Turning Your Ideas Into a Business

Foreigners. How do you turn your ideas into successful businesses? That's what we're going to dive into today. And today's episode was inspired by a conversation that I had recently at a meetup, a conference that I spoke at, and someone brought to me an idea that he had been working on for several years and had not achieved any revenue, even though he was had been working on it for several years, had spent a whole lot of time developing a product, but had not actually got it out to the marketplace or gotten feedback. So I was inspired by this to do a show about how do you take an idea and actually turn it into a winning business model. What's the difference between those who just have ideas and those who actually execute? I tend to agree with Gary Vaynerchuk when he says that ideas are meaningless, although he uses harsher words than I do. Gary, by the way, will be speaking at Freedom Fast Lane Live here in a couple of weeks and I agree with him when he says that ideas are meaningless. Execution is everything. But what does that execution look like? Today I'm going to go through what I call my million dollar blueprint and outline what a rollout strategy looks like from idea to getting it out into the marketplace, testing it, and actually getting feedback from the marketplace so that you can scale it into a successful business. Before we get into the meat of this, I want to do the pitch beforehand. We're doing a free training class over@freedomfastlane.com blueprint where I'm going to walk through this in more detail and I'm going to take questions on this process too. The selfish reason why I'm doing this training class for free is because the biggest hurdle that we've heard people say is the reason why they're not attending Freedom Fast Lane live is because they don't feel like they're ready for it. So. So I feel like if I can dispel some myths to get you to market, to get you to customers, to get you the clear roadmap on how you take your ideas, get them into the marketplace and turn them into successful businesses, then there's no reason why you wouldn't have a clear path to go to the next level at Freedom Fast Lane Live. So again, that's@freedomfastlane.com Blueprint is where the training class will be. Or if you're listening to this far into the future, we'll put the replay up on that page as well. And this is a cool incentive to clear some of your roadblocks so, so that you can come to Freedom Fastlane Live. So that class is coming up and you can get all the details and register for replays if you can't make the live1@freedomfastlane.com blueprint. So I have basically a four part rollout process for what it looks like to come up with an idea and then to get it in the marketplace and get it selling. I have talked about on the podcast before about the two types of businesses and I call them cash flow and disruption. The difference in those two business models is extremely important because they are completely different approaches. There are two approaches to building businesses. There is sell what is already selling and there is sell what the market needs. Sell what already selling is what most people are doing on Amazon. It's what most people do in the information product world. It's what, hey, it's what Procter and Gamble and a lot of big companies do. They sell what's popular in the marketplace. They do it better. They make sure their margins are there. They advertise the products. They get them into channels like retail or Amazon or search engines or whatever the strategy is for selling your products. That is selling what's already selling. That's the cash flow model. You can have a perfectly viable business running a cash flow model, but in my experience that tends to cap out at about three to five million dollars and have a lifespan of two to four years. There are of course exceptions to this rule. I threw out Procter and Gamble and a lot of old big box stores and businesses. Those would be exceptions to the rule. But in my view, that cash flow model or the four hour work week type of a model tends to last about two to four years before requiring you to make a a significant pivot point. The disruption model would be looking at the marketplace and saying what does this marketplace need that is currently not being solved? This is the Uber model. Of course we're going to disrupt a marketplace by doing something better than everyone else. I brought this up before in the podcast, but I beat this into your head again because where I see bad ideas happen is when it does not fall into either one of these categories. When you are looking at a business or considering an idea, if it does not fall into one of these two carrier, these categories run like hell. If you are not selling what is already selling out there or you're completely disrupting a marketplace, get out now because you don't have an idea. The worst business ideas that I've ever seen have been people who come to the table and they say, I've got this cool thing what do you think I should do with it next? If there's not a clear market for it now already existing on a marketplace somewhere again, Amazon, Walmart, magazines, other people advertising it for, for it somewhere, or if it's not completely disrupting a marketplace, get out. I participated in a, in a business group that basically was place where new entrepreneurs could come and get investors and get feedback on their business ideas. But there was a rule in this group that you are not allowed to give critical feedback to entrepreneurs. You weren't allowed to tell somebody that this idea is a bad idea, which I think is a mistake because I told people that their ideas weren't so great. But I think it's a bad idea. When you don't tell somebody that their idea has no legs, I don't think that serves them. If that's your opinion and you think it will save them heartache to go into a different direction, I think you should be able to tell them that. And I tell you this because the worst ideas that I heard in a tank like that, in a think tank like that tend to be because they fall out of one of these two models. They fall out of the fact that people are selling them. So nobody out there is selling something similar. And I've heard people make that argument. Well, no one is selling anything like this. That could be your problem. Nobody wants your thing. Nobody wants anything like your thing. Unless of course, it completely disrupts a existing business model. Now, if you're first starting out, I recommend you start with a cash flow business by selling what is already selling. And then when you have your cash flow in place, then spending your time on disruption. It is only now that I am putting my attention on building disruptor models, disruptor businesses. And