Zero To $1M in 12 Months: Step 6 of 8 - Build a $100K/Month Business with 100 People

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Welcome back to the podcast. This is part six of the eight part series to building a million dollar business. And today we're going to talk about cultivating 100 raving fans. This is an important point before we launch new products because it will give us the momentum and the leverage to be able to launch additional products that get to 25 sales a day while much faster. And I believe that you can build a million dollar business with a hundred raving fans. A million dollar business starting with just 100 people. Can you do that? I'm going to tell you exactly how to build a list of people that can give you a million dollar business even if you're starting with just 100 people. Think about this. What do Taylor Swift, WWE and Tesla all have in common? They're all really big brands that started with a small passionate group of fans. That group of fans took their product, their service or their business to the rest of their network. Other people voluntarily told their friends and posted about it and proudly said that they were fans of that brand or fans of that person and and it actually gave them status to do it. They bragged about that brand, they bragged about being a fan of that brand and as a result they recruited other raving fans to be a part of that movement. Today those brands are some of the biggest brands in the world. But they started with a small group of people that took the brand to the rest of the world. And I believe that if you cultivate a small group of raving fans that you can leverage that to build a million dollar business and you can do it with less advertising and more profit. Today I'm going to share with you exactly how we do that based on what we're doing right now to build million dollar businesses and based on our best case studies of entrepreneurs that we've helped follow this process that have used it to build million dollar businesses. So let's dive right into it. If you're new here. My name is Ryan Daniel Moran. I help entrepreneurs build million dollar businesses and have a multimillion dollar exit. And this is step six of an eight part series about building $1 million business. $1 million business is 100 sales a day. That's four products at 25 sales a day. At a $30 price point, that's just over $1 million in revenue which also gives you $1 million valuation on a business if you ever sell. It said differently, this is the path to having a million dollar net worth. This is how I built most of my wealth and have now helped hundreds of Entrepreneurs build seven figure businesses by following this process. Today we're going to talk about building 100 raving fans. Because that is step six. Before we launch new products, before we try to scale, and before we spend everything we've ever made on advertising, we, we need to cultivate a small group of raving fans. Because that group of raving fans is going to give us the content and it's going to give us the attention and the word of mouth to be able to take our product, our service or our business to everybody else in the marketplace. This is the step that sets my process apart from most of the other e commerce trainers or other business figureheads on the Internet because I am about doing more with less. This is the step of cultivating 100 raving fans, what we call ambassadors. Ambassadors are the people that you know will buy a product and leave a review. They are the people that you know will tell at least one other person about your brand or your product. When you have 100 people who will do that for you, your business starts to grow beyond your own manual labor. Up until this point, the process has been very manual. It has been about manually asking for reviews, grinding your way to the first hundred reviews. It's been about creating content so that you build a launch list and then writing email launch sequences to take sales. It has been very manual up to this point. And that is a necessary part of the process of getting your first 10,000 in sales and getting to 25 sales a day. But once we have 100 people that we know will support us, the brand will grow much bigger than our own manual work because those hundred raving fans will leave us reviews, which makes getting 100 reviews on every product much faster and easier. They'll also provide content for us, which makes the content and audience growth process more much faster and easier. And they will also tell other people about your brand or business, which increases your word of mouth advertising. In other words, if we do this step before we launch additional products, every product that we launch will get to 25 sales a day much faster. In fact, I tell people that once you have a business that's doing 25 sales a day, you are halfway to the million because you've built the road to 25 sales a day. Now we can just add another car on there. This part of the process makes the cars go faster. No analogy is perfect, but we're going with this one. Up to this point, you've been grinding. Up to this point, there was a lot of work and labor that went into creating a Launch or getting to 25 sales a day. This is the part of the process where things start to move faster. They start to go bigger than just you. This is where the manual labor starts to get a little bit easier. It changes because now you will be managing the flow from your ambassadors more than you are creating it yourself. It takes a lot of effort to get one product to 25 sales a day, but it does not take four times the effort to get four products to 25 sales a day. And in fact, the effort that you put in will be less and it will be more about relationship management and strategy management than it will be pushing buttons and doing manual labor. A quick recap of the last step of this process. It was about getting to 