, they know exactly what they are and most importantly that they can solve them. That’s where the Problem-Agitate- Solve method of selling comes in. It works like this:

i.PROBLEM: Describe in detail what the problem is they’re facing

ii. AGITATE: How is this problem worsening or what issues are it causing in your life?

iii. SOLVE: How will you solve this?

PROBLEM: Mexicans are coming into the country and taking our jobs
AGITATE: They are also bringing crime
SOLVE: I will build a wall

The above example is just one of the many ways in which Donald Trump used the Problem-Agitate-Solve method to garner support during his 2016 presidential campaign.

Takeaway:

When you can define a problem in a way that makes your audience think “Wow, it’s like they’re reading my mind” then they will naturally assume that you have an answer for this problem too. For your crowdfunding campaign or product launch you should do the same thing, first define the problem as best as possible, agitate the problem by describing the pain and then explain how your product or service can solve it for them.

3. OFFER A TRANSFORMATION

What does life look like after they purchase your product? How will this problem disappear? What does this look like?

A successful politician describes life after they get elected, what it will look like and how it will make the voters feel. They sell them on that feeling after they win the position, without explaining the policies that will get them there.

My friend Charlie Hoehn described this on Facebook better than I could:

“You don’t feel safe? I will promise you safety. I will promise you job security so you can pay the bills. I will promise you more of the resources you lack. And I promise that your family will have all of those things, too.
You don’t have love? I will promise you friendship. I will promise you more dates. I will promise you sex.
You don’t have self-esteem? I will promise you confidence. I will promise you respect.

Do what I say, and you’ll get what you want.

This is why millions of people have believed in the power of SlimFast, Hydroxycut, Subway, and countless products promising rapid fat loss. It’s because of the “Before / After” shots.

You’re the Before. I’m promising you After. Look at all those Afters! Don’t you want to join them?

I want you to love the future so much that you are disgusted with the present. I will promise you tomorrow, so you’ll give away today. And if you’re desperate enough, it doesn’t matter what my solution is. Your imagination automatically fills in the gaps.”

Takeaway:

Much like successful politicians and brands sell people on the ‘After’, you need to do the same with your product or service. Don’t get caught up on the features, focus on the benefits to the end customer. Show their happy face after they get your product.

4. CREATE AN ARMY OF MARKETERS THROUGH A SIMPLE MESSAGE

Political campaigns thrive when they can turn their supporters into marketers for the product (AKA the politician).

Crowdfunding is all about building a tribe of people who support your product. If you can make it as easy for them to share with their friends and get more people involved the better it will be for you.

I went to a conference in September, and Donald Miller of Storybrand was giving a presentation about marketing messaging that was incredibly powerful. He broke down several presidential campaigns marketing from Obama to Bush to Gore and was able to simplify why each worked and each didn’t. It was pretty incredible.

He then moved onto the 2016 presidential election that was ongoing and asked the room what the marketing message for Hillary Clinton was – the room was silent. He followed up by asking what the message was for Donald Trump’s campaign and the whole room chorused ‘Make America Great Again.’

We weren’t a room of Donald Trump supporters. However, Trump had clarified his message, been consistent and repeated it so much that there was likely no one in that room of a thousand people who didn’t know what it was — whether they supported him or not.

In this book ‘Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear.’ it explains that what people hear are simple words and short sentences. If you can distil your message into a soundbite, you will win. Researchers found that Donald Trump spoke at a 6th-grade level and whose speeches are full of short declarative sentences.

Takeaway: Simplify your message so that you can give supporters something to latch onto and clearly tell other people about. Ignore complex descriptions or anything likely to cause confusion, this will only dilute your messaging by making it more difficult for supporters to tell their friends about. By doing this you will turn your supporters into your marketers without them even realizing it.

5. ELECTION DAY = LAUNCH DAY

After the months and months of ground game gathering supporters and people you know will vote for you there’s a ‘Get Out The Vote’ campaign wherein you have your campaign workers and volunteers call, canvas and essentially ensure that everyone who already knows about you to come out and actually vote for you. By this point political campaigns aren’t trying to convince any undecideds or opponent’s supporters, their only goal is to get the people who already support them to turn up at the polls.

This should be the same for your product launch or crowdfunding campaign. In the week leading up to the launch you should be warming up your email list and letting them know exactly what’s coming and when.Don’t expect them just to remember about your launch; people are busy with their own lives. Give them a date and time to put on their calendar.

Takeaway:

All your energy for the week prior to launch is to ensure people know what’s coming and when. People should be well aware ahead of time so ideally by your launch day they have already made the mental decision as to whether they will buy or not.

Welcome to another year! This post marks my 3rd year for writing an annual review. Often we get so busy pushing ourselves up the mountain, always looking ahead that we don’t stop to look behind us, seeing how far we’ve come. This annual review process forces me to stop, reflect and be grateful for the year, while choosing how best to move forward into a new year.

Disclaimer: I write reviews mainly for myself to learn from, to show people what’s possible in a year and also to hopefully help people learn from my mistakes.

Being able to look back on my 2015 review article is really fun and reminds me how far I’ve come in only a year. If you haven’t, you should write your own Year in Review article. (If you do, post it in the comment section so everyone else can read it.)

For this review I’ll cover:

• Goals from 2015 review
• Highlights of 2016
• What went well?
• What didn’t go well?
• Extra-Curriculars
• Favorite Products of 2016
• 2017 Goals

Here were the public goals I stated in my review last year:

Business

• Grow BestSelf 3X and sell 50,000 journals
  Done! And then some 🙂
• Build my LittleMight email list to 5,000
  At 4,875 I’m only 125 subscribers short of my initial goal. However, I put very little time into growing my LittleMight list this year due to working almost solely on BestSelf Co so I feel fine with this.

Personal:

• Write 1,000 words per day
  It started off well… but dwindled after 5 months. Going to reestablish in 2017.
• Send daily personal message/email to someone I care about
  Turned into more of a weekly thing than daily. I think I’ll stick with this amount.
• Take 1 day a month off work for reflection and planning
  Failed at this. While I did reflect, I think I would benefit from taking more time off and disengaging from everything.

Highlights

• Jan: Attending Tony Robbins Business Mastery
• Feb: 24-hour Challenge in Nashville creating Slingshot with Bryan Harris
• March: Validated, Created and Launched From Zero to Funded course!
• April: Working on Bernie Sanders campaign
• May: Attended first trade show!
• June: Winning Shopify Build a Business award & my Chicago trip with Katya
• July: Summit mountain for Baby Bathwater event
• August: Ringing the NYSE bell and the Gatsby mansion event with Shopify
• Sept: Filming in NYC for Videofruit & Alabama for SELF Mastery Academy then SumoCon!
• Oct: Got a new puppy, Casey Jones!
• Nov: Daymond John joint venture launch and finalist for Forbes 30 for 30 (also turned 30 at end of Nov, promptly disqualifying me lolz)
• Dec: Going to Australia on a family trip.

What Did Go Well

1. Business growth + Team

This year represented a huge change for me as it was the year I became a boss, CEO, whatever you want to call it – and not just of myself! In just a year since launching BestSelf Co store on Shopify we grew our email list to 145,000 and did seven figures in revenue (over 2.4 M). Most importantly, our team grew from just Allen and myself to around ten people (between full-time and contractors.) I even got myself an executive assistant, Michee, who has become my external brain/problem-solver. Lifesaver!

Being responsible for a team is a double-edged sword, it’s stressful and puts a lot of responsibility on your shoulders as you make decisions, not just for you and a partner, but a whole team of people. However, the pro list way outweigh the cons as we would not have been able to grow without these incredible people. One of my favorite moments of the year was in December, the day before I left for my month long trip to Australia I sat down and wrote bonus checks to each team member. Probably the best checks I ever wrote!

Takeaway: The best investment is both in yourself and your people! Looking forward to doing more of it this year.

