CHOOSE: The Single Most Important Decision Before Starting Your Business with Joe Polish and Ryan Levesque - I Love Marketing Episode #350

The first thing you need to do in your business if you want to become an entrepreneur, if you want to be your own boss, if you want to start your own thing is you. And you teach us in your framework as well. You've got to choose your niche, you've got to choose your market. You decide who you're going to focus on serving.

I'm Dean Jackson, he's Joe Polish and this is the I Love Marketing Podcast.

Don't miss another episode of I Love Marketing. Subscribe today. More information can be found@ilovemarketing.com subscribe if you'd like to learn more about the Genius Network Annual event, go to geniusnetworkevents.com if you'd like to access the show notes or the exercise to help you take action on what was shared, please visit ilovemarketing.com 350 hey everybody, it's Dean.

Jackson and Joe Polish.

Here's the deal. We've got our friend Ryan Levesque on the line with us. So Ryan, all the way from Austin.

Texas, how are you doing? Pretty good Joe. It's great to be here man.

Yeah, yeah. So great to have you. Finally, we are doing an episode on our podcast with you. So for people that don't know who you are, Ryan Levesque is the Heck Inc. 500 CEO of the Ask Method Company and the number one national best selling author of Ask, which was named by Inc. As the number one marketing book of the Year. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Forbes, an entrepreneur and over 250,000 entrepreneurs subscribed to his email newsletter offering business advice. He's also a co founder and investor in Bucket IO, a leading marketing funnel software for entrepreneurs. And his latest book, choose, helps readers avoid making the single biggest mistake when starting a business and guides people through answering the all important question what type of business should you start? And so we're going to talk a little bit about the book today. I'll admit this, I have not read it yet and Dean has read a good portion of it. Based on what Ryan says, we'll see how compelled I and all of our listeners are to pick up a copy of this book. But Ryan, look, you're really known as a super bright, sharp guy that's helped a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of business owners with their companies, making money, doing better marketing, all that sort of stuff. So for anything that I didn't say in the little short part that I just read, how would you describe what you do?

First of all, it's awesome to be here. Super grateful for the opportunity and excited to dive right in. Really enjoying the kind of pre interview chatting we've been having about some old war stories here. I would say that what I help people do is choose the right place, market and business to start, understand the audience you've chosen to focus on at a deep emotional level and then serve and sell to that audience in the absolute highest possible way. And that's kind of what I've been doing for the past decade. I've done it in two dozen niche markets myself. I've had the opportunity to work with literally thousands of entrepreneurs now. And this is what I love. I mean, you guys, you got the title. I love marketing. And I'm right there with you guys. I love doing what I do and I couldn't imagine doing anything else.

Yeah. You know, let's ask you this right off the very top. You know, we have all, all three of us have invested, I mean, just thousands and thousands of hours on marketing and we have studied it and learned it and teach it and utilize it. Why do you love marketing? I mean, I know it's kind of a simple question, but I'd love to hear your answer to that.

For me, marketing represents this fascinating intersection between language, psychology, math, and I love this intersection. I love the math of marketing. I love the psychology of marketing. And probably what I'm most partial to is the language of marketing. I love obsessing over the nuance of language and language patterns and phrasing and cadence and tonality and all of these things that make all the difference in the world and represent the difference between succeeding in your marketing campaigns and failing. And so for me, I studied neuroscience. That was my degree, my academic degree. I studied neuroscience and Asian studies. And my focus in Asian studies was Chinese. So I was always, even at a young age, obsessed with language. And Chinese was my language of choice as an adult. Neuroscience was my kind of psychology piece and math was always my best subject in school. So for me, it represents like this fascinating intersection between these three areas. And every day is like a laboratory that you get to experiment in these three ways.

First off, I love the way you describe it and the intersection between language, psychology and math. I mean, I really think of marketing as applied psychology. However, the numbers need to work when it comes to math. A lot of marketers, and I would put myself in this category, may love marketing math, but when it comes to P&Ls and financials and these other areas that are really important in business, I know a lot of people that are great marketers that just suck at holding onto any money. Our friend Gary Halbert, who I originally learned marketing from, who I got to know very well, was a disaster when it came to money. He was always an edge walker with the whole aspect of loving math. How's your relationship with financial statements and balance sheets and stuff? I'm just curious.

Well, put it this way, my first job out of college was as a financial analyst at the investment bank Goldman Sachs. So I am a bit of a. I'm a bit of a math geek. I feel like you've got to identify what your strengths are. Right. Like I would say, like, you know, Joe, you are a super connector. You are a textbook. I may be wrong about this, but textbook extrovert. You have a Rolodex that is a mile long and you have great stories and authentic experiences with so many incredible people, high performing people in all fields. Right. I feel like that is, you know, a superpower that if it's not unique to you, I would say you're in the top 1% of 1% in that realm. I don't have that superpower. Right. But I am very good with numbers. And so for me, when I look at, for example, a cold traffic funnel and I'm looking at our aov, our average order value relative to our cpa and I'm looking at a seven day moving average on these two metrics and looking at how things are moving like that to me gives me a dopamine rush. Like I get a hit when I'm looking at Google Data Studio and I'm looking at those numbers and I see it and I say, gosh, if we just add two zeros to that number, like we're doing a million dollars a month in ad spend on just this one campaign, to me, I get lit up. But at the same time, I'm not one of these people who can do that all day every day. I then need to shift gears, get on stage and present. Teach. I love teaching. I love teaching. You know what I'm so passionate about. And so for me, I can compartmentalize that. I really enjoy that. I could not do that 10 hours a day, five days a week for the rest of my career. That may make me different from other marketers, but there are other things that I think other marketers are incredibly brilliant at. That's just not within my skillset. I go to a live event. Like if I spend time at an event like yours, like a genius network event, I probably need to sleep for three days. When I come Home just to recharge. Because it's like. So.

