How To Create A Product That Will Sell ( Top Business Advice For 2020 ) | My First Million Podcast

At HustleCon this year, that guy Eric Ryan talked about— the founder of Method Soap and Ollie and Wellie, all these great D2C brands, or sort of not D2C actually, just new consumer brands, um, that they sell through Target and whatnot. You know, he, he said a line that stuck with me. That was the number one most important thing from HustleCon this year, and in my opinion. He goes, you have to identify the culture shift first. And, you know, the culture shift happens first, and then the products and services that meet those cultural values come second. So let's say for Method Soap, he was saying, you know, consumers now, they turn their— everything they buy, they turn to the back and they read the ingredients. And so they care about what they're putting in their body, they care about what they're putting in their homes, they care about what they're putting in their babies, etc. Etc., etc. And so you see Honest Company take off because people care about what they're putting on their baby. You see Native deodorant take off because people care about putting natural ingredients and not aluminum and parabens, you know, in their armpits. And Method soap took off because they said, hey, you shouldn't have to clean your house with toxic chemicals. But he identified the culture shift first. Now, I don't know how much of this is just retro speak, because entrepreneurs do do that where they just make up a story later about how they did it, and the real reason was just some total numerical thing where they were like, oh yeah, I just saw a bunch of searches.

We know firsthand this was true with Moise with Native Deodorant that he did this.

Yeah, and he actually tweeted today some more info which I thought was good. He said, uh, he identified that natural deodorant was one of the top selling— he said number one. I don't know if it's actually number one, but it was one of the top selling products on Etsy, period. Yeah, but everybody was buying it out of a jar and you had to like do this weird thing, stick your hand on the jar, then rub it in your armpit. And he's like, look, people want natural deodorant, but they want the convenience of the stick. If I could figure out how to put natural deodorant in a stick, I think I can make a business that works. And, you know, 18 months later sells it for $100 million. So I think there's something to identifying the culture shift. And if the culture shift is, hey, we gotta like hunker down a little bit, or hey, we gotta like support our local businesses, like small businesses, that's where something like a Groupon or Groupon 2.0 is very, very interesting to me. Very hard to pull off, extremely hard to pull off because local is super, super hard. It's slow to scale and you're dealing with a lot of mom and pop style businesses.

But Groupon was not slow to scale. Groupon got to, uh, a billion dollars in sales. I, I think faster than any other company ever. Now, that's true. That's true. It didn't, it didn't operate well. It was, now there, it didn't stick. I, I don't want to talk out my ass. No, I think it did. Stick. I mean, look, up until recently, Groupon— hey, look up how much does Groupon do in revenue. They still—

well, it didn't stick from a merchant perspective. What happened was they onboarded all these merchants, the merchants went on, and they would get a bunch of empty traffic. And then those empty sort of calories, eventually they pulled off and they said, why am I offering these deals? People come, they take the sale, they don't come back. And that part didn't work. So they lost on the merchant side for a while. And then they got all these clones came out. That were doing the exact same thing. So customers sort of got inundated with Daily Deals products. So that was a bit of the problem there, but you're right, actually they did scale very fast.