2. From Zero to Funded launch

I launched the initial round of my crowdfunding course which meant I validated it, pre-sold the course and then created the content. I’m going to be working in 2017 to improve and tweak the course as I test strategies, and also show people how to not only crowdfund their idea but how to build a sustainable business after crowdfunding.

A huge win for me with this project was being able to see people fund their dreams. Elena was my first student to go live with her project Rebel Girls, she asked for $40,000 on Kickstarter and went on to raise $675,000 in funding. As of January 2017, she’s done well over $1,000,000 in sales – epic. My next student to launch was Elizabeth of Little Nomad, who raised over $104,000 in funding and has some very big and exciting things on the horizon.

If you want to get in on the next class opening you can join the waitlist here.

3. An Overseas Trip to a Faraway Land!

For the first time in several years, I took an extended holiday to a new place — Australia! My little brother is living over there for two years, so Keith and I flew out for Christmas, my mum flew from Ireland, and we had an Australian family Christmas together. For almost a whole month I was living in the future! We went paddleboarding on Christmas Eve, skydiving, snorkeling off Lady Elliot Island which we were taken to by prop plane, New Year’s Eve in Sydney watching the fireworks… it was the trip of a lifetime.

While I can’t say I didn’t do any work while I was there, I did take some much needed time off and came back refreshed, ready to crush 2017. I’m very grateful to have a business partner in Allen who steered the ship while I was gone, nevermind encouraged me to really switch off and be present with my family.

What Didn’t Go Well

Bad Hiring

I know I put team building in the ‘What went well’ section, but those were the one’s that stuck. Unfortunately, I hadn’t heard the term Hire Slow, Fire Fast until we’d already done the opposite, we hired fast and fired slowly. We hired quickly because we were reactive, trying to handle growth and bringing people on as soon as possible without giving them adequate training to be able to succeed in the role. I know now that this is the worst possible way to hire someone, for both yourself and the person you hire.

Operations

This goes along with hiring, but I’m putting it in it’s own section. For BestSelf Co Operations has been the toughest role we’ve found to fill. Why? Because when we started the hiring process, we looked in places where people like us would hang out, mainly entrepreneurs (uh-oh!). In retrospect this didn’t make sense as what we needed was someone who lived and breathed the operations role, someone who enjoyed being behind-the-scenes keeping things running smoothly. The people we hired were entrepreneurs with their own aspirations, and it wasn’t in operations, to grow to the scale we want these were not productive hires for the long-term growth of the company. However, each person served their purpose for that short time.

We’ve learned from those rookie hiring mistakes and before beginning the hiring process this last time we did a lot of research into the skill of hiring and finding A-players for operations. This paid off as the caliber of applicants were higher and most importantly, skilled in the roles of operations and organization.

Book resource: Who: The A Method for Hiring

Unproductive time spent on Politics/News/Social Media

I would hate to count the hours of how much wasted time was devoted to the circus that was this year’s US presidential election. I don’t mean volunteering or work done, I mean on bullshit like engaging on Facebook posts, reading mindless articles and everything that went along with it. It was an election different than any other (so I’m told), but I wish it had not taken my attention from things that were actually in my control to change.

In November I made the choice to take Twitter and Facebook apps off my phone to stop myself from procrastinating, as well as having Newsfeed Eradicator installed to cut out my news feed. The lack of social media apps on my phone has been a big help as now I have to log in on my phone browser to procrastinate, the annoyance of this logging in process often stops me altogether.

Travel

• Palm Beach, Florida – Business Mastery Conference
• Nashville, TN — work with Bryan Harris on Slingshot
• Chicago, IL — Fun trip
• Powder Mountain, Utah – Baby Bathwater mastermind
• Birmingham, AL — Spend 4 days for a video shoot with BestSelf and Armosa Studios (great people!)
• Orlando, Florida – Team retreat and Content & Commerce Conference
• Long Island, NY – Gatsby Mansion for Shopify
• Austin, TX — SumoCon
• Australia – family trip beginning in Dec, visited Sydney, Brisbane, Noosa, Hervey Bay, Bundaberg, Whitsunday Islands, Melbourne

Extra Stuff

Spartan Race

In June 2016 I ran my first obstacle course this year as a challenge for myself, it would force me to keep working out and looked like fun — it was! The only thing I wish I’d done differently was sign up for another one immediately after as once I was finished I took it easy and let my fitness habit slip. My goal is to do 3 obstacle races this year to make up for it.

Bernie Sanders Campaign

In my spare time (ha!) I volunteered for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign up until the end of June. Despite not making it as the democratic nominee I am still so glad I carved out the time to do it. Not only did I learn a ton about marketing, but I also did a lot of things that pushed me outside of my comfort zone which is always a good thing — it’s where growth happens!

Favorite Products of 2016

Before I buy new things I ask myself “Will this make my life easier, more enjoyable or save me time?”, if yes I’ll buy it. The following products are my favorite purchases of the year:

1. Bose headphones

Never felt the need for expensive headphones until these… and now I realize what I was missing. These Bluetooth headphones are incredible, the noise canceling is excellent for travel, I can connect to my phone and my laptop at one time, and with the built-in mic, I can do calls easily.

2. Nutri Ninja Blender

Another product I use multiple times a day, between my bulletproof coffee in the AM, to blending eggs for an omelet (for ultra-smoothness) to making quick shakes — no brainer.

3. Sunrise Simulation Alarm clock

For as long back as I can remember I’ve been using my phone for an alarm, however I stopped when I realized setting my alarm quickly turned into a Facebook wormhole. This alarm clock doesn’t jolt me awake; rather the sunrise simulation allows me to wake slowly and feel well rested – highly recommend.

4. Peloton bike

I fell in love with the business model for this company before I ever bought anything. They sell you an expensive piece of equipment and then get you onto subscription for the content to ensure it doesn’t turn into a clothes horse. It’s incredible.

My most expensive purchase of the year was the Peloton bike, an at home stationary bike that you can attended live classes on as well as tons of on-demand class content. During winter it’s a struggle to make it to the gym, so this was the perfect solution, now I can do a 30 min class of a high intensity workout and be back to work within 5-10 mins whereas having to go to the gym would regularly mean an addition 30-45mins of wasted time.

I calculated that the cost of attending 66 live spin classes would be the same as buying the bike, so my plan is to have completed those by March 31st, 2017 if I keep up the 3-4 times per week schedule thereby paying off the investment.

If you want to pick one up, buy off this link and you’ll get 2 months of free content (and so will I) — win win!

5. 27″ External HP Monitor

Needed a high-res monitor that also looked sexy but didn’t want to go for the outdated and expensive Mac display. I picked up this screen for less than $300, and it’s been perfect!

Goals for 2017

I grabbed this framework from Noah Kagan here.

Word of the year: Exponential

Work:
1. $X million revenue goal
2. 3 Retreats with the team
3. Speak at 3 events
4. 15 Successful students of From Zero to Funded course

Workout:
1. 4 x workouts a week
2. 2 x Obstacle courses/or races

Personal:
1. Write a fiction book
2. Get my driving license (yes I’m 3o, but I live in New York)
3. Plan a weekend trip away every quarter

Hope you had an amazing 2016 and that your 2017 is off to a great start.

Hit reply in the comments and tell me how your year went!

Today I want to share the story of Elizabeth, a student from my course From Zero to Funded.

Elizabeth reached out to me last year, and this was her email:

As you can see here she’s an action-taker, I love it and it’s why I’ve been so excited to see how far she’s come. Today I want to share her story from when she went from a full-time working mom to an entrepreneur with a physical product business who also recently appeared on Shark Tank!

Her Idea:

Elizabeth was a style conscious young mom with a keen eye for design, so when she had her baby and was shopping for playmats the only thing around were “circus looking things that looked really ugly in my living room”. These ugly playmats had to be put away before company came over – not ideal.

So what if there was a better solution?

That’s when she came up with the idea to create beautifully illustrated playmats that would create the atmosphere of a nice rug that you wouldn’t need to put away every time you had guests over.