25 sales a day. Our process, we call the flywheel, and the flywheel is about posting content and linking back to an email capture. And in doing so, we're building our audience. We're doing regular promotions and we're asking for reviews. In running that process for about 90 days, we can predictably grow sales with our target being 25 sales per day. In this step, we're going to add one more piece to this process, and we call this the traffic triangle. The traffic triangle is about getting people to see you in three different places. This is based on a psychological trigger that when you see someone in three different places, you begin to trust them. If you think about someone that you work with, they are a co worker. If you go out for drinks after work, they're a co worker that you sometimes go out for drinks with. But if you invite them over to your home to watch football on Sunday, they've now seen you in three places and they are now a friend. That is where the brain starts to trust someone because they've seen you in three very different contexts. This is also why if you go on three very different dates with someone, that's usually where the magic starts to happen. For the purpose of getting to a million dollars a year or 100 sales a day, we need three different places for people to see us. We need a traffic source, we need a community, and we need a conversion source. In the last video, we already built two of those places. We built a place for traffic that would be social media, some place that you're going to be putting your name out there and creating content. We've also built the conversion mechanism, which is the email list. So our most likely customers are following us on social media or they see our content, or they see somebody else talk about our content and they're on Our email list. Those are the best customers. But the raving fans need to see us in one additional place, and that is where we build the community. If we have a place to get exposure and we have a place to build community, and we have an email list where we are converting our prospects. Now we've completed the traffic triangle, and our work is to use each of these three areas to to feed the entire machine until we've got the foundation for every product to get to 25 sales a day. If you complete this traffic triangle, you now have the firepower to get to $1 million a year very quickly. Think about how you make relationships with people. Do you run an ad saying, I'm looking for friends, or do you just try to connect with a human being? And in most cases, when you connect with somebody in three different places, they become a friend. That is the basis for the traffic triangle. Once we get a prospect or a lead or a viewer or a customer to see us in three different places, they are likely to become a fan. And that's what we're cultivating in this step. So how do you build raving fans? How do you cultivate relationships with people that want to talk about you voluntarily and talk about your product and spread your business to the rest of the world? We're going to talk about the exact strategies of how to do that. But first, let me ask you, how do you make friends? Do you make friends by showing up with a script? The way that you build friends is by spending time with people, by getting to know people when you're trying to meet someone that you want to have a romantic relationship with. That is very rarely done on volume. That is very rarely done by swiping a lot and going on a lot of first dates. Now, that can be great to figure out what you want and what you like and who you might want to spend more time with. But if we never go to step two, which is spending more time with someone, we will never build a relationship. We will never build a relationship with a romantic partner. We will never build a relationship with a friend, we will never build a relationship with a customer, and we will never build raving fans. Raving fans and friends and partnerships are based on time spent together. And so the way that you cultivate this group of a hundred fans is by spending time with that group of people. And we can be strategic about how we spend time with people. We can be mindful about who we let into our life and who we exclude. But there is no getting around the fact that in order to build trust and to build camaraderie and friendship. We have to spend time with people. And that means that you have to be genuinely curious about adding value to someone's life more than you were thinking about extracting value. We will extract value from these relationships, but we will only do it once we made deposits into the relationship bank account. Only then can we ask for a withdrawal from that account. So let's get into how. How do we actually build this group of raving fans? We need one place where we are going to spend active time with our raving fans. And you might be starting with 10 to 25 people. Ultimately, in this step, we're going to be cultivating a group of 100 raving fans as a starting place. There are multiple ways to do this. Some of my favorites include podcasts, Facebook groups, and Slack channels. Or other messaging channels like Discord, where all the cool kids are hanging out, or Telegram, where all my conspiracy theory friends hang out. Any messaging channel where you are actively spending time is another appropriate place. In my experience, I've seen the most success with our clients and partners using Facebook groups in order to build community. And that is because people are already on there. You show up top of feed when you post into a group, and other people can invite their friends into the group, which gives you a source of growth as this community starts to build. Let me give you an example. One of our longtime community members is named Alicia. And Alicia was selling water bottles on Amazon. You couldn't come up with a more commoditized or