How To Validate, Launch, and Build Your First Digital Product

Boom. Welcome back to another episode of the Espresso Hour, where the running joke is this is going to be much shorter than an hour because we are once again hyped up on caffeine, despite it once again being 6:45pm here. I snuck in another double espresso around 3 just to be fired up for our ship. 30 call for this one. Feels kind of like repeat. I was actually watching last week's Espresso Hour as I'm writing up this framework that we're kind of working on, distilling of some questions to reflect on to figure out if you run a prisoner castle. So it's very deja vu, as I just said that again on a Tuesday here in Amsterdam. But here we are. Got some more good stuff to jam on today.

Nice. Yeah, I like this topic you pulled. It's something that I think we're going to dig into a lot. Maybe just real quick to start, I guess. Can we officially say that the new newsletter is live? We haven't shared it a lot, but you can go to. Yeah, you can go to Bottlenecks Biz. Bottlenecks Biz to subscribe to our new newsletter.

Yeah, that's right. So this has been something that was validated via Espresso Hour. So good. I'm glad you brought this up. Validated via Espresso Hour, where everyone was coming to us and saying, hey, we really love the podcast. Is there any written version of it? Like, have you distilled these frameworks anywhere? And this started as just us having a public meeting, basically talking about, hey, what are we working on in our business? And then the amount of attention that it's generated has been surprising because the views are pretty solid. Like we get 2 to 3,000 on most episodes and some pop off a little bit more. Podcasts is about the same. So roughly 6,000, 7,000 views across platforms per episode, which, relative to the amount of effort we've put in to grow it, is extremely high. But we literally just sit down, record it. But the goal from here is to take the outlines we kind of generate during these conversations and actually distill them into long form written frameworks you can use to scale your digital business. We're very excited to write about that one. I think it's. We've never really crystallized these frameworks. We've just started to talk about them. So a lot to come on that.

Yeah. And anyone that subscribes, after you type in your email, we prompt you and ask if you could fill out a short survey. It takes Two minutes. The reason that we're using the survey and this is a framework that we talk about often in our espresso hours, and we plan on writing about quite a bit. We're big fans of surveys, so we're using it and we're going to explain to you why we're using it so you can use this mechanism as well. The reason that we love surveys is because it's a very easy way of gathering really detailed information about people. What they're interested in, what they need help with, what different sort of archetypes they fall into, and the faster that we can gather that information about our readers. You know, the goal of using this survey and especially of having this newsletter is to eventually we want to build an education product around this. So the podcast is sort of our way of exploring and jamming on ideas in a, in a rougher format. We don't always have them all fleshed out, but they're just sort of like, hey, here are the pieces that we're thinking about. And you'll often hear Dickie and I bounce off of each other and figure it out together in real time. The newsletter is then sort of the crystallization of those. So we jam on an idea, a bunch of new ideas emerge. Then we use the newsletter as the forcing function for compressing it and going, okay, if we were to formalize this as a framework, how would we formalize it? And then the newsletter is all of these frameworks that we give away for free that really attract the types of people that we're most interested in working with and helping so that, and then through the survey we can validate, you know, who are those people? How big of a business do you have? What sort of revenue are you doing? What industry are you in? What are you selling? And that helps us refine the specific group of people that we can help most so that we can then build a program around that so we can help those people.

Yeah, a lot to come on it, but we're starting with, we need to crystallize more frameworks to attract more people that we could eventually ask what the most useful solution would be to them. So it's kind of meta, given what we're about to talk about, because we are going to follow this exact playbook as we launch our fix your offer program. Whether that's a low ticket digital product, a mid ticket cohort based thing, or a high ticket coaching program, or, or an agency service, we don't know exactly what it's going to end up being, but we're Going to follow this exact step by step guide that we're going to kind of workshop lay out for validating, launching and building your first or next digital product. So where should we start?

I think it would be helpful to rein in the thinking a little bit and define the word digital product. You know, when we talk about that, what does that mean and what's the price point that we're sitting in?