the reason why I'm going there next is because I've done the cash flow route. It's pretty cool. My life is paid for. And now it's time for some new adventures that will buy me the Cleveland Indians. Because building cash flow businesses aren't going to get there. They cap again at about 3 to 5 million dollars, which is fine. My businesses collectively do between 5 and 10 million, which is cool. But it's not going to get me the Cleveland Indians. I've got to go find my Uber. I've got to go find my cool investments that I can invest in and affect. And that's the next wave of my career. And everything that I'm doing next is organizing my life to be able to be a part of those disrupting companies. So when you've got Your idea, the first filter is okay, does this fall into a cash flow model or a disruptor model? If it falls into one of those, then you're clear to move on to the next piece, which is of course, you've heard me talk about before, picking a channel, putting the product or the service on that channel. Channels, of course, being where customers or leads already hang out. So if people are already looking for your competitors on search engines, social media, Walmart, Amazon, wherever, that's the place where you need to go. And this is for either model. It doesn't matter if it's a disruptor model or a cash flow model. There's a channel out there where there are already customers and leads ready for your service or that you can advertise to. Facebook would be a channel. The itunes store is a channel. The app store is a channel. These are all places where you can be discovered where people have their credit cards and they are ready to buy from you because they're already been proven to buy from somebody else. Now, the hardest, the hardest way, but also my favorite way, is to develop your own audience and sell to that audience. That's the longest route, but it's the thing that you control the most. It takes the most time and work in most cases. There are some exceptions to that rule, but that usually tends to take up the most work and is the hardest, but also is the most rewarding because you control it. A workaround for that, a workaround for building up your own audience is to use somebody else's audience. So if you pay a spokesperson who's got a huge YouTube following to promote your product or your service, you're leveraging somebody else's audience to get those initial customers. A great way to get into the marketplace and to get exposure. I come from the information marketing world. That was my background when I was in my early 20s. And the annoying model of people who sold make money online products was of course to put up a product, put it on someplace like clickbank.com where affiliates hung out. Affiliates would send it out to their audiences and both of them would make money. That is idea cash flow sending out to other people's audiences. Not the best business model in my opinion, because most of those guys didn't know what they were talking about. But a great cash flow play, they did some things right. They followed this model. So your initial customers. So step step two of the process, step zero, meaning what's your idea? Step one of the process being identifying if you're a cash flow or a disruptor model. Step Two being put it on a channel. Step three would be what I call user acquisition and follow up. So following up with your customers and also putting yourself in a position to acquire more customers and users. I said the word users because that's what applies to people who use your product beyond just being customers. For example, if someone downloads your app, they're a customer or at least a lead, but we call them users. This would be the disruptor verbiage for a customer. This is how you get customers and or users and then follow up with those customers and users. So that third piece of the process after you are on a channel where you can collect customers, is to follow up with those customers or have a process to ensure positive customer experience with your product or your service. So this can be in the form of communicating them through the actual product itself. Meaning if it's an app or some sort of digital product, it can be email follow ups, it can be some in use communication. If it's an app, it can be phone calls to your customers, it can be service calls if you've got some sort of a service that is in home. But what is the process for following up with customers in order to establish long term relationships? And then the fourth piece is what we would call profit maximization or we would call that high end up sells. So what is it on the back end that you're going to sell to these customers? Let's take a different look at this. Just to get some creative juices going. Let's look at like a nightclub. A nightclub is an idea, right? Is that a cash flow or a disruption model? Well, a nightclub just in and of itself is a cash flow play. Unless they're doing something completely different. Or if it is an app that is disrupting the nightclub scene, or if it's a franchise that's moving into every city around the country in order to do things differently. That would be a disruptor play. But if we're looking at one nightclub on the corner, then we're looking at a cash flow play. And the channel would be the street and the city that it's on. Right. Or they'd be getting leads and customers through channels like radio advertising, Facebook advertising. So their model is exactly the same of picking what business they're in, getting their customers and users through certain channels. Their customer follow up, if you've been to the same nightclubs that I have, is fairly poor unless they do some sort of text message marketing or email marketing. But most nightclubs could probably use a dose of increased customer follow up. But the profit maximization is very clear. There's all kinds of upsells in there. There's VIP rooms, there's really expensive drinks, there's cover charges. These would all be your profit maximize once people are in the door. So this model is what all businesses follow, regardless of what business it is that you're in. So let's go through what this might look like as far as rolling out a product or service. If you've got an idea in your brain and you haven't executed on it or you're looking to go into a new business route, I just want to chunk this down so that you can actually see what your business will look like as it rolls out. And this is fresh in my mind because my business buddy Sean, who's been on the show before, mostly talking about Amazon businesses, he and I are building a disruption company right now, or at least attempting to. And we'll talk about that more in future episodes as we develop this more. But this has been new ground for us, but the process has