Trevor Longino: Launching a product in one week, how to create Facebook Ads and more.

Hey everyone, my name is Eon Isaacs. I'm the head of global growth for the Founder Institute. Thank you so much for taking the time out today to join us on today's webinar. We have an awesome, awesome one planned out today. We have Trevor Longino. He's come back. He's done a few workshops and webinars for the Founder Institute before, and he has an exciting one ahead of planned out for today on how to utilize ads to launch a product in one week. Super excited to have it. Back with us. If this is your first time with us, you know, we typically run these webinars 2-3 times a week, just trying to make it super educational, super packed for all founders or aspiring founders. So hopefully you find some of this content super helpful. Let us know in the chat where you're coming in from. We had about 350 people sign up for this, so I think we'll get close to the 150, maybe 200 mark. We're at about 91 people live right now, so it'll start to trickle in. Super, super exciting. All right, we see we have some people from Vancouver, Cambridge, Spanish, French, I saw some other places, Orange County, Belgium, Seattle, New York, LA, Denver, Germany, Jamaica, Vancouver again, San Francisco. So very well international crowd. All right, folks, Akshay, do you want to bring Trevor up? And while Akshay is bringing up Trevor to the stage, let me go over some housekeeping rules. In terms of an agenda, we'll get to Trevor's presentation and then he'll do that for about 20, 30 minutes. After that, we'll jump into Q&A. Please use the Q&A tab. It's right next to the chat tab at the bottom. You'd submit your questions, we can bring it up, we can discuss it. After we're done with the Q&A session, we'll stick around. We have some private tables, they're online networking tables for those who logged on earlier. That will allow you to join a table, ask questions. I'll be on a table. Trevor should hopefully be on a table for a few minutes if you guys wanna ask more questions. Yeah, so that's the typical format of this event. Hopefully everything runs smoothly. All right, Trevor, you're with us. Let me just switch this so you're—

Yes, sir, I'm here.

Okay, awesome. Trev, you have about 100 people still trickling in. We'll probably get another 100 trickle in, but do you want to give a little bit of an introduction to yourself and then maybe start sharing your screen whenever you're ready? Oh, actually, sure, let me— do you want me to run the poll now?

Yeah, sure, go ahead. Let's send the poll in and then I will share my screen because my first slide is, you know, why do you care about the words I have to say.

So, all right, so folks, as you can see on your screen now, there you should be able to see like what is your monthly revenue. So if you can just kind of submit that in. Okay, so it seems like we got Trevor, can you see the results in real time as well?