Okay, actually, let's zoom out one second for where this idea to film this episode came from. It was on one of our ship 31st make calls where I can't remember her name, but she asked, hey, I have like a thousand person email list, maybe 2,000 people. I have a couple thousand Twitter followers, like 5 4, 3, 4, 5k, something like that. And she was like, hey, I'm thinking about launching this thing. And this was, it was funny. It was like our fourth call of the day. It was our fourth call of the day. It was getting. It was Friday end of the week. I was running on absolute fumes. And it was one of those, like, you hear a question and 20 ideas popped in my head and it was the last question of the call. And I kind of just went off on a four or five minute like, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang rant all the way down the line of like, here's exactly how I would do it.

And she got off.

In her. In the chat, she goes, that was worth a $20,000 mastermind investment. That is the thinking we eventually want to do with the fix your offer program. Right. How can we have someone come to us with clear numbers about their business and then talk about the different ways that they could unclog those bottlenecks? So that's where the origin of bottlenecks biz came from. Bottle business bottlenecks. We're still kind of workshopping the name. I'm not going to overthink that part of the. But that was where this idea came from, was one question from honestly, an ideal customer, someone who's doing 10 to 15k a month and wants to scale it to 50. Right. And I just wanted to lay that foundation of like, we heard this question. Now we're going to try to formalize that framework a little bit.

Yeah. And so I think it's worth pointing out here this idea of, you know, validating, launching and building. If it's your first digital product, you probably have maybe some nuanced differences compared to someone where it's your next digital product. But either way, the process ends up being very similar. Like, you know, Dicky, you and I now have multiple products. You know, like, we almost think of them as different businesses and yet we're still going through this same process over and over and over again every time we create something new. So I think the, a good place to start is. So how do, how do you define digital products? So usually a digital product is an ebook, a template or a grouping of templates, like a PDF of templates, something like that, or some sort of async course. Like Justin Welsh is a really good example. It's like I don't know how many modules are in his LinkedIn OS, but say it's 10 or 15 modules. Each module is a combination of text and video. And typically a digital product sits in the price point usually of anywhere from a couple dollars, like $10 to about $150. And I think we've learned that above the 150, maybe $200 price point, you start getting into a different type of product. That's usually where you see you, you a little bit are getting out of quote unquote digital products and you're getting more into cohort based programs or training programs with some sort of curriculum element or accountability element. Like there's these, there's more support systems. Whereas digital products tend to just be these standalone, super high margins. You buy, you download or you get access to it immediately and it's just you and the product and that's it.

Yeah, this framework works for all of them. It's really how to validate an idea. Because you might be listening to this and say, I actually don't know what.

I want to launch.

It could be a digital product, it could be a coaching program, it could be an agency service, it could be any of these things. I have people looking to buy something from me in some way and I have some kind of value to provide. What's the best way to package it up? And so there are a couple different routes you could go. But do you want to start with kind of the the why or do you want to just go right into the how?

Yeah, so I think the why just real quick, it's not the focal point, but it's worth acknowledging. Oftentimes if you've never launched a product before, you will naturally come up with every reason why you can't or shouldn't. And it's everything from someone saying, I don't know what my niche is yet, to I don't have a big enough audience, to I haven't been doing this long enough to I don't feel Like, I'm an expert and it's really worth pointing out that all of these are not objective truths. They are self inflicted obstacles. They're just false beliefs. They're things you're telling yourself that are not actually true. And so the reason why at least we're believers in every single person. Even if you're very, very early in the journey, every single person should build a digital product sort of like as quickly as you can, is because a. You know, the first thing is that there's a massive credibility difference between someone who writes on the Internet with no product and someone who writes on the Internet with a product like just you. You naturally perceive people differently. If you go to their Twitter profile and you see, oh, their bio, they write about, you know, how to buy your first rental property. And then they go, by the way, I have an e book here for $9 on how to buy your first rental property. You immediately assume that person knows what they're talking about. And so there's this perceived credibility that comes from creating a digital product that you can't really get just from I write on the Internet or even you have a big audience. There's. Even if you're someone with 300,000 followers and you don't have a product, the, the reader still has that like missing component in their brain. They're like, why do you have such a huge audience but you don't have any product like that? It's almost like it seems kind of weird.

Yeah. And I thought you were just going to keep rattling through each of these reasons.

I keep going. I just want to see if you had anything to know.

