Zero to $1M in 12 Months: Step 2 of 8 - Build a $1M Business with 100 People

In today's episode, we're going to lay out how to build a million dollar business, starting with just 100 people. 100 people is enough to start the road to $1 million. And we're going to lay out how to get those people, how to talk to them, and how to use that as the foundation to build your million dollar business. And this is not theory, this is not made up marketing stuff. This happens all the time. This is the foundation of how I build all of my businesses, both old ones, new ones, and the ones that I advise. And in fact, when I'm working with a client, this is often what we go back to to get a business either off the ground or from a stuck place to a growing place. This is the transition point for entrepreneurs who are either stuck or in their head figuring out what to do. So we're going to lay out how to build that audience that pays attention, wants to buy your stuff, and gives you the momentum so you can march down the road to 1 million. I want this to be the almanac that you come back to, the thing that inspires you or your team and your business partner to go in this direction. Because when you do this part right, this is what I have seen be the difference maker between businesses that, that stay stuck for years and the ones that grow and compound month after month or year after year. Back in 2014, I was starting a little yoga company with my friend and business partner, Sean, and we sold that business a couple years later. But when we were launching the business, we were selling a yoga mat on Amazon. We ordered the product from China and it was sitting on a boat for like two months. And if you've ever launched a physical product, you know that those two months are the longest two months of your life. You've got eight weeks where you just picked a product and got it made. Now you're waiting just to sell stuff. What I saw most people in the space doing was just sitting on their hands and getting ready and waiting for the product to be available for them to take a sale. And I said to my business partner, Sean, I said, our job in the next eight weeks is to do the work. So we've got people ready and waiting to buy from us as soon as that product hits. I come from an Internet marketing background. I come from kind of an old school marketing background that was all about building lists and launching things to that email list. And when I got into E commerce, when I got into selling physical stuff, what I called real businesses, businesses that I could grow and sell, sell One day I was stunned that there weren't more people who were using some of the plays from the marketing playbook that helped these businesses sell really expensive stuff. But they weren't using it to sell their $30 thing or their $50 thing or their hundred dollar thing. And I was stunned to find that so few brands knew how to build audiences and launch products to them. And I saw a lot of brands suffer. There was a time in which Amazon was growing so quickly, or Instagram was growing so quickly, or Kickstarter was the hot thing and it was growing so fast that you could get away with not having to do the basic marketing stuff that I saw make so many people successful. But today, if you marry the two worlds and you build a small audience, and we'll talk about how to do that, and you marry that with a platform like Amazon or Shopify or even Facebook ads, that is how you will win in the long term. People get obsessed over the strategies and tactics that get them more sales on this platform over here or what gets them more followers on discovery platform like Instagram or TikTok. But they miss the whole part of audience building that turns into money. You might be familiar with influencers who have really big followings, but they make all of their money just by renting out their audience. They don't have any products for sale and they don't really have a business. You might also be familiar with brands that sell a lot of product, but they don't have any audience, they don't have any distribution, they don't have any awareness to get in front of new customers. I think the magic is when you blend those two worlds and you build an audience that actually wants to hear from you. And you've got really good products to sell. So if you're in one of those two camps, the way through is to build an audience that wants to buy from you. Let's talk about how we do that. Some people question why the second step of my eight part process to building a million dollar business is putting 100 people on an email list. Why not Instagram? Why not TikTok? And the reason is because on an email list you can contact them directly. And to this day, email is still the best and highest converting platform of any of the other communication channels. People buy the most via an email list. Alex Hormozy defines a lead in his book $100 million leads as someone that you can contact. I would go one step further as to say that a lead is someone you can contact that has expressed interest in Your product, your service, or your business. And I found the easiest, fastest and most profitable way to build up a list of leads is to put them on an email list. I have made millions of dollars with email lists, both with my name on them and with company names on them. I've also done this for clients. I will work with clients that have email lists that they are not using well, and we turn that into money really, really quickly. But most brands are so focused on where they're taking their sales, and most content creators are so focused on where they're getting attention that neither one stops and thinks about the audience that they can contact. And without that, I don't think you have the foundation of a business that you can take to a million dollars and beyond. So that's why this matters. Now how do we do that? How do we build the list of