Uh, I don't think I can. No, I also can't share my screen till the poll is done, so it's fine. I'll just talk through who I am and we'll skip those slides in the actual slideshow. So, all right, I'm Trevor. I'm founder and CEO of Crowdtamers. I am a past CMO of a bunch of different startups. I've taken 15 different startups from zero to 3+, 5+, 10+ annual revenue. Um, and what I have learned through launching, I mean, more than 50 startups and helping a bunch of them reach success is there's a number of ways you can really de-risk launching a startup and the number of ways you can make your startup more successful really early on. And so with that said, let me begin with, uh, what— there we are. Let me begin with how you can launch your startup in one week. This is not me discussing something theoretical, by the way. Back in Uh, February, I launched a startup a week for 4 weeks, and we'll talk about a bit about that in the case studies and what I learned and how you can use those same lessons to apply to your startup. But I think before we go into what it is that, like, the specific tactics of what we're doing, I think we should talk about what you need to do to launch, because launching is that you don't actually need product to launch at all, although certainly if you have product your launch will be a little higher quality in terms of learning what you can out of it. All you really need to launch is to figure out who your audience is, what their problem is, and how do you offer to fix it. Now, that sounds quite simple, but the simplicity disguises a level of difficulty. You need to get enough people out there to see who you are, to begin to inform yourself as to who your audience actually is. And then of all the people who see who you are, some subset of them have a problem that you wish to be able to solve and you can offer to actually fix it. So there's two ways commonly I talk about how you can get that audience together. In either situation, I'm assuming if you're in this call, you don't have the capacity to command a million people to look at something you've done just because of who you are. So instead, you have to go to a platform where they have all those people. And the two common ways you can tackle this, one is through social media distribution, right? You go on Reddit, you go on Facebook, you go on anywhere where there's an audience of people, you contribute to the community, you point them towards what you've done, and you try and grow organically. This is free, but it is very slow. The other way to do it is paid promotion, and given that the topic we're talking about today is using ads to launch your startup in one week as opposed to many months with social distribution, hopefully this has your interest, right? So when we think about paid promotion and when using ads, and specifically we're using Facebook ads, I think it is helpful for us to all align on the pieces of an ad. So your ad breaks down to fundamentally these three areas, right? There's the primary text, which can be effectively infinitely long. I ran an ad last year where, just to test, I put a 1,200-word blog post in as the primary text. It didn't do very well. I don't recommend you do that either, but I was learning to see if extremely long primary text has a positive or negative effect on the performance of an ad campaign. Then you have creative, which is the actual image. I would usually recommend you have 7 to 12 words here. This one runs a little bit longer because we got packed in a subheadline here. And then down here at the actual headline, uh, on Facebook, this unit is about 80 characters, right? So as you're writing for these, you have to think about This is not really microcopy in the primary text, but it is fairly short. Then you have actual proper microcopy in your creative, and then your headline is again some relatively short thing also driving to a call to action. Now I have bad news for you, which is to get really good at writing microcopy in particular takes a long time. Takes about 15, 20 years before you're really a master at this, but I'm going to show you how to come close in 5 minutes. So the first thing we have to consider is when you have a— you're trying to introduce to an audience your product, your service, your item, your good, whatever it is you're selling, there are 3 different ways that you can try to convince people to pay attention to what you've done and try a demo, look at the product online, whatever it is, the step before buying. And I didn't invent these. Aristotle did 2,500 years ago. And he has logic, emotion, and he uses authority. We don't care so much about authority these days. We've made our authority kind of diffuse in that social proof, reviews, testimonials, these sorts of things carry more weight with people these days than you would normally. Like, 9 out of 10 doctors choose Crest. I don't really care. I want to see a yoga mom like me say why she uses Crest to brush her daughter's teeth. That will have more of an effect on me than knowing that dentists use Crest. So we've replaced authority with social proof, which is authority, but it's just kind of distributed authority. So those three types of appeal have remained very good ways to persuade for thousands of years. And then really, you can only offer one of three things. You can either offer less pain, you can offer more benefit, or you can tell a story where the person who participates with your product is transformed throughout. So those 3 basic values, those 3 basic appeals, you can construct a little grid here, right? And now let's take, let's think of how I would write a headline using Less pain, more benefit, tell a story for both logic, emotion, and social proof. So if we have this ad here, right, which some of you saw, right, we were running this ad for this webinar that you are now sitting in. So less pain could be, don't take 6 months to launch your startup, launch it this week. More benefit could be grow your business to $1 million a year in revenue faster with CrowdTamer's Web Relic Founder Institute. And then finally, tell a story. Every founder is concerned about how fast their startup is growing. We can help you grow it faster, X% faster, right? 3 weeks, 9 weeks, whatever it is. I gave a number, and all of these are tied to numbers, right? Save X% of time, make X dollars more money, or change some metric by a number. It becomes a logical appeal. Now, that over an emotion, we still say less pain. Ah, you know, you're worried about your startup. Let's take the worry away. More benefit. Sleep easy at night knowing your startup is growing successfully. And finally, Founder Institute has thousands of successful entrepreneurs. Come join them and learn from the best, right? There's emotion. And then finally, social proof. You get quotes largely here, right? Quote from one of my mentees who I've mentored at one of the chapters I'm in right now. I had one guy last week on a mentor call say, Trevor, I want you on my advisory board. The advice you've given me has totally changed my business, right? There you go. There's a quote. Or somebody who's, in this case though, with less pain, It would need to be, you know, you saved me weeks of time or months of time chasing down bad ideas. Someone to improve their life. Hey, my startup was going to fail, but it succeeded because of the great advice I got from Trevor and CrowdTamer. Finally, another quote from a famous person. Eric Ries writes Lean Startup, right? You get a quote from Eric Ries that says this is essential to making a startup successful is launching, earning, launching, learning, and failing fast. There you go. That's positive positioning. All of these things were, hey, we're making things better. Frequently, negative positioning is going to outperform positive positioning because the pain of losing something, generally speaking, is 2 to 4 times stronger than the pleasure of getting something. So instead of saying, you've gained X amount of time or you've moved X percent faster, Quit wasting months, right? You don't have months to burn. Or don't miss your chance to earn a million dollars because you didn't take this class. And then finally, a time-based fear of missing out, FOMO, right? This deal is only good for 48 hours. If you miss out, it's gone forever. There's logic is tied in on these. There's numbers associated. We also have the negatives of what you lose, what you don't get, what you miss out on. Emotion: everyone is frustrated. Your business frustrates you. Time to change. Or when your business makes a million bucks and you're vacationing in Cabo Beach, imagine how your friends will feel that they can't be there too. Finally, common customer