So I go back to my initial podcast compendium launch in September, October of 2020. The first digital product that I had and how this. It's so fun to go back through this framework and realize I used it then I'm going to use it again today, we're going to use it in five years. But there was that big credibility difference after I made that first dollar on the Internet because I think more than just the credibility, it forced me to build the skill of monetization where I had to create a landing page, I had to create a stripe profile, I had to create a lead magnet that I had a free version. And then it said for everyone who downloaded the free version, it sent them an email like, hey, do you want the premium version? I had to learn all of those little skills in a very low risk way because it was a $29 template and like 30 or 40 people downloaded it. So I. In just a couple of weeks, I learned everything that now I could go reposition, which then led to ship 30, which led to BJ, all those different skills. But the sooner you can learn just that feeling of one, it's possible to make a dollar somehow from some stranger, and then two, all the skills that come with it. If you think you don't have a big enough audience to create a digital product, I would just push back. Because the second you have 10 to 15 people following you, you should have something because it could be a template, it could be a PDF, whatever it is, it's going to force you to learn those skills.

I am a really, really big believer in this. It's why I title this whole series of books the Art and Business of Writing. So so often the reason why writers are a great example, the reason why writers typically complain about making no money is because they only practice one half of the of the skill. They only practice the art. And then they go, well, I'm practicing the art, how come I'm not making any money? And the realization is, because the business of writing or the business of doing anything is a different skill. So you can't practice the art and then go, and why isn't the business side working out? You have to think of it as a whole loop. They're connected. And so you have to not just practice the skill of writing and of clarifying, thinking, and building an audience on all of those, but you have to finish the loop and go, okay, and now how do I do something with that? How do I monetize it? What are the different ways I can monetize it? What are the different monetization vehicles? What are the different business models? Those are different skills. And so sort of this third, this third point that we were talking about, where creating a digital product prevents you from just falling into the trap of generating attention for attention's sake, I experienced this really viscerally. What happens is when you start writing on the Internet or you start creating and you start getting the dopamine hits of I'm building an audience and, and people are following me and oh, I had something go viral. You, you mislead yourself in thinking that more of that is what allows you to quit your job, or more of that is what allows you to start making an extra five grand a month on the side. And as a result, you just keep like you see it with all the people who write Twitter threads. It's like you just keep writing more and more Twitter threads and you're generating more and more Attention, but the attention isn't connected to a monetization vehicle. So you're spending all this time generating all this attention, but then you're like, why isn't my income changing? Well, it's. The bottleneck is really simple. It's because you don't have anything for sale.

All right, so we talked a little bit about the why. And one more point on that. We talked on how it's going to allow you to build the skill of monetization. But say you already have a product launching a different type of product or different type of service or a different type of program. I think is the same idea because we just did this with pga, right. We had never launched a higher ticket group coaching kind of program. We'd only done cohort based and we'd done digital products. So we talked about that when we were creating it. It was like the downside was zero because we were going to learn the skills of hiring sales reps and running application funnels and things like that, that worst case we could then reapply in some other direction. So when you're taking on a new product or new service, whatever it is, just understand that there is no downside. Worst case, you build new skills and then you'll figure out how to refine that offer in the future and sort.

Of like embracing the differences of it. You know, we talked about this in a previous espresso hour, but the easy thing for us would have been ship 30 worked, let's watch or let's launch another cohort based business. And that wasn't the right decision. Like we needed to change the monetization vehicle.

And we tried to, we tried a couple of them. Like we did a couple cohort based and we did community backend and we tried a bunch of different things that we, we've now only through the benefit of doing this for two and a half years, have learned or less efficient than what we've kind of transitioned towards now.

Yeah. So I mean we could jam on like what are all the faulty beliefs? If there's anything PGA has taught me just to put a fine point on it. One of the biggest things that, that running PGA has taught me and having all of these ghostwriters or aspiring ghostwriters in this program is how many people do not actually struggle with the hard skills of monetization. It's not hard to learn how to send an invoice via stripe. It's not hard to learn how to explain the product or service that you're doing. These are very teachable skills. The biggest bottleneck is people's faulty beliefs. It's people don't actually believe they can charge five grand for a service or people don't feel like they deserve to put themselves out there and go, I'm worthy of this work or I'm. I'm worthy of charging this amount of money. And so it's sort of interesting to recognize how much, you know, we can give so many of these logical frameworks, but so much of business, this is a future book idea I have. So much of business is the emotional side of business your ability to confront your own faulty belief systems and go, yeah, I gotta find a way to get over that. Otherwise I'm never gonna, you know. So assuming so with that whole, like, elephant in the room, right? Assuming you understand that's the bottleneck, let's talk about the. The logical framework for product creation.