Honestly, this is one of the reasons why I have a cold right now, because everything you described in that description to me as an example is accurate. Except the extroverted part. Yeah, I actually forced myself to in the beginning of my career because I realized if I don't interact with humans, I'm probably not going to do as well as if I do. And so the way that I actually connect people is in a lot of ways, I can just make the connection, find the value points that would be beneficial to each other, introduce them in a way to where they feel a certain level of trust and comfort and rapport and chumminess. And then a lot of times I just swoop out and let them go do their thing. And I kind of make that introduction in a lot of ways. It's sort of interesting and I do enjoy it. But I can only take speaking in doses, because if I do too much of it, that's why I'm not on stage all the time. That's why I turn down almost 98% of every speaking opportunity that's even offered to me, because I get offered a lot of them. Not that I don't appreciate it. It's just it's not my thing to be up on stage all the time. That's why I really like Genius Network and kind of doing my own thing versus just going stage to stage. But I have a lot. We have a lot of similar marketing colleagues and friends that they live for that stuff. So, yeah, everyone has their skill set, Dean. So I don't dominate here. You have read choose or parts of it. At least let's jump in and talk about it. Because anytime there's a new book written by someone that already has a track record of having helped a ton of people, it's valuable to share that first with our. I love marketing listeners.

Well, I'm going to go out on a limb. And even though the book's not been released yet, I'm going to say that this is a classic right now. I mean, this is a book that there's not anybody who's gone to this length to get to the very first thing. I mean, we talk about in our eight profit activators. The whole idea of profit activator number one is select a single target market at a time. And this is a really great deep dive into how specifically to do that. I think, Ryan, you're going to have another. Whatever recognition and awards that Ask got, this is going to be right up there with it as far as the impact that it can have on people's business, it's going to be tremendous. So congratulations on that to start.

You know, I'll tell you, the book was really born out of, I might even call it a mistake that I made with my first book. You know, when you write a book like Ask and it wasn't a book that I anticipated would have the impact and the results and the reach that it ended up having. And when you write a book like that, two things happen. Number one, you get a lot of letters and emails and Facebook messages and things like that from people who say, the book changed my life and it's been transformative. But you also get emails and letters from people who say, dude, I read your book, I followed exactly what you teach and it didn't work.

Right?

And when you get kind of letters like that, it hits you at the core, right? You start questioning, you wonder, what did I do wrong? Did I leave something out? Maybe my methodology doesn't work. Maybe it isn't as universal as I thought it was. And it sort of was the spark that kicked off what ended up becoming a three year research project to identify, really inspired by the work of Jim Collins. Right, Jim Collins. Good to great. Separating. What is it that separates those iconic companies that go on to have sustained success from those who are successful for a season but then end up disappearing or falling off a cliff? And inspired by that same sort of philosophy, I started looking at what was it that was separating the students of Ask who were successful and those who failed. I looked at the 23 different markets, niche markets that me and my team that I've gone into over the past decade plus, and looked at what was it that separated the ones that were very, very successful from the ones that were just successful for a bit and the ones that actually failed. It kind of was the impetus that led to this one key thing. And I discovered that the single biggest reason why people were failing all came down to the fact that people were choosing bad markets, right? And there's so much conventional wisdom out there that's all about what? What type of business should you start? What type of product should you create? What should you sell? It's all about what. But the reality is, the first question you should be asking yourself is not what, it's who. Who are you to serve? That is the first thing that you want to focus on. Everything sort of emanates out of that. And that's what this book is all about. It's all about how to identify who Your who is. And there are seven key factors that I identified in this three year research process that we found determined whether or not a market, a who, a niche was a green light or a red light. And these are the seven factors that we found that separated the most successful markets in our own business, as well as our clients, business and students, business from those that ended up not having that same level of success.

Pencils ready everybody? Here we go.

Number one.

I'm going to go right into them.

Yeah, I'm sitting there going, okay, let's see how Ryan responds to this one here.

You mentioned Jim Collins and being a fan of his and this what we're about to learn here and what a lot of what went into the book based on actual research and study, a three year study. So maybe talk just a little bit about that, the protocol for the study, and then kind of share some of these findings with us.

Yeah. So first thing that we did is we looked at, just like in Jim Collins, work he was able to take, he's been able to take through the course of his career, a data set of publicly traded companies which have a lot of publicly available information, and identify the factors that separate the ones that are successful from those that have failed. And at his disposal, his research materials were everything from quarterly reports, meeting minutes, from annual shareholder meetings, publicly available financial records, things like that. That's why he's chosen publicly traded companies as his laboratory. Well, because over the past decade we've gone into 23 different markets, 23 different niches in which we've built and grown businesses. We had this library of data available to us where we could look at knowing our actual results like I know what our privately held companies have generated in terms of revenue, in terms of reach, in terms of sales over the past decade, and we know which ones were more successful than others. So we use that as our starting point to see, well, what was it that separated those that were successful from those that failed. I was able to convince a number of our students and clients to do the same thing and make their information available to us as well. So we had access, we had privy, we were privy to non public information that allowed us to go deep and really identify the factors that made all the difference in the world. And so that was kind of the starting point behind that. Along the way we made some really startling discoveries, a few in mind that were things that, gosh, if I had made these discoveries 10 years ago, about half the markets that I went into, I never would have gone into them. I just didn't have the wisdom experience at the time to know that they would have been red light markets using this choose criteria.

Been there, done that. That's exactly right. I mean, it's so true. When you talk about having criteria, if you don't have access to research like yours, a lot of it is trial and error and you start to recognize patterns and you realize, well, why did this one work and this one didn't? And so, yeah, congratulations, that's awesome. So let's hear some of these. This is great.