competitive product than selling water bottles. But Alicia did something really smart to build raving fans. She built a Facebook group for people who were just drinking more water. She put videos in there encouraging people where they could drink more water throughout the day. And guess what? She talked about her water bottles in those videos. And she encouraged people that were in the group that were doing this challenge, that were showing their water bottle or their hike that they're on and where they're drinking water at. It was just a group where they were on this journey together. And Alicia got very involved in those people's lives. Not involved like showing up at their house, but involved like replying to comments and encouraging the people who are going through this part of their journey. And guess what happened? People happily went and bought her water bottles. In fact, they told their friends about this group and posted things like, wow, this company really cares about me. They became evangelists for her water bottle company. A few years into growing that business, Alicia sold it for a seven figure amount of money and she became a millionaire before she was 30. That is a smart use of community in relationship with building your business. If Alicia can do that with something as boring as selling water bottles, you can do it in just about any industry. In fact, one of our current clients is named Alina. Alina has a Facebook group for goldendoodle owners. She sells a product that is a shampoo specific for that dog breed. Well, guess what? Every goldendoodle owner is passionate about and already a raving fan of their pet. Pets are a great example because every pet owner is passionate about that one thing. They're already a raving fan of their pet. So if you put those people into a community where they are sharing pictures of their pets and they're interacting with each other and making product recommendations to each other, guess what? You've got a community. That Facebook group has served Alina's business very well. And she got to $80,000 a month in sales with just one product. How did she do it? She did it by following this process, building a small audience, having a launch, getting reviews, and then cultivating raving fans. In fact, this part of the process, the building ambassadors and raving fans, has served her so well that she struggled to keep up with demand. As she's building a million dollar business with one product, what happens when she launches another product? That one will get to 25 sales a day and beyond, much faster. Because she's already got this raving fan base that is ready to leave reviews, that is ready to talk about her business and they're already posting content which you can use on your social media channels. And that's what we're going to talk about next. How do we leverage a community as part of the traffic triangle? Because when we bring these three pieces together, you will quickly see how we can build a million dollar business with a very small group of people. Again, the traffic triangle is three, three places. There's traffic, community and conversion. Traffic is exposure. It's where people are discovering you. This is usually social media, especially if you are starting on a very small budget because it's free. Yes, maybe only 200 people see your posts. Doesn't matter. We'll talk about what to do about that. The second is conversion. That's putting people onto an email list so we can run promotions. And the third is building the community. Let's bring all of these three pieces together. One of my favorite ways to cultivate raving fans as part of this process is the following. When I post on social media, I always link back to my email list. And then here's the ninja secret on the thank you page of the email capture. I invite people to apply for our community. I invite them to apply because I want to have a filter for who gets in and who stays out. One of my questions in that application may be, are you willing to give us feedback about how the product works for you and any suggestions that you have for future products that we might release? Ooh, that's good. If someone says yes to that, I'll bring them into the community. And what happens when they're inside? They're in a Facebook group where I can interact with them and they get to know me and my brand and I understand how they think and how they're using my product as part of their life. So one piece of content that I make becomes exposure on social media. It becomes leads to my email capture and it might also trickle into some of my raving fans. And in a Facebook group or wherever I am building my community. Here's where the magic happens. That same person who is now a member of my community is likely to use my product and post about it in the Facebook group. If they say something good like, I just got my product, I use it for the first time and it's working really well, that becomes my next piece of content. I'll use that screenshot from that post or that text message or that email, and I will turn that into a piece of content that I'll post on social media. I'll bring that community post into the traffic part of the traffic triangle. Guess what that does? It gives me more exposure that links back to the email capture. And a few of those people may also join the community. In order to seed start of the community, I will manually invite people into a group or into a slack channel wherever I'm building my community. And I will personally reach out to people to bring them into that group. I will invite the people who have bought multiple products, the people who have reviewed my product in the past, the influencers who have talked about me on social media, or any of my personal contacts that I know are fans of the brand. In doing so, I am creating a special group of people that have done something valuable for me and my business. If someone