pain: your, you know, all your clients have— be more productive, save, quit wasting hours a week on filling out spreadsheets, which you hate to do. Common customer pain. Social proof, anti-testimonial. I could go grab reviews of other agencies on Clutch.co. Negative reviews, right? One star, worst experience ever. That wasn't us. We provide better services than the big guys. Someone quit doing something wrong is, you know, I've wasted $100,000 trying to grow my business. I learned how to do it right. In this webinar. And then finally, the classic— if you're on social media, I'm sure you've all seen— most people suck at launching their product. Here's how you can turn that around. Let me give you a case study. That's 18 different headlines, ran it in just at 5 minutes. And the reason why I went through all this is not to talk about how awesome I am, but rather to give you examples of— for your product, you need to have All of these as an option to discuss your business as you get ready to launch it. You don't have to have all of them right now. You don't want to launch with 18 different ad sets probably, but going through this exercise, figuring out how to talk about the benefit of your product. And you'll notice every single headline I gave you wasn't watch my webinar. It was rather get this result when you watch the webinar. Because nobody cares about what you've made. Nobody cares about your product. Nobody cares about your service. They care about the results of it. So if you're able to say whether it's positive, whether it's negative, whether you're using logic or emotion or social proof and write all these different ways to talk about your product, then you're beginning to be ready to think about how do I take all of this back into the audience, the problem, and the offer, because that problem shifts a lot. Depending on how I'm talking about this, and my offer shifts a lot depending on how I talk about this. Now, all of this theory here is so we begin to understand the core of any Facebook ad campaign comes to what is the creative, what's that visual, and then how do you position what you're doing to your audience, what's the problem you're telling them they have. Those are the two things you want to play with As you get ready to launch your business. So as we get ready to launch our business, right, spend our week and figure out how to make this go. It's worth thinking about— this is the classic pirate metrics funnel. I think there's hundreds of blog posts written about this: acquisition, activation, revenue, referral, retention. This is super well known. I don't like it. I think it misses a step. I'd added awareness above there as a— this feeds you into acquisition, activation, revenue, referral. Because if someone has never heard of you, you can't acquire them in the first place. And when you're running ads, unlike when you're getting PR or someone's writing about you in the news or whatever, you can control the awareness. And since we're using ads to generate this discovery, we have our hooks into this awareness problem. Now, from awareness to acquisition to activation to revenue is quite linear. Right. Revenue, referral, retention is— they're not really linear. They can happen in any order, but there's definite steps here where you will be losing a chunk of this stage of the funnel to reach the next stage of the funnel. And right now, as we think about building and running a Facebook ad campaign, we're really using this part of the funnel to ask questions about our launch, right? How many people can we get aware of what we've made and what percentage of them churn and then end up being acquired in a landing page. That problem that you're trying to solve, these numbers you're going to generate will end up looking tremendously different depending on how well you speak to an audience, how well you identify their problem, how aware they are of their problem, and what it is that you're going to offer to do to fix that problem. So you're trying to solve just this part of your business right now. With Facebook ads because you're launching your business and learning which audience is going to perform best for me. You're learning how do I get people excited about not just my ad, but also my offer and make them actually want to try my product out. So getting through answering this question is tremendously complex, but you can simplify this a bit If you say, all right, let me take a rubric, a simple format, and use it to solve problems. So an easy one that I like is inform it to strategize to act. Basically, I learn the background information, I use a known methodology to problem solve it, and I take action based off what I've learned. If we take inform and strategize and act, and we think about these gaps we have here, I could name these gaps, right? The capture gap, the engage gap, and the monetize gap. And right now we're really looking at the capture gap. We're using Facebook ads to begin to discover what is my capture. And I can say inform and strategize and act, and I can make another little three-way grid just like I did for copywriting. And capture begins with audit or understand what I'm saying, who I'm saying it to, and what information I am providing people. It is very common as I talk to early stage startups or even honestly later stage startups, Series B, Series C, they go, oh, the website, it's awful. Let me just talk to you about my product. Well, when you're running ads, you have a journey people go through, right? This Pirate Metrics funnel, the journey they go through. And if you say, well, I've— my website doesn't really tell the right story. It's out of date. I've moved on from there. You're going to have a really big problem because your capture mechanism, the way you're launching your business, doesn't match up with the story you wish to tell. You have to fix that. And sitting down and auditing and just seeing, what do I say versus what my audience tell me they want to hear? Just answering that will begin to give you insight into what is causing the churn from awareness into acquisition. Now, once you've answered what I'm saying, you begin to map to the outcomes your clients wish to see, outcomes your users wish to see, right? They don't care about your product. People don't buy a drill because they want a quarter-inch drill bit. They buy a drill because they want a quarter-inch hole, and the drill is the way they achieve it. So what is the outcome they wish to achieve with your product? And then that fuels You go to market experimentation. Now, this is a lot of stuff to try and, and tackle your way through, but the immediate problem we're solving right here in the capture area, there are a few tools we need to make sure we have before we really get running. One is Facebook ads or Google ads or Pinterest ads or anybody else's ad platform, right? That driving awareness. And then we, we get information from there, right? We spent $100, we had 2,000 impressions. Okay, that's people who were aware of us. And then there's this gap when people come to my site, but I haven't yet acquired them. And there we need analytics, we need Amplitude, we need Mixpanel, we need Google Analytics, we need Matomo, whatever it is, we have to capture this data of somebody visited and either started their journey to try me out or not. If you don't have your account set up on Facebook, and if you don't have your analytics set up on your website, it is not worth your while to try to actually make this journey because you will not be able to learn what you need to learn. So your first order of business is to say, I've put together a website, and you can put together websites very, very quickly using tools like Softr or Wix or Squarespace or really any of them. At the moment, you don't need to have a fully functional SaaS awesome product page. You need the beginnings of your journey, that place where you capture people from awareness into acquisition, and you need to be able to measure what happens there. So if you are not yourself a developer, there is no shame, right? Use Unbounce, use Softr, use anybody out there with a simple front-end tool to build the destination of your advertising. Now, once you have got your ads prepared, and then once you have got your landing page prepared, you have to begin to think about this journey we are going to go through, because the success of your whole business starts here. If you cannot find an audience that is interested and engaged in what you have to say, the whole rest of your business will not work. Now, sure, some businesses are B2E and you've only got 10 possible clients in the whole world and your intent is to sell them for $1 million a year each.