people that want to hear from us, want to buy from us, and give us the momentum to climb towards a million dollar business? Remember, this is step two in my eight step process for building a million dollar business. If you missed step one, you can go back and watch that it's about choosing the person that you're going to be communicating to. That's step one. Because when you know who we're talking to, it makes putting 100 of them on an email list much easier. If we don't know who we're talking to, then who are we putting on a list? There's a lot of attention about creating content, about building audiences, getting followers, communicating to those followers, et cetera. Let me ask you this question though. What determines what is a good piece of content? Is it something that gets seen by millions of people? Is it something that goes viral? Is it something that creates customers? What do we use to determine if a piece of content is good or not? I determine a good piece of content based on how many leads I get. How many people come into my audience and follow along and raise their hand that say, I want more information about this product or this service. Now, the pieces of content that create the most leads are not always the ones that get a million views. They're not always the ones that go viral. But if something is getting leads, if something is getting a pool of potential customers, then I can advertise that piece of content to make it seen by as many people as I want. And if I'm getting potential customers from that piece of content, then it might make sense to put advertising behind that piece of content. Now this flies in the face of what most people will say to content creators. They will advise them to structure it in a certain way to go viral. They will talk about ways to get likes and create controversy and trick the algorithm and all that stuff is really helpful. But it doesn't matter. If you don't create leads, you don't create a core group of potential customers that want to buy your stuff. So I would argue that the best piece of content is, is the one that creates leads. Now, let me ask you a different question. If you take a sale somewhere like on Amazon or kickstarter or walmart.com this is important to understand because it changes the frame of content creation. For when you go promote your business or announce that you're starting something, the purpose of doing that is to put people onto an email list. So when you're sitting in front of your phone going, what content do I create for Instagram or what do I post on TikTok? A lot of times our attention goes to, well, what's going to go viral or what's going to get views. But instead, what if your frame went to what is going to put people onto an email list? Let me give you an example. When an influencer goes to launch a product or to launch something that is actually going to make them money, I will encourage them to first make an announcement post that they're doing that thing, and then send people over to a waiting list where they can enter their email address so they can get updates about the development of that project or that product or that business. The reason why we do that is because we siphon off the most attentive people who want that thing and we put them into a method of contact. We put them onto an email list. Now the creator can go continue making content, continue building the audience. And once in a while they will say, hey, I'm doing this thing. Go over here to get on the waiting list. Those pieces of content that add people to a waiting list will be the most profitable posts that they make all year. It won't be the post that they can get a sponsor for $5,000, but it will be the post that puts a few hundred or a few thousand people onto an email list. And now they can then announce the product to that list and that will convert at a much higher rate than if they're just talking about it on their content channels. In the same way, when I'm working with an entrepreneur who is starting from scratch and we got to put 100 people onto an email list, the best thing that they can do to start is announce to their following. Even if it's on your personal Facebook, your personal Instagram, your personal pages. You announce that you are starting a business and that if they want to follow along that they can join the waiting list on the opt in page. That alone, that opening move often puts 50, 100 or a few hundred people onto a waiting list. And now we have enough to do damage. This is how we start the process of of building that audience of people that wants to buy from us. And now, on a daily or weekly basis, when we create a piece of content on whatever platform you want, we are calling attention to that email list and that is where we will communicate with our potential customers about when the product is going to be ready, about what deals or promotions we're running, and we can stay in contact with those people as we're building the business. A few weird things happen when you do this. Number one, it sort of liberates you to create content and communicate with your audience without having a salesy or ASCII approach. You're not trying to extract from the content, you're trying to put people onto an email list. It is much more communicative to be able to connect with your audience and send them over to the list where you will be selling them stuff that feels a lot lighter and less icky than talking about your product in front of your phone all of the time or trying to discount your product on Amazon so that you undercut everybody else so that you get more sales. The more the attention is on the long term building of that email list, the more you're liberated to do good work in other areas of the business. So let's break this down as if you were building an audience from scratch and your assignment was to put a hundred people onto an email list. How would we