Freedom_Fast_Lane_Predictions_for_2015.mp3

Foreign.

Welcome to Freedom Fast Lane, your neighborhood friendly Ryan Daniel Moran here. And today I'm going to be going out on a limb doing something bold that I probably should not do. I am going to be making some predictions for the coming year as I sit here and record this. We're a couple days before Christmas in 2014. I hope this year has been fruitful for you. I hope that it has been rewarding for you. I hope you are a year older, wealthier and wiser and hopefully happier as well. Now, it always gets people in trouble when they make predictions for what's coming next, but I just can't help myself. So I'm going to be making some predictions for what I think is going to be happening based on some trends that I'm seeing in business, in the economy and some other areas where I see some major trends and shifts happening so that you can be prepared for them. Now, if in a year from now, now I'm completely wrong, I'm not gonna base my career on this. This is just based on what I'm seeing. I was just at the bookstore yesterday. I was at Barnes and Noble and I was picking up a book by my favorite economist. His name is Peter Schiff. He's been famous for predicting trends and seeing where the economy is going. And I was reading through and some of the predictions made by some people are so bold, I have to laugh to myself, even though I can't help myself. But read the predictions that some people make. And sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong. And of course, people celebrate when they're right and downplay when they're wrong. So I'm not going to base my career on any of these predictions. I'm just here to tell you what I think is happening in the economy and in business, specifically Internet businesses, and where they're going to be, probably according to what I'm seeing happening right now in the marketplace where I think things are going to be going in 2015 and beyond. Now, before we get into it, there's one house cleaning item that I would like your feedback on. If you haven't noticed, over@freedomfastlane.com I have stopped doing income reports, income reports where I was documenting how much money each business was making. And the reason I've stopped doing them is just because I was starting to get a little bit uncomfortable with the way that they were being interpreted, because people were interpreting them as if, you know, I had businesses that were doing a quarter million dollars a month. And so I had friends and family members thinking I was personally pocketing that amount of money. And just the way that people show up around you when they think that you're making a certain amount of money, it tends to I guess, put a little bit of a change in the dynamic between those people and, and that's their experience, however they want to interpret those numbers. But I don't know, it became a point of contention for me and I'm now reconsidering how I want to do these, these monthly reports, if I should continue them or if I should change them in a way that might serve the marketplace more and also protect myself and my family a little bit better. So I would love to hear your feedback if you would leave me a comment over on this page@freedomfastling.com on the page for this podcast and just let me know what you think of the income reports. Do you find them helpful? How would you like to see them tweaked? Is there a way that you see that we could tweak them to make them better? I'm considering doing a progress report instead of maybe an income report just to be a little bit more clear. I don't want to mislead anybody, but I know a lot of people find them really helpful as well. So I'm changing my approach to that. I'd love your feedback on that. Alright, so in 2014 we saw some major things happen. We saw a bunch of people become Amazon entrepreneurs. We saw the Internet marketplace really run away from the old way of doing things. We don't so much hear about marketing on Google and Facebook anymore. We don't so much hear about little businesses that make a lot of money. We hear the conversation has shifted a little bit to long term businesses, to a lot of physical products businesses. And that is largely in part to the folks behind Amazing Selling Machine who have really changed the conversation and I think elevated the conversation a lot. But I think that the conversation is going to keep some of what it gathered in 2014 and then make some changes moving on into 2015. I think we're actually going to see a return to some old business practices that made sense that but people got away from because of certain changes in the marketplace. So more specifically, you have heard me say in the past that there is a major market consolidation coming for Amazon businesses. And I put the timetable of September 2015 and there's nothing major that's going to happen in September 2015. I just mean that at about September of 2015 that will mark basically the end point in which it is easy to build A business specifically on Amazon. There's been this big trend to move towards Amazon. The people who got in early, made a whole bunch of money. There's always a market consolidation in every marketplace. But every time there's a big wave of products and services into a certain channel, there's a consolidation that happens. And I think that will be in full swing in September of 2015. That doesn't mean you can't start a new business. That just means that it will be much, much harder to do it. We're already seeing this trend happen. We're seeing a wave of people. We now are nearing saturation point. We're not there yet, but we're getting closer to it. And then one saturation point point hits in probably summer of 2015. You're going to start to see people consolidate and push out the little guys in September of 2015. So that's not there to scare you. This happens in every market. But in order to succeed in that, if you want to start a new business, you need to be prepared to spend more on your marketing to have more products than just one. And that leads me to one prediction. In 2015, you're going to see the conversation change from what product can I have on Amazon to what business can I launch all at once? Because in order to compete, people are going to have to release entire businesses rather than just one product. You're also going to see people change the conversation to instead of what product is already selling right now that I can release to the marketplace, it's going to be what can I invent or what new spin on something can I create? The example that I think of is the.

