Zero To $1M in 12 Months: Step 4 of 8 - How To Get 100 Reviews In 30 Days

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Welcome back to the show. We're in the middle of an eight part series about building a million dollar business. We've gone through building a small audience, we've gone through your launch and getting the first $10,000 in sales. And today we're at step four. Step four is about building 100 reviews. And if you get this part right, you can suck at just about everything else and still have a shot at building a million dollar business or at least having $1,000 a day in sales. This step of the process solidifies your product so that it gets organic traffic. This is the part of the process that allows you to run advertising and be profitable. This is also the part of the process where we are starting to build a base of feedback that we can use to recruit other customers and raving fans. Trouble is, this is the part where most people quit because they get this big surge of sales out of the gate and then they wonder, what the heck do I do now? I'm not getting the glorious momentum that comes from this big surge of sales. And the trap that some entrepreneurs will fall into is thinking that that surge of sales is only going to continue forever and ever. Amen. Or even worse, they associate the big surge in sales with a launch. So they live from launch to launch to launch. And they never build the foundation of a business that takes sales whether they're working or not. That's why this step in the process is so important. But it looks a lot like work. It looks a lot like getting your fingernails dirty and doing the work that most entrepreneurs do not want to do. A lot of entrepreneurs will ask the question at this stage in the process, how do I get to 25 sales a day as fast as possible? Because we all know that if you have four products at 25 sales a day, that's a hundred sales a day. At a $30 price point, that is a million dollar business. And you can get there within about a year's time. However, if you skip this part of the process, you will jump from idea to idea, tactic to tactic, product to product, and you will wonder, do I have product market fit? Is this the product that is going to take me to the promised land? Or do I need to pursue some new strategy that that guy on Instagram said was taking him to a multimillion dollar business? You will always be pulled from different ideas and different distractions that keep you from this work. And this work is getting the first hundred reviews. This step in the process is the chopping wood. The tree will fall over as fast as you chop, or it will just stay there. If you chop a little bit every single day. No analogy is perfect, but we're going with it. This is the actual work that you show up and you control the. You control how many reviews you get. You can't control where Amazon places you in their search algorithm. You can't control how much free attention you get on YouTube, you can't even control the social media algorithms, but you can absolutely control how many reviews you get. And you do that by creating real, genuine connection with your customers and asking for the review. And there's some other ninja magic that we're going to sprinkle into the strategy, but I want you to know upfront that this is the part of the process that you can control. You can sprint your way through this. You can ask your friends for reviews, you can ask your family for reviews, you can post on social media, you can talk to your customers, you can order pizza every day and ask the delivery man to leave a review. I do have a business partner who every time we go out to dinner, asks the waiter or waitress to buy his product on Amazon and leave a review. He's just always in the grind on this process. But you can also build a system for getting regular reviews. That's the best way. But however you do it, you can't really move on until you've got a hundred reviews on your first product. Here's why. If you spend five minutes or more on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok or reading business newsletters, you will hear a thousand different strategies about how to grow your business. Most of them work, but none of them can work until they're built on a foundation of social proof. Other people who have said, this product is good, this product worked for me, I'm happy with my experience. Until you have that base of reviews, all other strategies are going to struggle. If you have a viral video that gets 5 million views and sends 100,000 people to your sales page, you might get some sales. And you might even think that the way to grow your business is to create viral content. That's not a bad strategy. But if you have at least a hundred reviews and they're good reviews, thoughtful reviews from customers who have positive experiences with your product or your business, then that viral piece of content will convert at a much higher rate. You might also hear from people that pay per click is the way to grow a business. And. And that also is an effective strategy. But if you are spending money to get traffic to your sales page and you've got three reviews your conversion rate is going to be 50% less or even worse than if you've got a strong base of reviews. No matter what strategy you follow after this step, it will be more effective if you have a