How To Make Your First $10,000 In E-Commerce (Zero To $1M in 12 Months: Step 3 of 8)

Hey guys, today we're going to go through the process to launch a product and get your first $10,000 in sales within your first 30 days. We're going to go through how to do it, what platforms to use, how to communicate with your audience and how to ensure that your launch has the best possible chance of doing 10k or more. And that's not hype. People do this all the time. Like this guy Miguel who did $100,000 in sales in his first 30 days and then he did it again on a second product. Or this couple right here that launched a product and did 100,000 DOL sales in 24 hours and then they did that again the following month. Those are amazing results. But a typical result that I see from the people who follow this process is about $10,000 in sales within their first month or two. Like this guy Steve. Steve launched his first product. It wasn't even ready for sale yet. He had no audience when he started and he did $10,000 in his launch. That's a fairly typical result. That's what we strive for with our clients and our members. So when we celebrate the heck out of it, the first $10,000 is like a four minute mile. When you get $10,000 in sales, you've accomplished that first big financial milestone that will take you down the rest of the road to one million. This is step three of the eight part process to building a million dollar business. Step one is choosing your person. Step two is putting 100 of those people onto a launch list. And then today is about how to launch, how to turn that into money. So you get your first 10k or so in sales and you have momentum out of the gate so you can build on that momentum and march down the road to 1 million. Listen, here's how you need to think about a launch. You need to treat a launch like it's an event. Think about how Apple launches their products. As I sit here right now, my phone is over here charging and I. It's like on its last legs. Like I have to manipulate the charger in a specific way because I'm holding off on the next iPhone release. What did Apple do in order to prepare their customers for the launch of the next iPhone? They do this every time. First they announce when there's going to be an announcement. Then they have a big keynote and a big presentation. There's a whole bunch of press, people are talking about it. And then there's launch day. What happens on launch day? Some people wait outside of the Apple Store to Get their iPhone. And the people who do get it first are running around showing it, they're taking pictures of it, they're showing all their friends and people are like, ooh, you got the new iPhone. There's buzz around this. This is how we think about any product launch. Now, you're not Apple, I'm not Apple. But we can take some lessons from how big companies do their product releases and we can weave that into our business so that we can ensure that our product is successful. Successful from day one. The important pieces of an event are that there's a beginning, there's a middle, and there's an end. A launch has activity leading up to it. There is a day when it is available for purchase and there's an end to the event. That structure will make you a lot of money. Most people will just release their product for sale and then kind of hope and pray and do marketing and ads and talk about their product and why you should buy it and convince other people to go check it out. But a launch has a specific structure to it. And if you have a product that is not working or you've got a business that is stuck, I would encourage you to come back and consider relaunching the products that are not moving using this structure. Because this is what will kick off the momentum that you can build off of and then get to consistent sales that will take you to a million dollar business. I've made the majority of my money in E commerce building brands and selling those brands. I've done been a part of four exits, two of brands that I started. But before I was in E commerce, I was your Swiss army knife Internet marketer. And in the Internet marketing world, there were a few things that everyone did that very few people do in other businesses. And one of those things is that they treated every new product like it was something brand new, shiny. And there was a lot of activity around that launch. Then they built off the foundation of that. Almost no one does that in E commerce. Almost no one does that in other businesses. They don't treat a new product like it's an event. Now in the Internet marketing world, there were platforms and there were marketplaces where if your product or your business got seen, then it would get a lot of free traffic. You could think about this like we think about websites on Google. If you're the number one result for a keyword, you're getting a lot of attention for that. And so there are entire businesses that exist just to make a website or a business show up. Number one On Google, there are platforms in every business. For example, when I was selling digital products, the platform that everyone used was ClickBank. ClickBank is a marketplace for digital products and I noticed that when I sent a lot of sales to a product, it would rank higher in the marketplace. What did that do? It created more visibility and free attention that other people would piggyback off of and they would promote that product too. I took that same mentality into E commerce and it was like bringing a flamethrower to a knife fight because there are platforms in E commerce to think about how Amazon works. The best selling products rank for keywords and they stay the best selling products. The same is true on Kickstarter. On Kickstarter, the most trending new products show up first and they get a lot of free attention. This is even true on Instagram if you have a post that is going viral because it's getting lots of comments. Those comments make that piece of content get seen by more people that don't know that you exist. We can take those lessons and work them into a launch for any product and get much more momentum and many more new customers that don't know who we are. And if we do this in a specific event style launch. Quick reminder, this is part three in this eight part series. I don't think you can do a launch successfully if you don't follow step two. And step two is all about building a small audience that you can launch to. Without that, it's hard to smash a launch and get it to at least $10,000 in sales. But if you do even a little bit, you're in striking distance of having a really profitable launch. So I'm assuming that you have a group of people that you can launch to. You don't go back and watch that previous video. Now remember, a launch is an event. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. So the first thing we need to do is structure the beginning of the launch. We do that by picking a date in which we're going to take sales for the product. This is not rocket science, but something magical happens when you tell a new entrepreneur that that we're launching on this date. Frank Kern calls this the get money date. Put a date on the calendar in which I'm going to get money, I'm going to take sales and now we're going to stack the deck and build up pressure leading up to that get money date. If you do that, you will make sales on the get money date. If you don't do that, then what I've seen is people kind of kick the can down a little bit further and they never take their sale. And if they do, it's a little dribble of sales and then they're discouraged about launch of their business, it's because they didn't actually launch. The beginning phase is putting a date on the calendar and making it public. And you can choose a day that is comfortable in the future. Sometimes that's two weeks, six weeks. We had inventory for a product sitting on a boat from China and it was going to take eight weeks to get into the shipping center. So we had eight weeks to plan for our launch. More than enough time to do damage to build up pressure for launch day. So pick a date and announce it publicly. Say it on your social media, email it to your list, tell your friends and neighbors that you are launching this business on this date. What that does is anchor all of our activities leading up to it to be buzz building. So let's talk about what buzz building looks like. Looking ahead to the launch day, your communication outward to your followers, to your customers, to your email list are all going to be about the product and the person that it's for and why you are launching this and what your expectations are. In other words, you're just sharing the journey of the launch with your audience and you're telling them that the day to buy is going to be whatever your get money date is. A good strategy during this time is is to show the product being used, if you've got a prototype or if you've got a few units of the product that you've tested to a couple people that you know. If you are selling a digital product, you might be sharing results from your beta program or from your experience in the past. You've got a physical product, then you might be showing the product and the different iterations that it's gone through leading up to this launch. The point of this process is to build up pressure and build up demand in advance. This is so important. I believe in creating demand, upfront demand, before there is supply. We do that by talking about the product leading up to the get money date, not after. Yes, you can still relaunch a product and you can still follow this process. But the upfront demand, that pressure is where all the momentum from your launch is going to come from. It doesn't come from having it for sale and then generating it in the aftermath. It's building it up beforehand and then cashing the check. One of the best ways to build up pressure leading up to a launch is having real scarcity. Nothing initiates action like the fear of missing out. Nothing gets people to move like a deadline. People will procrastinate until there is a consequence for not taking action. In the e commerce world, we have built in scarcity in the form of inventory. When you place your first order for a product, you may only have 100 to 1,000 units of a product that's available. That is real scarcity. So communicate that to your customers. And if you have an unlimited number of of units available, you can still do this with a discount that is ending On a certain date. We're going to move all of our launch attention to that launch day and then highlighting the scarcity around whatever you have a limited supply of. So that is your beginning and that is your end. Let's now talk about how we start the launch and then what happens afterwards to continue the momentum through the launch up until that final day. When we get close to the Get Money date, our communication on our social platforms into our email list gets more frequent. If you've watched my previous video about building your initial list of a hundred people, you know that I advocate for putting people on a list that have raised their hand and say, I might want to buy this. I don't really care if someone is on my list if they're not going to be a likely buyer. So it's okay to send more emails to post more frequently about your product. As you get close to launch day, you want to build up that pressure. If that offends some people on your list, they will unsubscribe and that's okay. Our goal is to take sales, not to keep people on an email list. When it is Get Money day, we do an announcement. We say when it's live and we tell them what we want them to do. Go to this link and go buy it. There is some marketing magic that happens here. When we get a buildup of pressure and we get a lot of sales up front, we can trick algorithms to work in our favor. If you know how Amazon works or how Kickstarter works, or how ClickBank works, these are all platforms to take sales. If you get a surge of sales in a condensed period of time, you will get free attention on those platforms. Those marketplaces say, hey, this thing's popping. Let's give it some visibility. Let's start to show this on other places on Amazon. You will see this in the rankings for keywords, but you'll also see it as your product starts to be recommended as other products that complement this one. You start to see it show up in other listings. That's free marketing. And it happens more often when we have a surge of sales out of