There's something that I call the five market must haves, right? So there are these five criteria that every market that was a home run checked all these five boxes. Every single market that wasn't a home run or that failed was missing one or more of these key criteria. We called these the five market must haves because they are one of the things that you want to make sure your market, before you pursue it, your niche checks off these boxes. Now, as I go through these different criteria, if you are in a market right now, and I encourage you to think through which of these criteria your market has, which it may be missing. And in the book, there are some very practical ways that you can validate each of these items. So you can kind of do a quick gut check as you're listening to me explain these, and then you can go back and go through the more detailed process. But the five market must haves. Market must have, number one. You want to focus on what's called an evergreen market. Now, an evergreen market is a market that we define as a market that was relevant 10 years ago and it'll be relevant at least 10 years from now. Now you can compare and contrast that to a fad market. Now, I learned this the hard way the first business I ever started. We're talking about the divorce market. We're talking about a couple different markets. The first market that I went into. People laugh when I tell you this, but it's the truth. The first market that we went into was teaching people how to make jewelry using Scrabble tiles and origami paper. Scrabble tile jewelry. Now you might be like, what? Is that really a thing? I went into this market because when I was looking to start my first business, I had no idea what I wanted to do. And my wife was probably sick and tired of me every single night at dinner saying, hey, honey, how about this idea? What if we open up a franchise? What if we, you know, what if we open a cupcake shop? What if we teach people Chinese, like all the Crazy harebrained ideas that I had. She brought one to the table, and she said, there's this. This is like, in 2007, there's this new website that's come out, and it's called Etsy.com. it's like eBay for handmade goods. And we're living in Asia at the time. We were living in Hong Kong at the time. And she said, take a look at this jewelry. And she showed me this jewelry, and she said, look, it's just Scrabble tiles, origami paper, and it's selling like crazy on the site. Look at all these people selling it. And she said, listen, we're in China. We have all the origami paper we could ever ask for. We have access to expensive labor in southern China. Let's set up a little factory, and we can import this jewelry into the United States. And I quickly said, well, honey, like, the whole reason why we want to start this business is so we can travel and be location independent and have freedom and all these things. I didn't want to be, like, in a polluted city in southern China, like, in a factory making this jewelry, right? That was, like, not my idea of the. Of the dream. So we closed the lid on it. And then a few weeks later, she comes back to me at dinner, and she says, I want to talk about that Scrabble tile jewelry thing again. I said, honey, I thought we closed the book on that. She said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Take a look. She pulled me around the. She turned her laptop around. She said, take a look at this woman here. She's not selling the jewelry. She's teaching people how to make the jewelry. Check it out. Selling this little tutorial on Etsy, and she's selling it for, like, 30 bucks. And look at her sales now. The cool thing about Etsy is you can actually look at a person's sales history. You can see exactly how many units they're selling every single day. So you can basically reverse engineer their income. And we went back about a month, and turns out that she was selling about 30 copies of this $30 tutorial a day, which amounted to about, like, 10,000 bucks a month. And my wife bought it, and it was like this really crappy thing built on Microsoft Word. It was spelling mistakes and very homemade. And she said, I'm going to learn how to make the jewelry. I think we can build a better tutorial. So we did that. We did a better tutorial. We started selling it first month, made a couple hundred bucks, thousand bucks. 2000, 4000, 5000. At our peak, made 8000 bucks a month. At one point, I remember turning to my wife and said, honey, we're going to be rich. Like, this is great. This is crazy. And then, literally the next month, sales fell off a cliff. Like, it was just uncanny. It was like, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. And the next month, boom. It was one of those moments where it's like, what the heck happened? And I remember turning to my wife, and at this point, I quit my job. We'd burned through a lot of our savings. My wife was in grad school. That's why we're in Hong Kong. She was in grad school, getting her PhD. She wasn't making any money. And we kind of had that moment where we said, crap, what do we do now? My wife quit her job, finished the PhD program. She got a job in Texas in Brownsville, which is a border city right on the Mexico, Texas border as a museum curator that paid $36,000 a year. We had an apartment with bars on the windows in the poorest zip code in America. We had two lawn chairs on the living room floor, a mattress on the floor that we slept on, and one car, used car. I'd drive my wife to and from work every single day. And during the day, I'd get to work and work on my business. And I learned from that first niche, the importance of not going into a fad market. The Scrabble tile thing was just like. It was like Beanie Babies or Pokemon. It was just like a fad. And it was huge. One minute and it disengaged, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, fit. Exactly. Or, you know, here's another one. This is a little bit more controversial, but I've got the keyword search volume to back up what I'm about to say. What was the thing that, like, everybody was starting a business around that you couldn't, like, turn a corner? Like, on Facebook, online. Everyone was building a new newsletter membership site, podcast, like, whatever. Remember, like, what happened about, like, a year and a half, two years ago?

Cryptocurrency or what?

Bitcoin. Yes. Right. Everybody, oh, my gosh, they're quit, quitting their businesses, going all in on bitcoin. And you can see if you go to Google, you go to Google Trends, you'll see the search volume for bitcoin is climbing, climbing, climbing, climbing. And then it reaches this huge crescendo, peaks up, and then it falls off a cliff. And that search volume trend was aligned almost 100% with the price of bitcoin, remember when it fell off a cliff? Member was going up, up, up, up, up, and it fell off a cliff. And ain't nobody talking about bitcoin these days, right? A few people that have, maybe businesses that have sustained it, but 90% of people who went into that market are doing something else now.

Joe, you remember a couple of years ago, the peak of it was in November, December, two years ago, and there were a couple of people at the annual meeting, at the annual Genius Network event that were bitcoin gazillionaires, and it was right on its way up, because I remember Eben Pagan and Ilko DeBoer and I were sitting in Amsterdam in July of that year, and it was sort of just making it, you know, the start of it being really a big deal. It had gone from like $1,100. It was up to $3,000 at the time. And then from then, from July till December, it went all the way up to $20,000 at the peak there in that, you know, seven months or five months or whatever it was from July till then. And then it dropped, the bottom fell out. And I don't even know where it is now. What is. What is bitcoin at right now?

I have no idea what it's fading.

At, but not even on our. It's not even on. On our radar. Right. It's like immediately, it's like the tulip market, you know, the big tulip explosion.

Be careful. Two weeks from the time we put out this podcast, it'll be a thing again.

Right, exactly.

But the point is that it's in contrast to what I call and describe in the book as a metronome market. Right. You think about a metronome, right? Just ticking along. Yeah. Tick, tick. Year after year. That's what you're looking for. You're looking for one of these metronome markets. And so I talked about, I mentioned we went, moved back to the States, we had nothing. Literally sold everything we owned. We had a suitcase each. That's it. Just starting over. I decided that the next business that we're going to go into was a market that was never going to go away. So I started doing research on the oldest hobbies in America. Any guesses on what, like, the longest lasting, oldest hobby has been in America for, like, the last hundred years?

Number 100 years, knitting close.

It's gardening.

