How to Get Product Reviews & Double a Brand in Six Months | #FFLTV Ep 20

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to Freedom Fastlane tv. Today we'll talk about ideas versus execution. Look at how we double a kitchen brand within six months. And we'll talk about whether or not there's an ideal diet. Let's get ready for the intro.

So I am fidgeting on this thing, which I think is the world's dumbest product and you might be familiar with. What is this thing called? Gilby, it's just a fidget cube. Just a fidget cube? This fidget cube was on Kickstarter and did hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales for something that you just mess with. What a random idea. But this product got creamed by a young kid who took the exact same idea, remade it and then put it on Amazon. And now there's a whole bunch of competitors doing all kinds of volumes, setting, selling these ridiculous fidget cubes. So the person who had the idea was first to market, technically at least to go out there and make a sale, put it on Kickstarter, raise hundreds of thousands of dollars and now they have no chance at having a business because there are all kinds of knockoffs on Amazon selling the exact same thing. That is why execution always trumps ideas. I always laugh when people say they don't want to talk about their ideas or they don't want to talk about their products because they're afraid someone else is going to steal the idea. Ideas are a dime a dozen. We can sit here and talk about ideas all day long. Execution is where all of the money is. So the people who saw this and saw it doing well on Kickstarter and went out and actually put it for sale in places where people wanted to buy. Those are the people who are really cleaning up right now. The person who came up with this idea and put it on Kickstarter did well for a short while and probably will have to now sit and come up with another idea. You know, at Freedom Fast Lane Live 2016, Tom Bilyeu, the founder of Quest Nutrition, was talking about how they were the first to market with a high fiber protein bar in the marketplace. And now they have all kinds of competitors. They have people knocking that off all the time. He says if you have a good Runway, then you'll enjoy two years of exclusivity on a product before you have a whole bunch of knockoffs. That's just the nature of thing. What is the solution? Continually innovate and continually stick to your brand message. By the way, what's the brand message of a fidget cube? Nothing. It's just a thing. You're never gonna go back and say, that one fidget cube was so good. I really wanna see what else they're doing in the world. No, that's not gonna happen. There's no brand equity to this. Now, they could have that if there was a big problem that they were trying to solve. But if you just think that an idea can exist in the marketplace and you can sell more of a product without anybody else coming at you, you're living in a fantasy world. So execution always trumps ideas and speed of execution trumps all. The faster you can take an idea and get it out into the marketplace and build an actual business around that, the more successful you will be. Rather than sitting around and hoping that your idea will somehow manifest into being a world changing company, it's your execution, not your ideas that make an impact.

Of course, I think that the best way to execute on an idea is to build a business and invest the profits. So let's look at some questions that will help you do just that. Alex Murphy asks I know you're into health and fitness. Do you think there's an ideal diet? I was just on vacation, actually my first real vacation in a few years and I was on a vegan themed cruise. Now I myself am not vegan, although I am partial and sensitive to a plant based diet. Mostly because I think that we'll look back on our generation and think one of the biggest failures we had as a society was how we treated livestock, how we treated the animals that were raised for meat. I'm not against eating meat, but I am against the abuse of animals. So I applaud the businesses and the organizations that exist to try and end that amount of cruelty. But I don't necessarily think that that is the healthiest diet. I think that is a separate conversation and it's a good thing for us to have that conversation. But while I was on this vegan themed cruise, I found it interesting the arguments that were being made for the most disease free diet or the diet that would produce the most longevity. The doctors who were proposing or advocating for a plant based diet were anti fat, anti protein, pro, a whole lot of carbs. And on the other side there are health experts supposedly. By the way, I'm not a health expert. This is just my opinion based on being interested in the topic. There are people advocating that carbs are bad. So is there anything that we can agree on? Is there any common ground to be had on an ideal diet? I don't know that anybody agrees on that except for a few things. As I have a lot of people who podcast about health or talk about this or are advocates for health, we all agree that there are a lot of bad things that we shouldn't eat, like processed food, like a lot of sugar, like high glycemic carbs. These are mostly bad things. In fact, if we look at all people who are thought leaders or who are doctors, the one thing we can agree on is to eliminate the bad things and then we can actually have a conversation about how we tweak things. When 70% of men in the United States are overweight, that's a real statistic, by the way. Overweight or obese, 70% of men are in that category. That's a problem. And that just comes from eating bad things. So most like, could we agree as a side comment for a second right now as we're recording this, there's this huge healthcare debate in the world healthcare debate on is it the GOP plan that's good? Is oral Obamacare a better plan? How about we just focus on if we eliminate the fact that 70% of people are overweight or obese, we, we have a much lower healthcare crisis in this country. Can we like start a conversation there? Because what we're doing to promote healthy living and getting bad stuff out of our diet isn't working anyway. I think the conversation about eliminating that and then talking about the rest is a more appropriate conversation. I'm of the opinion that a mostly plant based and also fat based diet is, is probably a good baseline of where we should start. We all know that the body can either run on fat or it can run on carbs. Some people run better on one or the other. So that's where the differences of uniqueness or individuality come into play. And I think if we factor in a lot of vegetables and a lot of plants and then we can have a conversation about what proteins are best or healthiest or what types of fats are healthiest or best. That's where we can get into the nuances of this. But mostly plants. A lot of fats, I think in my research has led me to believe that that is the strong foundation for a healthy diet and for longevity. I got into the debate with a couple of doctors on this vegan cruise about the role of saturated fat. Now we're just getting into the nuances of things. But they were basically saying that saturated fat is bad. And I disagree because they were assuming that a patient is overweight and they're eating a lot of carbs. And if that's the case, then yes, saturated fat would be really bad. But as the foundation of a diet from plant based sources and some clean animal sources, saturated fat could be argued that it's a really good thing. So it's my opinion that a plant based but also fat based diet is probably a good foundation for a diet. If you're really active, then work in other plant based carbs and some animal products if that's your diet. But most important, I think it's about stripping out the bad stuff and then we eliminate a healthcare crisis in this country and then we can have a more meaningful conversation about what the best thing and what the different nuances should look like. Nick Sanchez asks, how can I boost my reviews and ranking without chasing friends and family?

