What Kickstarter and Shark Tank Teach Us About Selling First

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS. This is episode 294. Sell your product first, then create it. So this is less about OFS and more about some general business advice that I've come across or that I've learned over the years from seeing lots and lots of people do things. In coming episodes, I'm going to have a series. Well, I don't know if I'd call it a series, but I'm going to talk a whole bunch about how I live the 17 hour workweek. I've been working about 17 hours a week for, it's about 15 years now and I get a lot of questions about it. And so I'm trying to detail how I'm doing that. And so I'm going to talk about that. But for today, I want to talk about two of the biggest mistakes that I see people when they are starting an online business or ways people fail in. There's two specific situations. The first one is they come to me and say, I don't really know what I would hire an OFS to do. And yeah, if you don't really know what you're going to have someone do, then you probably shouldn't be hiring someone. They're not going to run your business for you. They're not going to build your business for you unless you know what you're doing. You've got to know what you're doing at least before you hire someone. So that's the first place people fail. The second place where I see people commonly fail is they come to me and say, hey, John, I have the best idea for this product. Listen to this. Stop. I don't care. I don't care what your business idea is. It's not relevant. Because until you can show that you know how to sell this product, this thing, this idea, what your business idea is, doesn't really matter because if you can't sell it, which most people are really, really good at creating something awesome and really te terrible at selling it. And it's, as it turns out, it's really fun to create a product. It's really fun to create something new. It's not very fun to sell something. Now, obviously there are certain personalities that sell things really well and that's part of it. And so for them, yeah, selling it's going to be easy. But if that's not your personality, which it's not my personality to know how or want to just sell and sell and sell it's not. That's not what I want to do. So the best advice that I have figured out for this situation. You have an awesome product idea, is go sell that product first. Go create the sales process for it. Once you've figured out and proven, yes, I can sell this, then you can create the product. So I'm going to give you two examples. The first one is a neighbor of mine who comes to me with, oh, John, I have this awesome, awesome product. You should see this thing. It helps people buy properties. And it's so good at identifying available properties and distressed and whatever. And I'm like, that's cool. But like, are you the target audience? No, people are going to pay me. Everyone tells me they're willing to pay for it. Cool, sell it, then get someone to pay you for it. And he doesn't. He doesn't ever get someone to pay for it. And he, he keeps coming back to me like, oh, you should see this thing. It's so awesome. It's so cool. I'm like, have you sold it? Well, no, but if I do this or this to it, then I can sell it. They come back to me and like, oh, man, it's so awesome. It's. Look at, it's me. It identified this property, and that's cool. Has anybody paid you for it? Well, no, I just need to add this and this and this. You know, I need to add this to it. It's a really common way of saying, yeah, I don't really know how to sell this thing. And so if you don't know how to sell it, fine. I mean, it's really. He's having a lot of fun building it, but he's never going to make any money from it because he can't and won't sell it. So how could you solve this? Here's the second piece of this. Here's the second example. So one of the ways that I've taken care of this over the years is by putting up a website that tells. That sells the actual product. It is the sales pitch for the product. The product doesn't exist yet, but it's the sales pitch for the product. And it will let someone click the buy. And it will let someone fill out their information. Not credit card information, but fill out their information. Which shows me, yeah, your buyer intent is really, really high. And then on the next page, I could say, hey, I'm sorry, I'm preparing this product. It's not quite done yet, but when it's done, I will give you free access for some amount of time, or I'll give it to you for free or whatever it is, or I'll give you a really big discount. Here's a discount coupon for the future. And are you willing to tell me what your two biggest questions are about this? Well, what that does is, number one, it proves to me that someone is willing to pay because they took steps to fill out personal information. Number two, it gives me a buyer list for when I'm. When the product is ready. Like when the product is ready, I have a whole bunch of people that are ready to buy it. And not everyone's going to buy it, but a bunch of them are. And number three, it lets me solve actual customer problems before I create the product. So if the people are willing to tell me, oh, here are my two biggest problems, or here are my biggest questions or whatever it is, then in creating the product, I know I can solve those problems. And that's the, that's better sales information. I can include those things in the sales pitch. When the product actually launches, you can get traffic to it by posting on Facebook or running Google Ads, whatever. However you want to get traffic, doesn't really matter. But does it sell? Now if you get a bunch of traffic to it and it doesn't sell well, you just, you just showed either there's not demand for this really awesome product that you have, or people aren't willing to pay for it, or they're not willing to pay enough for it, or you don't know how to sell it. So you better keep trying to figure out how to sell it before you go and create it, because creating it isn't going to sell it. Here's another way that we have done this over the years with a physical product. We've posted it on a local classified, so Craigslist classifieds or Facebook Marketplace and saying, I have this thing, here's the price. Text me or email me, whatever it is. And then do you get people responding and saying, yeah, I'm interested. So this is actually how my son's business started. And this is how any, I feel like any kid could run this business. You find a product that you think you can sell, you can find it from China, you can find it, whatever it is, locally, someone that you know has a product, post a classified ad for it and see do people respond? If people respond and you can communicate with them and you can now see like their desires and their needs and their interests and their questions. And then you can, once you know, oh, yeah, I've gotten this many Responses. Now you can go and pursue actually sourcing that product. This is how my son started selling things. Right before he left the country as a missionary, he sold $300,000 worth of stuff doing this. So that's my pitch for how to solve the. One of the biggest problems I see people have is, oh, I have this really awesome idea. I don't care what your idea is, sell it first. Now, obviously, this isn't the right answer for every situation. There are situations where you have to create the product. There are situations where you have a really good idea of selling or you have a good track record of how to sell it. So that's a different situation. But if you're new, my suggestion is see if you can sell it first. See if you can get leads. See if you can get people to call you or get people to respond to your ads or whatever it is. Get a response, and then create the product. Also, just to add to this, an OFS is not going to do the work of figuring out how to sell it for you. That is not something they will do. I just had someone this week saying, hey, I can't. I don't know how to get leads for my business. Can I hire an OFS to figure out how to get leads for my business? Well, if you don't know how and you can't do it yourself, he said, I've tried this and this and this, and it won't work. Well, if you've tried a bunch of things and it's not working, then someone else probably isn't going to figure that out for you. That's your job. You're the CEO. Your job is to sell it, and you need to figure out how to sell it, then get someone else to do the work of it. Oh, last thing. Where do you see this in action? This. Sell first, build next. How about Kickstarter? I mean, what I'm talking about isn't new here. It's. This is how. So many things. Shark Tank. Sell it first, then build it, right? I mean, this is. This is a common thing. Make the sales pitch, then create your product.