Introducing Little Nomad:
*Traditional foam play mats are practical but not cute. We make beautiful play mats both Mamas, and little ones love! *

7 Things Elizabeth did to Crush It:

1. Became an Expert of her Product

Without experience in physical products, it always seems tough to know exactly where to start with everything. I always think the best place to start is writing down all your questions and then make Google your friend as you begin your research. This is how Elizabeth played it, and she used Google to start sourcing and to learn everything she possibly could about how to create these custom play mats. She researched everything from government foam standards, to the process behind creating the mats to the best shipping methods… essentially she became an expert in foam.

Takeaway: Do your research! If you have an idea you need to network and start speaking to people so you can find the connections you need to make it happen. Many beginning entrepreneurs are too precious with their ideas, worrying that someone would “steal it”. An idea is nothing without execution, and generally people that would execute well on stealing your idea don’t even have time to execute on all their own ideas as it is. Execution beats ideas every single time, and noone could have out-executed Elizabeth.

2. Fake it ’til you make it

Before Elizabeth even had a prototype she knew she had to test and validate the idea was something people actually wanted. Rather than spend a bunch of time and money going straight for a real foam prototype, she took a trip to Kinkos and got some large paper sheets, in the size of the mat squares, to use to mock up how it could look in a room. After photographing her living room and then photoshopping the illustrations on top of the initial paper mockups, she was able to show them in real life environments to further sell her idea.

Had she just shown a big rectangle with the pattern on it I doubt she wouldn’t have gotten as big a positive response she did. The reason being that showing herself and her baby on the mat people gives her prospects everything they need to imagine themselves using it the same way.

Idea + Ingenuity (and a little Photoshop):

Takeaway: You don’t always need to spend a ton of time or money to prototype your idea before you’ve done the initial validation. The speed of implementation is crucial for success, had she waited for weeks or more likely, months, for a real prototype she would have spent a ton of money and ended up delaying the project, perhaps even indefinitely.

3. The Power of Facebook Groups

Elizabeth knew her customer avatar, mainly because she was her target customer – a stylish mom. To get around more people like her, she went to where they hung out online, Facebook groups. Typically these Facebook groups were mom groups and local networks. From there she posted within the groups asking for feedback on her idea, it’s important to note that she wasn’t trying to sell to these people. Many groups ban that type of thing, so it’s important to add a ton of value into the group before posting your own stuff.

Think of these type of groups as a bank, if you have nothing deposited in the bank, then you won’t be allowed to withdraw anything. You need to make deposits over time to build a balance that you can withdraw on later – with groups you do this by engaging with the group and providing value first.

For weeks before asking for anything Elizabeth would engage with group conversations and help people out by commenting on their posts, which increased her trust level within the groups. This way when she was ready to post she had built up a good amount of goodwill credit with the group.

Here’s an example of one such post. Check out the amount of engagement on this within just a few hours:

Takeaway: Get into groups that are related to what you are building or where your target customer hangs out in. Spend a few weeks (or even months) adding value to build up your social bank before posting about your idea. Keep your posts “un-salesy” and lead them to your site or landing page if people seem interested.

For some of Elizabeth’s most eager prospects, she set up her own Facebook group to share mat designs for feedback, reward ideas and

4. Building an email list

Once she had her Kinko’s prototype photographed and had created a landing page through Squarespace, she started focusing on building her email list. In the first two weeks alone she collected over 1,160 emails.

In only seven weeks Elizabeth grew her email list to 4,565 people. Incredibly impressive!

I recommend ConvertKit (first month free here) for email list building due to their automation, although Elizabeth setup Mailchimp when she first got started.

Her landing page:

You can see that in her text she addresses the pain and describes how her idea will be the solution. If I had to critique I would have made the Call To Action something more like ‘Get Invite’ or ‘Join the Waitlist.’

This was her opt-in:

Honestly, I almost spat out my coffee when I saw this form that had gotten her so many emails as the amount of information she asked for seemed extreme. I mean I couldn’t even get the whole thing into one screenshot! In case you aren’t aware, for every field, you add to an opt-in form your conversion rate drops… however, these mom’s seemed to really want these mats!

Takeaway: Create a simple way to collect people’s emails. Make sure your headline describes the pain you’re solving and make the action you want them to take clear. I would recommend Squarespace,  Leadpages or ConvertKit to set up simple landing pages.

6. Know who you’re marketing to for your List

Once Elizabeth knew her market and had tested out what really resonated with the people from her mom groups she created a sponsored post within Facebook that she used to grow her email list. This is one of the ways she was able to grow her list so quickly in such a short amount of time. Look at the amount of engagement she got from this post, for her product that starts at $99 she was obtaining leads for as little as 10 cents!

Takeaway: Craft your messaging correctly by describing the pain, and how your product will benefit the user. Then put some money into getting the people you need for your launch.

7. Show some alternative use-cases

When setting up a crowdfunding campaign, I always tell people to focus on 1-3 different use cases for their product if possible. For Elizabeth, her primary focus was mom’s, however, within her campaign and on her website, she also showed several different ways of how you could use the play mat, for example as an anti-fatigue mat for the kitchen, a workspace or even an alternative to a yoga mat. These use cases came from the feedback she gathered from her Facebook groups. Not only does this increase the possibility that more prospects to buy from you, but it also gives people more reasons to buy as they feel like they’re getting more for their money than just a playmat.

Some imagery she used to get the point across:

Takeaway: Find other possible use cases or users for your product to increase potential interest. It’s important not to go too broad as you don’t want to dilute your idea, but there’s a sweet spot in there whereby showing a little variation can expand prospects. Personally, I don’t have kids so I wasn’t thinking this was for me until I saw that it could be used as an anti-fatigue mat and it got me thinking about it.

Little Nomad on Kickstarter

Funding goal: $68,000 (reached within 3 days!)

Final amount raised: $104,025

All rewards were successfully shipped out on time to her backers and her business is going awesome. Check out the Little Nomad store, built on Shopify.

Shark Tank – Episode #814

Elizabeth appeared on episode #814 of Shark Tank, episode description “a mom from West Hartford, Connecticut, changes Kevin O’Leary’s nickname to “Uncle Wonderful” and asks him to hold her toddler while she pitches her stylish version of baby mats.” It aired on February 3rd 2017.

That’s how it’s done folks! Elizabeth had the tenacity to bring an idea from zero to funded in a few short months that has gone on to create a business with raving fans who absolutely LOVE her product. Check out her Instagram here if you don’t believe me. No longer is she working for someone else but has the freedom to work on her own business while spending more time with her daughter.

Now let me ask you, do you have an idea you want to bring to life? What can you apply from this post that will help you succeed?

Drop a comment below and let me know!

Have you ever wished you could go back to high school knowing everything you do now? Well I kinda got to do that…

Recently I was invited back to give a talk at my old high school and share my journey since I left in 2005. The purpose was to impart any “wisdom” I had for some of the older students during Friday assembly.

*Cue the awkward high school picture*

(I’m not sure what was more tragic, my hair, the hairband or those eyebrows…)

I asked on Facebook what people wished they had known back when they were between 16 – 18 years old. I got some great responses from people…

There were a bunch of awesome responses, you can see the whole post here.

3 Myths I believed at School:

Myth: You have to know what you want to do for the rest of your life

Truth: Many of the jobs that exist now didn’t exist 10 years ago. Same as many jobs that exist now won’t exist in 10 years. You don’t need to have everything planned out, life happens, technology changes but as long as you follow your interests while providing value/solving a world problem you’ll be fine.

Myth: My future depended on my GCSE/A-Level exam results

Truth: A few years from now you won’t even remember what you grades were, nor will anyone even care. I missed out on a grade I wanted in my last year at school which meant not getting into my first choice university. At the time I thought it was the end of the world… it wasn’t.