has left a really good review, I want to reward them and encourage them to be a part of my brand moving forward. So I will invite them into my community to seed that group. If we have 25 to 50 people that we feel comfortable bringing into that group because they've left a review, they've given us positive feedback, they bought multiple products or they've talked about our product on social media and we bring them into a group and we're serving that group. That is a beautiful way to start building that base of raving fans. Then the rest of the traffic triangle process will continue to add to that group and so that we're regularly building our community of people and we can run the traffic triangle to get more exposure, more leads, and more raving fans. Do you see how this snowball starts to build? Within a few weeks or a few months, we can have lots of content that we didn't create ourselves. We're now building an email list actively and our raving fan base is starting to grow. So what does this allow you to do? Well, when you've got a community of people that actually like you and they actually like your product and they're regularly posting about you and your brand and your products, that all becomes content that you can use in your marketing. That means that you can use that on your Amazon listing or you can email it out to your customers. It also means that you can do things like run ads. And let me give you one ninja tip. That is the best type of content to create. TikTok Shop and other short form pieces of content that can go viral or become ads to grow your business. That's a little bit more advanced that we'll go into this video. Just know that having a base of people who are talking about you regularly and saying good things about you becomes the best source for content and for ads that will rapidly grow your business. Because it's not you talking about how great your product is. It's a group of other people talking about how great your product or your brand is. And they're talking about it from the perspective of how it affected their lives. That is when you've got the base of a brand that can get to $1 million in revenue and far beyond that. Now, what if your content isn't hitting? What if you don't have an audience of at least a few hundred people who are paying attention to you? Do you run ads to try and boost exposure? Do you do something and try and kickstart things? Do you make some really viral content that will put you on the map very quickly? My recommendation is to attempt to do more with less. If 75 people are seeing your content, but you reach out to those 75 people and just say, thank you for watching my content, your engagement will go up. Your connection with that person will increase the bonds that that person feels with you and your brand will go up. And it might be slight, but it's a deposit into the relationship bank account. We do not fix our growth problems by going faster in the wrong direction. We don't spend money on unproven ads. And in order to fix a bad sales problem, we first do more with less by cultivating connection with the people that are paying attention. Sometimes people will complain to me that they did a launch and they made some money, but the first group of sales that they took was from friends and family. And I say, awesome, you have an audience. You have an audience accidentally from spending time with people that you care about. Those are the people who came back and voluntarily supported your business. Now we just have to duplicate that process to the rest of the community. How do we do that? By spending time with the people who are paying attention. This means that when you post a piece of content and it gets seen by 80 people, we engage with those 80 people. And the more we do that, the more our engagement goes up and the more that the raving fans will start to come out of the woodwork to support you. Just this week, an old contact that I have not done business with for seven years reached out to me and said, I have been loving your social media content lately. I actually am enjoying watching you document building one of your brands. All I've been doing is taking screenshots of my sales on a daily basis and and giving commentary about what we're doing with the brand and telling stories about how I built this business and I sold it and then the new owner bankrupted it and I bought it back and now I'm rebuilding it. I'm just telling that story. I'm not talking about how to use the product to change your life. I'm not even showing the products in most of my content. I'm talking about my story and my process of building this business. And people are coming out of the woodwork to discover more about that brand and how they can be part of it. Those are the types of connections that we can add into our ambassador list. We can put them into a Facebook group or Slack channel or wherever. You're building community in order to build more trust and spend more time with that group of people. That's the group of people that will take us out of the stuck or part of the business and give us a predictable way to grow our sales, get more reviews, create more content, build an audience, and create a foundation for the launch of the next products. Business is about people. Business is about relationships. In the Internet, entrepreneurial space. We get obsessed with the tactics that are a way of dancing around connecting with people. We run pay per click ads and and we see that it's showing up in sales and we say hooray. Or we say it's not working or we try to come up with the perfect script to connect with an influencer or we hope and pray that an influencer picks us up and talks about us. Or worse, we try to come up with the perfect way to make a piece of content that will go viral. All of those are great strategies to grow a business. But. But if it's not built on some foundation that is