How I Went From An Idea To Paying Customers In 3 Days

So, I'm not selling anything in this post. There is a CTA for my newsletter, but that's it.

In this post I...

* Talk about how I identified a "cash flow" (customers of X, in my case - Infusionsoft.)

* Ran a simple ad campaign that was meant to help me find other customers of Infusionsoft.

* This ad campaign drove people to an email course that covered why it's a good idea to show variable content to someone depending on where they are in your company's sales funnel.

* I talked with each new subscriber to make sure that I didn't waste my time writing something that was only my problem.

* Went on to create a very simple product that solved a very specific pain point, and how I then delivered this new product to the people I was talking to.

Not sure what's scammy / whatever about that. I've seen a lot of people — especially engineer types — who dive head first into building some massive SaaS only to get demoralized along the way and give up because it doesn't end up becoming some huge success right away.

My goal was to try to make a case for building a very simple product for a very specific pain point, get customers who have this pain and want it solved as quickly as possible, and then (possibly) add complexity and scope from there.

Then I reached the bottom.

I would precis it as

1. Realised something is bugging him (Website does not integrate with email tool) and knew he could code something up to fix it.

2. Before coding something to fix it, checks if there is a decent market (if email tool == free mailchimp, no; if email tool = thousands per year infusionsoft, yes)

3. Spec'd out a Facebook Adwords (or whatever its called) campaign to target only people who had `liked` infusionsoft. (basically used infusionsoft as a keyword). Probably that techie stuff is cheaper on FB than google.

4. Advertised a (non-existent but easy to write) series of emails that would basically "qualify" people - that is if you read all the email course you clearly wanted the damn solution.

5. Wrote course, collected emails, and now after getting a handful of real leads, wrote the product that did, oh who cares, it probably tags email addresses with "stage1" "stage2" etc. The important part is not what code he wrote but that he had got a market first.

6. tell the list he has the product, get some feedback, refine, persuade, and sell... (more here but hell, zero to one is important)

The only slightly scammy here is 4. to whit "qualifying" customers. Thats the point of these long sales pages and in many cases these email courses, its to ensure by the time someone reaches the end then they are really interested in the thing you have been talking about.

But its not spammy if its a real product that does a real thing that someone who really wants it will pay for. Its spammy if Brennan does not stop mailing people who don't want it. For example I have had over half a dozen automated calls today asking about PPI (if you are in the UK you will know). It should be obvious that I don't want it from the speed of the hang up. But they won't stop.

So this thing Brennan is doing is called "Audience Development". And if you think its spammy, well, maybe, but the New York Times just leaked its digital strategy and that boils down to "audience development".

In the end Brennan just said "find the market first, find someone willing to give you cash for a product".

I am personally refreshing all my old blog posts and how-tos and was going to stick them out there, blogs and email courses etc. Not because I have a pain point in mind (well, being me is a pain point), but because I want to try this whole thing out.

(Disclaimer, I'm occassionally on bdunn's community google group)

Edit:

There is nothing stopping this article being rewritten and titled "What Open Source Developers could learn from "white-hat-internet-marketers". I have a couple of OSS products I like and am occassionally proud of - I could, in fact hell, I will, launch a similar email course aimed at people who have the same problems as drove me to solve them, then they can pick it up and use it. Its the same techniques, the same professional approach, just F/OSS.

However, I need to realise I have missed out stages 1-2 which is finding who will buy the product (download and use the OSS code) - luckily they are basically me and people like me and I know where I hang out.

So, for myself as a generalization, I'm writing it down as prime your target with something accessible (free knowledge, free feature-set, etc...) and engage them early in the funnel so you can iterate the lead-gen and the resulting product early.

I like the other approach better: provide useful, actionable information to assert your expertise and foster trust.

Then provide additional products and services for a fee (without stupid pricing tricks).

The workflow is basically:

    1. Find an audience ("wordpress consultants")
    2. Stalk their forums & chat rooms. Listen to complaints and problems.
    3. "Flip their pain" - figure out how you could trivially fix their problem. Nothing more. Don't jump straight to "web app" or even "softwarE" at this point. People in my class were working on shipping well built excel sheets, or books, or trainings.
    4. Build that thing in #3, and sell.  Normal email / blog marketing techniques apply here.  Get paying customers right away.

1. Problems too trivial to expend energy and time solving once and for all. (It's easier to pay the small cost each time you encounter the problem). Not marketable.

2. Problems you can solve, but everyone else already have partial or 'good enough' solutions for. Competitive, no innovation.

3. Problems you think you can solve, but you really can't. Doomed.

4. Problems you know you can't solve on your own, or with the resources available to you. Expensive.

5. Problems outside of your area of expertise.

6. Problems you have, but really aren't problems to anyone else.