Gardening, yes, of course.

Think about it. I mean, there's over 100 million Americans that consider gardening. They consider that to be a hobby of Theirs. And it's a market that's been around forever. It's not going anywhere. Now, it's taken different shapes of forms over the years, right, as gardening has evolved and agriculture has changed in America. But it's one of these things that's not going anywhere. So I started looking for sub niches within the gardening space, knowing that it wasn't something that was going to fall off a cliff, and we arrived at orchids. So orchid care. Now, if you go to Google Trends and you type in the keyword orchids, you're going to see that it's a cyclical market, right? It comes and goes with the. With the spring and fall and winter seasons, like many markets do, but it ain't going anywhere. It's basically been on this kind of metronome cycle for years and years and years. And so we went into that business, built a business in that space, took it from nothing to $25,000 a month in about 18 months. My wife quit her job. We moved to Austin, Texas, drove up north to Austin, and we've been here for the last 10 years. And that took that business to over half a million dollars a year. And to this day, over 10 years later, that business alone basically pays for living expenses. And it's a tiny little niche market in this space of orchid care. Now, I use that as an example of an evergreen market, right? A market that is.

You know, we were talking about the old days, and, you know, the first thing that I did online was a book called Stop youp Divorce. And it was exactly that same thing. I wrote the book with a marriage counselor from Texas who had been saving marriages for 45 years in private practice. That's all he had done, was marriage counseling for 45 years. And now 20 years later, it's still a perennial topic. You know, it's still. People every day are getting divorces that they don't want. And it's kind of. Of course, Joe was joking. We have. They've discovered now, of course, the cause of divorce. The number one cause of divorce is, of course, marriage. So they've made some breakthroughs.

That's hilarious. That's great. So it's the first factor. But what's interesting is being in an evergreen market is not enough. It's necessary, but it is not sufficient to be successful. The second factor, the second market must have, is to be in what we describe as an enthusiast market. Now, an enthusiast market, and this is what's interesting about the divorce market, but I have some ideas around this is it's in contrast with a problem solution market. Now, problem solution market is a market where consumer comes in, they've got a problem in their life, they want to solve that problem, and then they never want to be in that space ever again. Classic examples are things like. But a classic example would be something like warp removal or a flooded basement. Right? You've got a flooded basement. What do you do? Basement's flooded. You call up one of those companies, I forget the name of the company, but their marketing tagline is like it never even happened, right? Yes, sir. Yeah, it's like it never even happened, right? And that's what people want. They want to solve the problem, move on. But they're not signing up for any email newsletters. They're not listening to the Flooded Basement. I love Flooded Basement podcast. They're not, you know, the Flooded Basement Genius Network. There's no groups, there's no newsletters. That's it. People moved on with their life. And so in that market, in order to make money, you constantly have to chase after new customers. You have to find a new customer who has a flooded basement to solve that issue. Now you can compare that to a market like say the dog market. The dog market is probably the most, the quintessential enthusiast market. Why is that? Someone brings a new puppy home, they buy a dog, they bring a new puppy home, a rescue or whatever, they bring it home, and they are a consumer in that market for the next 10 to 15 years. And for many consumers, when that dog moves on and passes, they bring another dog into their home. So many people are in the dog market for their entire life. Now that's a beautiful market to be in because it gives you the opportunity to sell to that same consumer multiple products for years and years and years. So once you acquire that customer, they can become a customer of yours for months and often years and sometimes decades long. So it's the second key thing you're looking for. Now, going back to the divorce market, there's a third criteria. Now, it's not enough to be in an evergreen and enthusiast market. This one's a really interesting one. You need to focus on solving an urgent problem in the context of that evergreen enthusiast market. So an urgent problem is a bleeding neck problem. In the book, I describe it as specifically a $10,000 problem. Right? So we've all heard of a thousand dollar problem. Most marketers know that it's a big problem that people have in their life. It doesn't necessarily mean they're spend to solve it. Or it costs $1,000 in damage, but it's just indicative of a big problem, right? You're looking for specifically a thousand dollar problem, a $1,000 problem that under certain circumstances escalates into a $10,000 problem. I'll give you an example. So let's take the dog market. An example of a $1,000 problem in the dog market. Something I know we brought in a Chihuahua rescue last year, my wife's dog, it's four and a half pounds home protection. You know, it's a, it's there to fend off would be robbers. And we brought her into our home and when we brought her in, she had a potty training problem, right? So she's peeing on the rug, she's peeing on the sofa, on the laundry, on the bed, she's peeing everywhere, right? So we got to deal with this. Now that's an example of a $1,000 problem. A problem that is a problem that at some point you're going to turn to your spouse and you're going to say, honey, we got to solve this thing now. This cannot go on any longer. And when you find a problem like that, all price sensitivity goes away, right? So you're not trying to save 10% on a solution. We gotta get this thing solved. But here's the thing. Under certain circumstances, and this is what you're looking for, that $1,000 problem can become 10 times more urgent and severe. For example, if you have a dog that is peeing on the rug and you are about to go on a trip where you're going to take the dog and the whole family with you on an airplane, you're thinking to yourself, oh my gosh, this dog's going to be peeing in the airport. This dog's going to be peeing on the flight. The people, the passengers are going to be looking at us like we're crazy people. We're going to have to, we got to solve this thing now. And that's what you're looking for, is that $1,000 problem that under certain circumstances, someone will go online to solve that problem. And they don't care what it's going to cost. They got to get it solved now because there's a level of urgency that wasn't presently there. That's what you're looking for. And so in the orchid market, people always wonder, well, how do you do this? In the orchid market, the urgent $10,000 problem is people will care for an orchid, oftentimes given to them as a gift, given to them as a gift. Usually it's a mom or a grandmother who is gifted it by her son or nephew or grandson. And they wake up the next morning and they go to the orchid and all of the blooms have fallen off and it looks like nothing but a dried up stick. And this is the thing that causes them to freak out and say, what did I do? How did I kill this? Was it too much water? Was it too much humidity? Is there something wrong with the roots? Is it something wrong with the leaves? They go online and they will do whatever it takes to get the orchid to flower again, because orchids will live for hundreds of years. Orchids aren't a flower that you bring home and they die after you can have an orchid. People pass orchids down across multiple generations. They can be around forever. It's that $10,000 problem in that market that people go online to solve it and they will buy a book or a DVD or a course or some sort of help on what to do about that problem. So that's the third market.