Myth: University was the ONLY choice

Truth: University is not for everyone and if you decide you don’t want to go, you are not a failure. In fact, there are many people who do go to university only to waste time and rack up debt getting an education that won’t serve them in the job market. You do you. If you don’t want to be a doctor, lawyer or profession that requires a degree then it’s optional.

My Journey:

I believed I had to know what my career would be so when I was 16 I decided to be an architect, mainly because I was good at Physics and Art so Architecture just made sense. It was also a “serious career”… so of course my parents would be happy.

Then for the next 10 years I was on the “Architecture train”, never really exploring any other options, partly because I was busy with the constant workload of Architecture school, but mainly because I was scared that if I looked around and found something else I would get “off track” and have to start over.

The timeline of my life:

It was midway through 2012 when I realized that I was in a job that I couldn’t picture doing the rest of my life. When I looked at my bosses who were 20 years my senior and had their own successful firm, I still didn’t want to end up there — and that was the best case scenario.

I felt like I was experiencing a midlife crisis. It was at this point I started looking around at what other people were doing to see how I can pivot my life path:

Five to Thrive

These are the five things I started doing at that turning point in 2012 that led me to where I am now, and I shared these with the young students from my high school so they can get a headstart on them rather than wait 10 years like I did.

1. Find a Mentor

The best way to learn anything is to find someone who’s doing it and learn from them. If there’s something you think you want to do with your life, the best way to figure it out is to work for them and figure it out.

Find that person, bring them value and I would even recommend working for them for free if you have to. You’ll learn if you really want to do that thing, and if not you didn’t waste years at college on it – and if you do, they can probably help you get your foot in the door.

Takeaway: Life experience > university.

2. Never Stop Learning

Before 2012 I didn’t place learning high on my priority list. I had gone through school, gotten those all-important letters after my name and thought that was it. University was complete and I thought I had learned all I needed.

Then in 2012 when I realized I wasn’t experiencing the life I wanted I picked up some books and educated myself on what else was possible. What were successful people doing that I should be doing? It took me 2 years of hustling on the side to begin figuring it out. I even made a commitment to read 22 books before I would allow myself to quit my job.

Takeaway: Life is about the journey, not the destination.

3. Build Good Habits

Successful people are the sum of the habits that they create for themselves. If you create a habit of going to the gym everyday you’re going to be fit, same with if you read for 30 minute everyday you are going to be smarter.

Who do you want to be? What do you need to do everyday to become that person? Start crafting the habits for success in order to level up to the person you want to become. It isn’t easy, but if you do what you’ve always done you’re going to get what you’ve always gotten.

Takeaway: How have your existing habits been working out for you so far?

4. Permission to Fail

Many unsuccessful people quit after failing something once, but really failure is only the beginning of your journey to success as long as you don’t give up.

F.A.I.L = First Attempt In Learning

Each time you fail at something you should reflect, learn how you would do it differently and then try again. You only really fail or lose when you stop trying and stop learning from mistakes.

Before BestSelf Co I’ve had 4 or 5 other business ventures, the majority of which didn’t last but I wouldn’t consider any of them failures as they each taught me something different. Same with my business partner Allen who had some of his own. Had Allen and I never gone through those past “failures” we would not have had the skills to grow BestSelf Co into a seven-figure business in 1 year.

 5. Don’t Afraid to be Different

To have an above-average life you have to do above-average things. Whether it’s getting a job you want or getting into the university you want, you need to stand out from the crowd.

At some point everyone has good grades and people start to blend together, it’s your job to show why you’re different.

I recently went to a startup pitch event in Belgium, there were between 15–20 people pitching their companies, many of them looking for investment. At some point each 2-minute pitch started to blend in with the next, so even being 10% better than another pitch didn’t matter anymore.

That was until one presenter got up and stood out from the crowd, in fact she went out of her way to embrace her difference through her presentation. Part of it was that she was the only female pitching the whole night, which she pointed out as it was this idea that was sparked part of the story of her startup but it resonated with the audience.

I remember once she finished thinking ‘Well that was memorable’, not better, just different. When it came time to vote for the best pitch at the end, the audience voted her as the winner.

Why? She was different. Her company wasn’t necessarily better than the many others, it just stood out and resonated with everyone in the room.

In school we all try to fit in, not wanting to be different and draw attention to ourselves. When I had been back at school, I was the same, to the point where I had a small but semi-successful eBay business when I was 14 that I didn’t tell any of my classmates or school friends because I didn’t want to be considered “weird” or “different”.

Now I realize that there was no reason to be afraid, as once we’re out in the real world it’s these differences that will help you stand out from the crowd. It’s the “weirdo’s” that will create a dent in the universe and change the world — so don’t be afraid to be different.

Cue the famous Apple ad:

Now let me ask you, let me know in the comments what you wish you knew when you were in high school that you know now?

In the past 18 months, BestSelf Co has gone from a 2 person operation of myself and Allen, to a full team of people. In fact, we just celebrated our third team member being with us for over a year.

Between contractors, part-time and full-time people, we have around 16 people who play some role in the team, between customer support, marketing, development, and design.

… Getting there has not been easy.

In this post I’ll cover:

1. How NOT to hire someone
2. How to define a job role
3. How to create an automated application process that only brings qualified candidates (and saves you tons of time and energy)
4. The system we used for hiring that finally worked!
5. The tools we use that make boring paperwork easy

1. How NOT to Hire Someone

We hired our first key person in March of 2016, and the second shortly after.

At the time we were two months into running our online store after having completed our Kickstarter campaign and fulfillment. It was just Allen and myself trying to do everything, our bandwidth was maxed out and we were desperate to find people to help us lighten the load. As a result, we were reactive with our hiring and didn’t set ourselves or them up for being successful in the role.

Unfortunately, these first two people we brought on are no longer with us.

It’s not you, it’s me

It wasn’t that they weren’t good people, it’s just that we didn’t do a good job with the hiring or training them. A big issue was that we hadn’t clearly defined the role or who the person was we were looking for when we posted the job.

When we were hiring we were in growth mode and needed people fast — this speed came back to hurt us later.

When you hire someone and don’t make the time to train them properly, the wheels will almost always start to come off. It’s imperative that you give people all the tools they need to succeed in their role. It’s not the fault of the person you hire for “not doing their job properly”, as the leader you did not do your job when hiring.

The biggest position we had an issue with at BestSelf Co was hiring for our operations position because we were in a situation where we didn’t know what we didn’t know. As a company with multiple international warehouses selling and shipping physical products we only had a small idea of what we needed and were still learning as we went.

We thought we were looking for someone great with creating systems who was highly organized. However, there’s a whole other set of skills this person needed which included experience with handling a physical product business, inventory and everything that goes along with that. We kept trying to hire entrepreneurs we knew when the position required someone with an experience in logistics.

This key aspect was what we were missing with the first two hires for our Operations role. One of my regrets from 2016 (you can read in my annual review was this issue with hiring.)

Hire Slow. Fire Fast.

A book that both Allen and I read before hiring again was ‘Who: The Method For Hiring’, I would highly recommend to anyone trying to grow a team. It walked us through how to find and interview key candidates. Between that and Noah Kagan Hiring Process we’ve brought on 7 key people since going through this hiring process who have been nothing short of incredible.

Here’s what the process looks like:

Since applying this methodology to our hiring process we’ve built an amazing team. Here are the core members (note: we have multiple contractors for separate roles):

Our Hiring Process

Now you see the dangers of hiring too quickly or hiring the wrong people I want to share with you the process we use to bring people onto our team.

1. Defining the job

The first step is to define for yourself what exactly you are looking for. Who would be the perfect candidate for this role? The first failure point when hiring is not being crystal clear about what you really want the person you hire to accomplish.

Some questions you should be asking:

• What day-to-day tasks will they do?
• What experience would you like them to have?
• What programs or skills must they have to be successful?
• What does success look like for them?
• How many hours do you expect them to work?
• What personality type would fit well with your internal culture?
• What personality type would match this role? (Hint: an introvert would not fit in a sales role longterm)
• What can you offer them?