HD cameras that are really, really popular right now. The Hero HD is really popular.

The action cameras that you're seeing pop up everywhere. That's a new spin on an old product. Cameras were going out of style and then you have the GoPro hero come out and all of a sudden everybody loves having cameras again, specifically video cameras and action shot cameras. It's a new spin on an old idea. You're going to see that become more popular specifically on Amazon, but that is going to usher in.

A new opportunity for different channels. So let's see if I can make this a little bit more clear. I think you are going to see entrepreneurs have to think more creatively about the new products that they release if they're going to use an established channel like Amazon. Now, if they're not using an established channel on Amazon, they've been doing this for years already because Amazon is the Place where you go to buy a final product. It's not where you go usually to research something, but I think you may see that start to shift and people start to release their new products or their new spins on old types of products on Amazon and that is going to open up a new set of channels. And I think that the focus of attention for new business in 2015 is going to be a search for new channels outside of Amazon. I think if there is a big product launch in 2015, it is probably going to be about how to have your products sell in other channels like retail, how to have funnels that promote your products. What are the new ways that you can promote your business rather than just throwing it up on an existing channel and letting it sell, which is basically what a lot of Amazon entrepreneurs have done in 2014, even back into 2013. I also think you're going to see a return of a focus on email marketing. The reason for this is because most physical product entrepreneurs are new entrepreneurs. They are not skilled in the ways of how the Internet worked 10 years ago, even five years ago. So the new strategies that have kind of been lost in the last few years thanks to a change in the marketplace are going to come back and serve the marketplace that now exists. For example, I mentioned email. Email marketing isn't being heavily used to promote physical products businesses for most entrepreneurs right now. I think that is going to change. Funnels like sales funnels, where you have a front end product and upsells that is being very underused right now across all industries at the moment because you had regulatory issues in 2014, you had the Dr. Oz craze basically come crashing down. We all knew it was coming, we just didn't know. When we saw all these Dr. Oz products get shut down and we saw a lot of supplement companies go under as the FDA or ftc, whichever one it is, started to crack down on. People, people have moved away from information products just because it's not hot, it's not sexy right now. And things like different traffic sources like Google and Facebook are getting more difficult to maximize. And as a result of that, people have moved away from from sales funnels. At the same time you have Amazon people wondering what's the next stage beyond Amazon? I don't want all my eggs in Amazon's basket. What do I do next? And as a result, I think you're gonna see those entrepreneurs move into sales funnels and you're going to see those entrepreneurs start to learn the skills that worked five years ago like sales funnels like email marketing, like. And as a result, you're going to have basically a new wave of that type of a product moving away from Amazon and even physical products businesses. I think one wave that is going to become hot in the Entrepreneur Circle in 2015 is going to be app businesses. Creating apps for the iPhone, creating apps for Android, even Windows. At some point, Windows has to catch fire. I don't know if you ever used a Windows Phone, but they're actually excellent pieces of technology. At some point they have to catch on. So their app store is probably going to become bigger in 2015 as well. All that to say that if there's a new wave of type of business that is going to come on the scene, I think it is going to be app businesses. And the reason for this is because you have the maximization of a lot of different industries at this point and everyone is constantly looking for what is the next channel and what is the next opportunity. And I actually think that the app business is both late, meaning there haven't been a lot of big pushes of marketers and entrepreneurs to the App Store in the way that I would interpret it. I don't think there's been critical mass yet. There's plenty of opportunity there. It's still fairly easy to dominate. And it's been. Although there was an initial wave of entrepreneurs to move on to the App Store a few years ago, it has quieted down since. So I think you're going to see a lot of marketers and entrepreneurs move into app businesses. That is going to be the hot thing sometime in 2015. At some point it's going to become. It's going to be hot and everybody and their mother is going to have is going to be jumping on to start an app business. Just like podcasting was in 2014, where everybody was jumping on to have a podcast or everybody was jumping onto Amazon because it was the hot thing. Apps are going to be next. That is my prediction. If there's one industry that is going to explode, it's probably going to be the app business. It's probably not something that I personally am going to participate in, because it's not a business model that I know. It's not a business model that I really care to know. Except in the event of building a app business, not for the downloads, but for the users to then build and sell. I'm actually working to line up an interview podcast with somebody who actually builds businesses, not so much for the revenue, but for the users, because users are what drive an exit to A business. But now I'm geeking out on business and I'm getting ahead of myself. So forgive me. I think in 2015 you are going to see a return of another type of business that has faded in the last couple of years and it was warranted for that to die down. But I think you're going to see a roaring return to digital products, meaning information products being sold on the Internet. That industry has very much quieted down in the last few years and I think that is going to come roaring back. The reason I say this is because the, that business was purged of a lot of junk and that happens after every saturation. It's called a consolidation. A lot of junk gets purged and so new entrepreneurs or wantrepreneurs, people who aren't succeeding in business, fade out of that marketplace because there's nobody hawking that as a money making machine anymore. So you've seen a major movement away from information products in the last few years because sites like clickbank have cracked down. It's harder to buy traffic now from places like Facebook. But because of those, because of those changes, you've seen such a reduction in the business in that industry that now it's open again for new blood. It's now open again. It's almost like we're, we're going back to the beginning again. It's so ripe for the taking that creating information products is, it's easy again, it's back, it's cool again, or it's gonna be in 2015. So don't be surprised if you see a return of the information product in 2015. And I tell you all of these so that if you want to be ahead of the trend, you can start, you can start planning for this in 2015. Maybe it'll take a little bit longer than a year, but I think that information products and app businesses are going to be hot again because just look at the numbers, right? There's been this big trend into Amazon and into making physical products businesses and supplement businesses.