Okay.

That will not necessarily fit in this model of launch, but I would say for 95% of the businesses that are hoping to be successful, you need to have numbers at the top of your funnel to begin to understand why they aren't coming to you, which offers work, which offers don't. And the model you take is relatively simple. We come up with a couple different units of creative, and then we test them to several different people. The idea here being not, I'm testing them to George and Susan and Mark and Jonathan, but rather I am testing to a product manager, an engineering director, a head of operations, and a CEO, to each of them to see this message, which of them works for which people, you will find some of these messages are more performative and some of them are not. And what you want to think in the beginning, we're just testing this original awareness problem, right? We're solving this gap here. Later on, we're going to want to have alignment between what we've said here and what we say on our website and elsewhere. But for our very first tests, we're going to use Facebook ads, we're going to write compelling copy based off of the 18 headlines we've generated. And we're going to use designs that we know are performative to make these ads have the best chance of success. And then the landing page matters less right now. An example of, I'd say, a very unoptimized journey is here's an ad for a a random service that's talking about how to manage workforce disruption when you're having big layoffs. BetterUp coaching will help your teams feel more, more successful and more empowered. Cool. But when I click on this, it takes me to this page. There's no alignment in creative. There is some alignment in messaging, right? But this is also, uh, that one paragraph right here is like their, their token attempt. To make it feel like it's customized and everything else is not at all related to this offer. This is unoptimized. But if what you want to do is make 20 of these ad units and send them all to a page and then see which of these 20 units did best, this is fine because you don't want to make 20 landing pages. Later on, once you find a winner, your funnel is going to want to look a little more like this. This is a case— Intercom, pretty well-known, like, communication SaaS product. They clearly have message fit. They have 3 identical units of primary text, but they're testing their creative. Now I'm using Facebook's ad library here where you can see all of the ads anybody is running right now anywhere in the world, but they won't show you the targeting. So what I can see here is they've clearly got messaging fit. They are using a simple A/B split on their targeting. They have, I guess, 2 different audiences they're running, and they're running 3 different units of creative. And they have some more stuff over on the side of— oh, they're doing some kind of more reach testing, running on Facebook and on Instagram both. So they're running effectively a 12-way split here, right? 3 different ad units, 2 different audiences, 2 different platforms. Okay, this then drives you all to this page. And there is tremendous alignment here between the messaging, the offer, the visuals, everything fits, right? This is a more advanced funnel. I don't normally recommend you build this well-aligned fit for your very first experiment because you don't yet know what creative and what offer are going to work. But when you're more mature, when you figure some of these questions out, you very much want this sort of alignment where you start with a message that lines up perfectly with the landing page. And when you do this, I'd also note, when you sign up through Intercom, they ask you after you sign up to provide the link to your knowledge base, and almost instantly it begins to be able to serve questions, right? So the user experience here, the onboarding is very seamless, is very high quality. And I would imagine the performance is quite good for people who have the exact problem that they're trying to solve. So every feature, every new audience you want to tackle, every new approach you want to take, you come back to this, right? What's your audience? What's their problem? How do you offer to fix it? And this was a lot of theory, right? I've spent 20 or 30 minutes going through the why. And we'll talk a little more about this in particular as well. I've got some case studies to share and some, some other ways you can put this into practice. But it's also worth noting, if what you really want to do is to dive into this and get your hands dirty, well, one thing is right now, uh, I've got an ad template pack that I'm normally selling for $40. And it is— these are the top-performing units of creative of all the ads I've run in the last 5 years. All of these are performing at the top 1.5% of all Facebook ads. These ads do very, very well with visuals. They do very, very well with targeting, and they're free if you use this link. They're only free for the next 48 hours though. I believe I had a message about how to use FOMO to get folks to take action. There's your logical FOMO message. This is free for you. Type in bit.ly/SFI, like Founder Institute, _FB, like Facebook, _T templates. You can grab them for free. This gives you the tools you need to not worry about what's my design look like, where do I find good ads. These ads work. I know they work. I've used them and spent thousands, tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars behind these ads, and they are performative. All the text is obviously lorem ipsum, and there's no logos. Customize them as you want. This comes with, I think, Figma, uh, InVision, PNG, and SVG version of all of these. So regardless of your platform, regardless of your software, you can grab this free. The other thing, if you want to really dive into the nitty-gritty of this, I'm doing a bootcamp, the first ever marketing bootcamp for Founder Institute, and this is how to execute a profitable go-to-market strategy. It'll end up being a, I think, a 3.5, 4-hour workshop where I will go through everything I've discussed in theory here and go into very much tactics of how do you build landing pages that are going to be high performative and build them both in Figma, build them in software. How do you make things happen quickly? How do you make eye-grabbing creative, something that will really pop out and get folks to want to click? How do you target your campaigns as absolutely narrowly as you possibly can? And there'll even be for everybody who attends the workshop, does the work of launching something, and then sends in their results. I'll be doing audits of your ads, responding to what you've done, and offer recommendations on what changes you need to make either to your site, as I'm saying here, or to your ad campaigns. Now, I do these from time to time, and I tend to do these at, at big events. I was at a big workshop here in Montreal. Uh, we were charging, I think it was $3K for half an hour audit. And we, I did 24 of them in 3 days, right? 