Cool. So the way I started to shape this was I think there's three kind of key guiding frameworks when you're launching something and, and one, it's validate before you build anything. Two, it's bootstrap the building of it in real time with a group of customers. And then third is launch the product fully once you validate it with a small group and implemented all their feedback. So that is the progression we took with ship 30 with PGA with what we'll do with Fix My Offer. Everything kind of gets boiled down to that one. So the first framework is validate before you build anything. And we started to kind of map out some steps. But the first choice you should make is pick something to offer to someone. And the framework for this is choosing a specific problem for a specific person in a specific way. So for example, ship 30 helps beginner writers specific person start writing online specific problem in a specific way by writing every day for 30 days. And we could rattle off a bunch of prop like the premium Ghostwriting Academy helps aspiring freelancers or current freelancers become premium ghostwriters by creating educational email courses. Problem person way. If you can nail that, that is all you need to start and just choosing something to begin with. Well, then once we kind of walk through these next couple steps, we'll inform you of what little variables you can change when within that product. But if it's just like I'm creating a notion template, it's like, well, who's it for, what problems it solve, and what's the specific way that your notion template is different?

So that, that framing I think is super key because if you don't have that, you end up trying to solve a bunch of different problems for a bunch of different people. That doesn't scale. You can't scale something where you have to give different answers to different people all the time. Right. So the goal, the only way you can scale something is if you're giving, you're solving the same problems, the same ways, generating the same outcomes. And that feels very uncomfortable for people because they go, well, if I get that specific, I'm not, you know, who am I going to attract? But it's, it's the irony of specificity on the Internet. You know, you get specific and then the Internet's job is to find all the people that resonate with that. I think the follow up is then, you know, figuring out, well, what's the vehicle? Are you selling a 20 or $50 template? Are you selling $150 digital product? Are you selling like an $800, maybe like cohort based experience? Are you selling like a 3,000, 5,000, $8,000 training program? And the thing that I think this is one of the hardest things for people to wrap their heads around, and I've had conversations with CEOs of $100 million companies that can't understand this, is that the content of each one of those is actually not that different. In fact, at almost every level, the actual content is almost identically the same. So the template that you sell for $50 becomes a template that is part of one module. For example, it's the same template. You could break it out and sell it for $50. You could bundle it into the $800 cohort based business and put it in the first module, you know, the $150 digital product. That curriculum is probably the same curriculum that you would have for $800 cohort based business. That is probably the same curriculum that would be in a $3,000 training program. The only difference is, is very rarely the actual content of what you're sharing. It's all the other vehicles that accelerate people's success. And a lot of it comes down to accountability, community, some form of mentorship, et cetera. So maybe, Dick, you want to jam on that a little bit.