start? Well, our announcement post might add 20 to 25 people to start. How do we get the other 75 or 80? Well, now we can think about the types of content that we might create that would call out to our ideal people that raise their hand and say, hey, I might want to buy this thing. So one of the ways to do that is to say explicitly who it's for. You can say, I'm developing this product for this type of person. That is one piece of content that you can create. Another piece of content is telling stories about yourself or other people that you know that are that ideal person. And to explain that you're developing this product or this business specifically for them. Let me tell you a story about someone who did this really well. There's a member of our community the 1%. Her name is Liz and Liz is a mom and she has been researching what types of chemicals are giving her kids rashes. And she decided that it was the laundry detergent that she was using. So she announced on her personal Facebook that she was going on the journey of starting a business to try to solve this problem, to create a product that didn't irritate your skin. She didn't have the have the product ready yet. She just made an announcement post on her personal page and it got dozens and dozens of comments. It also added dozens of people to her waiting list. And she private messaged me and told me that she also made a couple of sales. Again, her product wasn't even ready yet. She doesn't have anything to ship. But people saw the announcement post, they signed up for the waiting list and they put down a deposit to buy the product for when it was ready. She's now in business. Now every time she's got an update about when the product is going to be ready or going to the manufacturer or taking the sample product and smelling them or testing them out to see how effective they are, that's a piece of content that she can send over to the waiting list. And now she's building a list of people that are ready and waiting to buy her product as soon as it's live. So you can announce that you're going in a certain direction. You can document the journey, you can tell stories, you can speak directly to the person and the challenges that they face on their journey. And every post may not add 25 people to a waiting list. It might add two or three or five. Some will add 20. But the more we roll that dice, the more we start to figure out what types of content don't just get views or likes. They add people to a list that might want to buy our product. This is how we start to move in the direction of not just getting attention, but turning our attention into customers. This is how we start to build the audience of people that will be the foundation for our million dollar business. And once we've got 100 people, that's enough to do damage. Now notice what I did not say. I did not say talk about your product all the time and hope that people want it and buy it. I talked about speaking to people. I talked about talking about the challenges that your potential customers might face. I talked about telling stories or making announcements about you and your journey as the business owner. People want to follow people and most importantly, they want to support other people. So the more that you or the people on your team are speaking to the direct target audience, the more likely they will be to purchase the once you launch the product or do a promotion to that email list. So let's make this super tactical. What do you actually do? Well, the first thing that I would do is I would set up a lead capture page that is connected to my website and there are a bunch of tools to be able to do this. The one that we recommend often is called Card because it's free for the first few hundred people. There are a bunch of tools out there and a lot of them have free trials or they allow for it to be free up to a few hundred people. I don't care who you use, there's a bunch of them out there. But I would set up a page that collected the name and email address. And the hook that I would use to get people to sign up for that is either be first in line for when this product is ready or just a discount, a coupon code or some sort of early access discount. Discounts and coupons. Not my favorite way to build an email list, but it is effective. The point is you're getting people to sign up to be first in line for when a product is ready. You don't need to write a long ebook, you don't need to have a free video series. You can do all that stuff. It's just not the most direct way to turn those leads into sales. But as long as you're building the email list, you have my blessing. Next, I would post on one traffic platform. That could be Instagram, that could be your blog, that could be TikTok. Wherever you're comfortable communicating with your potential audience, do that consistently. You don't need to be on every platform because we only need 100 people. So when we're communicating regularly on one platform and sending them over to a lead capture page, it is just a matter of rolling the dice enough times until we have 100 people on that email list. I use podcasting and YouTube and long form interviews. Like I'm weird. I don't do the new stuff, I do old stuff. I'm stubborn. I make content for like 15 years and people buy from me years into their journey. You don't gotta be crazy like me. You can go right for the ask. I'm. I'm stubborn. Like I do long form stuff that takes forever to make and takes a team. You don't gotta do any of that. When you just post on a platform consistently, you're. The whole point is to put people onto an email list that are ready to buy from you. So I would do an announcement post first and then I would consistently make posts about stories about your journey, about the challenges that you see that your customer or potential customer deals with. And I would send all of that traffic to one place and it is where