8 a day. And that's like, for any founder who's trying to launch, getting insight from a guy who's been doing this for 20 years and has a very long track record of success into what you can do to make your business make more money faster, be more investible, maybe reach revenue positive. Any of these things faster, and it's worth a big ticket to solve this problem when you don't have access to senior marketing management who can just diagnose things for you. But this is Founder Institute. I've been mentoring at Founder Institute for 6 years, um, a big supporter of what FI is doing, a big supporter of Jonathan and what he's doing, and were— after some discussions, I agreed to knock that price down. So for $399 on early bird, I think you have— and I might need to hop in at the end and clarify this— I think you have a week to get the early bird, uh, special. If you do that, it's $399 for all those things, plus you'll get, uh, my book, you'll get access to other assets I've created. All of these things are there to help guide you through how to go to market successfully. So that is, again, uh, I'll go back to the address here real quick. Oh, it's at the end. Uh, I'll, I'll go give you the address at the end. Uh, but it's available right now in the events tab. I do encourage you, if you want someone to walk you through the specifics of it and really see like how to build an ad campaign, how to make these, all these things work, this is a great resource for you and worth way more than $400. All right. Let's talk about some of this in a more tactical sense of what do we do with the strategy that I have been discussing. So, all right. We're trying to solve problems in this space. We're trying to answer, what do we do in this space? If you want to answer all the problems in this space, there's the, there's the address, fi.co/bootcamp/gotomarket. If you want to learn from me how to do all of this, this is the, the way to go. Now, once you've built your ads, once you've built your landing page, once you've hopefully got people who are signing up and you've got them in a CRM, this launch is the start of a tool, right? You can build this. It takes about a day to build a landing page. Once you've gone through the exercise I've just worked with you for on making your 18 positioning statements and use the templates I'm giving away for free to make your ads, you're maybe a day and a half in and you're ready to launch. Once you launch, the very next thing you need to do is investigate what's happening with people who sign up. You want to have, for example, right, a— in your CRM here, you say, great, here are my, my leads, right, folks who are trying me out, my qualified users in across the company or just different people who have signed up and are trying me out. You want to try and get them on the phone because we've got a ton of very low quality but high volume data coming from these ads. This launch will show you what attracts at the top of funnel, but it is also you are dictating. You are saying, this is what I think people want to hear. You can get on calls with people. And use tools like MeetGeek or Otter or Fireflies or any of the many, many competitions out there, you can begin to mine your calls for data. What are people actually saying they want your product for? What are the words people are using to describe their problem in their own words? And what personas are the ones who are talking to you and saying, I am super excited, I would love to have this product, but it needs X or Y or Z feature. I would note most people who say, I would pay for this if you added X or Y or Z feature, are lying to you. But there is still some value in seeing what they say they want. If it's already in your roadmap, might be worthwhile thinking about reprioritizing it if a lot of people say, this is a blocker for me. So you want to take sales calls or lead calls or beta users call, even 5 or 10 of them, If you're recording them and transcribing them, you get a ton of quantifiable data out of these very one-off personal conversations. And that's going to feed your capacity to go to a tool like SparkToro and take what you have been learning from these calls and from these personas and input it into SparkToro and say, who talks about the things that my audience says is their problem? And it'll make a report for you like this. It'll say, this is the podcast they listen to. This is where you find them on Reddit. This is the YouTube channel they subscribe to. This begins to give you a ton of information on your next round of ads, right? Because you can advertise. I'm sure Maxwell Leadership Podcast is going to be expensive to sponsor. But if you go on Spotify, you can pay per click to run for anybody who's on Spotify listening to Maxwell Leadership Podcast. Likewise, it's gonna be real hard to get Buffer to agree to a deal with you, but you can run ads on YouTube to Buffer's channel quite easily. So you begin to think about, how do I find where my audience that is most interested sits and is? And then my follow-up, right after my first week, my follow-up is how do I go where they already are and re-engage with them more? That is when you really begin to find the power of what you learned from your very initial one-week launch, and you're now developing it further. Now, the problem you might run into is, particularly if you are yourself a, a product founder, you care about what you were building, and you're like, I'm stuck. I, I know Trevor said here's 18 ways to write a headline, or that he's got here's how you, you know, build and run ads on Facebook. You use these templates. I'm just, I'm not unable to get unblocked, and you can get basically instantaneous help from a maybe somewhat controversial source. I have found, I've been using OpenAI, GPT-3, GPT-3.5, GPT-4 for like a year now. And OpenAI isn't as good as a true expert in the field, but it is definitely better than having no idea what to do. And with good prompt engineering, you will be able to take your idea expressed to OpenAI in a digestible form for the AI and have it give you answers back. So for example, you can say, I want you to be my media buyer, right? Explain to me everything I need to do, write my copy, and then All you have to do, this slide deck will come to you after the webinar, is you copy this prompt, you go to chat.openai.com, and you fill out the request with your actual request in brackets, and you put it in and you let it run. In about 60 seconds, it'll give you something that looks like this, and it goes on and on and on. It's quite long. The messaging here is mediocre. Visualize your network like never before. Or understand the flow of data between devices. This is very bad. But if you're completely stuck, you can use this to say, okay, simplified network management, I want to take that and improve it. I want to take it and tweak it. It gives you something to begin from. And you can use it to bounce ideas off. If your problem isn't I have nowhere to start, but rather how do I write with emotional language or with social proof language or any of these things. Here's a quote that I, uh, have been teaching people to use, a prompt, sorry, I've been teaching people to use on how to get emotional appeal or attract interest, desire, action, or whatever framework you want to use to write something about your product. And again, the outputs here are, um, it's okay, right? In this case, it was, I, for a company that helps you with insurance adjustments, Right? Whatever. Your insurance company doesn't want to make you happy, but we do. Maybe that's interesting, right? We talk about language throughout this whole thing, and you can take this and see, again, this is 80% of the way there, and I can use it to develop what I'm doing further. So with this information driving your decision-making, it gets easier for you to unblock yourself. When you say, Trevor, I'm not really a marketer. I've attended this webinar. I've got your free slides. I understand the basics of your framework, but I don't know how to apply it. Use a tool like OpenAI just to shake your brain loose and go on to the next thing. Now, I mentioned I have a case study. I launched 4 different startups in a month back in February. And that's kind of true. It's also kind of not true. What I actually did, and here's 2 of them, is I launched the exact same startup into 4 completely different markets.