strong base of social proof. And that comes in the form of positive reviews. That's why we can't move on to the fun stuff, to the tactics, to the scaling, to the things that move quickly until we do this hard work. And most entrepreneurs are so eager to grow, so eager to scale that they skip over this part of the process. And that's why they jump from tactic to tactic and they always feel distracted, like they're not making any progress. A good analogy for this may be investing. Most people don't invest. Only 50% of people in the United States of America have any investments at all. Why don't they invest? They don't invest because they don't see a return today, tomorrow, next week, next month, maybe even for six months. But if they do it consistently over a long period of time, the compounding returns create create financial freedom. Reviews and feedback work exactly the same way. Most entrepreneurs, specifically people who are building brands following my process of getting to a hundred sales a day, they're so eager for the fast results that they don't build the foundation of what will compound reviews are that foundation reviews do not make a big difference week one, week two, sometimes even week four. But if you build a consistent base of reviews and you use them appropriately, which we'll talk about in this video, you will start the compounding process and over a two to three month period, you'll be in striking distance of getting that first product to a consistent 25 sales a day. As some of you may know, a few years ago I sold a business for $16 million and we've documented that here on the channel. I actually bought that business back and I'm running the exact same playbook that I am sharing with all of you on that business again so that you can that it still works. At the height of that business, it was doing about $1 million a month in sales. And we could see a direct impact when a product dropped from a four and a half star rating on Amazon to a four star rating. And oh my goodness, if we drop below a four star rating, that was like death to a product. Nothing else worked. No amount of advertising, no amount of great endorsements from a celebrity could undo the doubt that's in a customer's mind when they see either a low number of reviews or they see a bad star rating like 3 1/2 stars. I remember telling a coach of mine at the time that my goal was to take that business to 100 sales a day because I had run the numbers and I knew that that was a million dollar business. I had never had a million dollar business before. Even. Even though I had been an entrepreneur for over a decade at the time, I never had my million dollar thing. He asked me, well, how many sales are you doing every day right now? And I said, five sales a day. That gap of 95 sales a day, we're doing five, I wanna get to a hundred. That felt like it would take years. That felt like it would take forever. It felt like such a mountain to climb. There was only one thing that was within my control and it was how much feedback I could get from my customers. So I started doing the manual work of calling them myself. This was at a time when Amazon would give you the phone numbers of customers, and I would just call them and ask them how their experience was. I would ask them how they were experiencing the product. And I got feedback that I never would have predicted. I got stories from people who were using my product for reasons that I didn't even think were possible. These were the kinds of insights that I never would have had had I not been curious about the customer and focusing on the one thing that I could control, which was interactions with my customers and getting positive feedback from them. At the time, the number one seller in the category had about a thousand reviews. We had 55, and we were so freaking proud of 55 reviews. In fact, I remember being on the phone with my business partner, Matt, and he said, can you believe that we've got 55 freaking reviews? We worked so hard for those 55 reviews, and we were proud of them because it was just enough to convince a random click on the Internet to consider us over the competitor that had a thousand reviews. The person who had a thousand reviews still beat us. They were still outselling us until we passed 100 reviews. And we often think that quantity of reviews is what tricks people into making a purchase. But what we found was that the quality of reviews and the process of regularly adding them and using them in a strategic way brought us to the number one product in the category. And we stayed there for years. It was that focus of getting quality reviews and using them in a strategic way that took that product to number one in the category, and that created the systems and the process for us to build a company that would eventually get to $1 million a month in revenue and sell for an eight figure exit. That's why focusing on this right now, even when you're doing three to five sales a day, is so vital to the long term success of your business. If you saw the last video in this series, we talked about launching your product and up until that point, it's you pushing the momentum uphill, it's you grabbing for every inch of progress, it is you writing the emails, it's you making all of the decisions. So at that point in the process, you might think that the more you work, the