Yeah, we've talked about this framework, but people don't pay for information. They pay for packaging, speed, implementation and outcomes. So another framework on top of that for pricing, a lot of people will pick a product and say, all right, now I need to know what to charge for it. Instead, pick a price point to charge and then focus on delivering so much value, at least three times as much value as, as you're charging that will simplify it. And so if you want just a quick and dirty template, I would say it's $49 for a template, $150 for a digital product, video based course, $800 for some kind of masterclass cohort based thing. And then if you really wanted to go higher ticket, which you will struggle unless you do something that is financially outcome driven, like teaching people a new skill that, that they could then go apply to their business or we could go down that rabbit hole. But here's a fun game we should play. Cole. I'm going to make up an example and we're going to walk through this. So I'm going to pretend just off the cuff that someone has a She's a single mom who talks about nutrition and she's got an email list of 2000 people and she's going to launch a keto cookbook to her email list. And so her specific problem is single moms who want to eat keto but are struggling to do it with their family obligations. And she's going to teach them they don't have time, right. And so she's going to teach them to cook the meals quickly using premade templates and they don't taste horrible. All right, so that's her. She comes to us and says, I'm thinking about launching this product. The exact steps we would take to have her do it are as follows. I would say first off, name the product something, use Chat GPT and brainstorm a bunch of names for it. We have little templates for that in our Right With AI newsletter, but come up with something to name it. So when you tell people about it, you're saying, I'm launching X. Then I would send an email to your list and this was the advice we gave on the ship. 30 calls you say very easily at the top and bottom of the email. Hey, thanks for reading. I'm thinking about launching X. If you're interested in staying updated on this, click here to join the wait list. Put that at the top, put that at the bottom. This is going to do two things for you. First, it's going to segment your email list saying, here are all the people who are potentially interested in your product. So then you can create a segment and say, in the future, when I do want to sell this thing, I don't sell it to my whole list. I just sell it to the people who told me they were interested. Then you're going to set up a survey on the back of that link. They'll Be redirected to the survey. In that survey, your job is to get one answer out of them. You can get more, but really you want to get one answer, which is, hey, I'm still building this. Want to make sure I cover everything that you have about X problem. What's the number one question you definitely want to make sure that I cover? And then if you want to add some extra information, like, hey, what's your age? Could you tell me about your current struggle, whatever it is. So for her, it might be, hey, what have you tried in the past? Right. Tons of different things. Whatever information that you would find valuable in creating the product. So you are going to bootstrap your entire curriculum just by asking potential customers what they want. Sounds so simple, but it's so, it's empowering when you have a type form with 50 answers or 50 questions to a bunch of things that you could answer in your product. So just then you have a product chosen, you have a validated list of potential customers. And I'll pause because we can jam on some of those. But the next step really takes it to the next level.

Yeah. So couple little like pro tips because this just as we go through this process. So if you're sitting there and the example, you know, I'm a single mom, I'm going to do a cookbook, I'm going to sell these recipes, keto recipes for $49 immediately. Whenever you're thinking of an offer, right? An offer is really the magic combination of what are you promising, what are you price anchoring to and how much are you charging. That's basically what an offer is. And I always, whenever I'm thinking of an offer, I immediately ask myself, how can I price anchor this to either time or money? So when you're like, what do you name this? You know, it's like, you know, 15 minute keto cleanse, you know, or like the million dollar keto diet for $100 a week. I always am thinking, how do you anchor the reader and potential customer to. If you did this on your own, it would cost a lot of time. If you buy my product, it costs you minimal time. Or if you try to do this on your own, it would be very expensive. If you buy my product, it'll be very, very cheap relative to how expensive that is. Right. Or you want this massive dream outcome. I can help you get there very, very quickly. So you're always price anchoring to time or money in the name of the product, in the, in the promise of the product, the hook, the Offer. So I just, I, I wanted to crystallize that real quick.

Any other follow ups on that? Because I, I like that a lot as you're the number one way to make money is make people more money, save people money or save people time. It's really the three main things.

Yeah. And, and I would say like to piggyback on that, this idea of, you know, pick a price point and then build the product that delivers on it. The reason that's so important is because, you know, you are the captain of your soul. Right. And all of these take the same amount of time. It takes the same amount of time and effort to do a really great $150 product as it does a really great $800 cohort based course. Like they all take work, so you might as well pick something that you're like, I'm really passionate about this and it's going to be lucrative for me if I get it right. So just pick that. Right. It's the hormozy. Solve rich people problems, they pay better. Right. So it's just pick the vehicle and then make it great. But something that I noticed people get in their own way on is like sometimes it go, it goes back to the faulty belief. You go, oh, it would be so great if I could create an $800 cohort based course, but there's no way I could do that. Okay, pause. Is that actually true or is that a self inflicted faulty belief? Well, that's self inflicted. And when you're coming up with what's the price point and what you want to do and you go, well, how do I guarantee that it's three times the value? All you have to do is ask yourself a very important question, put yourself in the shoes of the customer and how expensive would it be for them, time or money to do this on their own? That's the problem that you're solving. Education is you going, you trying and do this on your own is going to be expensive either in time or money. Or you can just pay me and we're going to get you there in a fraction of the time. And that's the, that's the, the way of thinking about how to back into what you're charging relative to the outcome.

