“There’s got to be a better way.”

This is what my videographer Caleb Wojcik and I said to each other 15 months ago—almost in unison—as we observed video creators of all types walking around the VidSummit event in Los Angeles.

That thought immediately turned into an idea, which then turned into some drawings, which turned into prototypes, which turned into what is now a new hardware brand that just released its first physical product into the world on Kickstarter last week.

Meet the SwitchPod, the first tripod invented specifically for vloggers.

This blog post is an all-in, super-detailed account of every part of this entire process. From how this idea came to be, who we worked with, every single design iteration, development costs, future potential manufacturing costs, how we’ve marketed and will continue to market this product, lessons learned, our biggest worries, and also our biggest dreams.

Caleb and I have never done anything like this before. We are not experts on the topic of designing and manufacturing physical products, and although we’ve put in a lot of seemingly great work behind the product and the campaign that just went live, there is a chance the product will not be funded, and it could ultimately turn into an expensive learning experience.

My hope is that after you read this blog post, you will:

1. Have a better understanding of how the process of designing and manufacturing a physical product works.
2. Gather some new marketing ideas for any projects you may currently be working on.
3. Get motivated to try something new and challenging in your own life.

And of course, I hope you check out the campaign on Kickstarter, too. Your support by backing the campaign, or even just sharing it with others, is extremely kind, and Caleb and I both want to thank you in advance for that:

Click here to check out our SwitchPod website.

The Origin of the SwitchPod

At VidSummit 2017, Caleb and I were standing in the main lobby and saw almost every attendee walking around with a camera (DSLRs, mostly) for shooting video. This was not unusual for an event that’s all about making videos.

Also not unusual was the tripod that most of them had attached to their cameras: a big and bulky contraption with a line of flexible balls for legs, also known as a GorillaPod. Some people had off-brand versions, but they all had the same style. I looked down at my own camera, and realized I was using the same exact thing, too:

The GorillaPod is a versatile tripod. It has flexible legs that can wrap around poles and tree branches, the ball head allows your camera to swivel 360 degrees, and there’s a quick release clip to easily remove the camera, too. It was launched by Joby in 2006.

YouTube had just launched a year earlier.

Vlogging (video blogging) had been around beforehand, but YouTube made videos easy to find and share. As more and more people entered the video space, and as cameras became more accessible and better and easier to use, vlogging had become a full-time career for many, and a fun hobby for millions more.

During all this time, however, the tripods built to hold cameras didn’t seem to evolve much, and once a few influential vloggers were seen holding the GorillaPod to film themselves (bringing the legs together and bending the legs to get the correct angle for a wider shot), it just became the normal solution for everyone filming consistently and on the go.

Vloggers took a product that already existed, and shaped it to fit their own needs. This is a classic example for where there may be a great business opportunity: when a product built for one use is being used in a different way.

Examples of this you may or may not know about:

• Instagram started out as a whisky sharing app (Burbn), but its photo editing filters are what caught most people’s attention.
• The bubble wrap we use in packaging today was originally designed to be a textured wallpaper.
• Frisbees were born from pie containers (shoutout to Back to the Future 3 for referencing this).

After looking around the crowd and examining the tripod I had in my own hands, we knew:

“There’s got to be a better way.”

The GorillaPod is pretty heavy, especially with a camera attached to it. I’m not the strongest person in the world, so when holding it out in front of me, I know it’s not going to be an incredibly long take.

Second, when the legs are together, my tiny hands can’t wrap all the way around the grip.

via GIPHY

Okay, my hands aren’t that small, but still—it’s not comfortable to hold.

And when I want to set the camera down again and go back to tripod mode, it’s not the easiest thing in the world. It should be easier. In that moment, Caleb and I started to go back and forth in rapid fire succession with improvements we would make to the product. Each one began with “what if.”

What if it did this? What if it did that? It was a fun thought-experiment, something I tend to do daily with various things I see. I think most entrepreneurs have that sort of problem-solving mindset. But most entrepreneurs, like most of the times I’ve done this in the past, just let the moment pass. It’s fun to think about, but really—how would this even really happen?

And then, right there in that moment, Richie Norton walked right by us.

Richie is co-founder of Prouduct, a company that helps entrepreneurs take ideas for physical products and actually bring them to life. He was actually a guest on my podcast a few months before VidSummit, ironically, to talk about how entrepreneurs could create their own physical products.

So when Richie walked by, I yelled for him to come over and hear our pitch for a new tripod for vloggers. After about two minutes of explanation, he said the three words that really started this whole process:

“Let’s do it!”

Next Steps

During the rest of the conference, Caleb and I couldn’t stop thinking about our idea. The problem was that our idea didn’t have any form yet—it was just a bunch of unorganized “what if” ideas.

So our first mission, per Richie’s instructions, was to clearly figure out exactly what we wanted. What are the “project requirements”? Project requirements influence the design solution that will eventually lead to a prototype to test and iterate. To understand what the project requirements should be, however, there are a couple of important steps that have to happen beforehand:

Researching and empathizing. They go hand-in-hand.

Research

Researching means to actively investigate the problems and needs of a target market. To understand existing solutions, and where they may be lacking. Caleb and I had two things working in our favor:

First, we are both in our target market. This is good because we understand the environment, language, habits, and goals of our target market already, but sometimes (and I know this from personal experience) being in your own target market can work against you. It can lead to product decisions based on assumptions that could turn out to be completely untrue. What really matters is how other people in the target market think, and the more research you do, the less guessing there is.

Luckily, we had a second thing working in our favor: We happened to be at a conference with hundreds of other videographers, YouTubers, and vloggers.

Immediately, we started talking to people about how they used their tripods, asking questions like:

• “What do you like and dislike about your tripod?”
• “If there was one thing you wish was different about it, what would it be?”
• “Have you tried other solutions and if so, what did you like and dislike about them?”

Real conversations: the best way to conduct research. And the cool part was that most people we asked were happy to share. In the hour or two we spent talking to people, we learned so much.

For example, we realized that many video creators—at least the ones who were there—travel a lot, and their existing tripod solutions were not very friendly to pack. They wished it was lighter with a smaller profile, but still sturdy enough to support their camera.

Beyond the research, having empathy for your target market is also key.

Empathize

To have empathy means to understand the feelings of your target market. Beyond the how and what of your future product, you must have an understanding of the WHY. As Simon Sinek says, “People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.”

A simple strategy to empathize with your target market is to (drum roll please) . . . ask why!

After they answer a research question from above, just follow up with something like:

• “Why is that important to you?”
• “Tell me more about that.”
• “What do you really want to do?”

After several conversations with more videos creators, we started to really understand what videos creators really felt:

Video creators just want to create. They want to tell stories and share. Filming is their life, and anything that can reduce the friction of doing that makes them happy.

So that became our goal—let’s create something that ultimately helps creators create more.

Taking Shape

Now that we had done a little bit of research and reconnaissance, we had a much clearer picture of what we and our target audience wanted. We also better understood the pains that people were having with their existing tripods, confirming a lot of what we already knew, but also learning a lot more, too.

For example, many flexible tripod solutions get weaker over time and begin to “sag,” unable to hold the weight they once used to. Another interesting finding was that 95 percent of the video creators we spoke to never used the flexible legs on their tripod to wrap around poles or trees when filming.

And finally (and this is a big one), several people confirmed having their cameras fall over when on the tripod.

That’s no good.

So ultimately, here’s what we were looking to create:

A lightweight but strong solution to support filming both while moving around and while stationary. It should be easy to manipulate, low-profile, and easy to pack away for travel.

And this brings us to our first major design idea: A tripod with legs that somehow come together to create a single handle that one could easily grip to film with or carry. The legs would not be flexible, but the shape would mimic the shape that video creators use while filming on the go.

How would it really work though? We’re not engineers and couldn’t even wrap our heads around the mechanism that would allow for this to happen.

This is where Richie and his company Prouduct really came into the picture.

After a quick call with Richie and Cole Chamberlain, an engineer on the Prouduct team, we realized that we didn’t have to know how the mechanism was going to work. That was Cole’s job to figure out. Cole just needed to know exactly what we wanted.

Like any good engineer, he gave us a structure to work with so we could at least get something started. It came in the form of this helpful sheet:

After a lot of conversation and a week’s time, Cole came back to us with this:

The CobraPod was a temporary name just to give this project some life. The name SwitchPod came much later in a conversation Caleb and I had specifically about the name.

In addition, Cole included some preliminary CAD (computer-aided design) drawings that showed how the mechanism would presumably work. CAD drawings are important because with those plans in the computer, you can easily 3D print them and actually have something that’s real in your hands.

Already from just having the images alone, we liked what we saw. Even though it was just designed on a computer, it was becoming more and more real. Another benefit of this stage is that we could already see what changes needed to be made. We were making decisions, and that was cool. The most common decision people need to make when they have an idea is just to get started, and it was awesome to know we were already past that point.

The first obvious thing to us was the shape. Although the architect in me thought it looked cool, looking at the product in the “open” position, we knew it needed to have a different shape. It wasn’t going to be high enough. Make it too high, however, and the whole thing could topple over.

What we needed were just some shapes—something to hold and play with. After a conversation with Cole about the shape we wanted, he sent us these:

These were cut shapes of plastic, although we could have just cut cardboard out just the same. Cole even included a couple random ideas with a few of the iterations, including one that had a strap and another with an extended piece of the arm to potentially make a camera easier to hold by resting the extension under your wrist. Nice ideas, but they weren’t going to work, and that’s okay. At this stage, it’s totally cool to have some fun and try new things. There’s really nothing to lose.

After some more conversations with Cole and another two weeks or so, we saw pictures of our first real working 3D Printed prototype from the team. To say I was excited was an understatement! I was stoked!

When you look up close, you can even see the layers of plastic made during the printing process.

It was incredible! I just wanted to get my hands on it ASAP, but the Prouduct team was playing around with it for a while. Some members on the team, including Richie and Jase Bennett, are video creators themselves, so we were interested to hear what they thought.

Here’s a text exchange between me and Richie, just to confirm if this thing was actually as cool as I was hoping it was. My text is in blue, Richie’s is in gray:

Jase sent a few pictures, too:

It was rad to see Jase actually use it in real life. He said he loved it, but also provided some key feedback that influenced future design changes. He said that for the heavier camera, he naturally just wanted to “choke up” on the tripod and grip it higher, like this:

This informed a later design that made finger grooves run all the way up the entire tripod, so it could become more versatile.

We got it in the mail a few days later and played around with it. It worked, but the first thing we noticed was that the curve away from the handle was a bit weird. What if it was straight instead? And what if we could save some weight by adding holes in some areas? And what if we had a way to somehow lock the legs of the tripod open after it was deployed?

Ahh, more “what ifs,” but these were ones that we could integrate into the design of our first iteration.

A few weeks later, another member of the Prouduct team, Thiefaine (who we call TFN) sent us some pictures of the newest 3D-Printed design iteration. This time it had a straight neck with finger grooves going all the way up, areas were cut out to save for weight and material, a robust latch mechanism that triggered once the legs were open was added, and it was also white!

Cole also experimented with hand-dipping the handles in rubber to see how we liked that.

It looked like it was straight out of a stormtrooper’s backpack:

Again, we were drooling to get our hands on it. Cole sent it over in a day.

It felt great. The finger grooves were perfect. No matter the weight of the camera we used, we always found a place to grip that felt comfortable.

The angle of the neck was good and we even filmed some videos with it just to test it out for a while. Unfortunately, once we started playing with the latch mechanism—opening and closing the tripod to see how it worked—little pieces began to pop out. Some tiny little springs did, too. Also, it required two hands to make it work. Could it potentially be done with one-hand?

It was only a plastic 3D-printed prototype, but even so, I was getting a bit worried about how many small tiny pieces there were.

This is where Caleb and I began to ask about manufacturing. How does that work and how much can certain decisions cost? Manufacturing answers depend on what you’re manufacturing, but we quickly learned that the fewer the pieces, the better.

This is when we learned about how manufacturing this product would essentially work:

First, after our design is finalized, we’d be ready to create the molds for each part. Molds are just that—empty cavities in the shape of that part that, when injected with a certain kind of material (metal, alloy, plastic, etc.), create that part. This is done on a line and your product can be created faster, and cheaper. A mold is needed for each part, and then someone needs to put the parts together to create the thing.

Having no electronics in our device helps. We did not set out to create a gimbal or steady-cam, which is a popular option among videographers today. We wanted to create the best tripod for people to use their own cameras.

Molds are, as we soon learned, very expensive! Depending on the design, we were told each mold for a unique leg could cost tens of thousands of dollars. It’s after the mold is created that the magic happens. Depending on durability, a single mold can create hundreds of thousands of parts for your product.