Markets.

Now, this is, I'd argue, pretty insane and not what I'd recommend you do, because the core functionality of this product was upload a video or capture a video or audio file and get a transcript of it, get a delivery of a summary, and get it instantly. Now, a lot of tools do this, right? The ones I mentioned earlier, MeekGeek, Otter, Fireflies, all of these do this, but we position these into very specific niches. And so put together, both of these websites are built on the same app. It's called Softr along with the other one I talked about as well. And then we made ads to drive people to these websites. These are the ads for the legal product called, uh, Summary.Legal. And there you can see all the ads we ran, and we were testing several different visual styles as well as several different pieces of language. And then the student one looks completely different. Again, the backend for both of these products and the other two as well was identical. It was all the same, but we had different frontends driving people in to sign up and super different pricing. The way that you would try out Summary.Legal is you'd have to book a sales call because lawyers aren't going to upload a random audio file and hope that they're not just going to have client data leak. Students don't care about that. They don't want to have a sales call. They want to try a thing out. If they like it, spend $2 a month and away they go. And so we had two very different CTAs just across these two different ideas, much less the other two. Two very different audiences, two very different ways to advertise the exact same thing. And so what do we get out of this? So for summary.legal, We're advertising to lawyers, to paralegals, to people who are partners at law firms. Cost around $2 per click. We got featured in 3 AI newsletters. We got 4 leads out of these. And these leads are, this is enterprise sales. So we started talking in February and if everything goes well, we might wrap up our discussions in November or December. But each of these clients is getting more than $50K a month. And that monthly value of a client being very, very high comes with the pain of the sale being very, very slow, right? But that was on $800 ad spend to get featured in these outputs and to get leads coming in. Tremendous result for a tool that is not unique. Plenty of people do this. Likewise, For ClassNotes, the student version of this, we spent substantially less. We spent not even $400. We got way more visits because students are cheaper to get their clicks. Got featured in one AI newsletter, got 6 people to actually install a demo. The numbers here don't look nearly as good, right? This, if we close a deal, ROI is off the charts. This one, lifetime customer value, I would guess at $2 a month is maybe $20. I've got 6 people who've signed up for a demo. Standard SaaS metrics suggest 2 of them might become paying. So I'm making $40 and I spent $350. That's not great right now. There's tons of room to improve on a very first ad campaign. But if you're running an ad campaign where you've got, for $800, you've got something like one, we'll say, in the realm of $1.3 million in potential upside, or $400 with $40 in potential upside, I know which positioning, which product, which attempt I'm going to devote more effort to on my second iteration. Now, these were two insanely different models tackling a very similar problem. It may not be that you were able to have quite as big a spread between your different experiments. But what you will see when you run different ads to different audiences driving to different landing pages, even on the same domain, is there will be this separation between some of this audience and some of this audience. And you will begin to understand which ones I want to devote myself more to. I have, uh, at CrowdTamer, the agency— I used to be a freelancer for years and years with it, but the agency is now just over 2 years old. We've launched probably 40 or so companies in that time. And almost universally, when you do a test like this, when you build a funnel and you say, let me find who my audience actually is, the founder has, this is who I think will be best, this is who I think will be the, our most targeted audience, this is our best guess at messaging. There's almost always a misfit. Now, to be fair, you don't talk to a go-to-market expert if your go-to-market is working well. But when you are saying, my startup won't make money, I can't make my business go, okay, well, either the bottom of the funnel, you're not getting folks to monetize. But if people aren't monetizing when they sign up, a very common problem is that very top of the funnel. User onboarding starts on the first impression. And if you say we solve this problem and I come to a landing page and you say we solve this problem, I go in product and I can't solve that problem, you might say, oh, it's my trial to close rate is where my business isn't working, I need to fix that. Very possibly it's actually your attract to acquire that is the main source of your problem. When you have got All those things aligned, then suddenly demo to close rate goes up. Every successful business has this alignment. They are able to say from the audience, they've chosen their audience. And particularly at the stage that most everybody in this call is at, you've chosen your audience and you've chosen a narrow one. They say you cannot boil the ocean. That's true, but not super informative. You don't even want to try to boil a swimming pool. You want to try to boil a coffee cup. What is the smallest audience you can possibly validate? The smaller your audience, the more defined their problem is. And the more defined their problem is, the better able you are to offer a solution. MeetGeek, Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai, and all the other, other competition out there. They are also something that any of the law firms who I'm talking to could choose to go with, but they are meeting transcription and note-taking for everyone. And lawyers or plumbers or doctors or dentists or roofers or anybody want to be told, this is for you. And so by narrowing down the audience for Summary@Legal and saying, hey, we're going to talk to big law firms with more than 300 employees, we're able to focus on a very specific problem. And say, this is the best solution you will find for it. And you want to find the same for your business. What is the narrowest audience you can find? And it sounds crazy if this is your first time building a business. You say, no, I want a broad top of my funnel because then anybody who I might be able to get into a sales conversation with, I could close. But the answer really is, if you have 20 clients for your SaaS product, all of whom are nah, it's okay, but they're not super excited about it. Churn rates are super high, and your ability to figure out what to do next after you've gotten those first 20 customers is going to be really hard. The narrower that initial launch audience is, the happier your users will be, the longer they will remain users with you, and the more able you are to say, I want to find more people like this to power my entire business. Now, gave you a bunch of tools, gave you a bunch of resources, mental frameworks, and hopefully you have found this useful. I would like to recommend, if you want to go into the tactics of this, if you want to actually see how this is done, work in a workshop, try and solve all these problems with help, go again, f5.co/bootcamp/go-2- market. Check it out, see if it appeals to you. In the meantime, thank you for your attention, all of you. I hope it was illustrative. We have Q&A. I do see a bunch of people saying they can't open the zip file on Mac. I don't have a Mac. I didn't know that. I will fix this and I will update the file in Gumroad, and you will all be able to download the right version like tomorrow, whenever I can find someone with a Mac to validate what the problem is. But beyond that, is there any Q&A, any questions I can answer for you?

Awesome. Thanks so much, Trev. I think this was very, very informative. I've learned each time I hear you, I learn something new each time. Folks, if you enjoyed what Trevor's content's all about, please, you can use the emojis. I think if you press 1 or 2 or 3. Okay, so Trevor, you're getting a lot of fireworks. Let's kind of move into the Q&A portion. I think let's, I think some great questions in here. I think let's try to burn through as much of this as we can and then we have some time for networking. But Andre from the US is asking, you know, Facebook versus LinkedIn versus Twitter versus Google, which is the best like focus for a lean startup? I think maybe another way of answering this question is like, what's the, how should a founder an early stage company think about what advertising platform they should use? What would your thoughts be on that?