Yeah. Because the information that she has with the keto like cookbook, she could deliver with a one to one service in the same way and charge $1,000 for more monthly coaching to someone who definitely needs it. So lots of different ways. But I think starting with, all right, pick one and try to Validate it. Because the way you would validate it would be the same. Like for example, if she said, all right, I'm actually only going to launch a one on one diet and nutrition coaching service. I would call that whatever it is and I'd send the same email to the list. Very same thing, same survey, same everything. So that's why I just pick something and then send it. If you want to get fancy, you could do like an ABC test and send three different offers to three different landing pages. You know, segment your email list. I don't want to get too much into the nitty gritty of what you could do, but you could accelerate it with validating products in different ways like that. So pausing for a second, we picked a product in some way, we validated it via a survey. Now we have a list of potential customers. Two things could happen. One, no one clicked on it. Probably try again on a new product. Let's assume you got a bunch of clicks, a bunch of survey answers. Here is the extremely important tactical thing that I would do if I could start over again. And we did this with, with PGA. From here I would go to calendly, calendly.com and set up a customer, a potential customer interview system. I would set 20 minute interviews and block like two or three days to do at least 10 of them. Then, then I'd send an email to a bunch of those potential buyers and say, hey, I'm working on this product. Would love to just talk to you about how it could be most helpful. In exchange, I'll give you access to it for free in the future. Now people go, but, but I got to sell the product. If you are going. This might not work if you're doing the high ticket coaching program, but for a digital product, this 100% works. You, you're going to find out how to have those interviews in a way that is valuable for them as well. And then you're gonna get on the phone and just have a conversation about what they've tried in the past, what they're looking to achieve, what stopped them, what would be helpful, delivery vehicles, what questions they have. You will learn more In 5 to 10 small 15, 20 minute customer interviews than you will in anything else. Right? So I would take that wait list of all the people who fill out the survey. So send them another email in a couple days with a link to the calendly and say, hey, whatever copy you need to encourage them to do it. From there you're gonna have a bunch of questions via the survey. You're gonna have a bunch of questions and recordings and conversations from your interviews that all you have to do to create the product is just go answer all of them. And if you do that, you're guaranteed to deliver on a promise because people have already asked you that. You have a potential list of customers, and then we can get into kind of the bootstrap, that building of it. But I'll pause there again because at this point, you kind of have everything you need to go and create it.

This is one of those pieces of advice where we give it and then people go, this, this sounds really. That's a really great idea. And then less than 1% of people actually go do it. And it really is like, if you're looking for a secret, this is the secret. The secret is just go talk to the people that you want to help. Ask them questions. They will literally tell you what you need to do in order for them to give you their money. That's it. But most people either rationalize not doing it because they think they don't need to. They're like, I can figure it out on my own maybe. But you'll get there a whole lot faster and you'll get the exact language that you want if you just go ask people. Right? It's like, it's one of those. It's like reading your work out loud. Everyone always says, as a writer, you got to read your work out loud. Everyone always says, yeah, that's such a great idea. Nobody ever does it. But if you do it, it's an amazing forcing function that will teach you a ton about your writing. And so it's sort of a nice segue, Dickie, into this idea of, you know, bootstrap the building of it with a small group. Your goal is to get there as fast as possible. Your goal is not to spend seven months building out the perfect video course. Do you know how many people do that? They go, they go spend $30,000, they buy all these super fancy ding dong cameras. They feel like they need to make it all professional. They hire some branding agency and they go and create a whole course without talking to a single customer. And then they go put it out into the world, and then nobody buys it. And they're like, I guess courses don't work anymore. I guess the course market is down. No, you just haven't talked to anyone, you haven't helped anyone. So you should do the opposite. You should get to, how do I get a small group? Could be 3 people, 5 people, 10 people, 20 people. How do I get that group as fast as possible and start building it with them. It's the same POV that we share in ship 30. You're not building products for people, you're building products with people.

Tons of different ways you could do this. You could put them in a slack channel, you could put them in a discord, you could put them in a telegram, you could put them in imessage, put them in an email chain, put them in a Twitter group dm. The goal is just to aggregate all of the attention of people who said they were interested in your product so you can ask them individual questions. Because from there you can do a couple things. You can put the product for sale and say, hey, it's in beta, you're getting early access, give them a discount. I think the number one way is charge. But tell them, hey, I'll give you your money back at the end in exchange for a future testimonial and a one on one interview in the future. So I could ask because you're just going to repeat the process, you just validated the product and what people might want. You're going to bootstrap the building of it. And then at the end you're going to do another round of one on one interviews, but you're going to ask different questions. What could have been improved? What worked well for you? If this was 10 times the price, what would it take for me to charge that? Some awesome questions. And as we start to crystallize this a little more, we'll list those out. But that's kind of the, the end goal is you get all the people who told you they wanted it, you get them together, you ask them to buy it, and then you build it along with them, module by module or page by page. So for example, if we were building this keto cookbook, you would start by validating each of the, the recipes that you're building. So you'd build the first three and you'd send it to them and say, hey, could you guys go try these? And rather than sit in your, sit in your home and cook them yourself, you're going to actually put them in the hands of your customers.

