How I Would Go From 0 to $1M in 2025 (14 Steps)

If I had to grow a business from zero to a million dollars in 12 months, this is what I'd do. Jimmy, can you leave me a review? So you got a business you're just getting started or a side hustle? Well, the one thing that will take you from zero to a million is you have other people say good things about you. Reviews are the easiest way to grow a business that works consistently and yet no one talks about it or focuses on this. Now you might be thinking, Cody, it can't be that important. But let me blow your mind for one minute. 93% of customers read reviews. 90% will not even use your product or service if there are less than three and a half stars. 58% of clients will pay more, travel further for a better reviewed company and unhappy people are 10x more likely to leave a review. But it can take 10 to 20x the number of positive reviews to negate one negative review. TLDR, if you have any sort of product or want to build a big business, you need obsess over reviews. We use something called the 12% rule. Typically only 12% of customers leave a review when asked. So your goal, get that 12%. Today we're going to show you how to do this with a business that costs this $0 to start. What? No way. Conter and think it is an online community education platform and a bunch of newsletters. And I created this business with no cash while working a full time job 3 years ago now and now it does millions teaching others to buy businesses and we buy businesses. So whatever your business is, you need people to say nice things about it. Let's use mine as an example today and you can see how we took the zero and made millions and had portfolio companies also make tens of millions through reviews. Here's how we did it in 14 steps. But before we get into it, understand that these are gonna vary. Some of these may work really well for you, some of them may not. So stick around to watch all 14 and then you can figure out which three to four you wanna start with. Now don't pick until you listen to them all. I'm listening. I call this one the ultimate mind hack. Basically you wanna positive review your people first. So when one of we applied this and when a technician goes out to do a job, this auto text comes to the customer the second that the tech is done. And it goes something like this. Bob said you were lovely to work with. Thank you for being an incredible customer and using our service. If you felt the same about Bob, please leave Him a review here. Insert link to the company. This is called the law of reciprocity. So you're basically saying thank you up front, then thank you for engaging with us. Which means that they're going to feel some degree of necessity to say thank you back. And that led to 20% more reviews. So let's figure out how to do this at Contrarian thinking and I'll show you doing it live. We'll do it live. Okay, so Melissa just bought one of our investor courses, so I figured I'd ping her directly with this and see if she will write us a review if she's happy with it. Thank you. No, no, no, thank you. This one's called a positive review loop. Basically what happens is whenever you get sent something like this, which is one of our members saying that something awesome happened to him because of our business, you immediately have a loop in place to respond and ask for a review. Typically I just respond to something like this, like awesome, good job. But instead I've started doing this and wouldn't you know what? They respond. All you need to have is one location where everything goes on. Could be Google reviews, could be Reddit, could be your own internal profile. They are already in a heightened state. Get a review, have the feedback loop in place so that you can continuously get a review every time somebody says something nice about you. Here we go, loop de loop. I give you an event, you give me a review. So we had a coffee shop that would do a 1x a month community coffee night. They had the owner there who would walk around and greet people and say thank you for coming. You know how you can help us as a small business the most? Post us a review on Google here QR code on their phone. And then he'd say something like, I feel like I get a little teary eyed reading some of them. So we walk around, say thank you. Real time for the reviews. This business now has thousands of reviews and more customers than they can handle. So we did an event and tried the same thing. Here's what happened. Well, they reviewed us all over the place. The first event we did was expensive. I probably wouldn't copy that one for you guys. We got a little smarter and we started connecting some of our members and they hosted their own events. It costs us zero. And look at this. We grab even more reviews and sometimes they bring friends, AKA referrals. Oh Titus, bring your friend hither. Every review gets a response. We set aside a channel on Slack for every single one of our customer reviews and testimonials. And our team responds to every single one, so you should too. Even if it's negative, we give responses. A bit of personality. Something like your review actually keeps me in business. Our love language is good reviews. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to support this small business. Or most people won't, but you did. Thank you. You gonna cry now? Obviously that's how you respond if it's positive. If it's negative, it's a little bit different. And you should have a specific response for negative reviews. 10 do. What do we do? I'm so sorry to hear that. I hate not satisfying every single person that works with us. Please email us directly. We'll do everything possible to make it right for you. Treat them like a human. They are treated like human beings. Text for tips My friend Nolan Gore runs a large service company and he did something brilliant. So he started texting his clients with this. Hi. Leave our tech a tip by writing a five star review. His name is Miguel. Mention his name and a five star review and we'll tip him. $10 for you. Cheers. Smart. It's basically like a free chance to tip someone who did well. 10 bucks, but you don't have to pay. So this led to hundreds of reviews for Nolan and those reviews lead to millions. So I started thinking about how do I integrate this into my business And I was like, oh, let's ping the community ping and ask if anyone's helped them, either our group or other members. And if they have, please tag us on social and we'll give them a new year SP bonus. Good tip. This one's called Drip Baby. Rather than using word of mouth to ask clients for reviews, this guy, Johnny Robinson set up a drip campaign. Johnny ran a cleaning company, grew to seven figures, then sold it for more than that, which is nice. And one item that he did I absolutely love. He integrated nicejob.com with the CRM so that his customers automatically got a text when they were finished that led them directly to a Facebook group. So the second their job was finished in that Facebook group, they could leave a review if that went unanswered. The SMS text was followed by two well timed follow up emails each asking for review. Just