And there's a high barrier to entry in that market built in because you have to buy a lot of goods. And when you sell a product, your end profit can be as little as a few dollars because you have cost of goods sold, you have fees associated with the sale and you might only end up making a profit of a few bucks. But if an information product you have a cost of almost zero and you can have profit margins of 98%. So as a result, you could sell a hundred dollar product and make $100 or you can sell a $30 product and make $30. And that is going to look cool again because it's compared to the physical products world where there are built in cost of goods sold and a higher barrier to entry. Since your end customer value is lower and, and your cost to get a customer is higher. Because of that, you're going to see a return to the old way of Internet marketing that was hot and sexy a few years ago and that's information products. So have I beat this horse dead enough? Have I beat this dead horse enough.

That information products and app businesses I think are going to become more popular in 2015? I think they're going to become roaring back.

Because the opportunities are there. And at the same time you're going to see physical products businesses look for new channels outside of Amazon. Not simply because.

Amazon needs to change, but because that marketplace itself is starting to get saturated. That does lead me to one, we'll call it one of my bolder predictions in 2015 and that is that Amazon is going to have to come up with some new way to innovate. It's gonna have to come up with something different in order to keep people interested. They had the, their Amazon phone, the fire phone or whatever it was, and it didn't do well. It absolutely bombed. And that was their big splash in 2015 was they wanted to have the competition in with Google and.

With Apple. They wanted to get into the data aggregation game where they've got all this data from your phone, they have apps, they're now trying to compete with Chromecast to get the Amazon Prime. Now in that little stick that plugs into your inter USB at the back of your computer and stream Internet video, they're trying to make a splash into, into Google and Apple's territory and they're getting their butts whooped. So as a result I think you're gonna see Amazon try to innovate in some sort of new area. The thing that I'm curious about, and this is by no means a prediction, it's more I'm seeing the trend has to happen at some point. 3D printing, I'm very curious if we'll see Amazon get into the 3D printing world and actually instead of having focusing on really fast shipping, if they'll focus on instant printing, if they'll, if they'll have certain goods be available to be printed, you can buy it online, you basically get the blueprint, download it to your computer and it print in your 3D printer. Now I don't know if this is, I don't know if we've got enough time, if the trend is fast enough moving in 2015 for it to happen, I think that's bound to happen at some point. But in 2015 you've got to see Amazon try to innovate in some way. They have too much cash, they're growing too fast to not try and work into some new area in order to stay relevant. Not that they're fading into obscurity, but because they're so aggressively focused on growth and what they put their efforts into in 2014 was an absolute epic bomb. So you're going to see some new area and new opportunities come into Amazon, but I don't know what that is yet. Let's talk quickly about new waves and new industries that are going to become bigger. I think new tropics are going to continue to become very popular. You might see the, the FDA finally get involved in nootropics, but I think you're going to see brain hacking and nootropics and eating for productivity become more and more popular. If you are behind on this, I did a great podcast with Elon Ferdman called Performance Enhancing Brain Drugs where we talked about what nootropics are and how they can help hack performance. I've been experimenting myself with them with interesting results. I'm currently drinking yerba mate.

And I'm loving my yerba mate and the productivity that it gives me. So I think you're gonna, I think you're gonna continue to see this wave become bigger. Right now it's still this like underground entrepreneurial, like.