And by the way, so okay, I'm so glad you said this because here's exactly what's going to happen. The single mom sits down and goes, I've got it all figured. I know all the recipes that I'm going to put in this cookbook. I'm the smart one. And then you go put it in front of 10 potential customers and if you don't take the time to talk to them and ask them, you're gonna miss so many gems telling you exactly how to improve the product and giving you signal as to what your next product could be. So let me give, here's a really easy example. So you make this cookbook, you think all your recipes are amazing. You go talk to 10 people and four of them all tell you that that your almond milk yogurt, I don't even know if that's keto, but whatever almond milk yogurt breakfast parfait recipe that you thought was so amazing turns out tastes terrible. And it tastes terrible because you didn't specify what type of almond milk you needed for the person to buy. You just said almond milk. So four different people went and bought four different brands of almond milk and they all got very different results. You didn't know that? Well, now you do. Okay, so your cookbook just got 1% better. So what are all the other instances where that's happening? Right? And then the real 10x takeaway here is you start to then pay close attention to what types of questions people are asking and say, people go, yeah, these recipes make sense. But when I went to the grocery store, I wasn't sure which brands you wanted me to pick. Ah, you just had four customers tell you what your next product could be. So for $50, you can buy the cookbook, but for $499, I will give you a customized grocery shopping list for you every week. Okay, you didn't come up with that. Your customers told you that. And so if you don't go through this process, you're going to miss all these opportunities. Whereas now, Dickie, if you think about it, our businesses are like this never ending stream of people raising their hands going, oh, if only you solved this problem for me. And then we're like, great, we should probably go solve that. Right? So, so you're, if you're listening, your goal is to get to, how do I have a little group of people raising their hand telling me, hey, this recipe in your cookbook is really not working out, right? You want to get there as fast as possible.

Okay, so here's a framework that will concisely distill that of when you're improving your product. The goal for each of your customers is two things. To get them the result you're promising so they'll buy the next product from you, and to make their experience so good that they convince some of their friends to buy your first product. So I'm going to Repeat that and use the example of the keto cookbook, right? They buy the keto cookbook, you've bootstrapped it with tons of people. Every recipe works. There's no potential mishaps. It's all been beta tested, everyone's cooked everything. They all loved it. What that means is first off, everyone's going to lose a bunch of weight on keto and then they're going to say, hey, now I'm in better shape, but I want to go do X. And you're going to help them solve that problem. The second thing is because the product is so good and they're going to be marketing it for you forever, which means when any time someone comes to them and says, hey, I want to learn more about this, I go, I have the perfect book. Which means your customers are compounding for you in multiple directions. Your LTV is increasing per customer because they're going to buy your next product and the marketing is compounding for you because all each customer brings in another. And it's kind of the first time I've ever said that out loud. But I think that is the goal is you solve their problem so they tell other people about it and so they buy your next thing. And that's just kind of a never ending cycle of progressive business compounding. So with ship 30, exactly how we did it, it was we provided a cohort based experience where everyone goes, that was the best one out there. I got to go tell all my friends. And then, hey, I've been writing every day for 30 days. What do I do next? Well, we'll solve that problem for you. And so as we talk these out, it's like you're able to look forward of how do we use this for future things, but also how did we kind of intuitively do this? Looking backward?

