Ryan Daniel Moran says entrepreneurs waste time perfecting products instead of asking customers to buy. The two biggest barriers: fear of the sale and thinking you need a massive audience. Build distribution first, he argues, so you have somewhere to sell when you're ready.
Hannah Lamumi asks, what barriers have you seen that prevent people from starting a business? Ah, this is a great question because there are so many people with ideas in their brain. There are so many people with things that they want to do. What is it that stands in their way from actually building the business? I think without question, the biggest barrier is just being willing to ask for the darn sale. I mean, the person who actually puts it out there and gets feedback in the marketplace, the person who actually is willing to look stupid because you don't look stupid, you just think you are because you're in your own head. Look, we have so many abilities to be able to take orders today. You can put up a Kickstarter and not even have the product done and take an order. You can pre sale products. You could talk about a product on Facebook and get people rallying behind it that are just your friends and co workers that believe in what you want to do. You can pull out your phone and have it go viral. You can put something on Amazon and it costs 30 bucks to set up an account. There is more opportunity now for you to be funded, for you to have a prototype, for you to pre sell your product, for you to get it out there than ever before. The difference is who's a person that's willing to make mistakes along the way and say, I'm asking for the darn sale. Whether it is emailing your customer list or pitching the client or picking up the phone and saying, if I could provide this value, would you be willing to pay for it? We all have our own insecurities, but when it comes to entrepreneurship, I have found that the biggest insecurity that prevents people from taking that action is, what if I can't deliver? Or what if I'm not of value? What if my product's not good enough? So we sit there tweaking and testing and polishing something that we haven't even got real feedback on. Ask your market what it wants, give them that, get feedback and adjust. You can do it profitably if you're just willing to ask for the sale. The second thing that I think is kind of a barrier to business is some sort of distribution. There's a perception of a lack of distribution, and I think we can hack this a little bit. I call it audience building. If you do nothing more than pulling out your phone, talking about your product, showing a demo of your product, advertising that product with like a hundred bucks as a boosted Facebook post, which wouldn't be ideal, but it would be something we would get at least a few thousand views on something like that. And then we sent them to a page that collected an email address that said, get notified when it's ready. If we did only that, we would have a list of people who are talking about the product, who are on a list that were ready for it when it got live. That's a distribution model. It's not a very sophisticated one, but it's the shortest one to actually taking the sale. Or it might be you then put up the Kickstarter page and you send your list to the Kickstarter, or it's you making a few videos using the demo, putting it on YouTube, and when the product is ready, talking about it on the YouTube audience that has started to follow your videos. So what is your distribution model for getting a product out there? For some people, it's Amazon listings and then ranking them for keywords. But is there a way that you can control a bit of the conversation so that when it's ready to launch a product or a second product, you can pull a lever and get it out there? If this is new to you, go watch the first episode of Freedom Fastlane tv, where someone asks the question, how would you start a business on $500 a month or less? And I say every dime of that needs to go into audience building. Because when it is time for you to monetize, you can pull a lever, have people see a message, and you can sell whatever you want at a profitable business.