We were still trying to wrap our heads around the entire financial model (more on that later), but we knew we had to finalize the prototype before anything, so we kept going with that. With all those little pieces that broke still on my mind, Caleb and I decided to go back to Cole and see if he could come up with a solution to keep the tripod legs open, but without the latch and the springs. Plus, something that didn’t require two-hands to unlatch. We suggested trying to use magnets, and Cole said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

We hadn’t heard from the team in a while, until we received an email, with a video in it. The video was a close up of Cole’s hands holding what looked like a baby version of what we were creating. A really tiny tripod:

In this video, however, he explains that he was just trying to solve the open and close mechanism. He didn’t need to print out and waste plastic on an entire leg to do this, he just needed something to test with.

He inserted magnets in strategic places within the tripod and, like magic, it seemed to work—at least on video. If you move one of the legs out, after a certain point, it just seems to snap right into place. If we liked how it looked, he’d print another full size one for us to use and check out. He also showed us in the video that he liked the look of the rounded corners, rather than the flat corners. It was better to hold, so we told him to go with it.

Soon, we had both a baby version, and a full-size version in hand. I took the baby version home to play with, and it was a ton of fun to open and close, and I could even do it with one hand. I even experimented seeing how fast I could open and close the thing, like here:

We were close, very close. Caleb took the larger model home for a couple of weeks and filmed with it just to see how it was used in everyday life, and in that process one thing became very clear—we needed an easier mechanism to get a camera on and off the tripod. At this point, there was just a screw with a hex head to tighten the camera.

We decided to add a knob, which Cole designed into CAD to show us really quick before printing the next version:

We thought it was time to print yet another version, but with the only big change being the knob, it was time to step up our prototypes. Instead of our plastic 3D-Printed models, it was time to explore materials.

We decided to get one made out of aluminum to see what the metal would feel like, and then another out of a plastic. Since it was plastic, we could create it in any color we wanted, too, so we decided to go for a bright red so when we brought it somewhere to show people, it could stand out.

Before sharing it, however, it was important to begin to think about protecting our idea. We needed to get a patent.

Patents

I’m not an attorney or professional in this manner, but I do know it’s important to protect your ideas and inventions. With that said, even if we do everything right, there’s still a possibility for something we create to be ripped off. My online courses have been ripped off, and a physical product could easily be ripped off, too. With the right protection in place, however, it becomes a little harder to do.

There are various kinds of patents, and honestly, this was the most confusing part of the process for me, but here’s what I know:

In the US, there are two types of patents: Utility Patents, and Design Patents. There’s actually a third called a Plant Patent, but it’s rare and we are not hoping to reproduce and create new kinds of innovative plants any time soon.

A utility patent makes up a majority of all patents (about 90 percent), and it’s designed to protect the utility or function of a particular invention. From Investopedia, “A utility patent is a patent that covers the creation of a new or improved—and useful—product, process or machine. A utility patent, also known as a ‘patent for invention,’ prohibits other individuals or companies from making, using or selling the invention without authorization.”

A design patent, on the other hand, protects the way something looks—it’s “ornamental appearance.” As defined by Wikipedia, “The ornamental appearance for an article includes its shape/configuration or surface ornamentation applied to the article, or both.”

The big dispute over iPhone patent infringements between Apple and Samsung were primarily about the design patents Apple owned, and the way the iPhone looked versus Samsung’s products.

Based on a number of conversations, it was recommended that we get a utility patent.

Unfortunately, utility patents can take twelve months or more to finalize, and costs seem to average into the thousands. On LegalZoom, there’s a two-step process totaling over $3,000. Additionally, before filing, you should also consider—are you yourself infringing on anyone else’s patents? You never know, you could have invented something someone else already did, and obviously that could get you in trouble. [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.]

We did a ton of research before starting this process to see who we were up against. We also had a lot of help and advice along the way and sifted through several patents (which are publicly available on the USTPO site) to see if our mechanisms were to be found. I won’t get into the details of this process, but there are people you can hire (patent attorneys, and even LegalZoom) to help you make sure you’re not infringing on someone else’s intellectual property (IP).

Still, there’s risk in sharing this before getting a patent, but how could we do more research and market this thing if it was going to take twelve months to get it filed?

This is where the Provisional Application comes into play. Not a “provisional patent,” as it’s sometimes mistakenly referred to, because that does not actually exist. Just the provision application for a patent.

Huh? Let me explain, as far as I and Wikipedia know:

“A provisional application is a legal document filed in the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), that establishes an early filing date, but does not mature into an issued patent unless the applicant files a regular non-provisional patent application within one year.”

In other words, applying for a provision allows us to essentially raise our hand and say, “Yes, we’re going to file a regular patent! But, yeah, we claim this IP.” Afterwards, a business can begin using “patent pending” in their product’s marketing. This dissuades others from attempting to create something similar, knowing we’ve already got a date to file our non-provisional patent.

It’s a bit confusing, but it allows us to begin protecting our idea, and only spend about $200 to do it. We used LegalZoom. Caleb applied (which required shop drawings from our engineer), but in about two to three weeks, we were in! Patent pending, baby, and we were ready to begin sharing this thing. Just in time, too, because some big events were coming up that attract loads of videographers, and we wanted to use this opportunity to hand it to them and gauge real interest and hear what they had to say. [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.]

By the way, for more information about the patent process in the US, best to go directly to the USTPO website here for a process overview.

Our First Reactions

A couple more weeks went by, and boom—we had our two new prototypes! One was aluminum in space gray that included some experimental rubber feet, and the other was a red plastic one that was even lighter, although it was a little warped from the hand-made manufacturing process. They each had the new knobs that made it easier to screw a camera on.

June, 2018. VidSummit, Anaheim.

It’s time to show them off, and see what happens.

We were so excited, we decided to shoot a video and share it on IGTV, which Instagram had just announced during that event. Here was our video filmed with our SwitchPods in hand:

And this is where marketing starts. Sharing it not just with people in person (actually, that was more for reaction and feedback, and less for marketing), but sharing it publicly online, even though we weren’t even close to being finished. I wanted to bring people—and especially you, my audience—along with me on this journey.

First thing we noticed, however, is that it was definitely getting people to stare. We heard people say, “What is that?” and had a number of people come up to us just to ask what this tripod thing was. It probably helped that as I was walking up and down the conference I kept opening and closing the tripod the entire time, which you can’t not look at when it’s happening.

Here’s a cool moment I captured on my iPhone when someone came by and saw the tripod:

And there were so many more moments like this. It was amazing. The feedback was wholly positive, and some of my favorite comments were when people held it and said, “Why didn’t I think of this.”

A couple of other key things Caleb and I made sure to do when talking to people about this:

First, we made sure not to tell people how to use it. We wanted to see if they could intuitively figure it out. Since it’s simple to use, of course, and it was always like a cool surprising moment when we handed it to people closed, and they figured out how to easily open it.

Second, we used the conversations to ask important questions like, “What do you like about it?” and (here’s the big one), “How much would you pay for something like this?”

Interestingly, the price ranges between dozens of different people were not far off, from each other, and where we were thinking of pricing—somewhere between $70-$100, which is comparable to (and depending on the model, cheaper than) the GorillaPod.

It felt good, real good. We also got some great feedback.

Jase Bennett on the Prouduct team had the red one in hand with a point and shoot camera on it all day. He was going to share it with some of his YouTuber friends to see what they thought, and when he reported back to us—it was the exact same feedback. Super positive, and everyone wanted to know where they could get one.

We had business cards, thankfully, printed overnight with just the name of the product (SwitchPod), and a quick domain (SwitchPod.co) we bought with an email capture form on it to begin collecting an interest list. We checked that evening after the first night of the event and I think we had about 14 sign-ups. Not bad from just word of mouth and a few business cards:

It was a good start, and we were excited for who else we were going to meet on day two of VidCon.

The next day, it was much of the same. SwitchPods and cameras on hand, and many more conversations with people. Overall, it was an excellent trip, although personally I was a little overwhelmed with the main areas of VidCon, which were mostly geared toward kids trying to get a glimpse of their favorite YouTube celebrity. Most of the work we did was upstairs in the creators and industry level area, and that’s where we collected most of our feedback.

As far as materials, the metal one felt much better. It was smoother and it had some nice weight to it when it flips open. The plastic one was lighter and although it still worked well, when a DSLR camera was put on it, it began to feel a bit top heavy and even a little flimsy.

The metal prototype we had in hand was aluminum and cost $2,000 to make.

Yes, $2,000 for a tripod!

But that’s because it was a prototype, made out of aluminum, by hand. There are no molds yet (hence, the Kickstarter campaign), and someone has to take a chunk of aluminum, and essentially turn that into the shapes we wanted. Unit costs will vary after the molds are made depending on the quantity ordered (the more you order, the less the unit cost will be), but this is how it’s done. Another factor in pricing is ultimately where the product gets produced.

Richie and the Prouduct team recommended China. They visit quite often to continue the good relations they have with the manufacturers there, and they found an incredibly clean, secure, and trustworthy manufacturer who agreed to be the one behind this product, should we choose to move forward with it. They helped to tool all of the aluminum prototypes we have so far.

As much as I trusted Richie and the Prouduct team, there was a part of me that hoped we could get this thing made in America. We soon found out why everything seems to be made in China, however.

It’s much, much cheaper.

This would be a very tough job to accomplish, and we’d have to increase our Kickstarter goals to even have a chance of being able to finance production in the states. We knew we were creating a great product for people all over the world, so I personally believe that although we are not manufacturing the product in America, we are bringing something new to the market that can help creators from anywhere create better videos and run their business.

With our SwitchPod prototypes in hand, we felt like we were close to the final prototype, but not quite yet. We had a debate about the grips on the bottom of the feet and wanted to increase the knob size to help make it easier to attach a camera, but in general, we were happy with what we had.

Marketing efforts are where my head was at. Luckily, we had an opportunity coming up soon for something potentially big.

Boise and the Chance of a Lifetime

In June of 2018, Caleb and I flew to Boise, Idaho for Craft + Commerce, an event hosted by ConvertKit. [Full Disclosure: I'm a compensated advisor and an affiliate for ConvertKit.] I’m also a huge fan! I was flying there to deliver the opening keynote, which was awesome. But even more awesome was the person slated to do the closing keynote:

Casey Neistat.

Casey put vlogging on the map, especially in 2015 when he started to vlog daily on YouTube. He’s one of my heroes. And for the SwitchPod, having a person like Casey tell his audience he uses the SwitchPod would be a massive dream come true for the product and for me.

Chances were SUPER SLIM I’d even get a chance to meet him, but we were both keynoting this event so . . . possible?

But, even if I did meet him what am I going to do? What was I going to say in the minute or two I’d have a chance to say something? Should I go up to him and say “Hi Casey, you need to see this invention, you’re gonna love it, can you share it with your millions of viewers please? Pretty please?”

But again, who knows if I’d even see him, and even if I did saw him, how could I meet with him and talk to him about the SwitchPod? Heck, even if I literally chased him down the street, he’d outrun me like it was nothing—the man runs ten-plus miles a day.

Caleb and I knew that it could just take a single key influencer to really put the SwitchPod on the map, but we’re also people who are really sensitive to influencer marketing and just how dirty those words can be sometimes. There are influencers who promote products just for money, disingenuously promoting things just because it puts more dollars in their pocket. And companies and product owners are either throwing tons of money at people with large followings, or begging (or worse, bothering) influencers with ask after ask after ask.

We didn’t want to do it that way. Some people can, and they do it well, but that kind of aggressiveness is not in our DNA. We wanted any promotion to come from a genuine relationship with someone, or a genuine curiosity for the product (or both!). We didn’t want anything to feel forced.

Caleb, being in the video creator space already (check out his YouTube channel), has a ton of friends and colleagues who had already expressed interest in supporting the project. I’m also connected to a lot of video creators and friends who, after a quick ask, have decided to support the product. Why? Because that’s what friends do.

There’s value exchanged in both directions when you have a real relationship with someone, and getting to the point of asking for favors takes time. It takes you giving value and being trustworthy, and it also takes you asking for help when you need it.

It’s okay to ask your friends and network directly for help, and honestly it’s recommended. You may be surprised, your network could be an extremely key part of your success, and you shouldn’t rely on just finding one slim chance influencer when you have guaranteed support in your life. Start with that.

We did. But sometimes—sometimes you get an opportunity that you don’t think will happen.

With Casey, it would be huge, but we went into the event not expecting anything. If we can’t do this in a genuine way, we don’t want to do it at all. We’re not foolish though—of course we were going to bring the SwitchPods with us and carry them with us at all times!

At the Event

Casey wasn’t even at the event on the first day. The keynote went well, however, and the SwitchPod did get some love from passersby. It was fun to talk to other entrepreneurs and share the story of the SwitchPod and how it came to be.

Casey was there for his closing keynote, and he crushed it. Just, wow. I was even more inspired listening to his story about how he got his start, his HBO show, his business endeavors, and how he took money from Nike for a commercial he was commissioned to do and just blew it on traveling the world, which was actually THE COMMERCIAL he created and it become an epic success. He is a masterful storyteller and craftsman behind the camera, and honestly even if the SwitchPod wasn’t a part of the equation, I’d still love to meet him.