And orchids, you know, one of the things about the orchid market is they're unique enough that you don't actually. You don't plant orchids right there. They hang, don't they? Or they're different than other kinds of plants. So require specialized knowledge.

There's specialized knowledge, all sorts when you start going down this rabbit hole. So in this business with a single book, then we launched a DVD set as a companion to that. And then we started building masterclasses on all the most popular varieties, from Pathiopetalum to Oncidium dendrobium, Cymbidium, Phalaenopsis vandas. We created an entire program on growing orchids hydroponically. So just growing orchids. We call it the just add water method, where you're not using any potting. We have a course on how to pot orchids in unique circumstances. So how to pot them in stumps, how to pot them in logs, how to pot them in trees, which is what you're talking about. There are certain varieties that have what are called aerial roots, where the roots just go in the air and they absorb moisture.

Thinking of, I thought that that was the thing. I have a friend who has a big greenhouse. That's what he does. It's his thing. And they're all hanging all like open air ones.

There's this entire subculture, right?

Yeah, no idea. I thought all orchids were like that. But you're saying. So they all. Some of them are planted in the, in the ground.

There's some more in the ground. Yeah, and some of them. So there's this whole. But the point is, and what's interesting that you brought that up is it actually leads to why the orchid market is a good market, which is market must have thought for which is future problems. So you simply want a market where when you solve that $10,000 problem, that burning, urgent bleeding neck problem for someone, it gives you this opportunity to become that person's trusted advisor for life. So in the dog market, imagine you have a dog that's peeing on the rug and I come to your house and I say, dean, let me help you out, right? I help you out with the dog, you take care of it and then the next day the problem is solved. All of a sudden I've become the dog whisperer for you, right? So then a couple weeks later, when you have another problem with the dog, the dog's barking or the dog won't stop jumping or doesn't come when she's is biting people, you're going to give me a call and say, hey Ryan, I'm having another problem with this dog, can you help me out? And you want a market specifically that opens up the opportunity for future problems. So the orchid market, future problems are I know what to do for this one variety. I know what to do with cymbidiums, but I don't know what to do with oncidium. So how do I take care of it? Oncidium or the potting material is making a complete mess. How do I do it with just water or the fertilizer? Expensive and it's toxic. Is there a way to make all natural fertilizer? The answer is yes. How do you photograph orchids? We have a course on orchid photography. People want to learn how to paint orchids. We have watercolor painting. How to watercolor paint orchids. So you see all these future problems that exist that give you this opportunity to create more and more programs down the road in that inch wide mile deep space. So that's number four.

Have you ever seen the movie adaptation, which I've got to imagine you have.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah.

For those people that have not seen the movie, just go watch it. It has a little bit to do with orchids.

Now this last one market must have number five is an homage to one of your mentors, Joe. Certainly some of that I've learned tremendously from over the years. And it's what we call PWMs, players with money. Yeah. Now that's a phrase I first learned from the late great Gary Halbert and it really means in this context, you're looking for not necessarily a market filled with millionaires or billionaires. You're looking for a market where people have demonstrated that they'll spend a disproportionate amount of their income in that area of their life. So we know a lot of dog owners, I'm sure, who spend what most people from the outside would consider to be crazy amounts of money on all sorts of ridiculous things, right? From doggy vacations, doggy spa days, pet insurance. People will spend $10,000 on a surgery for their dog. I mean, like, the list is endless. But that's what you're looking for, is a market where people will spend a demonstrated, disproportionate amount of their income in that area. Golf is a classic example. One of the tests that you can use is what is the barrier to entry into that hobby or topic or niche. So something like being a yacht owner or sailor. The barrier to entry for most people is to own a boat, right? Which is thousands of dollars. Now you compare that to the, like the chess market. What's the barrier to entry for chess? You can go to Walmart and buy a chessboard for what, 20 bucks and that's it. You can hang on to that chessboard for the rest of your life. So.

And once you have one, you have one and it's passed down.

Yeah, exactly.

Your father to you to your son to.

Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, compare that to a market that I'm passionate about. Like my area where I spend a disproportionate amount of my income is I'm a tall total, a full, which stands for adult fan of lego. So we have an entire LEGO room in our house. Wow. I've bought hundreds of sets over the years. I don't want to even calculate what I've spent on Lego. My two boys are super into Lego. I've got a four year old and a seven year old. We've incorporated Lego into our courses, our live events, like we do a lot with lego. That's like my kind of crazy beard.

Have you made the pilgrimage to Legoland right here in Winter Haven?

I'm waiting for my 4 year old to be just a little bit older so we can make the transatlantic flight without him totally killing his parents.

Well, there you go. Well, I live right on the. I live on the same lake as Legoland here in Winter Haven.

That's so cool. Yeah. And there's the one, the original US one in Carlsbad. And then obviously this, the original Danish Legoland. So. But the point is this. You want a market that checks all those five boxes and if you're missing any one of those checkboxes in these five market must haves, that's the first traffic light, that's the first red light. That's the first like, all right, do not pass Go. Go back to the beginning before you move on to the next test, right before you move on to the next test to validate. If your market is one to pursue.

This is really good. I mean, you know, this whole thing of looking at them and I've put kind of some of these into a through the checklist like what you were talking about with orchids. And we did this with. If we take Stop your divor as an example to put through the checklist, you know, it meets the evergreen market thing in that it's a relevant thing. It's not necessarily there's not enthusiast, but there's pain and urgency attached to it that they would definitely want to solve that problem. The urgent problem is the thing. Now you can have a viable business that doesn't necessarily meet all five, but what you end up with is whenever anything changes, it's vulnerable. Like where this, the vulnerability of stop your divorce was that there's a constant renewing group of people, but access to them, you have to go out and find them or be there where they can find you. And for years we were able to do that with, with Google AdWords. And as that became more and more expensive, it became less and less viable since it was a single product without the future problems to be able to continue to build that relationship with them. So just makes sense to know going into whatever market you're going to attract.