relational, that is about connection, that is about adding value to a small group of people, then we're just guessing. We're just hoping. And in the fast paced world that is social media and Internet entrepreneurship, those things are sexy because we see when it works, how quickly a brand can take off. But in my experience, the the real foundation of a business is built by real genuine connection with our customers. This is a lost art that we've forgotten about in the Internet world. But in the old way of doing business, you had a book of clients and you kept in touch with that book of clients. You had to actually have connections with the people you were doing business with. We don't have to do that anymore because you can buy a product on Amazon or via a Facebook ad, or because an influencer talked about you and you never see your customers at all. That's a beautiful thing. But it is much more powerful when you have a connection with a group of people and they take you to the rest of the world. I don't mean to get on my high horse here, but when people come to our events@capitalism.com I know at least half of them by name. I can tell you a little bit about their business. I attempt to be very present with my following. And I don't always do a perfect job. Sometimes my inbox gets way too full. But I know that when I respond to an email that comes from a customer or a client that it can dramatically affect their life. And even if it doesn't affect their life, it shows that I care. I try to instill that into the processes of my businesses. When I'm building a physical product brand that doesn't have my face on it or doesn't have my name on it, it doesn't mean as much for me to be interacting with people. But when a brand or a representative of my brand or me, if I am the community manager for a while, if the brand. If you as the brand owner, make an attempt to build connection with your clients, with your followers, with your customers. That old school playbook that used to work for hundreds of years has so much more of an impact today because so few brands will do it. I know that you want the fast way to a million dollar business. I'm here to tell you this is the fast way. The fast way is by building those connections with people. And when you have connections with a small group of people and you see how far that goes, you start to realize how much you can do with a very small group of people. Think about it this way. If you had 200 people, that was your entire audience, 200 people who cared and paid attention. But those 200 people bought your product, put it on auto, ship or subscribe and save, and they told their friends about it, left a review, and then posted on social media how great this product was. Is that an impactful audience? That's the type of audience that can take you from 25 sales a day to a hundred sales a day, even if you've only got a few products. That's the type of audience that will create the content and the goodwill that you can turn into ads that will convert on a very small budget. You don't need to have a perfect ad that converts to a massive number of people. You need a really good ad that comes from your customers that converts to a small group of people and turns them into raving fans. That's how we build a snowball, to build a million dollar business that is very profitable without us staying on the hamster wheel of spending a bunch of money on ads or grinding our way to the top. We have people who want to come back to us over and over and over again and they tell other people about us. That's what you want. Your goal in this part of the process is to build 100 raving fans, what we call ambassadors. Those are the people that we know are going to leave reviews we believe will give us positive feedback and are likely to tell their friends about us. We build that using the traffic triangle, getting our fans and customers to see us in three different places. We leverage the community and the traffic triangle to build the rest of the triangle so, so that we're adding to our traffic, our email list, and to our community. And that will build the base for us to launch new products and get them to 25 sales a day much faster. We will build upon that to get to a hundred sales a day and we will have a predictable way to launch more products, get them to 25 sales a day so that we have a million dollar brand. That's why in the next video we're going to talk about launching new products. And at this point, if you followed the steps, you have an audience that buys from you, you have a strategy for launching that product. To them, you've got a group of people who will leave reviews for you and you have a list of ambassadors who will take that product and help you spread the word. That makes getting to 25 sales a day on each product much faster and it will give us a very predictable way to launch new products. That's what we'll talk about in the next video. If you are enjoying this series, please do me a favor. Send this to someone that you know that would benefit from it. Because many entrepreneurs get stuck only taking their sales on Amazon or they get addicted to one advertising channel and they have no idea how to break out. I want to inspire E commerce entrepreneurs and Internet entrepreneurs to be more relational and it not only makes your business grow faster, it makes it more enjoyable and less lonely. On the road to 1 million make sure you're subscribed to the channel so that you see the rest of this series. And if you need some help and some free resources to help you start the road to 1 million, the best place to go is capitalism.com playbook. That's where you can download our playbook to getting to 100 sales a day. See all of our best case studies and our free resources for building a million dollar business. I'm Ryan. Danny Moran with capitalism.com thank you for being here and I'll see you next time. Take.