the gate. That's why having a launch is so important. We start to move in the direction of getting free traffic on top of the pressure we built leading up to the launch. So we announced that the product is available. That's when you will get your first sale. No one ever forgets the first sale. It's the best feeling in the whole world. It's this feeling you never forget. You get all tingly and excited and you're like, I knew it was going to work, I'm rich. It's so much fun when you get that first sale. But that's just the start of the launch process. If nothing else, when those first few sales start to trickle in, it's validation that this process works. But there's a whole other side of this process and that is maintaining the momentum after you've opened the doors, launching the product and taking your first sales. It's kind of obvious, right? Closing the launch. Also kind of obvious. But what about the middle? What do we do in the middle to keep the sales going? In my experience, most launches take about 25%, maybe 30% of their sales on the first day or two. Then they take another 30ish percent at the end. But the middle is where the rest of the sales come from. If this is done well, we have to keep stoking the fire and build up momentum even after that initial pressure has been released. Here's how we do that. Once the doors are open to a product we want to continue to feel feed the audience with momentum. We do that by sharing all of the goodwill, all of the good press, all of the good news, all of the positive feedback that you are getting that is as simple as saying, I took my first sale. It was Mary in Arkansas. And I'm so thankful for Mary. She is going to be the person that I remember forever. When you say that publicly, other people want to be like Mary. When you highlight that as a big win for you and the company, it encourages other people to get involved in the rest of the process. If someone sends you an email saying, I've been waiting for this product, I'm so excited. And here's why. That is really good content to share on your social media channels. When someone gets it for the first time and they're holding it up and they're all excited, that looks really good on a listing or in an email that you send to your other Followers. When we stoke the momentum with all of the goodwill that's coming from our audience, it keeps that momentum going. It is not enough to just launch and then talk about the product over and over and over again and then close it. That will get some result, but the best results will come when you involve everyone who's paying attention, even if it's only a few hundred people and you get them contributing to the story. This is how the people we work with come out of the gate with 10,000 in sales and then scale to $100,000 a month, sometimes within a few months, because they are extracting all of the goodness that is coming from this launch. This is as much about gathering good feedback and gathering momentum and energy as it is about making sales. During the launch, I will communicate with my audience every day. I will email every day, I will post on social media every day. I will take every single piece of positive feedback that I get and I will share that and sometimes email that out every day. Every little inch of progress I milk. This is where a lot of people lose the momentum in their launch because they're so focused on the sales and how far away they are from their goal that they're missing what they could milk for momentum. Those early reviews, those good pieces of feedback, the pictures or the videos that you're getting from your customers, are the best marketing in the entire world. So if nothing else, use this as a time to gather all of those assets, because you'll use them in your marketing for a long time. But as you share them during the launch, it will continue the momentum that you had on day one. When you open the doors. After a few days, maybe a week of being in business for this new product or new direction, we start to introduce the scarcity or the end of the launch. We do that by saying when a discount goes away, when a bonus goes away, or by being very real and transparent about the limited number of units you have available for sale. That is when we get a second bite at the apple. This is when we're now not just pushing the excitement for the launch, we're now threatening to take something away from the people who are paying attention. That's when momentum starts to build again. Until that final day when you end the launch, close the discount, or run out of stock once again. Leading up to that final day, I'm posting every single day. And as we get to three days before, two days before, and on the close day, I may be communicating with my audience three to ten times. I might send multiple emails. I will post on social media several times and I am getting ready to close the event. The event is ending and I am letting everybody know that time is running out. And I'm doing all of this while continuing to share the good feedback, the good reviews and all the positive momentum while thanking my audience, calling them out by name, and encouraging the rest of the audience to come participate in the evolution of this story that is the beginning, the middle and the end of an event. And when you structure that way, you get this big surge of momentum out of the gate, you get a horde of new customers and you capture all of this good feedback that you're going to use in your marketing forever and ever. Amen to grow from this foundation and build your million dollar business. Now, I can hear some people asking a question right now. They're wondering, how do I do this if I don't have a product? I'm so glad you asked because this was something that as someone who mentors a lot of entrepreneurs and invests in e commerce brands, we had to figure out a way to start to prepare for a launch if someone's product wasn't going to be ready. And that's when we discovered the magic of pre sales. In this crazy Internet world of ours, you can take sales for a product that doesn't even exist yet. It's the coolest thing ever. If you got inventory that's going to be on a boat somewhere, or you don't even have the money to run the inventory to get