Where the problems could be, you'll see running into ceilings. If you are listening to this right now and you run into a ceiling in your business, chances are it's because you're lacking one of these five criteria. For example, one of our businesses that I talk about in the book is a business called Rocket Memory. You know, I mentioned my background, my academic background is in neuroscience. When I put it this way, when I told my parents I grew up blue collar, neither my parents went to college first in my family go to college. But when I told you my parents that I wasn't going to become the next great neurosurgeon, but I was going to work on Wall street, they were okay with that. When I told them I wasn't going to work on Wall street, but I was going to work in China in finance, they Were okay with that. But when I told them I wasn't going to do any of those things and instead I was going to teach people how to make jewelry using this ebook that I'm selling online, they basically thought I was crazy. Right. It was like the ultimate fall from grace. So to pay them back to honor them. One of the businesses that we started was in the memory improvement space. And I did it because I wanted to show them I could use my degree like I could use my formal education. So we built this business called Rocket Memory. And what I learned, it's a business I never would have started today because I just didn't have the experience or wisdom at the time that that's a market that has the absence of PWMs. That market, that business attracts broke college students and grad students who are studying for standardized tax. Students were studying for the MCATs, going to medical school, the LSATs, going to law school that have a huge amount of information that they need to memorize. That's who we were attracting. You know, when I was in college, I had like a hundred bucks in my bank account. So it was a market I would never go into today. Now, what's interesting about the divorce market, that we talk about that one for a minute, it's certainly evergreen. It is by definition the most, almost the most urgent of urgent problems. Right. Your spouse tells you we need to get a divorce. That is like, that is the only thing you're thinking about. You know, you want to solve that thing immediately. Certainly filled with pwm. Right. I think there's a lot of well documented wealthy couples and individuals. Oh, absolutely. And in many cases PWMs, the problem is even more urgent because there's a financial implication to it as well. Right. Like my wife is going to take everything that I've earned. So there's a big bang. Now what's missing is two and four, the enthusiast and future problems. But if you think about one of the things I talk about in the book choose is being very careful about how you define what we call your bullseye keyword. Your bullseye keyword is the one keyword that making a small shift makes all the difference in the world around what type of business you're in. So the orcid example, I talk about this in the book. I'm actually not in the orchid business. I'm in the orchid care. Yeah, Orchids. Very different business. Orchids is selling flowers. It's a florist. I'm competing against 1, 800 flowers. I'm not in that business. I'm in the orchid care business. And so when you think about the divorce market, a slight shift or pivot could reposition divorce as the urgent problem within perhaps the marriage niche or the.

Yeah, and there's the. That's exactly right. That there's a difference between improve your marriage or improve your relationship, which would be what the people would need. Up until the moment that their spouse says, I want a divorce now, it's like the ice is broken beneath them. They would do anything to just get back up on the surface. There's that pain and urgency attached to it. We're improving. A poor relationship is more of a chronic problem. That's more of a niggling thing that people might have an awareness of. But when there's something urgent that happens to stimulate that response, it's a big difference. People aren't as interested in improve my relationship as they are in, you know, stop my divorce once it gets to that stage, you know, it's the whole thing about prevention versus cure.

It can be the doorway into a person's life, right? It can be the doorway into standing on the precipice of divorce. And that can open the door to, for example, if you have a marriage counselor business or a marriage advice business, it could be the doorway into that space where maybe that's something that previously the person would never have considered, right? Going to see a marriage counselor, but it opens the door to that. And then that can be that ongoing future problem situation where you're serving that person for months and years into the future. But we talked about an interesting theme which is around this idea of what is your niche? Like, how a big question I think people ask is, how do I know if I should niche down? Like, if I should be more specific or if I should broaden my reach, broaden my scope? And it was a question, if we go back to the research that we were really interested in as well, we're really interested in identifying, is there a right size niche? Because it's a question that comes up all the time. Now, we all know the adage, they're riches. And niches we all know, inch wide, mile deep. But what does that actually mean? So what we did is we looked at every single one of our markets and we started analyzing the keyword search volume in each of those markets. We looked at how many people were searching for that topic, that subject online every single month. And what we found was fascinating. We found that every single one of our most successful businesses, in terms of keyword search volume, all fell within a very narrow band. And every single one of the markets that was unsuccessful was either way above that band. So either way larger or way smaller than that band. And for months we debated, my team and I, we debated, do we reveal what our keywords are like, our most successful keywords? Because we're talking about this before we started the interview, that when people see an example of a successful market, many people choose not to use that as inspiration. They choose to just go in that market. Right.

I should share that story because I was telling you that as part of the thing about choosing a target market that, you know, years ago I taught a course on how to write, publish, and sell a money making ebook. And one of the things that I shared with people was this idea of selecting a target market. And ours, you know, my three were pain and urgency was one of them. Irrational passion was another one, which golfers and orchid and gardeners and all that stuff would fit into that. And the third was dimes for dollars, where people are trading dimes, investing in your program with a hope of that being a path to making more money. Those were kind of the three surest type of audiences. But I was sharing everything about stop your divorce as a market to illustrate to people that this is the type of market that would be a good market. And we ended up up having three people who took this course, went on to create my three competitors in that. In that marketplace, which were. It was very funny to see that happen. But out of that, of course, also came w. Dating with Eben Fagan and make every man want you with Marie Forleo and stop your anxiety. So really good things came out of it. But yeah, something.

You get it right? So it's, you know, for that exact reason, that cautionary tale right there, we literally debated for months, like, are we gonna reveal our. Our niches, our actual keywords? Because we knew we would be inviting competition. And in the end, we decided that we would create greater good in the world by revealing what our most successful keywords were so that anybody could go to Google trends, a free tool, and type in your bullseye keyword and compare it against our most successful keywords to see if your market is within what we call the market size sweet spot, that very narrow band, A market that's not too big, a market that's not too small, but in that sweet spot of market size. And so we revealed that. And for anyone interested in finding out what those keywords are and the process to compare your keyword against that, one of the things that I decided to just give it all away and include it in the book. Awesome.