you collect the email. Do that consistently. You'll have a hundred people on an email list. So what do you do from there? Listen to me very carefully. This is all you need to do to stay in good communication with your audience. Once you have em on an email list, at minimum send one email per week. That is just a company roundup. This is what's going on in the company. It's what's going on in your head. It's. It's how you're feeling about the business right now. It is your favorite reviews from the week or the interesting people that you met. Just do one Friday wrap up of the coolest things that happen in your business. For some people, that's the best performing piece of content or it's the best comment that you got on social media. Just do some sort of wrap up that starts to build a culture and a community. I find it to be helpful if I've got three points in an email, a story, a best of and an ask. That's kind of my formula. I have a story from the week, I have something that went well this week and then an ask of the audience and that ask might be tell other people about this piece of content or about this product launch that's happening. That just helps me show up and write with less stress. So one Friday wrap up every week is your minimum viable communication with that audience. When you start doing this, some weird stuff starts to happen. I don't know what it is, but people just start coming out of the woodwork to support you. I'll tell you a story. When I bought back a business that I had previously sold and we decided to start turning it around, the first thing that I did was start communicating with the email list that hadn't been communicated with in two years. They had not got emails from the company for two years. I just started communicating with them. You wouldn't believe the email responses that I got. I got responses from customers who were like, hey, I'm so glad to hear from this brand. I've been a customer for years and you don't carry that product that I loved before. What gives? That is a really valuable piece of content. I also got emails from people who were executives at other companies and they said Hey, I just saw that you're relaunching this business. I could introduce you to this person and this person over here. People just start coming out of the woodwork to be part of the story. So if you are creating the story, even if that story is, I'm starting a new business and we're going in this direction, people want to be involved. No one believes me when I tell them this. And then they do it and they get it and they make lots of money. So just, just, just, just, just do the thing. Now, here's the part that no one wants to hear. In order to do this well, you have to actually care. You have to actually care about the customer experience and the responses that you're getting and the people who are reaching out. And most people in the Internet space don't want to care because they just want something to happen. But when they actually care about the people who are on the other side of that email and they're writing in and you're responding to them, or at least someone on your team is responding to them, there is so much juice in that squeeze. When you get one reply from a brand or an entrepreneur that you're following along their journey, you're now bonded to that business. And here's how this plays out. That person who is now bonded to your business, they're more likely to leave a really good review when your product is ready. They're also more likely to pull out their phone and record a video for you that becomes another piece of content that you will link back to the email capture. They're more likely to tell a friend who will also become a super fan of the business. To do this, you have to think small and micro for a while before you think about blowing it up. That's why this video is about building a list of a hundred people, not a million people. If you build a list of a million people before you launch, you won't do the little things that actually compound over three to five years. But if you've got a loyal audience that is small, you can do a lot of damage. And that small group of people will come back and support you over and over and over again in the form of purchasing your product, leaving reviews, telling your friends, commenting on your videos, sharing your stuff, and bringing other people into the audience. You have to think really small and micro and be at a certain level of service with those people who are showing up in order to do this well. Otherwise, you're skipping the most important part of the process. Now, if you spend a certain amount of time in, you know, the entrepreneurial space, you will hear any number of strategies to build the email list fast, to build the email list quickly. There's all kinds of social media strategies and content strategies. But what you need to know at the beginning is that your job is to nurture a very small group of people. Once you have nurtured 100 people, meaning you might even be able to name those hundred people. They might be people that you've spoken to on the phone or had an email exchange with, or you can see their replies to your emails. When you feel like you've nurtured that group of people, that is when you think about growth, that's when you think about scale. At the beginning of the business, your job is to build up that group of a hundred really passionate people. It looks a lot like work. It looks a lot like being, you know, kind and present and responding to people. And that work will carry you very far. Nobody wants to do that. They want to skip the steps to the things that will scale them. But the people who take the time to nurture that small list at the beginning are the ones who win. Now, if you are a business that has been around for a while, or you are a content creator that has an audience, or if you're an entrepreneur that's wanted it for