So I've talked about Quest already once on this episode as I tend to use them as a case study a lot. But this comes up again to answer this question, because Quest does not do a whole lot of seeking reviews on Amazon. Quest has a huge audience that they market to on their website and publicly, but they don't go out and solicit reviews. They just stick to their brand message and they commit to the goal that they have as a company and as a result they get a huge following and people leave reviews because they become super fans of that business. That's the approach that I think is ultimately most beneficial for building a multimillion dollar brand. Of course, a lot of people want to have the conversation about how do I get reviews and how do I rank for keywords on a site like Amazon. And I think that is a valuable conversation to have. But I think that is a piece of a much bigger process of developing an audience and committing to a message that you want your brand to represent. So Quest, they're committed to ending metabolic disease and as a result, that's what they talk about in all of their marketing. All of their products follow that brand message. What is yours? If you don't know what that is, then it's really difficult to go out and hustle reviews, right? Bugging friends and family or posting on blogs and forums like, you've gotta grind your way to those hundred reviews. And like a lot you gotta do it. Like you gotta do the grind of getting those first hundred. But after that, after you've grinded your way to the first hundred reviews on your products, your reviews and your marketing should come from the way you talk about your brand to your customers. It should come from the audience building that you do. It should come from the list building that you do. I think that the fastest way to build a really impactful brand and a profitable business is to go out and bring people to the marketplace, not extract people from from the marketplace and try to get as much of that pie as possible. There is something to be said about that when you are first starting. So by all means go to forums and post on blogs and get in front of audiences to get your first hundred reviews and get your first couple products off the ground. But when you've got a brand that you are building and scaling, you do that by going out and bringing the audience to the marketplace, but bringing them to Amazon.com, getting them to talk about you through the content you put out in the world, the message that you wanna represent. When you stand for something, people more naturally resonate with you. They're more likely to leave reviews. And when you stick to that brand message, that's how you differentiate yourself and that's how you build a seven figure brand. Lacypena asks how do you go from idea to execution despite all the things you you know and have heard? When I was in college, there was a paper that we studied in one of my business classes that compared two groups that they put into the woods and they tracked who would get out of the woods fastest. One group, they gave no direction and no map. The other group, they gave them a map, but it was a map to somewhere else. So the wrong direction or no direction, who would get to their destination faster. What they discovered is that the group with the wrong map outperformed the group that had no direction at all. The way that I interpreted this was what you probably had was people conversing and trying to analyze different directions and deciding who would lead where. The others just got to work and they just started moving somewhere and then they course corrected. That's how I choose to answer your question. When you've got all of this information, all this conflicting advice, the best thing you could do, I think, is just pick a direction and go. And that's true in most areas of life. We could sit here and talk about what's the best way to lose weight. You know, I think it's going to be this or I think or you could just start moving. Just moving is gonna burn way more calories than sitting here and talking about all the different ways that we could burn calories. Even if it's not the most efficient way that we would go about achieving that goal. Business is exactly the same way. Look. Conversation today about freedom. Fastlane TV this is episode 20 of Freedom Fastlane TV and we have the conversation of what's the best way to get this message out in the world is what we're doing. Connecting is the thing that we want to represent achieving that goal. But when we started this show, we just said, let's go, let's do some case studies, we'll answer some questions and then we adapt along the way. That's how I've built all of my businesses. Let's throw some things into the world, let's see what sticks and then let's scale what sticks. And that always gets more traction than simply talking about something I believe in doing. Result driven activity, meaning let's put something out there and get some results and then tweak the strategy. Because feedback is different than failure. A lot of people are afraid to put something out there that's gonna get a measurable result cause they're afraid of failing. But getting feedback in the marketplace is different than failing. Failing is never doing anything. In fact, failure is kind of part of the success process because you're getting that feedback that you need to be able to tweak. So when you got all kinds of different conflicting messages and different advice coming at you from every different angle, I say pick the one that resonates with you or resonates with your skillset and just start experimenting. Be willing to get bad feedback. Be willing to make mistakes. When I don't know what to do, I say, all right, let's make some mistakes. Because mistakes are the feedback that you need to course correct and then you'll find the right way, even though a right way doesn't really exist.