So that's a bit like asking what's the best flavor of ice cream, and the answer is depends on what you like. Um, for any given startup, there will be a mix that is most successful. I generally recommend, even B2B, start with Facebook because Facebook is going to be cheaper, the cost per click will be lower, and you will be able to learn what is performative there. Across probably a dozen tests in just the last 6 months. Creative that does well on Facebook will also do well on Twitter or on LinkedIn, right? Good ads are good ads. If you've targeted them well, and you've written them well and designed them well, they will just perform well. So you can test on Facebook, particularly your initial couple of tries while your traffic is cheaper. Then when you find something that is working well, go over to LinkedIn, where you pay more per click, but you already burned through your first 2 or 3 attempts at making a good ad that weren't good. And you didn't waste that money on LinkedIn. So I usually recommend you start on Facebook. I would recommend you never under any circumstances use Google Display Ads. I have found them to be a wretched hive of scum and villainy. If you've learned language that works— oh, it's May the 4th, so that was an appropriate Star Wars reference. May the 4th be with you, right? If you're looking at Google advertising pay-per-click, that can be very, very good, but pay-per-click ads are intent capture. I'm searching for a solution to a problem. If your audience is not aware they have a problem or not aware that your solution can fix their problem, it can be very hard to get a good top of funnel on Google pay-per-click. So start with Facebook and then look at the other channels as they are useful to you.

I think that's sound advice. I just saw, folks, please submit your question to the question and answer portion or tab so that way people can upvote it and then I'll just bring up the ones that are the most relevant. I like this one by François. He's like, you know, from all your experience, what do you feel is the number one mistake that people are making with their funnels and conversion metrics? Is it— yeah, people have some tests on that.

Ultimately, people test small things. People test, oh, is it a blue button or a red button? People test, is this the number one productivity tool for developers or the number one productivity tool for software developers as headlines, right? And the answer is, it doesn't— this is not going to do anything, right? You want to test big, like I showed, right? The same software was both summary.legal and classnotes.tech and other platforms too. And that was maybe the psycho mode version of this, right? But even taking it back a little bit, and saying, my value prop to firefighters is, you know, we help you, uh, understand and report on the health and location of every firefighter in a busy, uh, active firefighting zone. But for construction workers, maybe it is understand the bottlenecks of where your people are wasting their time so you can have a more productive business. And the same tool, two different audiences, completely different value props. If you have the courage of your conviction to test something that rigorous, you will learn a lot more.

Yeah, that's well put together. I'm looking for the thread. Let's keep going. I think there's a lot of questions coming in. So I just want to make sure we kind of go through as much as possible the next few minutes. Nicole, who's the CFO of Square, Core is asking, you know, how close to product launch should we start testing these ads? Should we wait for investor funding? So good one, Trevor.

So there's, there's a cart and horse problem here, right? Because if you don't have any money, you can't test. I mean, you can, but you have to use social distribution. It doesn't cost a lot to run these tests on your own. $1,000 for any test is probably enough. I like to test things before I even have a line of code written. I like to validate that there's a need for a product before I've even tried to find a developer for it. When you do that, like, I had, I had 4 different ideas I launched last year, all of them with no actual, like, backend in place. None of them worked. And all I did was spend $1,000 to test the idea, and then I went, right? I mean, maybe I could have, through great struggle and effort, turned things around and made it successful, but Why work so hard to make money? Let me find a business idea that I know is gonna be easy to scale out of the gate and then put more effort into that rather than have all these ideas that I built and now I'm stuck with it and no, now it doesn't work, right? I only have so many hours left in my life. I'm a creaky old man of 41. I don't wanna launch bad businesses and hopefully you don't either.

I love that. Very, very sound advice. Always test. You wanna test everything before you go launch or at least start putting more effort into it. I guess a follow-up question is, again, it changes per industry, but what's an appropriate amount of budget you should allocate for a test? And we were doing this internally the other day and I was like, well, okay, what's a possible revenue we can take from this? And let's take a percentage of possible revenue. What is like, what is a good framework or a good process for somebody to think about? Okay, I can only allocate an X amount because best case scenario, I can make this amount.

So I think the two case studies I shared, or the one bifurcated case study, however you want to call it, that I shared, gives you a good bracket, right? $350 is the bare minimum you can spend to learn something in my experience. And I'm more comfortable spending more like $800 to $1,200. To really get enough top-of-funnel data where you have statistically significant answers. The less you spend, the stronger the signal has to be to be statistically relevant. I would note, if you spent $350, you've got 23 clicks on this ad and 24 clicks on this ad, and you're like, my conversion rate is 1.1% and 1.2%, the 1.2 is better. No, it is not. That is not statistically relevant. You don't know. And you can make a decision and say, that's all the money we've got. Let's go. YOLO. But I like to have enough data where I'm confident, at least like 90% confidence interval, that the decision I'm making should be right. And then when you run multiple tests, all with the $1,000-ish budget, even if you were wrong on one, you'll catch it on the next one. And over time, the quality of data becomes pretty unshakable.

I like it. I think you have a good way of breaking it down. All right, let's move on and do a few more here before we kind of jump in the networking. This is interesting. So Loretta is asking, you know, are you suggesting that people pay before for the product and how do you get them to do that? So I think maybe, I think you briefly talked about it, but maybe went over it fast, but like Where does payment work in your funnel?

Uh, if I can get them into prepay, that is a phenomenal signal. You cannot always get them to prepay, right? Kickstarter is 100% just prepaid for something that you hope arrives. Um, more commonly what I do is I make the product look as if you could pay. And then when you go to sign up or you go to pay, whatever it is, it goes, oh, hey, The beta is full. Give me your email address and I'll let you know when there's room. Because I don't want to measure people who say, I'll sign up for the beta. I want to measure people who say, I'll pay now. And then, of course, they can't. I'm not going to take your money if something I haven't even got an idea how to build. But measuring the interest to pay now is a very good signal.

