Ramit Sethi, Russ Perry, and other entrepreneurs share concrete startup tactics: break the $1 million revenue goal into daily sales math, use aggressive outreach and trade shows for early cash, ship daily with rapid iteration, seed your marketplace with a referral incentive, and nail your Product Hunt launch with a known hunter and active commenting.
In this video, I'm going to talk about my favorite tips from starting a business around the Growth Everywhere podcast, where I interview world-class entrepreneurs. And again, these are the best tips, so enjoy. I showed that chart and the math behind how to make $1 million over 5 years. And we showed 3 simple examples: a $50 product, a $500 product, and a $2,000 product. I showed that for a couple of reasons. Number one, we have a phrase, it's not magic, it's just math. If you want to make $1 million, that number can seem so large that it's like, that's impossible, right? I need to be some genius to do it. Actually, no. Here's the math behind it. It's not magic. It's just math. And if you take something like a $50 product times 3 sales a day times 5 years, that's $270,000. You can also change those inputs. You can do a $50 product or $100 product. You can do 3 sales a day or 1 sale a day. You can play with it. That's up to you. You're the CEO of your business.
First of all, it was hustle. Like, we just— I just hustled. I just— I literally emailed every person. I exported my LinkedIn database, all the emails, emailed all those people, and I coordinated a guest blogging strategy. Like, that was the extent of my strategy for launch, was how many people could I get to commit to me writing a blog post for them and then sort of quasi-publishing all those blog posts at the same time, offering a launch special. And it worked, and I, dude, I was writing blog posts about, I didn't even know what I was writing. I was like, you have a cupcake blog? Cool, I'll figure out a way to write about cupcakes. Like, it doesn't matter. So that was the launch strategy, but it gave us enough velocity to actually get some cash to then start investing into more strategic things. And the biggest thing we did right out of the gates in March 2015 was the Infusionsoft trade show in Arizona, the ICON 2015.
Nice.
I think, you know, honestly, in the beginning it was like, it's overwhelming to think about how do I start a company. And so one of the things that I did that I thought was helpful is to say, okay, let me map out all the things that I need to do, 'cause there's just so many, right? And let me put it all on a piece of paper and just get it all out. And then let me put it into pieces, right? Phase 1, phase 2, phase 3. And then every day I would wake up and just attack 1 or 2 things from the phase that I was in. So if it was like, I wanna start a, you know, a giant marketplace that powers the entire beauty industry. That's impossible and crazy for a French major to say. But if I woke up and I said, all right, I'm gonna find an accountant today and I'm gonna find a lawyer, right? Or I'm gonna incorporate, or I'm gonna find an engineer, or I'm gonna, you know, find a designer. Like, whatever those little projects are, I think that made it more doable in the beginning stages when there was no traction.
Before we ever launched the site, we launched a teaser page on creativemarket.com. And basically what we did is for anybody Anybody that signed up and gave their email address before we launched, we gave them a free $5 in credit to spend on content once we actually launched the marketplace. And so that was great. And so people came and they put in their email address, and then once they put in their email address and created an account, the next thing that they saw, which was really the only thing you could do on the site at the time because it was just this teaser page, was this viral referrer program. So we basically gave people that were coming in order to get the free $5 a way to spread the word with their friends, get them to sign up, and they'd earn even more money to be able to spend. So basically it gave them incentive to promote us, and it also helped us to seed the buyer side of the marketplace with all the people that we could come capture before we launched on day 1.
So I'd say the real core of why we managed to succeed is that we are Solving a problem many people have, and we know how to quickly solve it. So that has been a big advantage for us. But I'd say the key kind of reason for success has been the fact that we approached it in a very, very lean way. So as of day one, we've been shipping code pretty much every day, if not to say like hourly. We've put a lot of effort into making sure it's a lean organization. And we kicked off with a 7-month beta program, which meant it was very easy for us to grow, spread the word, get people using it, give us feedback, make sure we build a kick-ass product that people will spread. And then once we ended the beta, I think we had— we were lucky enough to have so many users that were willing to pay to continue using it.
We actually exited a previous company that was in a similar space to start Import.io. And so we kind of had an idea of what the customers were. So we weren't going into this without having done a reasonable amount of customer discovery upfront. And we'd really much honed down to the fact there were probably 3 primary personas, the 2 of which we were really focused on were data analysts and data scientists. And we decided that the best way to get some immediate attention from them was to go to one of these startup competitions, and it was actually run by Strata, who do a competition or do a conference that basically is for big data guys, data scientists, etc. And we entered the startup competition and won it, which was great. And that really gave us the first sort of market presence, which got a little bit of traction around the private beta.
Firstly, We, we did a ton of research and talked to, got on the phone with a few companies who had successful Product Hunt launches to basically come up with a playbook for how to do it. So number one is the time you post. We did ours at 7 AM Pacific. That seems to have worked. You know, if I could go back, I probably would have done it a little bit earlier. I probably would have aimed for 5 AM Pacific. Secondly, we looked at who we wanted to post for us. So there are a few kind of what I would call Product Hunt celebrities that when they post, That thing is guaranteed to go somewhere near the top. For us, we, we got in touch with Hiten Shah, so he was nice enough to post it for us. The other thing is we put a lot of thought into the images, both the, the product images as well as the headline image that would appear with it. And then we did what you would expect, which is when it went out, you know, Product Hunt does not like you to tell people to vote for it.
Mm-hmm.
In fact, they'll penalize you if they see you doing that, but you're definitely allowed to promote it. So we posted on our blog, all of us posted individually on our Facebooks, on our Twitters, hey, check out Truebill on Product Hunt. And then the other thing we did was we made sure we were hyperactive on the actual thread. So anytime someone commented with a question or comment, we immediately jumped in and said, hey, you know, I'm the founder. Thanks so much for trying it out. To address your concern, let me, let me respond to that.
Hope you enjoyed the video. Thanks for leveling up. Keep grinding. Don't forget to subscribe and we'll see you tomorrow.