2. Create the job posting

You don’t need to get fancy with your job posting, we used a simple google doc to lay out exactly who we’re looking for. We even created a template to make it faster for each new hire as many of the company information stays the same.

Contents of job posting:

1. Fun opening
2. Background on our company
3. What this new hire will need to do
4. Skills/Software knowledge they need
5. Who they need to be (characteristics you’re looking for)
6. Perks you offer
7. Details of what they need to do to apply

3. Create application process

The goal of the application process is to collect as many qualified people as possible. Don’t worry about having to go through a ton of applicants, there’s a way to automate your process to quickly filter out anyone who can’t follow basic instructions – this will save you a TON of time weeding out people that are a bad fit.

Create the instructions to apply

Here’s an example of ours:

Set up a canned response

This is for those who apply and get through to the next round of the hiring process. If you want to know more about Canned Responses, check out this tutorial.
Here’s what our canned response looks like:

Create filters for your emails

You’ll want to create filters within your email to automatically sort through the applications. This way you can have the people that followed your instructions sent through to the next stage and the rest will be filtered out. This stage is to get rid of people with bad attention to detail such as forgetting to include a link you asked for. For more info on creating filters, check here.

Here’s an example of what our filters look like:

Create a questionnaire form

The link to this questionnaire form will be in the canned response that those who get through stage 1 receive. This form can be created in Google forms, however, we like Typeform because they are sexy AF.

For the questionnaire content, the point of the survey is to get some insights into how the person thinks so ask questions that will make people give extensive answers and real-life scenarios. You should customize the questions depending on the job the person is applying for. For example, a marketing assistant would be given different questions than someone applying for a design position.

Here’s an example of a questionnaire we sent out for a ‘Product Ninja’ position. We ended up hiring 2 people from here!

Test the application process

Make sure your automation for the application process is all working prior to posting the job anywhere, this way you’ll know nothings broken — otherwise some bad applicants may filter in, or even worse, some great applicants may fall through the cracks.

5. Generate a flow of applicants

Now you want to get as many eyes on your job posting as possible so you can collect as many qualified applicants as possible. We used Ziprecruiter to post job ads on a ton of different sites, it’s super easy and takes a lot of the manual work out of the process. Other sources for generating a flow of great applicants are:

• Referrals from business network
• Referrals from personal network
• Hire external recruiter
• Your customer list (we found 2 people from here!)

Since we have a pretty extensive personal network of people that know good people we posted on our personal Facebook pages and offered between a $500 and $1000 referral if someone sent a candidate our way that we ended up hiring.

Here was one of those such posts:

Why the picture? We want as many people to see the post as possible, to do this we wanted to make it more interesting and fun (also Facebook algorithm tends to like pictures).

No lie, I’ve been 2–3 versions of this picture for each time we’ve posted, see:

6. Review Applicants

Once you start collecting applicants you can go into the survey and review the answers, from here you can score them on a 1-5 scale based on what you thought. At this point you want to set up quick 15 minute interviews with all the 5’s (and the 4’s if you feel like it makes sense). For positions like designers, I weigh their portfolio above their answers to our questionnaire so you can use your own judgement with this.

7. Interview Applicants

The interviewing is a four-part process, we got it from ‘Who: The Method For Hiring’ which I would highly recommend you pick up. This process can go fast or slowly, for some we’ve hired it’s been over the course of several months and for

The 4-Part interviewing process can go fast or slowly, for some we’ve hired it’s been over the course of several months and for others it went much quicker. The point is to ensure you vet and find the right person because a bad hire will cost you in the long run.

Here’s what that looks like:

1. The screening interview
2. The Who interview
3. The focused interview
4. The reference interview

For the initial screening interview here’s the 4 questions we would ask:

1. What are your career goals?
2. What are you really good at or interested in doing professionally?
3. What are you not good at or not interested in doing professionally?
4. Who were you last 5 bosses and how will they each rate your performance on a 1-10 scale when we talk to them?

I’m not going to go into outlining each part in detail, just pick up this book where they’ll outline the purpose and outcome for each as well as provide the questions.

8. Hire someone

Tools we use to make hiring easy:

Gusto – For payroll and filing appropriate taxes

Track1099 – For contractors, ensuring you have the paperwork you need at the end of the year

Bill.com – For automating ACH Payments and invoice payments easy

Hope you found this useful and can use it for growing your team!

I made it another year! This will be my 4th annual review, and you can read 2016, 2015 and 2014 if you’re curious. I do these as a way to stop, process and reflect the previous year to figure out what went well, what didn’t and how best to move forward in 2018.

Disclaimer: I write reviews mainly for myself to learn from, to show people what’s possible in a year and also to hopefully help people learn from my mistakes.

Spoiler alert: 2017 was the hardest year of my life

This review will probably be my most in-depth and revealing as it was a hectic year. In fact, typically I discuss the things that went well before what didn’t go well… but much of the year was shaped by the unexpected.

This post is divided into sections:

• Travel
• What didn’t go as planned in 2017?
• What went well in 2017?
• My Hit List (favorite books, movies, products, etc.)
• Goals from 2017 review
• Big Learnings
• What’s my plan for 2018?

Travel:

2017 was very busy on the travel front, I calculated between business and personal travel I was away from home for 140 days last year, approximately 36% of my whole year!

That was over double what I traveled in 2016!

I visited 3 new countries, Australia, Fiji, Thailand.

• Australia — Jan 2017 (10 days)
• Palm Beach, FL — Jan 2017 (7 days)
• Poconos, PA — Feb 2017 (3 days)
• Powder Mountain, UT — March 2017 (6 days)
• Europe trip — April 2017 (17 days)
  • Ireland (10 days)
  • Belgium (3 days)
  • Barcelona (4 days)
• FiDi, NY – May/June 2017 (19 days)
• Austin, TX — June 2017 ~ DC Talk (5 days)
• Boulder, CO — July 2017 (5 days)
• Ireland— July 2017 (10 days)
• Austin, TX — August 2017 (4 days)
• Nashville, TN — August 2017 (4 days)
• Boulder, CO — August 2017 (5 days)
• Denver, CO — August 2017 (7 Days)
• Fiji — Sept 2017 (9 days)
• Austin, TX  — Sept 2017 (4 days)
• Key West, FL  — Oct 2017 (5 days)
• Austin, TX — Dec 2017 (4 days)
• Thailand — Dec 2017 (16 days)

What didn’t go as planned:

2017 was a rollercoaster year, experiencing high-highs to low-lows, from one day to the next.

A perfect anecdote for this was the day I’d found out we’d won the Build a Bigger Business competition.

It was the 9th of August, and I was having coffee with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while, the conversation was emotional for me as we discussed my recent breakup (more on that shortly). Right then my phone started ringing, and the screen showed it was a caller from Canada. Typically I’d let calls go to voicemail, but I don’t get many calls from Canada, so I picked up.

It was Harley Finklestein, COO of Shopify, telling me that we’d won the contest and would be going to Fiji next month. I went quickly from tears of sadness to ecstatic!

Like I said, from low lows to high highs.

Divorce

After 7.5 years together (4 of them married), my husband Keith and I separated, and have since gotten divorced.

As you might imagine, this was a significant drain on my emotional and mental wellbeing. Despite it being reasonably amicable (as far as what I’d believe divorce typically goes), it was the most challenging experience of my life.

At first, I was in denial, pretending everything was normal because I didn’t want to be perceived as a failure (because that’s how I felt.)

It took a while for it to sink in as I was traveling a lot around the time of the breakup. I did this as when I was away I could easily compartmentalize everything, essentially making my problems ‘out of sight, out of mind’. It was particularly when I was back in New York that I’d have to face everything, which I did between all of my trips. In retrospect, it wasn’t a smart way to handle it as I’d lose any progress I’d make with every trip and felt like I was starting over when I got back.

I don’t think I understood the grieving process until I was deep in it.