Yeah, I like it. Because I think those days of collecting waitlists and stuff like that are pretty much done. The sooner you get your customer or your user to transact, the more solidified their intent is. But even if you just want them to, I know some people, they'll get them to pay and then refund them their money, but it's like, hey, at least we've got, getting a person to actually take out their credit card and pay is probably one of the hardest things to do. So whatever is your critical path of success to get them to there is probably my piece of advice for whatever it's worth. Alright, let's do this one. This is a little bit more specific, but I think just so people start to understand where does like top funnel, mid funnel, and bottom funnel work. But like this individual Maria from Sofia is asking, he ran successful ads quote unquote on Facebook. Got them to the page, but then zero sales. It's like, what would your advice be to them to further investigate? I know it's tough because you don't have all the parameters, but yeah, but there's a couple problem-solving steps you go through here, right? Yeah, like, how do you diagnose this? I would look at it.

So the first thing I look at is time on site, right? Now you're in the games space, I assume, from the name of the company you're in. And when you're in the game space and you're running If you're on Facebook's Display Network, that means you're running ads that are popping while people are playing whatever game, right? Those clicks can be garbage quality. And so what you wanna see, I would note Facebook encourages you to use Facebook Display Network because they make more money when you do. You don't make more money when you do. And it's worth keeping in mind Facebook's interests and yours are not aligned. Facebook wants you to pay as much per click as they can get. And you, of course, want to pay as little per click as you can get. So if you're in the game space, you're running ads, and maybe you're an FD and maybe you're not, I don't know, but you can see what's your time on site. If people are on your landing page for under a second, those aren't humans. You're paying for bot traffic. And the result of that means you can't make money. All of your money went to bringing bots to you. Now you can complain to Facebook and they'll go, cry me a river, because they don't care. But the other thing you can do is say, okay, one, turn off FDN because it's garbage. Two, how do I change my targeting up? I'm looking for the demographics I can bring up, people who will spend longer on site. If they're spending at least 7 seconds average time on site, a human is there. Now the human might not like your game, But at least if you've got humans coming and considering, you can begin to see, okay, what feature do I offer? What language do I use? How do I persuade somebody this is the right thing for them? And making sure, again, if you're trying to drive actual sales, alignment between ads and landing page needs to be quite tight. If you have an ad that says, you know, the greatest Cookie Clicker clone since Cookie Clicker, and then they land on a page that's a forex strategy. F4, right? I'm done. Make sure you've got a good fit there as well. You think of all that, we've all seen the ads, right? The random dude who's solving stupid puzzles with fire and ice and water, and then you go click on the game and you're like, this is not, this is not that game. What's going on? That's an ad agency who's paid, you know, to bring traffic and not paid on money. And so They got clicks, good for them. The client is broke. Sounds bad. So I would analyze there and see, is it bot traffic? Is your landing page and ad aligned? And when you begin to figure that out, then you can diagnose the actual problem.

I think, yeah, that was a great step-by-step way of looking at it. Um, okay, let's do the final question by Sarah. Uh, again, this is a little bit more specific, but just so everyone understands where to use major content and when they should be looking at testing campaigns. Let's kind of do this one together. Um, like, it's like to launch product, when, when is the right time for him to launch ads?

So that's again a, uh, when I, I mentor a bunch of startups through FI, I'm in like 5 chapters right now, and anybody I talk to in the early stages of the program, they go, oh, I don't have everything ready yet, I don't have a website, And I'm like, you literally, you can build one tonight, and you can have a website live tomorrow, and you could drive ads to it the day after. Why aren't you? And the right time to launch is always now. That's my book is called Validate First, right? The idea is before you build, validate. If you have an idea, you can put together a page with Softr, with Wix, with Squarespace, anything, have it live, and start learning now, if anybody cares. It is very easy to LARP as an entrepreneur and say, I have an idea that is cool. To put yourself out there, to make a page, to send traffic to it, to commit money, even if it's just $50 to it, takes commitment and boldness, and it's scary. One of the things I like about FI, Founder Institute, the community, everybody, Most everybody in this group, they aren't LARPers, they aren't pretending to be entrepreneurs. They haven't solved everything yet. No one has solved everything yet. They're here to learn and they actually want to build. And if that's you, then validate first, launch today. Let's go.

Yeah. Ryuuji also says, I like that, like the LARP as an entrepreneur, which is great. All right folks, we're pretty much done. We're at the top of the hour. Thanks so much, Trev. Thanks so much for taking the time and educating the audience. I think this was very informative. I hope everyone got valuable content and valuable information out of it. We're gonna stick around for the networking, but Trev, any final words for the audience? Any words of wisdom? I think after 20 years of marketing, are we all doomed? What's the light at the end of the tunnel here?

I think the summary, the high line here is figuring out if people want your product and which people want your product is a process of discovery. My mission as a marketer, as an educator, as a mentor is to demystify this problem. A lot of people build great stuff and don't understand there's a process. Now, there is more than one way to go to market. My way is not the only way. My way does work very reliably to tell you early problems you're going to discover on how to bring an audience in and solve them. And 60%, 80% of the founders I talk to, if they had launched and validated as fast as they could, the problems that they come to me with and they go, I can't solve this, would have been answered. So I encourage you, right? Attend the course if you'd like to. I think it will be handy. If you don't want to, you don't have to. Everything I do, everything I teach, everything I charge for is free on my blog.

Go read it.

You can give yourself the summary of 20 years of marketing education by reading some of the 100+ articles I've got there. Every single one of you in this call has an idea you want to see come true. I want to help you. Founder Institute wants to help you make it true. And I encourage you to equip yourself with the tools for success so that you will have a much higher likelihood of building a business that grows and scales.

Sound advice and sound word of wisdom. All right, folks, we're gonna wrap up. We'll see you in the networking tables. There'll be one table for Trevor, one table for myself, and just some general networking. I encourage you all just to spend 5, 10 minutes talking to each other, talk about the content, talk about your problems, talk about your businesses, and just learn from one another. But with that being said, enjoy the rest of your evening or afternoon, wherever you're calling in from. We'll wrap things up there. Thanks everyone, take care.

Thanks, y'all.