more sales you make. You might think that the harder you push, the more your business will grow. But reviews are where we start to tip things in the other direction. When we get reviews and we get them consistently, we start to get what you might call passive sales. You start to get sales that trickle in without you working. This is the part of the process where you're starting to build something that works and runs without you, or at least make sales or without you. If you don't do this process, then you're always going to be in the grind trying to make sales happen, trying to manufacture them from thin air. But if you build the process for getting consistent reviews, you will start to build the foundation of sales that come in with or without you. And that's when you are freed up to build a business that has real value that one day you might sell for millions of dollars. Okay, so how do we actually do this? What steps can we take to start building the machine? Let's go into that now. I work with a lot of entrepreneurs, thousands of them. I've helped hundreds of people build million dollar businesses. And a lot of times they will come to me on a coaching call or in person at one of our events and they'll ask about all these complicated strategies or these tactics and wonder what they should do next. And I often tell them, don't ask me another question until you've got a hundred reviews. There's nothing else to focus on. All you need to figure out is getting your first a hundred reviews. Then we can worry about all the other tactics. I'm thinking of a story of a brand that I started a few years ago and I didn't have time to continue running this brand. And so I partnered with someone that I trusted and that I knew and I offered to mentor and invest in this person while he ran the business. A few months ago he called me to kind of frustrated, feeling like the business wasn't growing. And he honestly was feeling like he was letting me down because the business was not Growing at the pace that we both hoped that it would. And I said exactly what I just shared with you. Don't focus on anything else until you've got a hundred reviews. That gave him the focus every day to wake up and say, how am I gonna go add a review today? How am I gonna go add three reviews this week? If that's the only question that he thinks about, can he find a way to do that? If you're not thinking about all of the other opportunities in your business and you're only thinking about, how do I go get a review today, you'll find a way to do it. We'll talk about some strategies to do it. But first, I want to share with you the results that happened when this person started focusing almost exclusively on getting reviews. I know I'm beating a dead horse right now, but I need you to understand that the only step that you need to worry about right now is going out and adding reviews to your product. And. And in this case, focusing exclusively on reviews more than doubled the business within less than three months. That single product is now doing $1,000 a day in sales. That would have been a record day three months ago. Today, it's just a good day. Now that business is growing, it's compounding, and we can look forward to the progress rather than waking up and saying, what am I going to do to get sales today? Now the machine is running and it's compounding week over week, month over month, and now it's on the road to being a million dollar business. Okay, Ryan, Mr. Podcast Man, Mr. Capitalism Man, I get it now. What do I do? How do I go throw 100 reviews on this thing? Just go do it. Stop asking me questions. Don't ask any more questions until you have 100 reviews. The way that you start is by starting with what you have. If you conducted a launch like we talked about in step three, and if you have some audience, even if it is a very small email list, which is what we talked about in step two of this process, then you've got something to work with. You have some group of people that you can contact and ask for feedback. Now, here is a lesson that has served me very well in my life. When you are asking for something, go for the easiest yes possible. When you are asking someone out, you don't lead by saying, I'm looking for a wife. Do you think you'd make a good one? That is not an easy yes. You go for a date or you ask for the number. You go for the smallest yes, possible. Which opens up the possibility for future yeses later down the road. The same is true when it comes to reviews. Side note, I do this with podcasts. I do this with speaking engagements. People ask me, how have I had Gary Vaynerchuk on my stage? How have I built a relationship with Gary Vee? How have I had the sharks from Shark Tank at our events? How have I built influencer relationships with some of the most impactful influencers in the world? I don't go right for the ask. I go for the easiest yes possible to start a relationship. Sometimes that means I'd like to sponsor your podcast. Who should I talk to? Or I would like to have you at our event. Can you put me in touch with whoever manages your speaking calendar? That's an easy yes if I get a response from someone that is opening the door to a relationship. Reviews work exactly the same way. Sometimes when someone orders from us on Amazon, we'll send an email to them that says, hey, this is Ryan from Switch Supplements. I'm