When I was home in New York, everything would sink in, and I fell into a mild depression — there were many days where I didn’t even want to get out of bed. It was a considerable burden personally and also slipped into my professional life as I felt unable to perform at the same level, both for myself or my team. I wasn’t able to be creative, and it felt like all my energy was being used for merely maintaining.

I realized after sharing experiences with others who’ve been through it that it’s all part of the grieving process, and the only way out is through it.

Don’t judge your blooper reel by everyone else’s highlight reel

The irony was that if you were to judge by social media my life looked like it was beyond incredible. It only occurred to me whenever I bumped into someone I hadn’t seen in a while, and they said “You’re doing amazing!” how warped social media was.That’s when the saying, “Don’t judge your blooper reel by everyone else’s highlight reel” became real for me.

Burn Out

After five years of entrepreneurship, I finally hit burn out.

Between the travel, working and my personal life in disarray I ended the year feeling mentally and physically exhausted. In fact, I was at a conference in Austin in December when I had to fly home a day early due to feeling mentally wrecked. I didn’t feel like I could show up another day and put on the same facade.

The advantages of running a remote team were that I could work from anywhere. The disadvantage was that I had done just that, worked from everywhere and never felt present as my mind was always thinking about work — for five years.

As the holidays approached I had people asking me what my plans were now that I was “alone”. As it was my first holiday season single, I wanted to skip the family stuff and go away on my own to regroup and refresh. So I did.

I booked a solo retreat in Thailand, and it was the best present I’ve ever given myself.

What went well:

1. Business growth + Team

We grew our team significantly over the past year. We went from a 6 person team at the beginning of 2017 to 13 people strong by the end of the year!

Growing the team has been the most challenging yet rewarding thing I did in 2017. I love investing in our people and seeing them grow as people as we simultaneously grow the business. I can’t wait to do more of it this year!

We completed two team retreats where we bring everyone together for team-building, planning, and fun.

We implemented a reading program.

Our mission is to help people become their Best Self, and that starts with creating a company culture that allows for the same personal development. We got this idea from our friend Jeff of World Wide Cyclery who does it with his team. 

2. Shopify Build a BIGGER Business 2017

In 2016 we won the Build a Business Competition, I wrote about the experience here.

Then in 2017 Shopify announced a new competition, the Build a BIGGER Business competition with Tony Robbins, which is for not new businesses but existing businesses that have scaled and grown.

We ended up winning the second year in a row (the only company to ever do that!). As part of the prize, we got to ring the NYSE opening bell again! So we got to experience a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity twice!

As part of the prize we got a 3 day New York experience, private jet flight, a trip to Fiji to stay at Tony Robbin’s private resort for a week and then mentorship from Tony Robbins, Tim Ferris, Daymond John, Marie Forleo, Tobi Lütke, Jon Steinberg, Debbie Sterling, Harley Finklestein and Tom Farley.

3. New apartment + new hobbies

At 30 years old I’d never lived by myself before, I’d gone from flatmates to living with Keith so living alone was an adjustment.

I moved into my new apartment in Long Island City (LIC) in June 2017. LIC is one stop from Manhattan (about 5 minutes) and is by the water with great views of Manhattan. It’s a two bedroom apartment with one bedroom being used as a home office.

My first guests and dear friends, Katya and Roel of Space Refinery, helped me making the place feel more like home. This is what we did in a day:

I moved across the street from a climbing gym which I joined shortly after moving and have been going an average of 2 times a week since September. It’s a great workout and a great spot to meet people outside of my usual circle.

4. Retreat in Thailand

When I hit burn out, I booked myself a personal retreat in Thailand.

I set an out of office for my email (first time ever!), I deleted Facebook, Twitter, News, Email from my phone and brought only fiction or mindset books with me. I didn’t want to think about work, so I forbid myself from reading any business books.

It was the first time in 5 years since I got into entrepreneurship that I 100% unplugged from work and felt truly relaxed. I used the time to focus on myself and even bought some artist materials to get back to being creative again. This was a quick watercolor on the beach and was the most relaxing 30 mins I’d had in years:

I used the time in Thailand to do a complete detox. I completed an 8 day cleanse, which meant not eating and giving my body a much-needed rest to repair itself. I took a month off drinking and followed a vegetarian diet — it was the most healthy holiday I’ve ever had and as I said, the best gift I could have given myself after the year I had.

I met a lovely bunch of people who were also traveling solo, and we enjoyed a lovely Christmas Day together, on the beach, in the water and eating delicious, healthy food. It was incredible.

My Hit List:

A collection of my favorite “stuff” from the year, in no particular order.

Best Books:

• A New Earth – Eckhart Tolle
• The Four Agreements – Miguel Ruiz
• Principles – Ray Dalio
• How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big – Scott Adams
• Ready Player One – Ernest Cline

Best TV Shows:

• The Handmaids Tale
• Game of Thrones
• Black Mirror
• Big Little Lies
• Ozarks

Best Movies:

• Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
• Wind River
• Lady Bird
• Wonder
• Icarus

Best Products:

1. SONOS
My SONOS speakers were my Christmas gift to myself – they are incredible. I first experienced them when I traveled to Belgium last year, and my friends had them all over their apartment.

I picked up speakers for my office, my bedroom, bathroom and the living room. It’s sick!

2. Briggs & Riley Carry On
I’d never invested in great luggage before and always felt like I’d arrive, and everything would be a mess. Then my friend showed me her luggage and wouldn’t stop talking about how amazing it was. When she showed me the space to hang clothes, that it was expandable, separate sections… I was convinced.

I love this bag – I’ve had this luggage for only six months, and it’s been well worth it. The best part is how much you can carry and still have it as a carry-on.

3. 2017 iMac 4.2ghz 64 GB 2400 MHz DDR4

Taking advice from my friend Bryan who said:

“If you were a lumberjack, would you buy the cheapest axe they make? No. You’d buy the best, take care of it and keep it sharp. Same goes for your computer. Don’t go cheap here. It is your tool.”

I upgraded to a desktop computer this year (still use a laptop when I travel), was a hefty investment but not one regret.

4. Anker PowerCore 10000 Portable Charger

I barely leave the house without this thing, it’s fantastic. If you have an iPhone you know how quickly those batteries die – this charger will keep your fuel up. Highly recommend.

5. Gravity Blanket

I’m a serial early-adopter for cool ideas, and also always see products that improve my life as an investment — so I preordered this sometime last year from only a Facebook ad. I received it a few weeks ago, and I’m digging it.

My heat was broken when I returned from Thailand (when it was 6°F outside), and I think this blanket saved me.

Goals from 2017 Review:

When I review my goals for 2017 that I wrote in last years post I see I was woefully off target in some of them. Although in all fairness, when I wrote my goals for 2017 I hadn’t expected the turbulence in my personal life so I won’t be too hard on myself.

Work:

1. $X million revenue goal
2. 2 Retreats with the team
3. Speak at 3 events

Workout:

1. 3 x workouts a week
2. 2 x Obstacle courses/or races (didn’t do any this year)

Personal:

1. Write a fiction book
2. Get my driving license
3. Plan a weekend trip away every quarter  (need to specify ‘relaxing weekend away’ for next time)

My 2017 work goals were on track. However, my personal and workout goals took the backburner. I would usually be embarrassed by publicly missing my goals, however considering the year I had I feel like I had a good reason for taking a different path. This year I’ll be prioritizing my personal and health goals.

I’ll be getting my license in Q1 this year so I’m not making it a goal, it’s just happening!

Big Learnings:

1. Schedule time for creativity & new things

Less time on travel and consuming content, more time on creation!

Whether it was design or fun experiments, I used to be much more creative than I have been the past 18 months. As I’ve gotten caught up in business and entrepreneurship, this has taken a backseat and has caused me to not enjoy life or work as much. It only occurred to me when I was in Thailand and was painting and sketching for fun. There was no agenda for myself or for anyone else; it was just for me.