Look down upon community. The people who are experimenting with their brains and things that make a lot of noise and mainstream attention often start that way. So I think you're gonna start to see bigger companies capitalize on this trend and push nootropics into the mainstream. Now what that exactly is gonna look like, I don't know. But I think you're going to see things like piracetam, aniracetam and these lab made drugs start to become more mainstream and people take them outside of this little brain hacking circuit where it is right now. I think you're going to see those things get pushed into the mainstream. Things that are in the mainstream always start as little cultish ideas, which is what nootropics are right now. But that's changing and I think you're eventually going to see capitalists bring that into the mainstream and hopefully clean it up a little bit. Right now you sometimes have to order them from overseas. I ordered a nootropic from overseas and had my credit card stolen. So I hope that I'm right in this, that some nootropics become more mainstream and you have more opportunities to purchase them. And I think right now you can't even sell them on Amazon. I think they'll become mainstream enough to where you can buy them online in a safe, secure way. And it's going to be pretty routine for people to purchase those. I also think you are going to see in 2015 be the year where you have major companies making it cool to believe in alternative medicine. I said I phrased that poorly. So let me try to explain. I think you are going to see a.

Legitimization of the alternative medicine area. I live in Austin, Texas and in Austin, Texas, it's very cool to be alternative and to do things like to ascribe your physical problems to leaky gut syndrome or to going gluten free or these areas or these ideas that again started as cultish ideas that, that a lot of people took as woo woo science that are now gaining a lot of traction. I think you're going to see that become more accepted in the media. And more specifically, I think you're going to see mainstream medicine adopt a lot of previously alternative ideas into their common practices. So I. This trend has been happening for more than a decade where alternative medicine is becoming more and more mainstream. I think 2015 is the year where you have the, the western medicine world finally adopt a lot of things of alternative medicine.

And not all of it. Not the stuff that's still woo woo, but things that we've seen coming down the pike, things like I mentioned leaky gut a second ago. I think you're gonna see things like that become more legitimized in the western field of medicine. And I base that simply on the trend of the populace in certain areas of the country becoming cool with these ideas. I see this in Austin and this is a. Austin is often a predictor of what is going to be mainstream just because it's such a melting pot of, of a city. And there's. You have all these, all this diversity. And I think you're going to see the best ideas out of a melting pot like that filter over into the mainstream, specifically in alternative medicine. I also think you're going to see more of a focus on intentional communities in 2015. We are so isolated as a world right now. We are more connected, yet more lonely than we have ever been. And we have things like Facebook where we can know everything, what's Going on with everybody and yet we all feel bad about it because we're comparing ourselves to what we see on Facebook. I think you're going to see intentional community start to become popularized now. I'm not sure what that means. I don't know if that means more co working areas popping up around the world. I don't know if that means. I hope, I would like to see it actually. People building communities where people come, they bring their families and they live with other families and they are working together and they're actually building real community. At some point that is going to happen because we're lonelier than ever and we are tribal people and we create community. And at some point that is going to happen. I don't know if 2015 is the year, but I think you're going to start seeing people talk about intentional community now. Forgive me, I don't mean to offend anybody. I am not saying this is how I've chosen to live my life. I just see it as a trend. You see things like monogamy and long life marriage starting to fade as a trend. Right now. It's, it's becoming less and less popular. I was talking with somebody once and they said the fate of monogamy is going to be a trend. And then you're going to see monogamy and marriage come back later and it'll be a trend again, it'll be cool again. But right now the trend is to not be monogamous and to not have lifelong marriage. The reason for that, in my opinion, is because we are more disconnected than ever before. So since we're disconnected, we put all of our emphasis on one person to try and complete us. And that is a tall order for anybody. So people try to fill in the gaps through other ways, other means. I think you're going to see the importance of community start to come back because we're craving it so, so badly and what we're doing isn't working that you're going to see people start to adapt to intentional communities, bringing their families to an area where everyone is living together, they're serving one another, they're doing life together. And I think that's a really healthy alternative to what we've been doing up until this point. So you're gonna, I think you're gonna see people living closer together. You're going to see people actually building. They might even call them intentional communities where they are, are, are doing life together. And I think that's going to be a healthy thing and a trend that is going to continue for a long time, but we're going to see it really kick off in 2015. Let's move for fun into economics and politics briefly. I think in 2015, some interesting things are going to happen in politics because there is no direction. There's no clear leader.