been exactly the same as if we were building an Amazon.com based business. So our process, we came up with the idea for the business after sitting around at dinner and kicking around some ideas of what we were going to do with our careers next and how we wanted to work together next. And we came up with an idea that really excited us. And before jumping into creating the product, we ran it by, we did some quick market research by basically calling everybody we knew who might be a potential user of this particular product and saying, what do you think of this idea? And after getting rousing support from a lot of different people, we decided to go and have this, our prototype built. And when I say prototype, I'm talking about the mvp, your minimum viable product, the first possible iteration of your product. When I talk about the yoga mat example that Sean and I had when we developed the Zen Active Yoga mat, we got our prototype by communicating with a yoga mat supplier, a yoga mat manufacturer over in China, and having them send us a sample which cost us like 5, 50 or 100 bucks to get them to make a prototype and send over one specific sample. We took that over to Girls at Starbucks, use it as a pickup line, and asked people to just test it out and see how they liked that mat to get feedback so we could test that and get it made. We're doing the, doing the exact same process, but in a completely different industry with this disruption company and we're developing our prototype. Cost of little bit more than a hundred bucks to get this type of prototype made. But we are going through the process now of refining the prototype based on feedback, based on getting it out to people who can test it out and give us some feedback. So that's the product development piece, coming up with the idea, testing it to a few people, getting some feedback. And now it's on to that step of getting our customers, getting our users and our customers. Now I mentioned earlier about utilizing audiences and the best but hardest being developing your own audiences. Well, again, the workaround to this is leveraging other audiences that might be available to you. You know, you can go right now and set up any advertising account to any advertiser. You can set up any account on YouTube via Google AdWords and advertise on any YouTube channel, any YouTube video, any topic, and have a video demonstration of your product pop up over any YouTube video that you want. You can do the same thing on Facebook by getting in front of your exact target market and advertising in front of them so that people will use your thing, your product or your service. So when people talk about I need more traffic or I need more sales, I kind of do a little face palm there. That's the sound for facepalm. Because all the users and customers are already out there. They just need a system for getting in front of them and communicating their message and delivering their product or service in front of that audience. There's three or four billion people on the Internet and you have access to pretty much all of them through the different advertising channels. So the way that we're going about marketing our disruption company is by partnering people with audiences that meet our target demographic and compensating them to share our message so that people find out about our product. We believe that is the fastest route to getting that first thousand customers. And we think our estimation is a thousand customers is that first tipping point to get other people to start to hear about the product, digest the product and get it out in the marketplace. That next piece of course is going to be the developing customer relationships. So the customer follow up process, what are we doing in order to stay fresh at the front of the mind of our customers and or our users? What is it that we are doing in order to stay in front of them? In the beta phase when we're still launching this out, it's basically getting a lot of customer feedback. But in future iterations for future follow ups to these customers, it can come in the form of email follow ups, it can come from social media, it can come from however you decide to follow up with your customers. Ours will probably be, will probably be some sort of email follow up because that is our skill set. And then of course that final piece is selling them more stuff. Once you have that strong relationship with customers, how are you going to follow up with your customers? So in the Internet marketing world, this would be, you know, I have this book on weight loss that I'm going to sell. This is a cash flow play. So I'm going to put it on a channel. So I'll put it on Udemy or Amazon or clickbank.com I'm now going to partner with people on Instagram who have large fitness followings and get them to promote my thing by paying them to do so. Now I get all of these customers that are coming to my sales page. I'm going to follow up with them via email, I'm going to get them onto a webinar to teach them some cool stuff and then I'm going to sell them my other fitness trainings or I'm going to sell them my DVDs or my workouts or my diet shakes or whatever it is that we're going to sell more stuff to. Most of the profits come from that follow up process. They come from the follow up and high end profit maximizers. Yet Most people spend 90% of their time on the initial customer acquisition. Customer acquisition. The most expensive and the hardest part of running a business where all the money is and where all the eases is turning those customers into repeat customers because they've already raised their hand and said, I like your idea, I want more of it. So rather than focusing on new users and customers, where all the money ends up being is in getting those customers to buy more. And that's where I recommend you should spend 80% of your time once you have solved that initial problem, how you get those initial customers. And of course you're going to do that by leveraging channels and by getting in front of audiences that already existed. I hope this is helpful for you. I wanted to do just this quick podcast for you because I was inspired by it based on the conversation that I had at this conference. And if you want more of the this, we're doing a free class where I'm going to dive into this a little bit deeper and also answer your questions over at a free training class@freedomfastlane.com blueprint. If you're listening to this far in the future, you can go there and you can watch the recording. And of course this is just a selfish and shameless way for me to clear your biggest roadblocks so that you're more encouraged to come to Freedom Fastlane live here at the end of the year. Thanks so much for listening to this episode, and I'll see you on the next one.