2018 = Create more than I consume

2. Relentless Focus & saying NO

I have a hard time saying no to people that ask for my time, especially as I have a tendency to want to help people — so if I get asked to meet for lunch or coffee, I often say yes. This leaves me feeling stretched thin as I’m prioritizing other people’s agenda over my own.

I’ve realized that the people who want to meet often do so because they appreciate the cool stuff I’ve done, therefore if I stop doing the focused work that got me here, then I am no longer the same person that they wanted to meet in the first place.

2018 = Relentless focus on what I want to do, achieve, have.

3. Less Travel, More Work

This goes along with relentless focus. Travel throws me off my routine, and the start/stopping is disruptive to my work, my team and life. I’m going to be much more picky about what events I choose to go to in 2018, so I can hit every milestone I’m aiming for this year. It’s also important that I scale the creative side of the BestSelf Co team so that it’s not dependent on me, that was a big issue with the travel this year.

My goals for 2018:

Work:

1. Scale the product team to work without me
2. Speak at five events
3. Visit China – factory visit & Canton Fair

Health:

1. Bike 1000 miles
2. 3 x Obstacle courses/or races (signed up for one so far)
3. Follow vegetarian diet 4 days per week. Limit alcohol to a maximum of 3 times per week (typ 1-2).

Personal:

1. Do something creative 2X Weekly (drawing, painting, writing)
2. Write and publish a short story
3. Unplug for 2 weeks during the year and explore a new place

Comment below and tell me what a goal or commitment you’re making in 2018 – I want to know!

Hiring the right people is hard, as detailed in my struggles when building our team.

Once you hire the work isn’t over as now you need to create or breed a culture that supports the people so they can do their best work.

Creating a remote culture is even harder as there’s a lack of an everyday tangible connection to the team.

As co-founder of BestSelf Co, a young bootstrapped company we knew that we weren’t going to be able to contend with other big companies on salaries, benefits or cool office space when we were building out our team.

Given this, how do you motivate people to do their best work?

You make work more than just collecting a paycheck.

Feeling aligned with a company’s values, mission and philosophy is one of the top reasons employees love where they work. It’s also a primary reason that consumers feel they have a relationship with brands.

Given that I’ve never worked at a remote company, nor at a company with a great culture, it was difficult to understand what that could even look like so I started doing some research.

A company famous for their company culture is Zappos. I would highly recommend reading ‘Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose’ by Tony Hsieh which had a big impact when creating ours at BestSelf Co.

I learned that one of the first steps to creating a cohesive culture within your team is to first define what your core values are. However, knowing we should do it and actually taking the time to do it are two different things.

After winning the Shopify Build a BIGGER Business competition in 2017 we were given the opportunity to spend time in Fiji with Joe Gebbia in, co-founder of AirBnB. Our big takeaway from our time with him was to sit down and define our core values — before we left the island.

It’s easy as a founder to push things like this to the side when you’re growing because it doesn’t seem like a high priority. However, had we done this process earlier we’d have saved ourselves a lot of heartache, specifically with our hiring process.

Some examples of companies with core values:

All these companies have very clear and defined core values.

Our process

When Allen and I sat down to define our core values we shared our personal values that we knew had been crucial when starting and growing the company thus far.

Then we looked to our team to see what core ideas and methodologies had already been floating around.

When Zappos created their core values in 2005 they asked their team to share their own personal values, which they combined and compared against the team. This is the email they sent out:

Our team was 8–10 people whenever we sat down to define our core values. While we didn’t follow the same structure as Zappos with having them share their values, we instead took the key employees (the one’s we’d love to clone) and defined the values that made them great.

This exercise was challenging in that after completing it we could see a few team members that did not share our core values, which made for some hard choices to be made.

Had we completed this exercise earlier and known our core values it would have been much more clear who was the right fit (and who wasn’t) during the hiring process.

After some massaging and consideration, here’s what our core values looks like now:

1. Default to Action

Make decisions, take initiative and solve problems. A little less conversation, a little more action.

Allen and I have always defaulted to action. It’s the reason we initially became accountability partners, and why I asked him to be my partner on our first Amazon business — because I knew I could count on him to get shit done.

2. Assume Positive Intent

We give each other the benefit of the doubt always whether it’s a teammate, vendor or a customer. Always assume that people are doing the best with what they’ve got.

We give people the benefit of the doubt at all times. We believe the world would be a much kinder place if more people did this as when we assume negative intent we get angry and frustrated. By assuming the opposite automatically we can be better listeners and be more effective in our communication. With a remote team, this is especially important.

3. Absolute Ownership

Everyone has a stake in the success of the company and should be passionate about growth opportunities. Act like owners.

I got this concept from ‘Extreme Ownership’ by Jocko Willink, a former Navy SEAL who shares the idea that the team believes in the “why,” understands the “why,” and then pursues the “what.”

This begins at the top with the leader but flows down to the rest of the team who should “own it all.”

4. Thrive in Discomfort

We believe the status quo is soul-sucking. We focus on continuous learning and personal development so we’re better than yesterday but not as good as tomorrow.

All growth comes from discomfort, and since I’ve made it a point to step outside my comfort zone my life has changed for the better.

We want our team to constantly work on improving themselves while working with us so they also can become their Best Self. We do this through investing in them through conferences, an internal reading program and setting an example for them of stepping outside our comfort zone.

For example, I signed up for a Spartan race with 5 days notice this month and signed up for a 40-mile bike race earlier this year (before even owning a bike) to force myself outside of my comfort zone.

5. Best is our standard

Constantly work to raise your standards in every area of life and the universe will meet you there.

We believe that how you do anything is how you do everything and whether it’s in your personal life or within BestSelf Co we always aim to do our best. By doing our best we’ll consistently raise our standards and others will raise theirs to meet us.

Weekly implementation:

To ensure the Core Values are not just meaningless statements that we created once and never look back on we have established weekly accountability.

Each week we do a round robin and ask the team to choose one team member and an action they completed in the past week that demonstrates one of our core values.

At our BestSelf Unlocked event, we did a short segment on core values in which we had our team present one core value in pairs, and what each meant to them.

Share your values!

Does your company have a set of core values established? If so, how were they created and implemented on?

I’d love to hear all your thoughts in the comments!

Success and economic growth lies not in good products or services but in the quality of the experience you provide.

I recently delivered at Keynote at Seva (formerly Convertkit) Craft and Commerce conference about starting a growing and global brand through crafting a Product Experience.

I believe we’re at a point in history where selling experiences have eclipsed the creation of products.

Had an absolute blast at Craft and Commerce this weekend. It was a privilege to be asked to speak on the same stage as @caseyneistat @patflynn @nathanbarry @artofvisuals @paleochef and so many incredible people. Loved connecting with old friends and new ❤️ – I created this talk very recently around how to create experiences using a 3 step framework. It was my first time doing it and I really enjoyed sharing some of the weird stuff I’ve been fascinated by this past few years. . Thanks you for having me @convertkit /Seva! #craftcommerce #entrepreneur #craftandcommerce

A post shared by Cathryn lavery (@cathryn_lavery) on Jul 2, 2018 at 5:18pm PDT

Back when I was in architecture school I did my masters thesis on experiential architecture — a study on how spaces can make you feel differently. As I’ve transitioned into entrepreneurship, I’ve found myself fascinated with how to create experiences and transformations through product. In this post I’ll be sharing the framework I use when designing an experience, — whether you sell physical products, services or digital products, your goal should not be to only sell products — but to create an experience for your customers.

The success of any product lies not solely on usability, but in its meaning in the lives of its users.

We launched BestSelf Co in 2015 with a single product on Kickstarter, the SELF Journal.

Since then we’ve grown from an idea to remote team shipping products globally, we won the Shopify Build a Business competition in 2016 and went on to win the Shopify Build a BIGGER business competition in 2017.

All of this started with us figuring out how to create an experience for our customers.

What is an Experience?