After the event, some of the speakers and VIPs were up on the roof of the hotel for some hors d'oeuvres and drinks, and lo and behold, guess who decided to stick around and join us. Freaking Casey Neistat himself. Like, he was just there, hanging out, talking to people.

My heart was beating so fast.

Caleb and I probably looked like a couple of high school kids giggling in the corner while stealing glances at the hot guy on campus.

Anyway . . .

Casey was surrounded by a group of people, so I didn’t want to interrupt. While at the bar waiting for a drink, I see him start to make his way toward us.

This is not a drill folks!

We locked eyes (er, actually, my eyes on his sunglasses), and I thought he was going to say hi and go for a handshake, which I was totally prepared to do, but he literally held out his hand, and said, “Okay, let me see this thing everyone’s talking about.”

Wait, who else is talking about this here? Nevermind. Casey Neistat actually asked to see our invention!

I handed it over. I introduced myself and Caleb, and all throughout our explanation of what this thing was, he was playing around with the hardware—opening it, closing it, playing with the screw knob, holding it out in front of him, putting it back down to his side, holding it out in front of him again. Like he was a machine doing a calibration or something.

It all happened so fast, but it really happened!

He said some great things about the SwitchPod, too. He really liked that finally someone focused on creating a tripod solution specifically for vloggers. He even went into a little history about the GorillaPod and how vloggers have just made it their own, but vlogging is not what it was built for.

He then offered some really amazing suggestions, too. He said it should be a little smaller—the length was a bit too long for him and where he’d feel comfortable holding it. Also, when we asked him what color he’d want if we could send him one, he said:

“Just black. Nobody wants to go around and be noticed with one of these things.”

That was huge. We were thinking of creating all kinds of colors—space gray, YouTube red, and others. But just black. It seemed so simple, yet when Casey said it, it makes complete sense.

We didn’t want to take much of his time, but he said we were doing good work, and that was a big win.

Just to be clear, Casey did not endorse the SwitchPod or say he would support the final product. He saw it, he gave positive comments and offered suggestions, and that was that. And honestly, I couldn’t have asked for anything more.

We also captured video footage of Casey during this time while he offered his feedback and handled the SwitchPod, but again—to be respectful to him and sensitive to how that may be misinterpreted, Caleb and I decided not to share it. It was just useful for us to hear back what he said because I really wasn’t able to remember much of the details. I was still a bit starstruck.

New Prototypes

With Casey’s suggestion to make the SwitchPod shorter on our mind, we wanted to see what the new size would feel like. Cole 3D-printed a new version based on a reduction of about 15 percent and sent it right over.

After taking it out of the box and holding it up, I knew—this was the right size. It just felt . . . better.

Plus, beyond that, this is a massive savings in materials over the long haul! Thinking back, we probably should have tried various sizes much earlier in the prototyping phase, all the way back to when we were just testing shapes and sizes. We didn’t expect to go smaller, however, because we were basing our measurements off of how people used the GorillaPod. It makes sense, though, because smaller was not possible with the GorillaPod. Yes, there are different sizes, but everyone had the biggest one because they all had heavier DSLR cameras.

We had a new, wider knob on this one, but the knob still wasn’t feeling quite right. We were going to shoot for longer in our next prototype. The main part of the tripod, however, was finalized. We were super close to a final prototype! After that happens, you can work with your manufacturer to get real potential costs for the molds, and also the unit costs. That was our next goal—to get to that point.

During this time, we also began an Instagram account and a Twitter account, because we wanted some social behind this brand, too. Small marketing efforts were now a part of the process, although we knew once the prototype was finalized, it would be full on with marketing efforts to mobilize our network, prepare the Kickstarter campaign, and shoot some amazing video footage and photography to support the product across all channels.

The Final Prototypes

This was going to take some time. We ordered two prototypes from China through our manufacturer, and it was going to take about four to six weeks. It was a little bit of a time crunch because, similar to our opportunity in Boise, we had another event to go to that could bring us some great exposure:

VidSummit 2018.

Yes, the same event where this very idea was born! If we had our final protoypes in hand by then, we could rock our new SwitchPods in their almost-final form, and really get people talking—hopefully not just with us, but with their audiences, too.

Because remember, this was an event full of video creators.

The prototypes did come in on time, and boy—were they smooooooooth . . .

Plus, the proportions just look better at this height, don’t you think?

Caleb and I spent a majority of the event in the hallways sharing the SwitchPod with people. Because of the way it works and who we were showing it to, we didn’t have to do much to draw attention. We were often stopped while on our way somewhere, just because someone wanted to ask about it.

And of course, we had our business cards to hand out, although the silhouette of the shape of the switchpod was from our older prototype, but only we know that. Having an easy to follow domain name (switchpod.co) was helpful, too.

Some of our friends, including Sean Cannell from Think Media and Justin Brown from Primal Video spent time to shoot some footage with the SwitchPod to help when the product releases on Kickstarter, which was super generous of them! And Derral Eves, the founder of VidSummit, even took notice. He gave us a huge pat on the back and was stoked that this idea was born the prior year at his event. He even took the time to introduce us and the SwitchPod to some key influencers in the world of video at a private event we were invited to, which was literally GoKarts, and was amazing.

It’s just been really amazing to see people get behind the product. For me, although I’m not known for my video work per se, it’s been really fun to share this journey with my audience along the way—for over a year now. Even the moral support from those who wouldn’t buy a product like this is just incredible. Thank you!

We ordered a couple more prototypes (at yes, $2,000 each), but we were all in at this point. Green light: Yes, we were going to kickstart this thing!

Up to this point, we were about $30,000 into the process. This includes all the prototypes we ordered, and the help we received from our friends at Prouduct. It includes the provisional application for a patent, the branding work, and web-related things.

Many may say this is a gamble. $30,000 on the line before even REALLY validating this thing with dollars behind it is not something I just brush away—this is a serious investment here—however, as you can see, we have had many clear stop or go points along the way—points where we could ask ourselves, do we want to keep going, or are we done here? So far, the lights have all been green and we’re stoked to see it enter this next phase when it’s out there and people can vote with their dollars.

I really do hope this gets funded so that we can have the molds made and place our first order. That would make me so happy! But you know what, even if the Kickstarter doesn’t go well, like I said earlier, it would have been an expensive learning lesson, and I’m okay with that.

Now What?

Well, hopefully you’ve been inspired by this journey of ours thus far. It would be really cool if you checked out the Kickstarter Campaign Page to see how things were going, and you know—if you wanted to help increase the chances of hitting our goals, we wouldn’t be opposed to it, of course.

And a huge thank you in advance to anyone who does support the campaign, even if that just means you share it. Really, thank you.

Even if we do get funded, Kickstarter is not the end. In fact, it’s really just the beginning.

When we have real customers, there will be real-world stakes.

Communication

We must be open with communication with our customers during the manufacturing process so that everyone stays in the loop along the way.

It’s going to take a while to get these things made, and then shipped. Once we have funding for the molds, the molds itself could take about six weeks. The product order will take about four weeks to fulfill, but we should also get samples to test a few of the products off the line before completing the rest of the order. Then the product gets put on a boat for another four to six weeks on it’s way to the US. The products then get shipped to a fulfillment house where they are then packaged (if not already packaged in China, which is a possibility) and then shipped to backers.

We are advertising an August delivery date, however we can definitely get it in ahead of that if everything works perfectly, which it is likely not the case (hence the buffer period).

Manufacturing Costs vs. Kickstarter Funding Goal

This was a tough one. We didn’t want to create a massive funding goal in the hundreds of thousands, because that’s quite high for a Kickstarter campaign. There’s something to be said for marketing and PR purposes to reaching a funding goal sooner than later, if possible.

With that said, make it too low, especially when you have to pay for molds and manufacturing, and you won’t have enough to place your order, or you’ll have to order fewer units at a higher cost per unit.

Our declared Kickstarter campaign goal is $100,000, but we would love to double that.

We need to have three separate molds to create: one for each leg. We did explore having the same mold for each leg and building a way to support that into the system, but for the way our hardware works, and to keep its structural integrity, we have to have three different pieces coming together. Here are our pre-manufacturing costs:

Overall, this will not be a home-run profitable venture until we successfully fund the campaign and then have enough to order another round of product. That second sale, for example, whether that comes from Amazon, our own store, retail or other, since the molds and pre-manufacturing are all taken care of already, the margins would be significantly higher.

Now, there’s one thing you might be seeing on this chart that you might be wondering about. There are zero dollars spent on it, but there is significance there, and that’s the ball head.

A ball head is an attachment you can add to our (or any) tripod to be able to then swivel your camera around and move and point it in any direction. We had initially wanted to create a new one to serve this product and become that attachment people could get to more easily change angles and such, but three things:

1. Trying to create and manufacture two products, versus just one and really get it right didn’t make any sense. Since this is our first attempt at this, we decided to drop the idea of the ball head, for now, and focus solely on making the most amazing tripod for vloggers.
2. With the screw on the SwitchPod, you can actually attach any ball head or quick release anyway.
3. When we met Casey, another question we asked him was if he would need a ball head on it, and he said no. He wouldn’t use it with one.

I think it was smart not to develop another product on top of this one, which would also confuse the Kickstarter campaign. We wanted to keep it simple. As you’ll see on the Kickstarter page, there aren’t a ton of different combinations of products and offerings. It’s simple, grab one or more (maybe as a gift, for for separate cameras you might have), and that’s it.

In Conclusion

No matter what happens, I’m happy with all we’ve put in thus far, and whatever the outcome, I’ll be stoked to have learned so much about this world of inventing and manufacturing a physical product.

It’s been a pleasure to work with Caleb on this journey as well. I think it’s really important, when you work with a partner, to always be open and completely honest with each other. There were many moments during this journey where we’d check in to see if we were pulling our weight for each other, and it always seems to even out when we both believe in the product and campaign.

Also, a big shout out to our wives, Caleb’s wife, Jen, and my wife, April. They’ve both been super supportive during this process as Caleb and I focused on this new business on the side of everything else we do. And Jen, she’s got some talent behind that camera—a lot of the pictures on the campaign page were her doing. Thanks, Jen!

Caleb and I did start a separate company together to house this product and any potential future physical products we might be creating. Studio Jigowatts, LLC. Can you guess what inspired that?

And finally, the big question I’ve been asked quite a bit: Where do we want this to go? What’s the endgame?

If it becomes a little machine that runs and turns a quiet profit each month, I’d be fine with that. Hopefully we’d put systems in place to automate the process as much as possible, and we could continue to use this product to experiment with other fun things, like how one might get this in a retail store, or maybe on Shark Tank. As long as we’re having fun, that’s all that matters.

I’d also be happy, obviously, if this blew up. It’s been hard to not start drawing ten other physical product ideas now that I understand how this works, and so I’ll keep those ideas in my shoebox for later, just in case. A full company that churns out amazing physical products on an annual basis (or more) could be very fun, especially when a lot of the products are things that scratch our own itch.

And yes, we have discussed selling the product or idea to another more reputable company in the tripod or video space, should that ever be an opportunity that comes our way. We’d be open for seeing an offer and exactly how that might be structured, but selling the product or company would be a win in our eyes, too.

I hope you enjoyed this journey with me, and I hope you continue to be on it with me.

Check out the Kickstarter Campaign for the Switchpod if you haven’t already, and please, if you liked what you read here, a quick share would be amazingly helpful. Thank you, and all the best to you and your fun outside-of-your-comfort-zone projects!

Update (2/4):

This blog post was written a couple weeks before our launch, and as you may have already seen, the campaign for the SwitchPod has gone much better than expected.

We reached our funding goal of $100,000 in just 11 hours and 26 minutes, and after Day 2, we more than doubled that. The initial wave has slowed down, but we expect there will be several more waves of exposure between now and March 30th, both organic and through upcoming paid advertising campaigns.

Although the campaign is now live, I'm continually documenting our steps and decisions along the way for you, and I plan on publishing a recap after the launch has ended.

I hope you enjoyed hearing how this all came together. When the campaign ends, that's actually when the real hard work begins. We must deliver this with quality and on time, and that just doesn't happen automatically.

In the meantime, thank you so much for your support. Both Caleb and I appreciate it so much! If you haven't had a chance to check out the campaign yet, click here to see where it's at now.

And finally—probably the best moment to happen so far since the launch—make sure to watch this video that mega YouTuber Peter McKinnon created after we sent him a handmade prototype. Pay careful attention to what he says about how Caleb and I approached him.

The post Meet the SwitchPod: My First Physical Product (Costs, Manufacturing, and More) appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

Validating a product idea: an all-important step to take to avoid wasting time and money building a product nobody wants. It seems like an obvious thing to do, however many times it's a step that gets pushed aside.

