Evan Carmichael and Stephen Kelly explain how to attract the right customers: design products to solve your own frustrations, use social media to make noise rather than cold outreach, and speak authentically about your mission. About 75% of entrepreneurs research products before visiting a website.
Questions this video answers
Focus on building products that solve your own frustrations (selfish design), then create massive, authentic noise on social media to let ideal clients discover you. Use social platforms as a real‑time feedback antenna to iterate your product, and let the empowered consumer research find you rather than relying on cold calling.
Chapters
The next question is from Carson. It's a great idea because I love what I do. I found my passion. I know what I want, but when it comes to selling, finding the right customers is tough. Any advice there?
Yeah, I think obviously we talked about this last time around, really believing in your passion and the essence of— sounds like in this business you've got a product, then you need to find out how do you connect to customers. And I think the world of digital media is a great way to go. And you can get immediate feedback in real time. You can almost build products just in time for thousands of customers through social media. That's the best way, honestly. If you've got antennae, social antennae to listen to your customers and build and course correct your product strategy to meet their needs, you're going to probably have a great business and you'll create huge value. Just focus on the value you're creating, the problem you're trying to solve from. And continue to be disruptive. If you do that, you're on to a winner. I love it.
To add, I would say all of the greatest products that we've come up with, I designed selfishly. Like, they were for me. Like, I feel like, why has nobody done this? And I'm frustrated and I don't want to make it, but nobody's done it and I need it selfishly. And so I create it. And it— that's always been like the biggest leap where I've tried to like just look at a market and try to figure out where's the best opportunity, because I wasn't deeply passionate about it. It never became something massive. And so this might be a curveball answer for you guys, but I always design products around things that I love, I feel I need in my life. And in terms of the promotion, this might even be a bigger curveball, is I don't do cold calling and Salesforce and that kind of stuff. My, my business model is I kick up a ton of noise in my industry, right, through using social. Like, I make a lot of noise in the entrepreneur world. People People know me, you may not know me in different worlds, but I kick up a lot of dust in my industry and people notice, and then people find me. And I find that that's way more effective because you have ideal clients coming to you as opposed to you reaching out and trying to spam people or cold call them and say, please buy my product. It puts you in a much more powerful position. So create awesome products because you're making something that you passionately believe in, and then kick up a ton of noise in your industry to get the right clients coming to you.
Yeah, it's interesting. And in the last 10 years, the world's turned upside down because what digital economy and us running our lives from the palm of our hand with smartphones, it means people are back in control of their lives. They build apps that meet their needs. So it's now the reality is most consumers control their own destiny, control their own time. The old days of kind of companies coming up with ideas and either spamming or sales and marketing and all that stuff. Just interestingly, from Sage, about 75% of our entrepreneurs who come to us and buy our products have done their research about the product before they even come to our website. So it's kind of cool now that anybody, whether it's TripAdvisor, it's Holidays, it's whatever your group is, whatever your community is, you guys are in control of your lives. And so what that means for if you've got a great product solving either a big problem or just solving your own frustrations, If you put it out there, it's pretty likely people will find you. They'll find you and they'll find you pretty quick.
Yeah, I think it's important to, to surround yourself with people who make you come alive. And if you have a powerful mission, people are going to care about it, right? Like Stephen's here with me. He's the CEO of a big company, right? And you wouldn't think of him as a CEO of a big company the way he's talking and his passion for entrepreneurs. And when I, when I saw him speak at Sage Summit, I was like, I got to get this guy on my channel. We have to do something together. Dude loves entrepreneurs. We've got to find some way to get together. And it wasn't— there was never like a sales pitch involved. It was just he's got a great message. We have to get him involved. And I think if you could speak with passion about what you're doing, you will start attracting people as long as you start making some noise about it.
Yeah, I love this guy, but he's talking a lot of sense. And through social media—
what, he's talking a lot of sense?
And he's talking a lot of sense. And he's a Blue Jays fan. All good things. So with social media, there's chemistry, there's magic where people come together, form communities. And, you know, it's when we hire people as well, we hire people who've got the same passion, the same energy, the same belief. And, you know, it's more than just business. It's about making a difference. It's about following your passions. And many of you guys are out there following what you think is a noble cause. And we applaud that. We absolutely applaud it. So I think the world of digital has changed everything and things that took years happen in nanoseconds now and communities come together and solve problems together. So that's a rich territory for you to bring products to market, meeting the needs of people out there, creating value and building great businesses.