“The awareness of the psychological effects elicited by the interaction with a product, including the degree to which our senses are stimulated, the meanings and values we attach to the product, and the feelings and emotions that are elicited” – Schifferstein and Hekkert, 2008

An experience is the customer journey from beginning to end, from the physical activities to the emotions felt.

There’s a vast gap between selling a commodity and selling an experience, but the riches lie in filling this gap.

Think about Starbucks and how they took a commodity like coffee and created an experience around it.

When Howard Schultz created Starbucks, his goal was to create a unique experience to separate themselves from other coffee shops.

It was to be the third place, between home and work. A place that provides comfortable chairs, chill music, the internet — and coffee.

From the beginning he wanted it to feel like a continental coffeehouse.

When places like Dunkin Donuts used the term Small, Medium and Large, Starbucks had Tall, Grande, and Venti as well as well as fancy sounding drinks like Caffè Americano, Caffè Misto, and Macchiato.

When Starbucks made the experience feel different to us, we stopped using the prices at chains like Dunkin’ Donuts as an anchor, but instead were open to the new anchor that Starbucks created.

This meant they could charge more than other places serving just coffee.

I mean think about it, how much fancier you feel ordering a grande americano than a medium coffee? For a lot of people, enough to pay an extra dollar at least.

That, to a great extent, is the genesis of how Starbucks rose to the top and distinguished itself — by creating its own experience.

55% of consumers would pay more for a better experience. – Defaqto Research, 2011

The experience economy has and will continue to change the way we design and deliver products.

Then there’s Apple…

Apple is probably one of the most famous companies for its product experience — because, for them, nothing is too small to be considered. A company where simple actions are created to include moments of delight.

(A small example would be the simple act of emptying your trash on a Mac as compared to a Windows. If you’ve done either you know it feels different.)

Then there’s the physical aspect of their products and the packaging.

You know that feeling when you purchase a new Apple product?

The unboxing experience is second to none.

In fact, many of us (me included) have a hard time disposing of the boxes afterward and so our closets look a little like this:

So now I know what you might be thinking, Apple sells cool products and has an almost unlimited budget which makes the experience more accessible to create.

But what about Harry’s?

They sell razors, AKA the most boring thing in the world.

Like, imagine meeting someone at a party and them saying “I work for a razor company” you’d be like cool (read: boring) and make an exit to refill your drink.

But someone says they work for Harry’s? You would probably ask a million questions about this awesome brand (maybe including how you can also get a job there.)

— this is the result of creating an experience.

…So how do we go about creating an experience?

The 3 Acts of Product Experience

Creating experience should be considered in the same way you write a play. It is a three-part act with a beginning, a middle and an end.

1. Beginning: Visceral

This is your immediate natural reaction to the product, the form, the design, feel, texture, color.

When you see a product or visit a website you have a visceral reaction to it, this is natural and not something you can typically control.

Examples:

• Allure of color texture
• User interface design
• Website design & imagery
• Senses; how can you engage them?

2. Middle: Behavioral

This is the more cut and dry part, consider visceral as the form, the behavioral as the function.

What is your physical response to it?
How do you act?
Do you understand it? Is it functional?
Does it satisfy your needs?

Examples:

• User experience — is it clear what action should be taken?
• Ease of use — do you need a manual to turn it on?
• Support — is it needed?

3. End: Reflective

The more ‘woo woo’ area of the experience, but what really makes it unique.

How did it engage your associations and memories?
Did it trigger feelings of surprise, delight, and trust?
Can you tell a story around it?
Does it appeal to your self-image?

Examples:

• Memory of experience
• Emotional associations
• Self-expression

What we did:

When we started BestSelf Co, we knew that customer experience was key for our success and so we mapped the customer journey in detail for each of these three parts. We laid out both how we wanted people to feel at each step and how to make ourselves unique.

We knew the key was not in creating something brand new, but creating an experience that felt new.

ACT I – VISCERAL

Positioning:

Not a day planner – a 13-week framework to achieve your goal.

Like Starbucks separates themselves with using grande rather than medium, we would use the term goal framework rather than day planner to create a new anchor in your mind.

We believed that people would place more importance on achieving a goal than planning their day — this would make them more invested in the outcome.

Packaging

When designing the SELF Journal, we knew we wanted to create a similar experience to Apple from the moment our product arrived at a customers door to opening the package.

Some questions we asked:

• How can we build anticipation before the SELF Journal box is opened?
• How do we create an experience to remember?
• Can we tell a story through the packaging?

Our mission was to design a beautiful box that people would keep, but we didn’t want it stored in the back of a closet somewhere gathering dust, it should still serve a purpose.

The SELF Journal chronicles your goals and serves as a physical representation of your achievements. These goals should be celebrated and put on display, which is why we designed the box the way we did.

We even got down to the packaging tape on the outside box.

We didn’t have the budget for a custom box when we started; this is a great way to create a unique branded experience with a low budget.

Funny story we’ve had a customer tell us they saw a box in their apartment building that someone else ordered with this tape and ended up checking up the site and buying from us.

ACT II – BEHAVIORAL

It was important to us that it was clear how to be successful with this product — it’s important to ensure your customer or client knows what success looks like.

To do this we knew that we had to create content and resources to help people find success with the tool so that they would continue to come back to us.

Some things we did:

Quickstart Guides

Created quick-start guides on how to complete journal based on frequently asked questions we received.

Community

Built up a community of people who are trying to achieve their goals through the SELF Journal. It is an extremely engaged community and has become an incredible resource for us for customer interactions, feedback, and ideas for future products.

It’s currently at over 31,000 members!

ACT III – REFLECTIVE

The reflective part of the journey came from a culmination of the steps we took during visceral and the behavioral stages that left people feeling generally delighted and knowing what they needed to do next.

It appealed to their self image of feeling motivated as they were working towards something bigger. To motivate people further we worked to create engaging challenges to keep them accountable and moving forward.

Challenges

We knew how important it was to have our customers create a habit of completing the journal each day, so we created a challenge to encourage them.

The challenge became essentially like a rebate system, and if they used the product every day for 30 days, we would give them a $10 Amazon gift card.

To be eligible, they would take a picture of their journal and either tag us on social media or put it in the group.

Outcome:

• Incredible group engagement
• Incentivized habit creation
• TONS of user-generated content for us

Physical Vs Digital — Bridging the gap

If you sell digital products or intangible services, consider how you can create a physical connection with an otherwise intangible product.

People’s perception of value is much greater when they have something in their hands which they can hold.

A great example of someone doing this well was Appsumo. A few years ago I bought an online course from them in 2013, and about a week after my purchase I received a small Moleskine notebook in the mail.

It was simple, yet incredible and memorable — and cost them less than $10.

They created a physical connection to an otherwise intangible digital product and in doing so engaged me after the sale.

Now’s the time to take action. You know the different elements that make up an experience — now you need to take the knowledge and craft it into your own journey.

Download the Product Experience Template: Click here to Download your Bonus

Questions to provoke thought:

• How can you build anticipation before your product/service is delivered?
• How do you want the person to feel buying/opening it?
• How do you create an experience to remember?
• What does the initial visceral reaction look like?
• For physical products, can you tell a story through the packaging?
• For digital products, is there a way to bridge the gap between digital and physical to give customers a tangible feeling?
• What does success look like with your product and how can you ensure that happens?
• Does your customer know what the success of your product or service looks like?
• What are fun ways to drive engagement?

How to Create Your Own Product Experience

Creating an experience for your customers will produce great results, because it will separate you from your competition, promote customer loyalty and solify your brand.

My recommendation:

1. Storyboard your existing customer journey
2. Categorize the journey into visceral, behavioral and reflective
3. Spot the gaps of where you’re not taking advantage of the opportunity to stand out.

When you do, share the results with me. I’d love to see how a few small tweaks affect your business.

Comment below with some people or companies you’ve had an incredible experience with, I’m looking for more examples for the case study I’m working on.