Why? It could be because:

1. We think we already know what our audience wants and will pay for.
2. We're anxious to actually begin creating something and rush through the research phase.
3. We don't know how to validate.
4. A combination of all of the above.

I'm fascinated by the idea of product validation—spending time upfront to confirm that what it is we're about to build is actually something people want and are willing to pay for.

If you find out it's not, then good—you will have avoided wasting time and money and can move on to something else. If you do validate your idea, then you've given yourself a much higher chance of succeeding with that product. Your execution of that product, the sales page, the marketing, etc. play an obvious role in the success of that product, but at least you're not as worried about the product itself being a cause of failure.

In this post, we're going to explore 6 ways to help you make sure that what you're thinking of selling will sell.

1. Share Your Idea

The biggest mistake people make when creating a product of any kind is keeping the idea to themselves. You must share your idea with others.

As mentioned by Jon Saddington, uber-successful serial entrepreneur featured in Session #61 of The SPI Podcast:

…Because this is what happens when you start sharing that idea–it starts becoming refined. And a refined idea is a much more mature idea. You'll quickly get feedback—instant, guttural feedback from people, and especially complete strangers that say “that is a stupid idea” or “that's a great idea but have you thought about this?”

Jon Saddington

Of course, a big reason why we don't do this is because of the possibility of other people taking our idea. Jon goes on to share in our interview:

…Here's the difference between you and the next person on the street who has a great idea–if you're committed and you love the idea, you will actually see it to completion. Most people never execute on their ideas because they just never execute. The reason I'm a success as an entrepreneur, and why many other entrepreneurs are a success is simply because we do it. We don't just talk about it, we do it. But talking about it is where it starts, and because when you start talking about it with other people, you continue to drive the motivation. You continue to build momentum, and you continue to get excited on a much better and much more refined idea.

Jon Saddington

The more you share your idea, the better that idea becomes. or the more apparent that the idea is not a good one. Share it with friends, family, people in your mastermind group, people in your community and even complete strangers!

I personally made the mistake of holding a couple of product ideas back in 2010 when I dove into the premium WordPress plugin space. I could have saved over $10,000 in development costs if I had simply taken the time to ask people their opinion on my plugin ideas, rather than keep them a secret so that I could unveil it later down the road.

2. Find Products Like it That Already Exist

Most people think competition is bad—especially if someone else has “beat you to it” and built and marketed your product before you.

Entrepreneurs, however, know that competition is a good thing—especially if you find a product like yours before you spend time and money to create it.

Why?

Because someone else has already spent the time and money to validate that idea for you!

Plus, you have an advantage coming in later—not only knowing that there's a market for that product—but also knowing what can be done better.

If you're creating a course, for example, search through a course directory like Udemy to see if a course like it already exists. If so, see how popular it is and what people are saying about it already. What do people love about it? What do people want more of or feel is missing? Keep note of those things because your ultimate goal is to create a better version of what's already out there.

Give people want they want—yes—but give them a better version of what they are already getting. (click to tweet this)

3. Pay Attention to “Signs”

In 2008, when I was just starting to think about monetizing GreenExamAcademy.com, I was lucky enough to have a few people in my audience tell me they wanted a more convenient way to study for the LEED exam, rather than just reading page to page off of a website. A few people even told me they would buy a book if I had one.

You can't get any more clear than that. (Actually, yes you can—but more on that later in this post).

Other times, however, the signs are not so clear, but they are there.

Last year, when my 5-day per week podcast AskPat was launched, a custom player that was built to help serve the show became a huge attention-grabber for a lot of other podcasters. I received numerous emails from people asking me where I got it from and how it works, and then it finally clicked that this was something other people wanted too. Then, after having private discussions with a number of podcasters, I pulled the trigger to turn it into a distributable premium WordPress plugin, which later became known as The Smart Podcast Player.

Chris Ducker also tells a story in a presentation he's given in the past about how Virtual Staff Finder was born. [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.] In one of his blog posts about using VAs (virtual assistants), someone left a comment saying he wished there was a service that could help find VAs for him. A couple of months later, Chris executed on that idea and VSF is now the top resource on the Internet for finding virtual staff.

It's all about reading your audience and creating that solution that people may be asking for, although they may not (and are usually not) asking you directly in a completely obvious way.

4. Create a “Mini Version” of Your Product First

One of the cool things I've learned about food trucks since starting FoodTruckr.com is that a lot of people who start a food truck are actually aspiring brick and mortar restaurant owners. They use a food truck to validate their restaurant idea, test their menu and build a brand following before paying a lot more money to start an actual restaurant.

You can do the same thing with your product. Instead of going all out with the full creation of a product, you can create a “mini version” of that product and see what the response is like. It may not be 100% fully functional, but you'll get honest feedback on a version people can sort of use, instead of just the idea of that thing.

This works particularly well with software.

A great example that comes to mind can be heard on Episode #13 of StartUp, one of my favorite podcasts. Alex Blumberg, the host, creates a half-working version of an app idea that he had, and he shares it with people and listens to the response as they use it.

The response isn't pretty, but it's necessary for him to figure out whether or not to keep going with it.

If you're creating a course, perhaps you dedicate time to creating the first module—and that's it. Share it with power users in your audience and ask to record their voices as they walk through it with you. It can be as simple as a Skype chat. If you don't have an audience, you can pay a few people to go through it and give their first impression.

If you're writing a book, outline it and write the introduction, and then get feedback from those who read that. Is this a book that looks interesting to you, and why or why not? What would you look forward to reading the most in this book, or what do you feel would be missing based on the table of contents?

5. Sell Before You Build

Most of the above tips go into making sure you've got a good potential idea on your hands, which is obviously important to understand up front so you can continue to build it out the right way.

But, if you truly want to know whether or not a product will sell or not, you've got to get people to pull out their wallets and actually pay you for it.

Notice how I didn't really get into surveys or simply creating landing pages to build an interest list. Those can help, but when you ask your audience “would you buy this”, many may say they will, but when it comes time to pay they don't. Having a list of 1000 people who claimed they will buy could end up leading to disappointment.

Building a list is important, but it's not a true indication of whether or not a product will sell.

True validation comes from people actually paying you for that idea. And yes, even before they can get it.

We've talked about this kind of validation in the past here on SPI. In Session #146 of The SPI Podcast, Jarrod Robinson shared how he was able to earn several thousand dollars from his audience before the actual creation of his product, an app idea he had for his target market of Physical Education coaches.

Recently, Jarrod shared even more details about the results of his $15,000 pre-sale launch on his site here.

John Lee Dumas from Entrepreneurs on Fire has also successfully presold a number of his offerings before creating them. Podcaster's Paradise, as well as Webinar on Fire were presented to his audience as solutions that he was going to build if there were a certain number of people interested, and he was completely upfront and honest about that to his audience. If he didn't get to those numbers, then he wouldn't build those things. Easy enough. [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through these links.]

He indeed asked for payments from people upfront (again, before the product was even created) to validate products, giving customers “champion” or “VIP” price for doing so.

Both of those products were validated, then John and his team worked hard to actually create the courses after that. You can bet that after selling those products and meeting his goals, he was motivated to do the work to put those things together and make them awesome.

These examples come from people who already have built an audience, but what about pre-selling strategies for those who don't already have an audience?

This is where paid advertising comes into play. You're going to have to pay a little bit to discover whether or not a targeted audience on a platform like Facebook, for example, would be willing to pay you for that product idea.

In a similar fashion as John's example, you'll want to truly understand the ins and outs of what this product will become so you can setup a sales page as you would if it really existed. You could drive traffic directly to that page from Facebook, or you could try something like collecting registrants to pre-sell webinar, which could convert even higher for you since you'd be building a relationship with those prospects at the same time before your pitch.

Either way, you'll want to be honest with your customers and tell them the product is not yet created, but like John, you give them something for coming on early and say straight up that you'll build the product if you have a certain amount of interest.

Tim Ferriss talks about a similar strategy in The 4-Hour Work Week, using Google Adwords to test product ideas and gauge buyer interest. [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.]

Does this actually work?

Yes.

This article on Entrepreneur.com shares that Alex Brola, co-founder and president of CheckMaid.com, an on-demand cleaning service, used ads to verify their idea:

“We actually validated [the idea] without having any cleaners to do the cleanings. We threw up a site, a booking form, a phone number, and ran some [pay-per-click] ads through Google and Bing, and saw what the conversion rate would be had we actually had cleaners.”

Alex Brola, CheckMaid.com

And actually, there's a service that can help make this kind of thing happen too. QuickMVP claims that using their service, within 5 minutes you can setup a landing page, send ad traffic to it and quickly validate your idea before you spend any more time and money on it. Pretty cool!

Oh, and by the way, Dropbox, now a billion dollar company (which I use myself every single day now!) used this same technique to get thousands of signups before writing any single piece of code too! [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.]

6. CrowdFunding

And finally, a very popular way to validate a product idea, which combines #5 from above with marketplaces where people are looking to pay for exciting stuff that doesn't exist yet, is crowdfunding.

Sites like Kickstarter are crowdfunding platforms for entrepreneurs testing the waters. At the same time, they are building a rapport with their potential future customers too.

Run a successful campaign, you've got a product with paying customers already! If you fail, then you've learned that product may not be the best idea after all.

The only caveat with platforms like this is that if you do run a successful campaign and meet your funding goals, you will have to deliver on your pledge awards, and pledge awards (goodies given to people based on what level pledge they backed your idea at) can be a very exhausting part of the process.

It's Not Easy…

It's not as easy as a coin flip to truly validate a product or idea, but it's a whole lot easier putting in that time and effort up front than wasting a load of time and money down the road when you find out your product didn't turn out like you had hoped.

There's no real way to 100% guarantee of the long term success of a product before it's actually out there in the market, but using these techniques you can definitely increase your chances.

Thanks so much, best of luck, and if you find this post useful, please use the sharing buttons below to spread the word!

Cheers!

The post 6 Ways to Validate a Product Idea Before You Waste Your Time and Money appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

Today is a HUGE day for Team Flynn! My software product, The Smart Podcast Player, is now out of hibernation and is live for public release! [Editor's Note: The Smart Podcast Player is now called Fusebox.]

In this post, I'll talk a little bit about what it is for those of you who haven't heard about it yet, and then I'll get into the 7 most important lessons I learned during this year long journey of building it.

The Smart Podcast Player was initially called the AskPat Player, because it was custom built to showcase my new podcast, AskPat. After going live with the new show, hundreds of people asked me where they could get their hands on a player just like it for their own show, and that's when the idea to turn this into a software product was born.

If you'd like to play around with it, you can actually see it in action and interact with it on the sales page. Click here to open up a new window and check it out.

The product launched in June 2014 to a limited group of beta users. Since then, my team and I have been listening to feedback, tweaking, adding new features and testing like mad. It's been so much fun, and I couldn't be prouder of what we've been able to put together!

Did You Know?

My podcasts have been played over 3.5 million times directly here on the blog. That's a lot of listens not coming from other media platforms including those who are subscribed via iTunes or Stitcher.

As much as we all want our listeners to subscribe on iTunes or something similar, you will always have people who listen directly on your website. This was made even more apparent when I redesigned my website and in an attempt to clear the cutter and consolidate, I made it just a little more difficult to find my podcasts. When I did that, my downloads numbers decreased by nearly 50%!

Unfortunately, most website podcast players don't care to enhance that front-end listening experience, and if it's a first time a listener is listening to your show, there's a lot of missed opportunities while they're on your website.

Not only does The Smart Podcast Player look amazing both on desktop and mobile, but it helps listeners find more of your content and interact with it. Beta customers have already reported increased downloads since installation, and several have said their listeners keep complimenting them on the look of the player on their website.

With the debut of our newly added feature speed control (one of the most requested features…especially by me!) I expect even more downloads and love from our listeners. Here are some of the details:

I don't want to make this entire post a sales pitch, so if you have a podcast—no matter what host you're using—you can play around and check out how The Smart Podcast Player can help you by clicking here.

For the rest of this post, I'd like to share some of the biggest lessons I learned while putting all of this together. It wasn't always smooth sailing…especially when the original developer exited the project.

What?!

Yeah…keep reading…

Lesson #1: A Limited Beta Group Was the Best Decision Ever

After a few hundred people purchased the player for the beta launch, we closed the cart. We opened it up again a few times for a few podcasting related communities but after that, you couldn't buy it anymore. That upset a lot of people.

We were very strict about a closed beta group and keeping good to our word for having the cart stay closed until the public release. For me and my people pleaser personality—that was hard for me to do, especially knowing that the cart would be closed for months ahead and people kept asking me to let them in.

It wasn't until someone else with more experience in software told me it would hurt more than it would help to open up the cart to individuals after establishing the beta group.