just reaching out to see that your order arrived on time. Could you reply to this email and just let me know? All I'm looking for is a yes. Why? Because that opens up the door for a further conversation. That is step one in your case. If you just did a launch and you got some sales, the next step is for you to reach out to those customers who raised their hand and said, I'm going to buy this product first. I was first in line to buy it. What's the easiest yes possible that you could use to open up a conversation or to open up a relationship with this person? You could ask them if they'd be willing to tell you a little bit about their experience with the product. You could ask them if their order arrived on time. You could even ask them if they would be willing to be on a VIP list to get discounts in the future. There's multiple ways that you can go for the easy yes, but we don't go for the review right away. We go for a simple yes. That looks a lot like relationship building, because that's what this is. This is a people business. And the more that you build a connection with people, the more that they are willing to support you in the form of a review and feedback, a video, testimonial, etc. So the first step is to start with what we have and we go for the easiest yes possible. Okay, Ryan, well, I did not just have a $10,000 launch, so what do I do instead? I ask the question, what do you have to work with? Do you have a personal Facebook page with your own friends? Do you have a Facebook group that you are active in? Do you have 100 followers on social media? Do you have the ability to create stories where you are documenting the process just to build relationships with people who are watching? We start with what we have and we go for the easy, yes possible. That's how we start the process. That may not get us to 100 reviews, but I can almost guarantee you that it will get you to the first 10. Let's get even more tactical for those of you who are overthinking this. I used to call my customers and one time I saw that someone had reordered my product and and they had bought three units of the product and I was like, huh, I wonder what prompted this person to come back and buy again? So I picked up the phone and I called him. His name was David. And I said, david, this is Ryan from Sheer Strength Labs. Sorry to bug you. I just noticed that you placed a second order and I just wanted to hear how your experience has been. And he said, ryan, I love your product. The next few minutes of this conversation I wish had been recorded because he then went on to tell me details about his bedroom life with his wife that I did not want to hear, but sure gave me some insights into my product. At the end of the call, I simply wrapped up by saying, david, thank you so much for chatting with me. I know it's weird when a company reaches out to you and asks for feedback. So if it's okay with you, I would like to give you a $25 credit for your next purchase on any product in our line. Would that be okay with you? That's an easy yes. He said, yeah, of course. I would love that. Great. I'm going to go ahead and email that over to you. What email address should I send that to? That's another easy yes. He's now said yes twice. That's when I go in for the kill. David, thank you so much for chatting with me today. You don't need to share all the details that you shared with me publicly, but it would mean the world to me if you would take two and a half minutes and write a positive review on Amazon. Is that something you'd be open to? And he said yes. I went for three yeses, and that got us a review on Amazon that was very effective. That's not scalable, but it took 10 minutes and I can do that every day until I've got a hundred Reviews, that's slow. It looks a lot like work. And there's way more tools that make this easier today. But if that was all that you did, you'd be at 100 reviews within a couple of months. And now we can get to the good stuff of building a million dollar business. Now, I mentioned that there is some ninja magic that we can sprinkle on top of this to make things even more effective. Here's a lesson that you should remember for the rest of your life. What gets celebrated gets repeated. Or if you want more of something, appreciate what you have of it. I have a lesson that I teach my daughter. I started teaching her this when she was about 4 years old. I started teaching her how to negotiate. This has backfired. I buy a lot of things for my daughter now. I started teaching her this because I was so tired of her asking for things and me just saying, yes, no, here's why. So I taught her how to make asks that felt like gives. And I taught her that the more she appreciates something, the more she will get of it. For example, when my daughter wants to get a new toy, I remind her, esther, what is the best way to get more of what you want? And she says, appreciate what I have. That's right, sweetheart. What this does is, this is magic. She now communicates to me how much she appreciates the toys that she has. And when I see how much she appreciates what she has, I want to buy her more things. This has made her an incredible manipulator. Whenever she wants a new toy, she starts playing with her old toys and telling me how much they mean to me. I have trained my daughter to be a master manipulator. And guess