text, text send. Did it work though? Well, you tell me. In less than a year they added 300 plus reviews across Yelp, Facebook and Google and claimed the number one spot for window cleaning in their area. The review count for them is so high actually that it's 3.3x more than those the next two companies combined. And these guys have only been running this company for two years and they're in their like early 20s. So with that kind of social proof, it's no wonder why their sales pipeline went through the roof. Oh, another trip. Got it. So I call this one the wall of winning. Basically what you do is you put all these testimonials and reviews you're about to get all in one place. The idea is that you review stack these testimonials so that every time a customer wants to check you out, they have a list of undeniable proof that they should go with you. You make more money when you sell more things. But people have low trust in today's society. So the best thing you can do is stack a list of reviews so long that the proof of them giving you their money for this thing is irrefutable. You have to trade on trust. And in order to trade on trust, sometimes you need other people to tell people about you. Location, location, location. Locations matter. Most small businesses put reviews in the worst places humanly possible. Like this. Look at these handyman company. Basically you got to scroll all the way down to the bottom in order to get reviews. They're real slow to scroll through, which is also not ideal. And they also have like some obviously not real image that's not the human that is giving the review, which is also not good. Compare that to, for instance, another company we own, Viral cuts. Where, where are the reviews? They're right here up front. I'm on there. Sam Parr. It's our real images. There's Dan Ko. These are real people that use viral Cuts and they can see what the success is. It's all over their face. It's located everywhere. Make sure you put it in the right location, location, location, location. Just reviews, like for real estate, the two Rs. Meme, meme, meme, meme it or make it memorable. So a lot of times when people ask for reviews, it's super boring. In fact, in one of our pool companies that we had, we used to have these little papers left outside after every single pool got serviced and cleaned. And the papers were really boring. What did I immediately do with these? I threw it in the trash. So did all of our customers. So we made one small change. We made these little cards memeable. These little memed cards that all they said on the back is, we were here and you looked great. And then at the bottom of it, it said, can we please, please, please, please get a review from you. It's everything that matters to us in Our small business then it had a QR code and these got 3x the number of reviews as anything else. So meme it, create a magic moment and then you might even get it shared on social, which is a huge plus. Girl, you gonna be getting so many cat memes. Run a giveaway. We want to get more subscribers and reviewers. So we did a giveaway and we got all of our subscribers excited. So how it works is you ask every single person to write, review or refer somebody and if they do that, then you enter them into a giveaway. This led to a thousand plus people writing reviews and subscribing to our newsletters. Huge. You should mimic doing the same athlete, Kobe. Now we create a wow moment. This one just happens to be a box too. What's in the box? But basically what you want to do is you want to create a moment that's unexpected for the people who buy from you. You don't tell them it's coming. You don't tell them that there's anything in particular that's going to happen. You just surprise them, make them go well. And what we do is every single member of our community, when they sign up to join the community, they get a box in the mail like this. Free gifts, nothing better. Inside of it, we have a bunch of fun little things that they get for being a member of the community. And I cannot tell you how many times because we put on the very top of it a nice little postcard. This leads to a review. We are surprising and wowing people for giving them something cool. This leads to not just reviews, but social posts. So it's called a twofer. Let's try for a twofer. Butter them up, baby. So you have customers who are doing things with whatever your product or service is. So how do you get them Every time they take an action to feel like they're getting a little back hat, to congratulate themselves by their user milestones, basically time. Or it could be success metric for us. We give them this. It's called a deal tombstone. If they close a deal, they close a business. Then they get what I got when I was on Wall street at Goldman and all that, which is, congratulations, you bought a business, Here's a tombstone for you. These could be big, these could be small. But afterwards, since you've buttered them up, you say, man, since you're so incredible and so loyal, have you written a review yet? And this is when the reviews flow in like butter. He's buttering him up. Will work for reviews. This is super. Important. From my buddy, Alex Hormozi. When you first start out your business, don't ask for money, ask for reviews. We've done this in almost every business I started. And every new product that we launch, we use a test group and we say, actually don't pay for it. Here's what we'd like. First, tell us what you like and don't like about what we're doing. Second, can we use your name and a little testimonial or review in order to get more clients? The truth of the matter is, if you are able to treat your first clients like they will be your only clients, they can be the only source of your clients for many months to come. One individual who loves your product and won't shut up about it, what I call a proselytizer, will go out and spread the gospel about how awesome you are. That is if you work for reviews up front for free. For free. Sometimes you just got to ask your network. When I first launched Contrarian Thinking, I went out and asked my friends and family, if you haven't actually done that, you haven't gotten your first 5 to 10 reviews from people who know and love you, what are you waiting for? It's not that difficult. And if you do it up front, that means you basically don't even have to have a product. I mean, the Internet doesn't love this, but that is how you get your feet off the ground. I've never understood businesses that have zero reviews. That's just lazy. When we first launched our course on appsumo, this happened before the product even went live on it. We had asked our community for hundreds of reviews. They looked at the product before it was live and then gave us reviews the second that it was. And because of that, we were able to get more reviews than they've ever had on any course at all times. Knock knock. If you guys have any problems with this or you have questions on reviews, hit me up in the comments. I'll answer them. Let's get you to that first million bucks. It could be as easy as knocking on the door and asking somebody for a review. Hello.