The beta group is meant to be a special set of early adopters who know that the product works, but is still in a developmental stage and therefore may include bugs. They are also there to provide valuable feedback and offer feature ideas for future software updates before the public release. It's also a fantastic way to test and tweak your customer support systems and internal workflow before opening it up to the world.

After the cart is closed, the focus should be solely on listening to feedback, making improvements and squashing bugs for the beta users. They are a special group of people, and when you let new users inside after you say you've closed it up, they become less special and you begin to lose your focus.

Anyone who wanted the player after the cart closed was instructed to signup to the waitlist. Of course, we kept in contact with them along the way sharing new developments and keeping the buzz going, and they were all emailed today about the public release.

Thank you to everyone who was a part of the beta group. You were essential in the direction of the product. Your praise and constructive criticisms were definitely heard and the player wouldn't be what it is today without you.

And if you happened to missed the beta launch, thank you for your patience. I'm glad we're open for everyone today!

Lesson #2: How to Handle Feature Requests

After you launch with an MVP (minimum viable product), it's smart to ask your existing customers for ideas and feature requests based on how they use it and what might be missing from their experience. When you do this, however, you open up the floor for a gazillion different suggestions, and you'd be mad to implement them all.

At this point, it's all about prioritization—ranking the requests based off of what's most important—and it's not just based on what most people are asking for. There are a lot of other factors involved, especially when it comes to software.

For example, there may be a feature request that everyone asks for. It may seem obvious and you might think it's the one to implement first, but then after talking to the developer, you find it'll require months of work and testing.

It might make more sense to implement 3 other feature requests first that don't take as much time. Yes, you're going to miss that feature request, but unless it's essential for the purpose of your product, you can move things around.

Less popular requests are important to consider as well. Maybe there's one or two people that suggest an idea but it's innovative enough to be a game changer for everyone.

Internally, my team worked through these requests like this:

1. All feature requests were put into a Trello board called Smart Podcast Player. Trello is the project management tool my team and I use. I covered it recently in my 9 Tools and Apps I'm Likely To Use More than Any Others in 2015 article that I published last week.
2. Within that Trello board, the very first list we call our Backlog. Every feature request gets its own card in the backlog, and any description of what the idea might entail is included with it. The cards can be color coded too, and are the default color as they come in, so we know they haven't been prioritized yet.
3. Once every two weeks, my team and schedule some time to go through the list of cards in the backlog, and we prioritize and filter through them. Some get deleted because they are impossible to implement or don't align with the goals of the product. Some get a low prioritization, and others get a high prioritization. They are color coded as such. Then, they are prioritized and ranked amongst the existing cards. Trello makes it easy because we can drag and drop things to reorder them.
4. When the development team is ready for a new feature to add, they pull from the top of the backlog, and move it out into another list showing that it's currently the feature that's in development.

This keeps thing super easy and organized, helps us understand and talk though what needs to be done next, and keeps us focused on that next one thing.

We currently have a list of 14 feature requests still in the backlog, ranked in order. If we wanted to get all of them implemented before going live with the public release, then it would never happen. You have to ship, but ship smart.

Lesson #3: You Can't Just Jump Immediately Into a Software Business

There's a huge market for premium WordPress plugins and I recognized this for a very long time. This is why back in 2010 I paid $10k to hire a company to develop two WordPress plugins simultaneously for me, both of which completely failed.

They never even made it to market.

I learned a lot of lessons from that double-failure (besides never work on two projects like this at the same time) so it wasn't a complete loss, but a hard lesson I learned was just how complicated the plugin developmental process is. There are different versions of WordPress, different versions of WordPress themes running on different versions of WordPress. There are theme platforms like Thesis, Genesis and StudioPress. There are different browsers and other plugins to be compatible with.

It's madness!

Back in 2010, I didn't realize just how much time and money it was going to take to create a plugin (let alone, two) that would not only be a great solution to an existing problem in the WordPress space, but one that was compatible with all of the above.

Besides not having enough cash on hand to full develop these plugins for maximum compatibility, they weren't even good concepts to begin with. I completely rushed into that idea, failed to provide the development team with a wireframe and clear instructions about my vision, and I wasn't prepared at the time for what running a software-based business would require.

I chased the money, and I got beat. I also threw a bunch of money at a company hoping it would all work out, and it doesn't quite work like that.

This time, however, with the experience of that failure behind me and with an actual internal team to support me (plus a product idea that is actually good and serves a specific audience)—things are going much much better. We're talking smart steps forward. Not jumping into things too fast, but also not taking our sweet time either.

Thinking back to my two-plugin failure, I'm very lucky those didn't pan out. Why? Because what would happen if it was sold, and I started to receive a bunch of customer support emails?

I didn't even have plan for that!

Let's talk more about this in this next lesson…

Lesson #4: Customer Experience Is EVERYTHING

I remember hearing about a study about hotels. The study revealed that hotel guests who had a bad experience resolved were likely to give a higher rating to the hotel than a guest who had no issues at all.

Customer experience is everything, and I saw first hand through this beta experience just what kind of positive response people have when your customer support systems are on top of it, even when things go wrong. I was emailed a number of times from customers who said they wish other companies were as responsive and as helpful as my support team was.

Here's an eye-opening article by HelpScout related to customer service. Let me share some of the statistics with you:

• “78% of consumers have bailed on a transaction or not made an intended purchase because of a poor service experience.”
• “70% of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated.”
• “91% of unhappy customers will not willingly do business with you again.” That is, unless:
• “Resolve a complaint in the customer's favor and they will do business with you again 70% of the time.”

Leading the way on my team is Mindy. You may have heard her speak in Session 138 of the SPI Podcast about why she cares so deeply about those who she serves. She is my Happiness Hero, and here is a part of that segment from her in that session:

“I worked in hospitality before I went out on this lovely freelancer and agency journey of mine. In hospitality there's one phrase that really sticks in my mind a lot, which is everything communicates. If you walk into a room, in this case it was our event center, if the window has streaks on it, that communicates that we don't care enough about our space to make it nice for you…if you try to download the Smart Podcast Player and in some way it didn't work for you, if you reach out to us and say this didn't work, I need to make you feel like (we) care because in you having trouble with that download, that communicates that maybe we haven't thought of something. It's just the idea that every little interaction you have with somebody tells you a little bit about them and we want to make sure you understand how much we love you.”

Mindy Holahan Peters

I'm very lucky to have Mindy on the team, and so are my customers. Her, along with Ray, Bryan and Eric who are all helping with support are amazing, and I know that the better the experience for our users, the more likely the podcast player will succeed as a product.

Currently, my team is using HelpScout to manage customer inquiries and keep track of it all. They usually go to Mindy and Ray first, and if they don't have the ability to resolve the issue, anything super technical gets handed off to Bryan and Eric.

Setting expectations is extremely important as well. We have a 24 hour answer period between Monday and Friday, however we're always hoping to reply sooner. Now that we're in a public launch, it's a little scary because there's no limit to how many customers we could have (and therefore how many ticket requests there could be), but we're confident through our testing that we've squashed as many bug as we can at this post.

There will always be “edge cases”, however, and for them we'll do our best to provide massive support.

And lastly—the support page. The support page is KEY because it'll answer questions your customer might have sooner than you can, and it relieves a lot of the back and forth and actual man-hours from the team.

In case you're curious, you can see how we've been able to put the support page together here.

Lesson #5: Pricing for Software is Different

Pricing is always a tough thing to figure out. You have to realize how much value you're providing and that's where you start, but you have to also consider where other products place themselves in the market as well, in addition to who your target audience is and what their goals are.

I've made a lot of pricing mistakes in the past. On GreenExamAcademy.com, my first ebook was sold for $19.99. It wasn't until one of my own customers—a business owner and, well—guardian angel—emailed me to say that I totally underpriced my book, and that I would sell even more copies if I raised the price.

I didn't believe him because that didn't make any sense to me. Raise the price and sell even more? How could that be? I wanted to be the cheap solution for everyone.

I decided to test out his theory though, and lo and behold, I ended up selling 50% more. Why? Because my perceived value was much higher, and thus people trusted the product more.

With The Smart Podcast Player, I've had a lot more years of selling experience under my belt, however zero of that includes software, so I went around asking others who had software companies how to properly price and what their biggest mistakes were.

After talking to about a dozen of my friends, one thing was clear: selling software was much different than selling info products.

The theme that kept coming up over and over again was that if support will be ongoing—you'll want your existing customers to somehow pay for that support. This could be in the form of a larger upfront payment with lifetime support included, or a recurring payment to continue to receive support.

This made me think of Market Samurai, a keyword research tool I fell in love with back in the day. I still love it, but don't use it as much anymore for various reasons.

To use their product, after the trial period you pay a one-time fee. Depending on when you get it during that trial period, the price may change, but the fact is that currently, at least for the past 5 years, there is no recurring payment required to continue to use the software.

That's amazing from a customer's point of view, however from a developer's point of view, a little worry some.

You see, Market Samurai has been a huge hit. They should be—it's a great product—but because the product is one that has to deal with a lot of change (i.e. the world of Google and keyword research data), they have to continually provide updates and support for people. So, as their customer and user base keeps growing and growing, with more updates, support inquiries and man hours from their team required to support those people, the overall profit per customer begins to decrease over time, and could eventually get into the negative.

If I were to take an educated guess, I would assume that Market Samurai would love to turn back time and switch to a recurring payment model, or perhaps a model based on usage.

This is why when coming out of beta, The Smart Podcast Player adopts an annual subscription model. It's already apparent that with the changing environment of WordPress that this is absolutely necessary to handle and support a product like this. When sharing the price point with my friends, many saw the $97/year subscription as extremely generous, but also smart.

Personally, I feel that for anyone that is serious about their podcast, this is definitely worth the price, and the beta users we've spoken to also agree.

Pricepoints can always change, however, and depending on how it goes it may even go up in the future. If any new features we add include the requirement of a server, for example, for things like stats or massive databases, then those costs will have to be accounted for too.

Lesson #6: Personnel Will Change

A few months ago, I got a message from the original developer of The Smart Podcast Player, who had helped me through the entire beta launch. It was a long message, but the first line pretty much sums it up:

“Hey Pat, I wanted to reach out and let you know that I'm planning on moving on from Team Flynn soon…”

You know how sometimes you read something shocking and your heart starts to pump two times faster? That's what happened when I read this email.

He was the only developer on the project—he coded the software himself, and all I could think of was “what am I going to do!?”

The timing was off, but the rest of his email explained his situation and I completely supported him and his decision. Luckily, I owned the rights to the code so there wasn't anything funny going on in terms of him running away with the software (which happens sometimes, so make sure you get all of your contracts in place!), but I still had no developer and no idea what was going to happen next.

Luckily, I asked another developer, Bryan on my team who usually helps me with backend/server optimization, to see if he was up to the task of filling in the role of lead developer for this project. He happily agreed, but we both knew this wasn't going to be easy. He was entering a totally new environment that someone else coded from scratch.

Matt, my executive producer and I negotiated some time for the original developer to work with Bryan to get him up to speed. He agreed saying it was the least he could do, and after a month or so Bryan took over as lead developer, and he's been awesome. He's the one who coded the speed control features and new social sharing features on the social track player, which look and work great.

I always do what I can to make my team feel happy and appreciated. Often times after a big milestone, I'll send them a nice gift or at the very least, a personal message praising them for their hard work. It's one of my favorite things to do, and I know that it helps the team stay motivated, but also happy to work and stay on board with me.

Even if you're the best leader in the world, you have to realize that some of the people you work with will move on. It just happens, and you can't get mad or upset or blame anyone—you just have to keep moving forward.

I know that because I treated the original developer well when working together, he was more than happy to stay on to help catch Bryan up to speed, and I'm extremely thankful for that.

Always keep your people happy.

Lesson #7: Instant Results Are Awesome!

My absolutely favorite part about selling software is that people get what they pay for almost immediately. Once it's purchased, it's there and working for them once it's setup. Within 10 minutes, for example, you can get the Smart Podcast Player up and running and lookin' good on your website.

After the first day of the beta launch sale, I already saw customers using and enjoying the new players on their websites. It was SUCH as cool feeling.

When selling information, on the other hand, people have to buy the product, then they have to consume it, then they have to put it into action, and then typically the results vary widely from consumer to consumer. Many never even complete what they started out to do.

I've seen a lot of other entrepreneurs make a transition from infoproducts to the software business. Clay over at LeadPages and Gideon over at SplashEO are both great examples, although they both continue to provide a lot of amazing free information at the same time, which drives a lot of sales for their business. [Full Disclosure: I'm a compensated advisor and an affiliate for LeadPages.]

I get such a high seeing the player on other people's sites, and I can't wait for the next wave of emails to come in from people using it on their website too.

Also, a lot of people are using it in very innovative ways too! With the smart TRACK player—a single track player, a lot of people are using that to include podcast episodes in their regular blog posts when it's appropriate. That's what inspired much of the layout of my “Top 3 Everything” of 2014 post, which features 10 different podcast episodes across 2 different podcasts, all in one post using The Smart Podcast Player.