a really long time, you will likely overlook this step. You will likely try to skip that nurturing process. Of the first hundred people. I have seen and advised brands who are doing $2 million in top line and they can't grow beyond that. And my advice to them is, is to come back and start to build the raving fan base of a hundred people on an email list. And they don't want to do it because they can't see how it will help them grow past 2 million. And so they look for the next tactic or the next strategy that's going to take them from two to three. What they don't realize is that that small group of a hundred people is going to be who buys their next and most expensive product. It will be the 100 people that give them the glowing review that get other people to buy the product. It will be those hundred people that give them video testimonials and great feedback that become the ads that grow the rest of the business. This step is the pivot point. Whether you are a new entrepreneur or you've been in the game for a long time, it's the pivot point to be able to scale a business to the level that you desire and to do it profitably without depending on outside traffic or or outside platforms. Because if you do this, you can get kicked off of other platforms and still have a business. Because people want to hear from you. It also means that those people are not looking at your competitors. They're not shopping on price. They're not giving you the middle finger, saying your product at $50 and the competitors $40. No, they want to buy from you because they're bought into this process and you represent the journey that they're on. That's why this matters. Whether you're beginning or you're established, this is the pivot point to grow a much bigger business. Let me give you a tactic that I would suggest that you do this week. If this is new to you. Once you set up your opt in page and you create a piece of content like an announcement post about the waiting list and you get your first 10 to 15 people. My invitation to you is to manually personally reach out to those 10 to 15 people and just say, hey, I'm so and so. I saw you opted in. What brought you to my work. I would invite you to do that for 20 to 30 minutes a day. Just reach out to those people who are opting in and be curious about their experience. You don't have to sell them anything, you don't have to ask for anything. Just be curious about how they got here. It will get you into the mind of the customer and it will start nurturing that list of people that will support you moving forward. If you do nothing else, that will get you ready for the rest of the steps of this eight part process to building a million dollar business. Let me wrap by telling you a quick story about someone who did this and did it well and it's made an impact in their business. I'm a part of a supplement company that sells a sleep product and it's a sleep product for for entrepreneurs. The company is called Switch. The product is called Kill Switch Sleep like you're dead. My partner on that project, his name is Tomer. Tomer has been pushing the buttons and doing the work on it while I advise it and provide capital for the business. And I encouraged Tomer to do exactly what I just shared with you, to post a piece of content and to send that over to an email list and to interact with the people who are opting into the email list. Just have conversations with them. The most mysterious thing happened. The people who signed up for the email list that we interacted with bought the product more often. They also bought more product. They were also more likely to buy it again and again. They were also more likely to comment on the next piece of content so that it got more visibility in the algorithm, which meant that more people would come over and join the email list. And I told him, I want you to spend 30 to 60 minutes a day just interacting with these people, posting content and sending them over to the email list. Just do that. 30 to 60 minutes a day. Within a month, the business had doubled. Within three months, the business had tripled. That was without outside ad spend. That was without something going viral. That was without doing discounts. That was without even having a ton of reviews on the product. That process of nurturing the small list that started as 100 people was the foundation for that product to go from stuck to growing consistently week over week and having repeat customers come back again and again. Okay, so how does this turn into money? We've covered this a little bit, but there is one specific strategy that I will share with you in the next video about how to launch a product to this audience that you have been nurturing. If you do your launch in a specific way, it it, in my experience is the fastest way to take a new brand to 10 to $25,000, sometimes within their first month to three months. I've had some people do it and have $100,000 in sales their first month. That doesn't happen very often, but it does happen occasionally. So in the next video we're going to talk about how to take this audience and structure a launch so that you get sales on day one and you've got the momentum out of the gate to be able to start building your million dollar business. If you want some help on your road to 1 million, we do help entrepreneurs follow this eight step process and you can see the entire process and all of our free resources about how to do it over@capitalism.com playbook. This will show you how to pick a great product, build your audience, have a great Launch, get to 100 sales a day, build $1 million business, and prepare for a multimillion dollar exit. And guess what? When you go over there, you'll be on my email list. So you can, you know, reverse engineer what I do personally if you're into that thing. I'm Ryan Daniel Ryan with capitalism.com thanks for watching. I'll see you next time. Take care.