Let me ask you this, Roy, just because I want to make sure. And this is sort of interesting too, because there's a lot of really smart marketers who write books. And of course the book is used as a tool to acquire leads and then sell people into whatever thing that they're doing. And there are many people that do really awesome versions of that. There's other people whose book is nothing but a really well drafted sales conversion methodology. And as marketers, we know that books are seeds, they're probes and they will lead people into other things. And there's certain things that are right for people and things that are not. The reason I bring it up, and I'm wanting to frame it this way is one of the things that me and Dean have done a lot of over the years and we'll interview someone on a book is we'll suggest someone gets into their book funnel so that they can see how they're actually marketed to. Because in so many ways the selling process and some of the best ways that you can learn from somebody is actually see how they are selling you and to actually play customer, be a customer, go through the process, look at the conversion. Because just there's very, you know, for every person that writes a book, the vast majority of them make no money off the book and it never sees the light of day and they really don't understand the before, during and after units of a business. And for as long as you've been doing this, and for as a student, as bright as you are, and as much as you understand psychology and niches and many of the things that you've talked about and of course certainly I know the book will be filled with that. There are things that you have packaged into the book and I'd like to have you kind of go a little backstage with us here and talk about why did you write the book. It will do many things for people, including what you just even shared today. But what do you want the book to do for you?

Yeah, it's a really great question and I'm glad that you brought it up because I'm a big believer in if you want to be a student of anything, if you want to create anything, you need to be a consumer of that thing. I always advise people, if you want to deliver first class service for your clients, you need to fly first class, you need to stay at a five star hotel, you need to experience what it means to go through that so that you can Deliver that. And similarly, I'm a big believer in being a student of marketing by being a consumer of marketing. So being hyper aware, just buying stuff and then kind of being that omniscient observer from afar, watching you go through that process and observing your reaction and your response and how does it make you feel and what questions were you running into and where are you getting stuck and taking all those observations and incorporating the best of the best of that in your work? So I'll talk a little bit about that. So one of the things I realized with Ask, I had never published a book before. My experience, up until that point, before releasing my first book, Ask was as a niche marketer, right? So I had built businesses in all these different niches from Scrabble, jewelry, orchids, memory improvement, satellite tv, water filtration systems, all these different niche markets. But I'd never taught marketing before. I'd never taught it. And so Ask was really the first time that I revealed to the world the methodology I had used in all these different markets. And I learned a lot of things along the way. One of the things that I learned was that as basic and rudimentary as I thought, Ask was in many ways for many people. I was teaching them algebra when they never learned arithmetic. So in other words, I was teaching, you know, I had assumed that people had gone through the 10 years of math that's required to do algebra when some people were still learning what's one plus one. And that's not a disrespectful thing. It's just they hadn't gone through that education. I overestimated the amount of education, marketing education people may have consumed leading up to that point. So what I realized is that I needed to teach pre algebra, right? I needed to go one step before Ask. Before you ask, you need to choose who you're going to ask. So that's the business reason for writing this book. If we look at from a funnel standpoint, choose is the first step. The first thing you need to do in your business if you want to become an entrepreneur, if you want to be your own boss, if you want to start your own thing is you. And you teach this in your framework as well. You've got to choose your niche, you've got to choose your market. You decide who you're going to focus on serving. Once you choose, the next step is to ask. So really, if we look at it from the how does it serve my business? How does it serve our company? We are creating a massive customer demand for Ask. We are Creating the step. We are teaching people the step you need to go through before you ask and leading people up to the edge of that step. So once you choose, choose culminates in identifying what your bullseye keyword is. And there's a science and process behind that. Once you identify that bullseye keyword and who you're going to serve, the next step is to ask them a very specific set of questions to understand what you should build, what you should sell, what you should create, and the language you should use to describe that thing that you're going to create or build or sell to the world. And that's where asking comes in. So the end of the book, the last, the last line of the book, I mean, I'll even. I'll pull it up if I can, if I can find it. So what's your next step? Where do you go from here? Well, once you choose, your next step is to ask. And the next step for someone to go through after the previous book, buy the other book.

You'Ve created their future problem. Right there.

Exactly.

That's brilliant.

Yes. And hopefully. And that is the meta thing. So we talked one level, meta, which is seeing what we're doing in our business. The second meta level beyond that is to see how we have applied chews in our business, how we've decided what our niche is, how we've decided who our who is, and then how we use ask, which is what we teach in our other book in our own business. And so we eat our own dog food. Right. We use exactly what we teach. And I believe that, number one, if you are a teacher out of integrity, you have a duty to your customers, to your students, to your clients, to practice what it is that you are teaching. That's number one. Number two, I believe that that is. It's a litmus test that I use before I decide to learn from anybody, before I decide to take on a teacher, a mentor, I want to look and see are they practicing, are they applying, are they doing what they are teaching? And I use this with the doctors, the medical doctors that I work with, I use this with the marketing experts, the health experts. I want to make sure that they are actually doing what they are teaching in their books and their courses and their programs. And so I believe that's another great way to learn is to see how a mentor or teacher of yours is using what they teach in their own life, in their own business.

Let's do this for timing purposes here. Who is this book for and who is it not for?

Yeah, so in the opening dedication to the book, this is what it reads. It says, if you've ever had the crazy dream to start your own business, if you've ever dreamed of doing your own thing, if you've ever failed or lost it all on something in a quest to shake the status quo, if you have something right now that is changing the world, but you don't know where to take it next, or if you're simply trying to figure out what you want to do and who you want to be when you grow up, this is the book I wish someone had written when I was where you are right now. In short, this book right here is for you. So really, this book is for anybody who's at that stage where maybe you're trying to decide what your next thing is going to be, whether that means you don't have a business right now and you're thinking about starting your first business, maybe you have a business that just kind of hit that ceiling or isn't going where you want it to go and you need to maybe pivot or tweak or change directions, or maybe you're starting something new. Maybe you have something else that is working and you want to start something else or something new and take that in a new direction. This is the first fundamental step that getting this first thing right again. The single biggest mistake people make is they choose the wrong market. It doesn't matter. You do everything else right.

Right.

You can have be the best copywriter in the world. You could have the best technology, you could have the best team. But if you choose the wrong market, you're setting yourself up to fail right from the start.