Again, I'm so proud of what the team has been able to built, and I can't wait for the next round of features we'll be putting into the software as well. I'm having so much fun with this, and I hope that you'll enjoying watching it all happen too.

Thank you so much for all of your support for The Smart Podcast Player and everything else I'm up to. I appreciate you!

Cheers!

The post The Smart Podcast Player Is Back! And My Top 7 Lessons from Building a Software Product appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

Market research, surveys, focus groups, middlemen, test markets—these are all things that people (and companies) spend a ton of money on to ensure that a new product they create with will become a winning product.

You and I—the bloggers, internet entrepreneurs and small online businesses owners of this world, can utilize many of the above strategies to ensure that whatever products we construct will become winners too. Whether it's for a future product such as an ebook, course, membership website or software (or even physical products if that's what you're into), we have the convenience of working online to easily and inexpensively conduct market research, create surveys, find focus groups and run test campaigns.

There is, however, one particular no-fail strategy that we can all use to create the next winning product.

To fill you in, I'm going to quote my new favorite book, Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson (full disclosure – I earn a commission if you purchase the book), who are the founders of Basecamp:

“The easiest, most straightforward way to create a great product or service is to make something you want to use.”

It's as simple as that.

When you “scratch your own itch,” as the authors like to call it, you accomplish several things:

You Solve Your Own Problems (And You're Not Alone!)

Because you're creating something for yourself, you're solving your own problems. If the product you create doesn't sell one copy or help anyone else, at least it has helped you, and that's something you can be happy about.

In most cases, however, there are hordes of people out there with the exact same problems that are looking for a solution just like the one you're building for yourself.

When I created GreenExamAcademy, all I was doing was building an online resource to help myself pass the LEED exam. I would have been happy just studying for the exam and passing the test, which I did. After several months, I discovered that thousands of other people were flocking to my site to help them pass the LEED exam too.

That's when I turned that site into my first online business.

You Become Your Own Customer

Part of the problem with creating a product is not fully understanding the exact needs and wants of your audience. Since you are essentially your own customer, you'll have a much easier time designing and delivering the content that needs to be delivered.

Many times, you'll hear people say “put yourself in the shoes of your customers.” Well, that won't be a problem since those shoes are yours.

When I created Ebooks the Smart Way, I created that book for myself. It includes everything I wanted to know back when I wrote my first ebook for GreenExamAcademy. Even though it was written after I had published my first two ebooks, I wrote it as if I had the ability to go back into time and give it to myself before I wrote my first one.

Not to toot my own horn, but people are telling me that Ebooks the Smart Way is one of the best and easiest to read guides on publishing and selling an ebook, which is exactly what I want it to be.

You Become Your Own Test Market

After you've completed a product for yourself, it's easy to test on your own and quickly make any necessary updates or changes.

If you're designing something for somebody else, it takes a lot of time to go back and forth between parties and even when changes are suggested, they are not always put into place correctly the first time around.

You Become The Proof

You may have heard this quote before:

“I'm not only the president, but I'm also a client.”

This famous motto is from the Hair Club for Men commercials, and is a perfect example of “you become the proof.”

If you can create a product for yourself and show that it works, you'll be more likely to get other people excited about that product too.

My Upcoming Special Project

The reason for writing this post, other than because Rework is one of the best books I've read in a long long time and I just had to expand on this particular idea of “scratching your own itch” here on the blog for you, is because I'm soon coming out with my own product and I'm definitely scratching my own itch. [Full Disclosure: That link leads to Amazon. As an affiliate, SPI Media receives compensation, at no additional cost to you, if you purchase through this link.]

I cannot disclose exactly what the product is just yet, and yes I'm partly trying to create buzz for it (I'm just being honest!), but here's what I can tell you now:

• This product is not an ebook, course or membership website about how to blog, make money online or anything like that. Even though I've been asked several times to create one (and people have offered to pay me if I created one, which is totally awesome, thank you!), I think that's just what everyone expects me to do next. Although I may eventually do something like that, I know that part of the reason why people follow me and why SPI has blown up is because I do things a little differently here, so I'll continue to step out of my comfort zone and try something different.
• The product is actually a WordPress Plugin that I so desperately need. There is nothing like it available today, but even if no one else downloads it, I'll be happy because it will save me hours a day, and make my life as a blogger and internet entrepreneur a whole lot easier.
• I've already found a plugin developer to work with me on this project, and it's underway as we speak.
• The few people I have discussed this project with (some who are A-list bloggers that I met at Blog World Expo), were really excited about it too.

Because it's for me, the mock-ups were really easy to design and I know once it's live on this blog, you'll see just how useful it can be.

I'm sorry to leave you hanging like that, but there will be more on this special project soon. Once it's revealed, you can be sure I'll go over the process with you from start to finish.

Thanks for your support, and I wish you all the best. Cheers!

The post The No-Fail Approach to Product Creation appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

This is the final part of the 4 part “How to Test Your Online Product Before It's Even Made” series.

In Part 1, we discovered how to know if a market even exists for our product idea. In Part 2, we learned how to figure out the benefits of our product and learned about the two-phase sales process. In Part 3, we learned about how to setup a squeeze page to capture leads to test our product, and here in Part 4 we'll be tackling how we can use a sales page to get even more defined results from our tests, all before we have a product actually made.

To recap, here's an illustration that shows exactly what we're up to:

I love my pen and tablet

Anyways, as you can see, we're basically conducting two tests based on the two-phase sales process. If we don't see a notable conversion rate for conversion test #1 (people entering the squeeze page vs. opting in to our email list), then we have a good indicator that we may not have a winning product. Of course, several versions of the squeeze page should be tested, but if we end up with a dead idea at this point, we've at least saved a lot of time by not spending months creating a product that may have never sold.

And If You Do See Some Conversions

If you do begin to see people opt-ing in to your email list, awesome. People are interested. You now have a couple of options:

1. You can begin to create the product. You now have something that tells you that your product idea matches some people's interest, and also that you're able to reach your target market too. Use the motivation you've gained by people opt-ing into your list to crank it out as soon as you can. Furthermore, you may want to utilize some of the people on your email list to help create the product itself to ensure that you're building it in a way the appeals to your target market. Make sure you somehow reward the people that do help you out.
2. You can continue by testing Phase 2. More on this below…

Step 4: The Sales Page Test

For some of you, a converting email list will be enough proof for you to pull the trigger and begin creating your product. However, for others, it may not be enough. As I previously mentioned in part 2:

“Your market can tell you exactly what they want. Your market can go even further to tell you that they would give you money for something you plan to offer. The brutal reality is that when the time comes to actually pay you, when it’s time for your market to pull out their wallets and enter their credit card information online, your market’s word means nothing.”

For those of you who want more…

In conversion test #2, we're going to take our traffic through the exact same process they would be going through if they were actually buying a product us, via a sales page. By tracking to see how many people end up clicking the “buy now” or “add to cart” buttons, we can see exactly how many people would of taken out their wallets and paid.

When you do end up with conversions at this stage, you'd better get your product created NOW, because there are people waiting to pay you for it. All the more motivation to get it done

So, how does it work?

Here's the trick:

When people click the “buy now” button, or “add to cart” button, it doesn't send them to a page where they fill out their billing information. We don't have an actual product yet, so why would we?

Rather, it sends them to a page that tells them that the product is currently unavailable. We can track how many people reach this page through a conversion funnel in Google Analytics, or any other website tracking tool that you're used to. If you're using Google Optimizer to test different versions of your sales page (as you should be), then that will keep track of the conversions for you as well.

This is the best way to test if people would actually pay you for a product without actually having a product.

But, that's not cool!

You may be thinking that it's kind of mischievous to offer a product to someone and then tell them it's unavailable. Well, don't worry because this happens all of the time. Have you ever tried to buy something, only to see that it's on back-order or sold out? I have, but I don't remember when and where that happened.

Now, have you ever been offered a special bonus or discount on the product because it wasn't available? Probably not, but that's exactly what we're going to do. Here's why:

• We should give the people that reach this point something because they were kind enough to be a part of our little test. We don't tell them that, but they'll be happy to receive a discount on the product in the future once it's created.
• These people are highly targeted customers. They already proved to us that they want to pay, so we better make sure we get them back here once our product is ready.
• It will decrease the chances of people changing their minds when your product does become available.
• It may also help to gather some buzz for your product. Traffic that reaches this point may inform others about the special bonus or discount offer for trying to get the product early.

We can offer a discount by showing them a coupon code that they will need to enter into the shopping cart once the product does become available, but there's an even better way:

We can have an opt-in form for a separate email list on this page that you can use to contact these people directly. Aside from being a way to ensure the people who reach your “deal page” get the discount code, you can use your email list to let them know exactly when your product is available.

The Sales Page

Unfortunately, the topic of the sales page is far too big to include in this post. I plan to write a blog post in the near future about the sales page, but I definitely recommend hiring a copywriter, or using the sample sales page from Yanik Silver's Moonlighting on the Internet book [This link leads to Amazon. Full disclosure: I earn a commission if you purchase through this link] , which I did have some success with myself.

That being said, I hope you understand the objective of using this method, and how it can really show us how successful a product idea can be without actually having the product created.

No Conversions?

If you've setup your sales page, sending traffic to it from your blog, from social media, and your existing email list, but you aren't converting, there may be a few things going on:

1. Your sales page isn't structured properly. You may want to ask people to read it for you and give you feedback, or look into hiring someone to optimize it for you if you haven't yet.
2. Your tracking may not be setup correctly. It's a fairly common issue, which I've actually experienced myself. Double and triple check your tracking codes and tools to make sure the data your getting is accurate. You may want to ask a couple friends to go through the process for you so you can see if your tools are picking them up.
3. You just may not have a good enough offer. You know people are interested (based on conversion test #1), but maybe your price is too high, or your bonuses aren't convincing, or your product just doesn't have enough value. At this point, you may want to hit your existing email list with a survey. You know you've sent them to your sales page already, so you can use a survey service like SurveyMonkey.com to conduct an anonymous survey with your list to see exactly where you're going wrong. (In the settings in Aweber, you can set it up so that people who do reach your “deal page” and opt-in for the discount code get automatically taken off this original list. You don't want to ask the people who did click on the “buy now” buttons why they weren't interested, when in fact they were).

In my opinion, if you're got interest on your squeeze page, you should be able to convert them into sales. What's nice is that if you do see conversions on your sales page, you not only have some crazy motivation to start and finish creating your product, but your squeeze page and sales page are already finished and proven to work!

Cheers!

I hope you have enjoyed this series. I know there are a few holes, such as the sales page itself, which I do plan to address later, but I hope you can now see that it is possible to test your product ideas before you actually invest a significant amount of time to it.

Thank you all for your wonderful comments and inspiration, as well as the birthday wishes! I just turned 27 yesterday, but wanted to make sure I finished this post for you today.

Lastly, if you have yet to subscribe to the blog, you can do so by clicking here.

I wish you nothing less than success.

The post How to Test Your Online Product before It’s Even Made – Part 4: The Sales Page Test appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

This is Part 3 of 4 of the “How To Test Your Online Product Before It's Even Made” series.

In Part 1, we made sure a market exists for our product. In Part 2, we discovered the features and benefits of our future product and deconstructed the philosophy behind the “two-phase” sales process. Here in Part 3, we're going to take a closer look at the first phase of the sales process, which is all about lead capture.

In order to convince a person to take a big action, it's easier if we get them to take a smaller action first. We know this already. This is why we get free samples, why we are encouraged to test drive, and why we want to capture email leads.

For the purpose of testing our ideas for future online products, if we can't get people to be interested in what we have to offer and simply sign up for an email list (the small action), then there's no point in creating the sales page and/or the product itself. If they don't want to test drive the car, they are not going to buy it.

So Why Email for Our Test?

You might be wondering why we're so interested in capturing email leads at this point more than anything else. Why don't we just track to see if people reach a certain page, or click a certain button?

There are two specific reasons:

Reason #1 is because clicking a button and reaching a certain page is too easy. It's almost second nature for most of us. When we see a dark blue underlined piece of text like this, we automatically want to click on it. Did you just try?

So, if it's second nature for most people, then it's not a great indicator for people's interest and the possibility of buying from us. It may be a small indicator, but not really.

Reason #2 is because if we do capture an email lead, which takes a certain amount of thinking and processing of information from the person filling in their name and email address, we can follow up with that person if we do end up creating a sales page and a product in the future. You can't go back to those who clicked a certain button or went to a certain page, but you can always contact people on your email list. No waste.

How Do We Capture Email Addresses?

There are several email marketing software companies available to choose from, but the email service from ConvertKit is the one that I recommend. [Full Disclosure: I'm a compensated advisor and an affiliate for ConvertKit.]