it made, you can take sales ahead of time. I mentioned Miguel earlier who put his product available on Kickstarter and he ran this launch process and it juiced Kickstarter's algorithm and he had $100,000 in pre orders. His product wasn't even ready yet. That was more than enough cash that he needed to be able to go make the product, get the inventory and get it shipped out to that first wave of customers. I also mentioned Brad and Chelsea of a brand called Maple and Lark. They did the same thing. They announced that their product was going to be made, they took $100,000 in pre orders and then they went and had the product made. You can take orders for a product and have cash in the bank before your product is even ready. So if you don't have any cash or capital to get started, this process can be the seed round for getting your business off the ground and taking sales, even if you don't have anything to sell right now. And when you do this, it's really cool. Once you pre sell a product, you've got baked in customers. So when you do go to launch on Amazon or Shopify or wherever you take your sales, you got baked in customers and, and a baked in list that goes and support you on that platform as well. So you get to relaunch and do the same thing all over again. It's so cool. Look, my camera guy behind here tell me that we're done. He said this is a good enough video, but I just, I have to hammer this point home a little bit more because I don't think some people realize how effective this is and how it, it liberates you to promote whatever you want. I'm looking at my board right behind me and I've got examples of people who have done this. One of the names on there is Jack. Jack Cole is a member of our mentoring community and Jack has a Facebook group and that Facebook group is Dog Owners. He put them onto an email list and now he builds up buzz when he's releasing a new product and that gets the product to 15 to 25 sales a day right out of the gate. Whereas most people would wonder, how am I going to get to 25 sales a day? He runs a launch process and he gets to 25 sales a day really quickly. And guess what? You only need four products at 25 sales a day. To have a hundred sales a day at a $30 price point, that's a million dollar business. And the way to kick it off is to launch. And you launch by following this beginning, middle and end process. And then we can start to build the rest of the momentum that keeps it at 25 sales a day and beyond. That's what we'll talk about in the next video. I want to warn you about one thing before we wrap up at the end of a launch, there is almost always a comedown or a crash. A launch is exhilarating. You have sales from strangers, you have feedback from people who like your product. Your sales are building and building and your brain starts to forecast, at this rate, I'm going to be a millionaire by next month. And then when the launch ends, it can be crickets. There are some lessons in that. First of all, it means that the launch process worked really well. It did its job, and you can always do it again. It means that there's pieces that happened in the launch that we can use to continue the sales moving forward. If you are doing regular promotions or if you're building an email list or if you're highlighting your customers, these are all habits that we're Going to work into the rest of the process to get the product to continue to make sales and compound over time. Still, there is always a crash. You might go from $10,000 in sales your first month to a sale a day after that. That is normal. After the launch, we take all of the work that we've done and we put it into a process that starts to bring us to a consistent 25 sales a day. We're gonna start talking about that process in the next video. But it's important that you see which pieces contribute to a successful launch. Building that small group of people that want to buy from you is a necessary part of the process. Talking about your customers and celebrating the progress that you're making with them, that's a necessary part of this process. Learning how to communicate with your audience and having a beginning, a middle, and an end. These are important lessons that you have to learn once. Because when you go to run a promotion for your product later, you will follow the same process. So starting in the next video and throughout the rest of this series, we'll be talking about how to use those strategies and those little wins that we got throughout the launch to build the momentum so that every product is doing a consistent 25 sales a day. We do that over four products and we've got $1 million business. And you can do that in about a year's time. There's a lot of ways to make money on the Internet. You can become an influencer, you can be an affiliate marketer. You can sell physical stuff. My game is building businesses that you can scale, scale and sell. It means building a brand that gets to a million dollar run rate, does a million dollars a year in sales and beyond, and that you can sell for a truckload of money. That's my game. And the way that we kick off all of those brands is by building a small audience and launching. Then the work begins. It's the dopamine dump of your life that gives you the satisfaction and validation that you're onto something. And when it goes well, we know that, that we have the foundation of something, that we can grow to seven figures and then maybe have an exit. If you want to see the full playbook for how all of this works, how we choose brands, launch them, get them to 100 sales a day, prepare them for exit. You can download our playbook@capitalism.com playbook. I'll also send you some of our best resources, best case studies, and best pieces of content that will help you go down this road. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran and I help entrepreneurs build million dollar businesses and have multimillion dollar exits. If you enjoyed today's episode, please let me know by leaving a comment or shooting me an email@ryanapitalism.com and if you want to see the rest of the series, stay tuned. Hit the subscribe button wherever you are watching or listening to this and I'll see you for Step four. That'll be coming soon. Take care.

Of.