So let's talk about the marketing things that you're putting in place here, and let's just promote your book. And I know that you had told me beforehand that you set up a link for people that are. I love marketing listeners, that they can get it and talk about the funnel and the process you them through if they choose to get it that way.

Totally. So I know we only had a chance to talk about a few of those seven factors. We didn't talk about how to measure market competition, for example, and a whole other set of factors. But if you'd like to get your hands on a copy of the book, we wanted to do something super special for your listeners. So I'm going to give away a physical hardcover copy of the book. I'll ship it anywhere in the world. All I ask is that you pay a few dollars shipping and handling. And when you do that that I'm also going to include over $200 in free bonuses. Number one, I imagine if your listeners are anything like me, they probably like to listen to audiobooks. So I'm going to hook up everyone with a copy of the audiobook for free. Number two, one of the biggest questions I always get is Ryan, you've got these seven factors. What are examples of niches that check all the boxes. So I have a list of my 25 market list that are the exact markets I would go into right now if I wasn't promoting this book. And I'm going to hand that list to anyone who grabs a copy of the book for I also have a mindset training when it comes to launching your business. Again, my background in neuroscience, I'm very obsessed with psychology. So I have these 17 mental hacks for overcoming fear, failure, analysis paralysis, overcoming self confidence, self doubt. I'm including that for free. And there's a special link that we set up to get this. You're not going to find it on our main website. It's choosethebook.com love for I love marketing. Choosethebook.com love and again, free hardcover copy of the book. I'll ship it anywhere in the world. Plus these bonuses. Just pay a few bucks shipping and handling. And to Joe, to your point, when you do that for a few bucks, you're gonna get the best marketing funnel education you could possibly ask for because we are literally spending thousands of dollars a day just on traffic to this funnel. Variations on this funnel. So you can see what is working now when it comes to selling a book at scale. We're in pre orders right now. We sold 20 something thousand copies of preord. Just getting started in what's working now for book marketing in 2019. That's awesome.

What other things did we not share or it could be one or two things, Ryan, that we should have talked about that we did not. Anything that you'd like to share that was just kind of crucial to this whole conversation that you think would be useful? We can take a few minutes to do that.

Yeah. The one last thing that I'll mention is this. There are two sides to identifying what market and what business to go into. We spent a lot of time talking about external factors. We spent a lot of time talking about things like the market must haves things like how to measure market size if you're in that market size sweet spot. We didn't talk about market competition but there's a whole other side to that and that's looking internally as well, and what I mean by that is you want to make sure that you're building a business that not just fills your bank account, but it's going to fuel your soul, right? It's going to keep you going when times are tough. You're not going to wake up one day ten years from now feeling like, why did I spend the last 10 years of my life doing this? And for that we have an assessment. It's an assessment that's part of the book. It's free in the book and it walks you through. Which of the 16 different entrepreneurial types do you fall into based on your answers to a series of questions? So there are 16 possible outcomes in this assessment. And if you are a fan of assessments like Strength Finder, Colby, things like that, it's going to help you identify from an internal set of factors what type of market and what type of business is right for you. You can actually get that through the book. But there's also a way for you to go through that process yourself if you'd like, by just going to choosequiz.com choosequiz.com if you go to that secret link, it'll take you to that actual assessment and you can see one of the secrets to my success in the 23 markets that I've gone into and the students that I've worked with is in every single one of those market. I've used some form of survey, quiz or assessment as the lead generating front end in that business. And I've done to the tune of about 5 million email subscribers using that one strategy. So if you want to see an example of an assessment that's getting about 1200 email subscribers per day, we have about 1200 people per day taking this assessment right now on Cold Traffic. That's another marketing education in and of itself and it's going to help you make the right decision for you and your business.

What I want to say to our listeners after you read the book, I think there will be a lot of things that come up with it. And the way that I look at this, Ryan, I think we should do a follow up down the road on this.

I'm totally doubtful.

Once the book is out in the wild and a lot of things are happening, there'd be a whole other level of insights that not only will come from the readers, from our readers, from people out there, but, but also from you. And I'm always curious as to what putting your knowledge and wisdom out into the world actually does for the person that's doing it. I Mean, I'm always a big believer in being a player, not an observer. I don't watch much sports because if I'm going to do something, I'd rather be the one just not watching, but the one doing it. And I think the same thing in business in a lot of ways. So I'd like to just think of this one as part one of our conversation and go from there. So, Dean, any smart shit you want to say before we wrap this up?

I love it. I mean, I think we said a lot of smart shit. This is. It's just so in alignment with what we talk about. It's totally drives. It's a deep, deep dive in profit activator number one, select a single target market and the importance of it. So I loved it from the moment I picked it up.

Now, of course, from my standpoint, I'm definitely super, super interested, even more so than I was PR to do in the interview of reading the book now because it's really great. And like I mentioned in the beginning, at the time that we scheduled this, I just simply hadn't had enough time to read the book. And there's a lot of books that are available out there and a lot of things. And I think one of the number one questions that came from one of my genius network members, Mike Aguilera, we actually did an interview with him and I said, how do you get through all the books, like all the seminars? How do you actually decide what you're doing, going to read, and what's going to get your attention? And he said this really great question. He goes, well, I just asked myself what needs solved? So the things that you put your time and attention on is what needs solved. And so I think with a book like choose, this could solve a lot of problems for a lot of people. And therefore, if any of what we've discussed resonates with you, and I'm sure it does, or you wouldn't have been listening to this whole podcast, then this certainly is a book that can solve a lot of problems and. And unveil a tremendous amount of opportunity. So really, really appreciate it. Ryan, the website one more time and make sure I say this right. It's choosethebook.com love.

That's right. You nailed it. Cool.

And if someone wants to take the quiz, it's choosequiz.com and yeah, so really appreciate it. And to all of our listeners, you obviously know, I'm sure some struggling entrepreneurs or people that are out there running around being dreamers, that are trying to figure out how to make, and I'm sure this book would be very, very beneficial to them. So share this podcast with anyone that you think needs to hear it and maybe pick up a copy of the book for them or persuade them to do it themselves. And then we'll talk to you on the next episode of I love marketing, so I appreciate it. So thanks guys.

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Sam.