For this post, we're more concerned with getting people to take that first small action and signing up for our email list. Consequently, I won't be covering what you should be writing in your follow up emails, but I will definitely cover that in a later blog post.

As far as setup and creating your opt-in forms for your website, ConvertKit does a fantastic job of walking you through the process.

Step 3: Setting Up The Lead Capture Process

The rest of this post is dedicated to illustrating how we can setup a “squeeze page” to properly test and capture email addresses for our product. To me, the page gets it's name because we're taking traffic to a certain page, and “squeezing” them into an email list.

If you have a blog or website where you can place an opt-in form in your sidebar, that's great. Your sidebar is a perfect place for an opt-in form, but for the sake of this test, we're going to leave it out.

The reason for this decision is because we want to see results and numbers that come directly from the features and benefits of our product, not just because there's an opt-in form that shows up in the sidebar. For this same reason, we will not be offering a freebie, or “lead magnet”, because many times people will only sign up to get a free gift. Remember, we want to see raw results from the product we're going to offer. Once we know the product will sell, we can introduce the sidebar opt-in form and lead magnets to get as many people into the sales funnel as possible. We don't want any false data.

I love how this is starting to sound like a science experiment. In a way, it actually is.

Squeeze Page Theory

There are said to be “proven” methods and tactics to optimize squeeze pages. I will cover most of these next, but realize that the only way you'll know what works best for you is to literally test different strategies against each other. We'll talk more about that in a bit.

Here are some basic “squeeze page” theories:

1. No Choices

The primary function of a squeeze page is to get people to opt-in—that's it. Because of this, we want to remove any other action that the visitor could possibly take. Advertisements, links, and navigation items should be taken out. We're basically leaving them no choice but to either opt-in, or leave.

2. Nothing Fancy

This is one of those cases where less is definitely more. The more graphics, dazzle and glitz we put on our squeeze page, the more distractions there will be. The focus should be on the content of the page and the opt-in area.

3. Continuity

Many people say that a squeeze page should have absolutely no graphics at all, but I think that's a mistake. At least for me, I think a squeeze page with a simple header that has graphics similar to our other pages will help keep a sense of continuity throughout the entire process. I'd like for them to know that they are still on our website.

4. What Goes Where

Since most people read from left to right, we want our content on the left hand side of the page. Our opt-in area should be in the upper right hand corner, and everything should be above the fold.

(Remember, “above the fold” means the reader can see everything without having to scroll down).

If for some reason you cannot place everything above the fold, it's wise to place a second opt-in form (for the same list), below the fold as well. This way, you can make it easier for the people who do scroll down.

5. Your Content

The content of your squeeze page is the most important element of this phase of testing, and probably the hardest thing to figure out. For help, we can use the list of features and benefits that we created in the previous post.

If you have the resources, I definitely recommend finding a copywriter or hiring one for this quick project. He or she will definitely use the list you created to write you some killer content for your squeeze page.

Your content should include:

• An Attention Grabbing Headline: The headline is usually placed in large red text at the top of the page, and is used to “hook them in.”
• 1 or 2 Questions Directed to the Reader: These questions should address the top concerns that your target audience has in your niche. These are usually placed below the header on the left hand side of the page.
• 3 or 4 Things Your Product Can Do For Them: Usually in bullet form, underneath the questions, you're going to answer the questions you just asked using the benefits from your list. Don't worry about the features—your readers don't care about them. Remember, all they care about is “What's in it for me?”
• A Call To Action: This is really important. You're going to ask them to sign up for your email list to get more information about your product. If you don't ask, they will not sign up.

Things to remember:

• You don't want to mention any specifics or features about your product just yet. All we're doing is creating excitement about your product, and making them want more.
• Don't mention the name of your product, if you even have one yet. The name is probably the last thing you should worry about, but for some reason it's what we all want to figure out first. There's really no need to mention it here.
• Again, less is more. If it looks like an essay, they're not going to read it, which is why the bullet points work so well. They're easy to read and straight to the point.

6. Your Opt-In Form

The opt-in form, which is located on the right hand side of the page, doesn't have to be fancy either. As long as there is a call to action, a name field and an email field, you have exactly what you need.

Lastly, you should somehow mention that you won't be selling, distributing, or spamming their email addresses.

Other Options for Content

The content piece of your squeeze page does not have to be just text. In fact, many people are using audio and video in their squeeze pages now because it adds a little more personality to the page.

If possible, I would recommend testing all three forms of content at the same time. You can use Google Optimizer to send equal amounts of traffic to each and see which one performs better for your audience. This way, we can make sure we've covered all of our bases so we don't assume that we have a dead product when people would actually respond better to a video instead of text.

You could also test different headlines, font sizes, and bullet points—anything you want!

A Final Word About the Squeeze Page

These theories for the design and content of your squeeze pages should give you the best chance to determine whether or not your product will be something that your audience will be interested in, in the least amount of time. Remember though, that these are theories (although they have been tested on several sites and mentioned by a lot of other internet marketers). The only true way to know if a certain setup for a squeeze page works for you is to tweak and test your ideas for yourself.

Sending Traffic To Your Squeeze Page

Once you setup your squeeze page, your job is to send traffic to it and let your page do all the work. You can use the features on Google Optimizer, Google Analytics, or even a url shortener like bit.ly to track the numbers for you. I prefer Optimizer or Analytics because you can set it up to see the exact percentage of how many people signed up for your list, vs. how many people viewed the page. If you're testing different versions, as you should be, then all you need is Optimizer.

Here is a list of some of the ways that you can send traffic to your squeeze page:

• Links via Twitter.
• Links in your sidebar. (This is ok here, because they still opt-in on a separate page after reading your content)
• Links after your blog posts (in a highlighted box!)
• Links on your Facebook page.
• Place a link in an existing email list.
• Ask a friend to tweet or blast a link for you.
• Paid Advertising via Google Adwords and Facebook

Regarding the paid advertising, think about this: it's a lot cheaper to spend $250 for traffic now, than to work on a project for 3-6 months that doesn't sell as expected.

If you get a lot of signups, that's a great sign! Plus, your email list will continue to grow. If you don't see very many sign-ups, then you either need to tweak something on your page, and if that doesn't work, you may have to dump your product idea and move on to the next. Better to know now, than later.

The lead generation factor is a good indicator of customer interest in the product that you want to sell. Some may even suggest to stop here, and get your product created at this point.

In the next step, for those of you who want to be absolutely sure about your product, we're basically going to setup a real live sales page. I'll show you how that works in the next post.

Thanks again everyone, you have no idea how much I appreciate your time, attention, and your comments. Cheers!

Click here to read the last part of this series.

The post How to Test Your Online Product before It’s Even Made – Part 3: Lead Capture appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

This is Part 2 of the “How to Test Your Online Product Before It's Even Made” series.

In Part 1, we discussed how we can make sure a market exists for our product. Here in Part 2, we're going to dissect the nature of our product, and prepare it in a way so that we'll be able to gauge exactly how it will be accepted once it enters the market.

Your market can tell you exactly what they want. Your market can go even further to tell you that they would give you money for something you plan to offer. The brutal reality is that when the time comes to actually pay you, when it's time for your market to pull out their wallets and enter their credit card information online, your market's word means nothing.

People backing out of their word online is a fairly common occurrence. In person, it's much harder to go against your word because—well, it's done in person. But online, people seem to throw around words a lot more without actually following through.

Therefore, simply asking your email list, your Twitter followers, or your blog subscribers if they would pay for a product that you are going to create simply will not work. Many people are too nice and say they will pay, but they don't.

So instead, you have to take some of them through a very specific funnel, which mimics the real buying process, to actually get some tangible numbers and proof that your product will actually sell. I'd like to give credit to Tim Ferriss (full disclosure – I earn a commission if you purchase) for writing about a similar “tester” sales funnel in his book, although I've taken it much further and have broken it down into a two-phase process. You'll see why…

Step 2: Make a List of Your Product's Features and Benefits

Even though this series is about how to test your product before it's even made, you still have to have a good understanding about the product you want to create. Don't waste your time on the name, what font you're going to use, or what the cover will look like. That's not important right now. The only thing you should worry about are the product's features, and the product's benefits.

Features vs. Benefits

No, they are not the same thing. I think every entrepreneur struggles at one point in their lives trying to make sense of the difference between the two. Here is my attempt.

A feature is a special fact about something. A benefit is what that fact can do for someone.

A feature: my house has solar panels.

The benefit: I save money on my electricity bill.

A feature: A home gym folds up and fits under the bed.

The benefit: You don't have to waste space in your room with ugly gym equipment while you're not using it.

A feature: My blog has a step-by-step series about how to test your online product before it's even made.

The benefit: So you don't have to waste your time and money completing a project that may produce less than expected results.

Which do you think is more important: the feature, or the benefit?

Have you ever heard of the expression, “What's in it for me?” It's basically what any customer in any niche wants to know. The features really don't matter—it's the benefits that they provide that do.

If you're still struggling trying to figure out what the benefits of your product would be, here's a super cool trick. Take any feature of your future product, and add the words “which helps you…” on the end of it, and finish the sentence. You now have your benefit. Examples:

The house has solar panels, which helps you save money on your electricity bill.

A home gym folds up and fits under the bed, which helps you save space in your room when you're not using it.

My product has X, which helps you Y and Z.

Make a list of as many features and benefits as you can. We'll be using this list in our later steps. I just wanted you to start thinking about it now if you haven't already.

A Two-Phase Process

It's fairly common to break down a sales funnel into a two phase process. In phase one, we engage with potential customers, seeking out those who would be interested in learning more. In phase two, we present the solution and our product to those people.

The reason this works so well is because by engaging with potential customers we establish a relationship with those people first, which is necessary before any type of selling should occur. Like I've mentioned in previous posts, you can't just go up to someone you just met and expect them to buy whatever it is your trying to sell.

A relevant story:

About a year ago, once I started making some good money online, I decided to invest about $800 into affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is neat because you're selling someone else's product and earning a nice commission for each sale. You don't even need a website to begin. All you need to do is send someone to a product through your own special link, and if they buy that product, you get money. Sounds good, right?

So, I signed up for ClickBank and found a number of interesting, high-commission items that I wanted to promote. I also signed up for a Google Adwords account, which would allow me to place the “hoplink” into an ad. If that ad was clicked, it would send the customer to an already prepared sales page. With Adwords, you pay only each time your ads are clicked. I was so ready to earn some easy cash.

I spent an initial $400, which was about 600-650 actual clicks on my ads (over thousands and thousands of impressions), and I didn't even get one sale. Not even one.

Terrible.

Pathetically, I emailed Clickbank because I thought there was some kind of mistake. Hah! How lame is that? Of course, there was no mistake…except for the fact that I didn't know anything about how to be a good affiliate marketer.

Since I had $400 left in my affiliate marketing budget, I decided to spend half of that on learning more about affiliate marketing. I bought some books, and even a couple months in a membership website, and I learned one very valuable strategy:

First, setup a “squeeze page” to capture email addresses, and THEN send those people on your email list to your sales page.

When I first heard about this, it seemed to contradict what I learned when I first started doing business online: the more pages, clicks and time it takes for a potential customer to get to your end product, the more chance there is of that person leaving during the process. So, it was weird to me that people were adding on this additional step in the process, but after some more research and discussion with others about it, it makes perfect sense.

Like I said before, it's a way to engage customers upfront without hard-selling them anything right away. Also, when a potential customer fills out the email opt-in form, it's like a mini-transaction that takes place, which sort of prepares that person for more information and more transactions in the future.

So, I went on the hunt for a few affiliate products that had their own squeeze pages setup already. I spent my last $200 sending clicks to the squeeze page, and wouldn't you know, I got 6 sales. Yes, it's only 6 sales, but at around $30 each, I nearly made up the $200 I spent on Google Adwords.

Needless to say, pay per click affiliate marketing is not for me, however, I'm really glad I spent that money to learn some valuable lessons about internet marketing along the way.

A squeeze page for an offer isn't necessary in order to do well at affiliate marketing. As Ian mentions below in the first comment, there are people out there doing extremely well the old-fashioned way.

So how does this help us?

First, it shows that we should be using a two-phase process in our sales funnel. Secondly, in our test, we can separate each part, and not move on to the next until it's proven that we should.

In other words, we'll test the lead capture phase first. If that doesn't go so well, there's no point in continuing, and we'd save a ton of time, frustration, and disappointment.

If it does go well, we know we have people who are interested in what we have to offer. We'll then take them through the second phase, and using analytics and tracking, determine if they would actually reach the point of paying for your product. I know it sounds confusing now, but I'll show you how it's done in the next post.

Of course, we'll have to test several versions of the lead capture process, (which I'll talk about in the next post as well), so we don't base our decision off of one “bad egg”.

I know this particular post doesn't have as many “go here” and “click this” and “try that” as the others in the series, but I feel it was necessary to give you this background information before we actually put this stuff into action. I hope you agree.