This is the part of the show where we look at one of our students businesses and look at how they could grow faster to. Today's submission is from Kevin Keller. The brand is KP Kitchen. They're currently selling between 30 and $40,000 a month. And their products include kitchen and baking products, including a pancake batter dispenser, silicone muffin pans, and a cupcake decorating kit. I chose this case study today because I think this brand could very easily double in the next six months. And we're gonna look at exactly that. So the specific question that Kevin Keller asked was how can we scale this to a million dollar business when they're currently in the six figure range? How do we get it to a seven figure brand? Their ideal market is moms who have kids who are either housewives or have a part time job. They love to cook and they spend a lot of time with their children. Their Audience is pretty small, which we're going to address in this case study. And Kevin is asking, is it better to launch as many products as possible, or is it better to focus on a few products with really high margins? So, first things first, you've done a great job, and I think you've built a strong foundation with the products you've chosen and the number of products, and especially with the person that you are targeting. I say that the minimum that you need to have to really have a million dollar business is three to five products. You've got three products. If you want to roll in one or two more, awesome, that's fine. But I think you could probably do it. But with the products that you currently have right now, my guess is that you are not getting as many moms into your community as you need, especially if your audience is less than 2,000 people. That means that we need to go out and get more moms. Good news. We have a few billion of them that we can choose from. So where do moms already hang out? You're taking your sales right now just from Amazon.com, specifically in the euro. So where do moms who shop on Amazon currently hang out? And that's how we can take this from a $40,000 a month company to an $80,000 a month company and do it in about six months. So moms in the EU hang out on Facebook. So we could run Facebook ads or start Facebook groups. They hang out. They're reading cooking books. They hang out in forums. My recommendation would be to start getting in front of them by running Facebook ads. Or what I've seen work really well in the tribe right now is we have people running challenges on Facebook to get their ideal person into a group, and then they market their products to that Facebook group. So, for example, one of our tribe members name is Brian, and Brian runs challenges for runners. So all these runners join this challenge, and throughout the challenge, the they're buying his products along the way, which I think is just a really smart way to get your ideal people into one place so you can market your products to them. So for you, it might be running a cooking challenge for moms. So we're gonna cook one thing every day for 14 days for two weeks and watch what happens with your relationship with your children. Moms start inviting their friends into the group. You get a few thousand moms into one place, and now you can market your products alongside the recipes that you're recommending to those moms. That's just one idea that you can test if you'd like, but the idea is to go where the moms are already hanging out, get in front of them and then put your products in front of them. That is what is going to really create a community around the business that you are building. And it's going to get that audience number up a lot faster. It's also going to be really affordable and you're gonna have raving fans as a result of doing that. What that is also going to do is it's gonna give you a really strong review group. Now I don't mean giving products away in exchange for reviews, cause that is frowned upon at Amazon now. I mean just having a community that rallies behind you is gonna be a great source of reviews because they believe in what you represent. It's also going to create really strong fans that talk about you via word of mouth. So if you have more reviews, you have more people choosing you over the competitors, then you're naturally going to start to rank for more keywords and give you a launch list of people when you roll out product number four and product number five. So that gives you the launch list so you don't have to give away hundreds of free product. You can just go to the group or the Instagram following or wherever your audience is hanging out. You have a profitable launch list, you have a great base of reviews and, and that makes it profitable for you to release those next products, makes it much easier for to get those reviews. And as a result, the existing products that you have are going to get more exposure. They're going to get more of the total marketplace. You're going to have a higher percentage of people choosing you. Your conversion rates will go up because you have more reviews and you have this pipeline that you can put more products into as a result. That's how you can take this business that's doing, you know, for half a million dollars a year, get it to a million dollars a year and up. And then you can continue that process over more products and more profitable products and take this into the multi millions. I think the theme of this episode was just go out there and do things. We love to have conversations and debates, especially in a world of social media. We like to argue how smart we are, argue for our opinions. We love to fight to see our ideas represented in. But I think a superior way of getting things done is to just go out and do them. The quote that I kind of live by is the only thing standing between you and what you want is the BS story that says that you can't have it. And the cure to procrastination is a just stop thinking about it and just go and do it. That is true in health. Losing weight, getting in shape, building muscle. It is true in business. Just going out there and putting products into the world. It's true about dating. I really want to meet somebody. All right, for the next hundred days, just go. Approach every attractive person that you see and ask for their number. It is just about going out and doing things. Ideas are trumped by execution. And going out and experimenting and getting results and tweaking along the way, I think is the best way to get closer to what you want. And building the world that we want. We love to sit here and talk about how we're gonna achieve the world that we want and the solving the problems that we think matter in the world. I think it's for individuals to take responsibility to support causes, to support businesses, to release products, to profitably solve the problems that we want to address in this world. That's how we are going to create a better world. That's why I think we need more entrepreneurs. We need more people like you who are committed to success creating a better world. And that's how we're going to achieve that. So thanks for watching Freedom Fast Lane tv. We'll see on the next episode.

Sam.