Yeah, I love that. I think it's helpful to. I want to just keep drilling this point home because I find it's hard for people to wrap their head around. Oftentimes charging more doesn't mean not always, but doesn't mean adding more content. It usually means adding more support or access. So for example, my book the Art and Business of Online writing is $20. The ship 30 curriculum is basically the whole book. There's some other examples we throw, you know, some other deep dives and some other things in there, but it's basically the art and business of online writing, but in a cohort experience. So what's changing? It's not really the content. What's changing is the experience, the support and the access. Right. If you read my book, you don't get to interact with me in. You know, if people are following us on Twitter, Dickie, they don't get to interact with us in ship 30. Now you have interaction, right. So you're changing the level of access and you're changing the type of experience. And so for a lot of people, it's worth internalizing your digital product. A $50 keto cookbook. The only difference between a $50 digital product, keto cookbook, and you charging $250 for an hour of consulting is usually not the content. It's the fact that on one you're getting on a call and the other is, I'm downloading a PDF, Right. Even though, like, for. If someone. I've had this happen, someone goes, cool, I'll pay you ten grand to hop on a call with me. I want to ask you some questions. I'm sharing all the same frameworks that are in my books. So it's the same content. It's just ones in a book and ones. I'm going to tell it to you directly over a Zoom chat. Right. So I just, I think it's really helpful for people to internalize that. The reason creating digital products is such an amazing forcing function is because it's clarifying your thinking. And then you can go monetize that thinking in a dozen different ways just by changing the experience, changing the support, changing the level of access.

And that's exactly what we're going to do with these frameworks. We're starting a newsletter that might become a paid newsletter, it might become a digital product, might become a coaching program. Tons of different ways we could do it, but it all starts with just putting something out there that's going to force you to distill these ideas. And it excites me to look at this as we're going to eventually distill this and then apply it. And we can use something we launch as the perfect case study for this. If we made like a long, deep dive, post on it.

Yeah. And, you know, like, let's. Let's do it in public, too. If you listen to this, comment on, you know, the YouTube video or wherever you're watching, but leave a comment of. In an ideal world, you know, what's the thing that we could do that would be most helpful for you? What type of product do you have that you're selling? You know, what's your biggest problem? If you were like, oh, if you had this offer, I would love to do that. Right. Because that's going to give us data of. All right, so what are all the options? What are all the things that we could do to help?

Ooh, and maybe we could spice it up and have like further down the road, do take some of those people. When we eventually launch some of our stuff, we'll pick one lucky winner and do like a little quick call with them and that way we get more ideas. And so let's do it. Leave a comment with the number one thing we could help you with in whatever business it is you're running and we'll go from there because we're going to start to distill all these frameworks at Bottlenecks Biz B I Z where you can find all these. We're going to start sending our newsletter here this week and then we're just going to start firing those off where we're going to take the frameworks we talked about here. The signal that you give us with Twitter DMs, with Twitter threads, with YouTube comments, with email responses, whatever of the things we should go deeper on are extremely helpful for us because that validation says, hey, go invest time in writing these up more long form or make a hyper specific, scripted, tailored YouTube video breaking down this framework. That's how we're going to approach this. So listeners, readers, watchers, you can help us by leaving a comment, leaving a Twitter dm, whatever it is that you find most helpful. And we will take a look at those. So if you're on YouTube, hit subscribe. Leave a comment with the number one thing we could do to help you improve, Go to Bottlenecks Biz and subscribe. There'll be a survey after that that'll gather a little bit more information about your business as well. And so I think we asked the same question on that redirect survey. What's the number one thing we could do to help you improve? And then if you're on Spotify, itunes, all those, hit the five star button, leave a review, leave a comment, forward this to a friend. What else we got? Anything?

I mean we just gave. Look, someone's gonna take this framework that we just laid out and it might not happen right away, but you're gonna take this framework and you're gonna go build a successful digital business with it. Like we've, we, this isn't like, oh, we sat down and we thought all this would, all this would be nice in theory. We've done this exact same thing multiple times now and it works so, so well. We're doing it right now with we're doing a paid webinar collaboration with Nathan Baugh, who writes about storytelling and AI on Twitter. We're doing that here in two weeks. And we went through the same exact process. We sent every we sent out an email. We said, who's interested people? Join the wait list. We're going to ping that list with just, hey, these are the people who said they were interested. You should come check out this paid webinar. If the paid webinar goes well, maybe we'll expand it into a whole different product. So we are constantly doing this exercise over and over and over again, and.

We'Re going to keep on doing it for many, many years to come. That's it for this one. Thanks, everyone, for watching, listening. We'll see you next week. Right back here. Right back in your earbuds. Have a good weekend, y'.

All.

See ya.