As always, thank you for your attention. Cheers!

Click here to read Part 3 of 4.

The post How to Test Your Online Product before It’s Even Made – Part 2: The Two-Phase Process appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

The purpose of this 3 or 4 post series is to save you time and money. I'll take you though the steps you can use to determine if your new idea or product that you want to create will be worth your time and effort.

Which guy would you rather be?

Jim, who spends a year creating a membership website for a certain niche that he believes would love his product;

Or Jeff, who spends a month testing his niche market, only to find out his idea for a product would have totally bombed.

I choose Jeff. Why?

Because when doing any kind of business, there's a HUGE difference between what you believe, and what you know. And here's the ugly truth—what you believe means nothing. Your gut feeling can only take you so far. Jim's beliefs may or may not turn out to be profitable for him. Jeff knows his idea is not going to work, so he'll move on to the next until he finds one that does.

So how do you know for sure if your idea will be successful or not, before you begin investing a significant amount of time creating your product?

Step 1: Make Sure a Market Exists

The first thing you have to do is make sure a market for your product exists. That means there are people who are interested in what you have to say, and on top of that, willing to pay for the kind of information you have to offer. If you end up finding out that a market does not exist, you've already saved yourself a lot of time.

“But Pat! My idea is totally revolutionary, and nothing like it has ever been done before!!!”

Here's my two-part response to that:

1) Is that what you know, or just what you believe? And,

2) Are you sure you want to create the first kind of something?  As Seth Godin says in Free Prize Inside (full disclosure – I earn a commission if you purchase), “version 1.0” of most things end up failing. Think about Napster, Friendster, and even the Segway. Innovate and be remarkable in a proven niche, and you'll be more predictably successful.

Moving on. Here are the key indicators you should look at to determine if your ideas have a market or not:

Google Advertisements

Type in keywords related to your idea into Google Search. If you see paid advertisements on the results page (see below), then that's a good sign there is a market for that particular niche. Read each one carefully to see exactly what they are about.

Competition

If there are other websites doing something similar to what you had in mind, then a market for your product idea obviously exists. You may have even noticed some of your potential future competitors in the paid ads that showed up in your Google Keyword Search. Don't Worry! This is a good thing. We can later use information from the websites and products of our competitors to our advantage, but we'll save that for a later blog post. Just remember—competition is good, both for you and for the consumer.

Amazon

Do a quick search at Amazon.com for any books or other items related to your product idea. If you end up with results in your search, again—don't worry. Like I mentioned before, this just confirms that there is a market for your product.

Check out the top books and read the reviews. The more reviews there are, the better, because this confirms that people are actually paying money for this kind of information. After reading through the negative reviews, is there anything you should make sure you include in your product so that you don't get the same responses from your future customers?

Forums

Here's a cool trick.

For whatever niche you're looking into, type into Google Search: “Forum:Niche“, where Niche is the name of your particular niche, or a related keyword. For the example below, we're going to use “mountain biking tips”.

You'll end up with a list of all of the most popular online forums related to that niche. Click on the first few and browse around a little. Here are a few questions to ask yourself as you do this:

• Is there a lot of conversation going on? How many posts or threads exist within the forum?
• When was the latest post? This will help you determine how active people are in the forum.
• What are people talking about? Are there any sections within the forum related to your idea or product?
  • Ninja Tip: Do a search within the forum itself for certain keywords that relate to your idea and see what you come up with. You may need to register for the forum in order to perform a search, depending on the admin's settings.
• Is there anything you may want to add to your product or idea that you see in the forum? Please make note for future reference.

Quantcast

Here's a cooler trick.

In the search field at Quantcast.com, type in the url of one of the forums that you visited. Here's our result for bikeforums.net:

You now have an exact profile of the kinds of people who are interested in your niche. In less than 10 seconds, we know their:

• Gender
• Age
• Ethnicity
• Number of Children
• Income Level; and
• Education Level

Take note of the income level that comes up from your search. If most are in the $0-3ok range, you might want to think about a different market. In the mountain biking market, it's no surprise that most are in the $60-100k range—some of those bikes are really expensive! We know these people have money to spend.

On the left hand side of your Quantcast results page, click on “Geographic” to see exactly where they are located (this feature is not available for some sites):

Would you benefit from geo-targeting your product? Are there specific things you have to learn about a certain region in order to make your product successful?

Next, on the right hand side of Quantcast, you can see what other sites these people have been to as well:

Not only does this information help us confirm that there is a number of people who may be interested in our product, but it will help us in the future when we start advertising and writing copy.

Online Commercial Intention

Lastly, I'd like to cover something called Online Commercial Intention, or OCI. According to Market Samurai, “OCI is an indicator of the chances that someone searching for a keyword is looking to buy as opposed to browsing for information.”

Market Samurai, a paid tool, is an excellent keyword research device which actually spits out the OCI as one of the results for each keyword that you analyze. You can, however, enter keywords one-by-one into the tool at the Microsoft AdCenter Labs here.

Enter your niche keywords (try as many as you'd like), and you'll get an idea of how many people are “just looking”, vs. how many people are “looking to buy”. I wouldn't base my decision to move ahead with a niche or not based on this tool alone, but it is a somewhat reliable indicator for commercial intent which may play a role in the later steps in this series.

Coming up…

Of course, there's a lot more than just knowing there's a market out there for your product. In the next post, we'll discover how we can get closer to knowing exactly how your target audience will react to your idea or product.

Cheers!

For Part 2 of this Series, Click Here.

The post How to Test Your Online Product before It’s Even Made – Part 1: Making Sure a Market Exists appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

If you don't master this one thing, you will fail in earning a passive income online. What am I talking about? It's something called automation. I like to say that automation is Passive Income's best friend. Without automation, there is no real passive income. Let me give you some examples:

You work for a company. You work X hours, and you get paid X dollars. Are you earning a passive income? Obviously not. Next…

You own a small store at the mall. Customers come into your doors, find an item they like, pay your employed cashier, and leave happy. Are you earning a passive income? No. You're still working and probably putting in a certain amount of hours each day. As a “brick and mortar” store owner, you may be working less in your store, but you're working hard making sure your products are stocked, employees are paid, books are kept, managing your employees, etc. Next…

You sell figurines on Ebay. You start an auction, people find your figurines and place bids. The winners pay you automatically each time through Paypal. Are you earning a passive income? Nope. Once you get paid, you have to manually package and ship the item at the post office. Then, hopefully it gets there in one piece. Next…

You own a website online that sells toys. You don't have any inventory as the toys are drop-shipped to customers by the manufacturer. Customers find your website, purchase toys with an online billing form and payments are automatically processed and the money gets placed into your business bank account. You tell the manufacturer the addresses of the customers and their orders, and the manufacturer ships the items out for you. Are you earning a passive income? Not yet. You are still needed in order for transactions to be completed.

None of these example are examples of an automatic business model.

An Example of Automation

Here is a true life basic example of how an entire transaction process is fully automated to provide a passive income. Below, you'll see a flow chart of how I make money on my blog at greenexamacademy.com. Notice where I am in the equation:

I am NO WHERE within the equation in any part of the transaction. In the wise words of Timothy Ferriss of The 4-Hour Workweek [This link leads to Amazon. Full disclosure: As an affiliate, I earn a commission if you buy through this link.]:

“I am not a tollbooth through which anything needs to pass. I am more like a police officer on the side of the road who can step in if need be…”

—Timothy Ferriss, pg. 187

This work flow is truly automated because I could do anything I want and sales would keep going through.

I still answer emails from customers, and if one part of the cycle brakes down or stopped working for some reason, I'd have to step in and work around it. But the fact is, I'm not needed to complete the transaction and earn money.

(I could hire someone to manage all customer service emails as well as make sure everything was still working correctly, but I'm not at that stage yet. Still—I wake up each morning with sales, and it's because of this business model.)

Note that membership websites also fit this business model.

Scalability

Another way to find out if a business model is truly automated and earning a passive income is to see if it's scalable. That means if I sell 10 items in one day or 100,000 items in one day (which would be sweet), I wouldn't be any more involved either way.

Take a look at my flow chart. If 100,000 customers came through and bought my ebook, I wouldn't have any problem handling that kind of influx. Now thinking back to the examples at the beginning of this post, you would not be able to handle that many customers at once. Passive income and automation is scalable.

Is Writing on eHow an Example of Automation?

Editor's Note: This portion of the post is very dated. We no longer recommend eHow as a method of generating passive income.

In my thoughts, the actual act of writing on eHow.com is a step toward creating an automatic passive income generator. Having articles already written on eHow is somewhat synonymous to having my ebook already written and on sale.

Here is a flow chart for you eHow writers out there:

As you can very well see, YOU are out of the “transaction” equation as well. As long as you have articles written on eHow, everything is automatic and you are earning a passive income.

Other Assessments that Can Be Made

First, let's look at this flow chart. It's the same flow chart as my ebook example from above, but instead with YOU in it, (because this is really all about how you can improve your earnings and lifestyle). This is what you should aim for:

I will eventually give you the details about each part of this chart, but for now, let's analyze how we can increase your earnings with this business model:

1. Increase the amount of customers: The more customers you have, the more people see your webpage and ultimately buy your product. This can be done by advertising, promotion, testing content, publicity, luck, etc.
2. Increase how much money comes out of your sales page: To do this, you can either increase the price of your current product, or create an entirely new product to sell along with it. If it's an ebook, why not create an audio guide too? That's my plan…
3. Duplicate the entire equation: Since you're not involved within the transaction, you can start a whole new project and do the same thing in another niche. Then you'll have 2, 3, 4 or more of these all running at once, and you can continue to sit back and relax (or go to Fiji with all the new money you're making. And while you're there, you're still making money…awesome).

To The Readers

I hope this has shown you the power of automation and how it is the basis for all passive income that is made online. More automation equals more passive, and less YOU. This way, you can earn money while spending more time doing things that you want to do. The technology and services are out there to make your life a lot easier—why not use them?

If you have an online business already, try and draw a flow chart and see where you fit into your own business model. How often are YOU “a part of the equation”?

If you aren't at this point yet, I'd like to know what you think. Does it all make sense to you and can you see the benefits of implementing such a business model? Is it something you'd like to do in the future? There's no right or wrong answer here. Some people like to be on the front lines and in the trenches while running their businesses.

I hope you enjoyed this post. Until next time!

The post The One Thing You Must Know About Passive Income—or Else! appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

My first full day of being laid off was absolutely a waste. I didn't even leave the house or change out of my pajamas. Not because I was sad or depressed, but because I sat in front of my computer all day thinking of my next money making idea.

The problem with me is that when I start generating hundreds of ideas in my head, I don't organize my thoughts. In general, things that are organized are successful. For me to have successful and organized ideas, I must find a way to organize the generation of those ideas in my head, before they are even thought through. I found that the best way to do this is to draw a mind map

What's a Mind Map?

According to wikipedia:

A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.

The perfect tool for generating business ideas. There is actually a program called FreeMind that helps you with mind mapping on the computer, but I'd rather do this on paper.

How Mind Maps Work

The best part about a mind map is that as you're generating ideas, the mind map expands them for you automatically. Plus, it's like documenting what's going on in your brain so you see the progression and flow of your thoughts.

I'm thinking about writing and selling another E-Book. The success I had with my first E-Book leads me to believe it has the absolute best profit-margin for any product that I could sell. 100% of the sale goes directly to me. Sweet. There's actually a great article from Darren on Problogger about Mind Mapping for Ebooks, which is where I first learned about the power of this tool.

So here is my actual Mind Map I created today. Disclaimer: When drawing up a Mind Map, you shouldn't edit while doing it or leave any ideas out. That “dumb” idea could actually be your most profitable, so just spill your mind.

I've highlighted the central ideas for you, and you can see how the ideas expand from there. Looking at my Mind Map, I can see I have some potential ideas here. I could write about how to draft on AutoCad and include tips and tricks with instructions on how to work faster. I could write an E-Book about how to negotiate a salary or what to do when you get laid off. The possibilities are endless with this list. You can easily create your own, and see what your Mind Map tells you.

Now of course, I'll be doing more research on the specific topics in my Mind Map, to see which ones have the most potential. I'll go over this in a later post, but for now, just know that there is a lot of potential in each and every one of us. Just think about what you do during your day. What are you good at? Or on the other hand, what do you wish you had to make your day easier?

You Don't Have to Be an Expert

You might look at your ideas and just shrug because you start thinking, “how will anyone pay me for this kind of stuff? I'm not even an expert!” My answer is, people will pay you. If you offer something people want, even though you're not an expert, they will buy it.

It just may be an E-book that organizes information that's already known or out there. I'd pay for something if it made my life easier, definitely. Don't get yourself down, and in my next post, I'll talk about how to do research to see which of your ideas has the most potential.

The post How to Start Making Money Online with Mind Maps appeared first on Smart Passive Income.