In any direction. There's no real clear successor on either side of the aisle. In any side of the aisle, really, if we include third parties, there's no clear leadership being passed off to someone. So as a result, there's going to be a scrambling for leadership on both the Republicans and the Democrats. I think that, that what's going to happen is that on the Republican side of things, there's going to initially be a run to the right, meaning you're going to have the very old school Republicans like Rand Paul, like Marco Rubio, start to become, I guess you'd call them Tea Party candidates. They're going to be the ones that are getting a lot of the attention as far as the presidential run. My favorite, of course, being Rand Paul, the son of my hero, Ron Paul. And I think that those candidates, even, even Chris Christie to a certain extent, are going to be very popular on the Republican side for a while. So there's going to be a run to the right. You're going to hear the Republicans talk about the small government, no policing of the world, keeping government out of your business.

I think the message that Rand Paul has right now is going to be the one that is mainstream in 2015, but that is not going to last. Because what I think is going to happen is that Hillary Clinton is going to announce her candidacy. And in order to compete with Hillary Clinton, they're going to have to change their message to be more.

Centric. So I think that it's going to start off being right and you're going to have a push to the right and then it's going to come back to the center once Hillary Clinton runs. Because in order to beat Hillary Clinton, whose message is already well established, you're going to have to move the conversation more centered, center right rather than far right. But I don't think it's gonna work. I think that we're talking 2016 now. So forgive me, but I think if I'm right about Republicans starting out right and then moving the conversation to be more centric, I think they're gonna put up somebody like Jeb Bush and it's not gonna work. And Hillary Clinton will end up winning the election 2016. Now, I might change my mind at the end of 2015. I'm trying to only predict 20, 20, 15 right now. But in 2015, I think you're going to see the conversation go more right until Hillary Clinton announces her candidacy. Then it's going to come more center and it's probably going to be somebody very center getting the nomination in 2016. But we'll address that at the end of 2015. I hope that my next prediction is right and that is that on the politics side, at least when it comes to, I don't know about 2016, but in 2015, I think you're going to actually see.

Politicians play nice and cut back on negative campaigns. Reason being that it everyone knows we're tired of it. Everyone knows that the negativity in politics isn't cool and we're tired of hearing it. And it's going to be cool when the candidate who comes out and has a positive spin on things, he's going to start getting votes and politicians are going to say maybe a positive spin on things actually works. So I hope that it's right that we're going to see a move away from negative campaigns and towards positive, dare I say, respectful campaigns or respect in politics doesn't really exist. But I do think you will see a movement away from negative campaigns. And let's talk briefly about the economy. I think that the economy is going to mostly be flat in 2015. At some point we've got to have a major pullback. At some point we have to have another recession because market values are way too high, because the current state of oil prices is going to bring everything else down, which I happen to think is a good thing. I would argue that a recession is a necessary part of a growing economy, not something that needs to be avoided. But I think you're going to see a recession start to happen. Might wait until 2016. If it waits until 2016, then we're going to be mostly flat in 2015 as far as the stock market goes. But we're going to start to enter a bearish market sometime in 2015. I don't think that the Dow, which is currently just over 18,000, is going to be this high at the end of 2015. It has to come down. It has to come down because. Because valuations are way too high, things are overbought. And at some point you've got to see that change. So I think we're going to enter a bearish market in 2015. It might not come into full swing until 2016, but there's definitely going to be a some downward pressure on the stock market and the economy as a whole. In 2015, we might reach slight new highs before there is a pullback, before there is is downward pressure. But 2015 is going to be the year where the pressure starts to push the market down, and it's probably going to come full circle in 2016.

Let's talk about my favorite topic in the world. Baseball. Just for fun, here are my predictions for the baseball season of 2015. In the AL East, I am going to take the Boston Red Sox. In the Central the AL Central, I'm going to take the Detroit Tigers. In the AL West, I will take the LA Angels. The wild card game is going to come down to Cleveland, New York and Toronto. I'll go with Cleveland and New York in the wild card game in the national league. In the NL East, I will take Washington. In the NL Central, I will take St. Louis. In the NL West, I will take the Dodgers. With the wild card coming down to San Diego and Milwaukee, I have no reason to pick what's going to happen in the playoffs. But just for fun, for the World Series, I will take I think I'll do the an LA showdown. I will take the AL Angels against the LA Dodgers with the Angels winning the World Series.

To wrap things up, I will talk personal for a second in 2015. We're gonna see a weird year for Ryan 2015 as I continue to grow my businesses, as I continue to grow my pursue my dreams.

In spite of a major change in my life, which is going to be a little baby Ryan, sometime born in 2015. More on that in a future podcast. Thanks for listening to Freedom Fastlane and I'll see you on the next show.