what? I'm happy about it. I would way rather buy her a toy knowing that it's going to be appreciated than go out and buy a toy because the toys that have already bought her are not being appreciated. Do you see where this is going? The more that you appreciate what does exist, the more that you will get of it. What does this have to do with reviews? Well, this was perfectly illustrated on a coaching call that we had inside of the 1% where one of our members was saying how much he was struggling to get to 100 reviews. Here is what I told him. Ben was at 63 reviews and he was only focused on the fact that he didn't have 100 reviews. He was only focused on the sales that he was not getting. So I encourage him to flip it and think about the 63 reviews that he already Had. That's marketing gold. How much time had he spent appreciating those reviews? And I don't just mean in the airy fairy sense. I'm going to meditate and appreciate my 63 reviews. I mean publicly thanking those people. I mean talking about how much those reviews mean to a business that is small and getting off the ground. The more that he appreciates the 63 people that went out and left a review, the more that other people see that and say, man, I want to support this guy. It's kind of weird how much he freaks out about one positive review. I'm going to leave a review and watch him freak out about that one. That's the energy that will take you to 100 reviews. When you've got a small base of people, but you appreciate the heck out of them, you will invite other people to do the same activity. When you are just grinding to close a gap, then you're operating from a taking mentality. You're no longer in this place of building relationship or going for easy yeses. You're not in a place of appreciating the customers that are there. You're actually energetically resenting them because you're not at your goal yet. That's a terrible place from which to build a business. So we start with what we have and what we appreciate. What we celebrate gets repeated. And that takes us to the next step of this process. When you get a review, you milk it. You milk it for all you can. There are multiple ways to do this. Some people will screenshot a review, post it on social media, and then move on. I look at this as content. I look at this as an opportunity to turn it into video content. I look at this as a reason to email my list. I look at this as a reason to post multiple times. I might take that piece of feedback and create several different pieces of content around it and talk about how much it means to me, what it means to this person, and the difference that it made in their life so that it calls out to other people who are in a similar journey. When you start to practice milking every single review, you will realize that you never have a lack of content. You never have a lack of reviews. You only have a lack of creativity of the different ways that you can use what you have. And the more that you do that, the more that you will invite other people to leave a review. Guess what that does? It starts to create a pipeline of other people who want to leave you reviews. So when you are publicly celebrating the reviewers of your product like they're the hero in your journey. And you're milking that via content and broadcasting it. You're now encouraging other people to fall into that system. This makes going for the ask much easier because if someone has seen how much you appreciate every review, when you go for the ask, they are much more likely to say yes. So to recap, we start with what we have, then we go for the easiest yes possible and we celebrate the heck out of every inch of progress when we've done those things. Now we can more actively reach out to people to make this process faster. That looks like manually reaching out to customers who have purchased. It also looks like sending DMs to the people who comment on your posts. It looks like sending messages to the people who are following your content. One thing that I encouraged Tomer, who you met earlier, to do was to message every new follower on Instagram and say, hey, thanks so much for following my work. What brought you to my page? And that just opened up a conversation where he could add value. Sometimes that means that he makes connections with influencers or people who create content with 5,000 followers or 10,000 followers. And so he says, I appreciate you following my work. Can I just send you one of the products for free, just to try, see if you like it? That's an easy yes. A lot of times that gets free posts from people who have reach. Do you see what we're doing here? We're cultivating connections with people that will leave us reviews that might create content for us and will be bought into the long term vision of this company. This is when you're creating raving fans. This seems really slow at first, and it is. But if you build this habit now, it influences your culture for the growth of your business and it creates a community of super fans that want to buy the second product and the third product. But it starts here. It starts before the scale. It starts before the growth. I don't think people realize the value of, of one really good review. One really good review becomes two pieces of content. One of those pieces of content becomes an ad that converts. Those conversions become customers that you then can reach out to and build relationships with. A few of those customers become average reviews, one of them becomes a great review. You turn into content that might become an ad. Do you see where this is going? We can start to build a system in which we are cultivating feedback and getting reviews every day. So we start with what we have. We go for easy yeses, we celebrate what is working and then we start to make manual asks. From there we can build a system, a flywheel that gets leads and customers and reviews ongoing every day until we're at 25 sales a day. But remember, if all that happened was you went out and grinded your way to 100 sales, that would be good enough for this process. That would be 100 pieces of feedback that we can use for content, use for ads, and start to build the flywheel. That's what we're going to talk about in the next video. A great example of someone who does this well is the brand Chewy. Chewy sends birthday cards to the dog. They're handwritten cards, they're thoughtful, and they're written by someone at Chewy. When someone gets the birthday card for the dog and it's handwritten and thoughtful, they often post it on social media that invites two or three of their friends to go and buy from Chewy versus buying from another company. When you've got two people coming to you for every one customer that you reach out to, we are now compounding when our customer experience is so positive that people will voluntarily give you content or reviews. Now we're building a machine. That's when we've got enough momentum for us to take these ingredients and build a recipe to that will predictably get to 25 sales a day. And remember, it only takes four products at 25 sales a day to have a hundred sales a day at a $30 price point. That is a million dollar business and it starts by you creating a culture of celebrating the positive feedback that you are already getting. One little side note, this video is about getting reviews, but I like to celebrate all positive feedback whether it is a review or not. When I see a customer have a win, I post that in my stories. I might email that out to my list. I encourage my clients to post their feedback in our private Facebook group. I do that for a couple reasons. One, yeah, it makes really good content that I will share publicly, but also it allows me to understand their journey on a deeper level. I use those posts to prep for coaching calls. I use those to have discussions with my team about how we can serve our people on a deeper level. It serves multiple purposes and my clients and customers see that I am actively using what they're posting to make their lives better. And when I celebrate them, it makes them the hero in the story. You know what else it does? This is super interesting. I didn't expect this when I started doing it, but when I started bragging about the success of my clients and students, it psychologically made them want to prove me right. When I brag about the momentum of one of my students from having a good launch or getting to 25 sales a day or getting to 100 reviews, when I talk about that publicly, it makes them look really good. Makes me look good too. But it also gives them the extra shot in the arm to finish the process, to finish the eight steps because they know I'm watching and they know that other people are watching. That is good for everyone. Do the same thing for your customers. Do the same thing for the email that you get from a customer that talks about how your product changed their life or made a meaningful impact in their experience. Do that with the reviews that you get and the more you do that, the easier it will be to get others and the more that it will be easier to get great video testimonials or recommendations or introductions to people who can impact your business. When you appreciate the good feedback you're getting, you're inviting more people to participate in the growth of your business. And that as a byproduct becomes 100 reviews. Once we're at 100 reviews now, we can move faster. Our pay per click traffic is going to convert at a better rate. Our TikTok posts are going to convert into more customers. Our review rate is going to be higher. We're going to start to climb the organic rankings and and we can start the process of maintaining 25 consistent sales a day en route to building $1 million business. We'll talk about the system for doing that in the next video. So make sure that you are subscribed. If you watch this whole video and you want to go through this process all eight steps, the best place for you to start is for you to download our free resources. The Playbook to building a business that has 100 sales a day is written and ready for you@Capitalism.com Playbook. When you go over there you'll get the playbook to 100 sales a day. You'll also get a free 15 day course to implement the steps of the eight step process and you'll see some of our best case studies of people who did this well. So go over to capitalism.com playbook. That is the best place for you to start your road to 1 million. I'm Ryan Daniel Ryan with capitalism.com I help entrepreneurs build million dollar businesses and have multimillion dollar exit. This is the part that most people skip so if you get good at it, you'll be ahead of almost everybody else. Thanks for watching I'll see you next time.