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In today’s Q&A, we are helping Amanda figure out how to validate her idea before she spends a lot of time and money developing her digital product.
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Resources Mentioned in this Episode
- Today’s expert is Michael O’Neal from solopreneurhour.com
- Our episode with Michael O’Neal
- Evernote
- Michael’s product called Sololab
- Tim Ferris
- Screw the Nine to Five
Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to an Expert Q&A with S&J. Today’s expert is Michael O’Neal of The Solopreneur Hour podcast and solopreneurhour.com.
Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to another Q&A with S&J mini-podcast. Today we have an Expert Q&A and we are super-excited to welcome back Michael O’Neal of The Solopreneur Hour podcast and solohour.com. Michael, welcome back to the show, man!
MICHAEL: Hey guys! So good to be back, I appreciate you having me on again.
JOCELYN: Yeah, we are excited for you to answer another question –
MICHAEL: Appreciate chya! Does that sound better?
JOCELYN: Yeah, that’s better.
SHANE: I told somebody we were on your show and I said, I swear he had a drawl at the end of that; we sucked him into the south, man.
MICHAEL: I’m ready, I’ll do the whole show like this. I don’t mind.
JOCELYN: All right well, Amanda of teachsheetz.com says, “How do I validate my idea with my audience? I want to tell teachers about my Teach Sheetz website I’m currently working, on which can be used to create customized board sheets. Instead of sifting through the millions of options online, they can customize their own worksheet in under five minutes, using a site that has a functionality of Canva. I think this is a great idea but how can validate it with my target market? How do I know others can think it’s a good idea before I spent all the time selling it? I don’t have a huge audience, what do I do?”
SHANE: This is a huge question we get Michael, and I’m really interested to see what you think about this because most of the time when I hear people get frustrated and quit online marketing, it’s because they spend a month creating a product and nobody bought it. So Mike, how do you look at an idea and validate that in your business before you spend all that time, you know, creating something that nobody may even want?
MICHAEL: I have an answer for both scenarios: One being that you have no list, no platform and one being that you have some list and some platform. So, the no-list and no-platform, here’s one misnomer I think people have about online marketing in general is that everything has to be done online. And when you have more time than money, you can afford, time-wise, to actually go talk to people and if she is already immersed in the teaching community – I think a lot of times, when people come out with ideas for very, very niche businesses or products, it’s because they are totally immersed in that –
SHANE: They are the market basically.
MICHAEL: They are the market. She’s creating something for herself in this case. So, she has to go out and literally go find some of herself which is, don’t do it super-casually, don’t be like, ‘Hey, you want to come to happy hour at six o’clock and we’ll have a chat’. It’s like no, find ten of your friends at least that are in the situation you are in and ask them, ask them what are your challenges here and how would you – I have this idea; however, before I tell you my idea, this is very important like what order you do this in.
SHANE: Right.
MICHAEL: I have an idea but before I tell you the idea, what would you do to customize your worksheets? I don’t understand what I’m –
SHANE: Right.
MICHAEL: – saying right now.
SHANE: Sure, just makes total sense though.
MICHAEL: Right, so what would you do, or how would you solve this problem and let them tell you and say, ‘Okay, that’s great feedback’ and she’ll put it in her Evernote and say, ‘Here’s an idea I had’, and run it by them and go, ‘What do you think of that?” And they’ll tell you and then you say, ‘How can I improve upon this idea initially?’ They’ll tell you and then say, ‘How much is this worth to you?’ If someone could come out with a package or a plan that said, ‘Hey, this is exactly what’s going to be offered, how much is it worth to you?’ Let them tell you the price, don’t tell them ahead of time what the price is because they might – the market might be way higher or lower than your idea was.
SHANE: Sure.
MICHAEL: And so, don’t leave money on the table. And then once that’s done, you say, ‘Okay, if I created this –’, like let’s say, hypothetically, this thing was done on Friday; if I came to you and said, ‘Okay, this thing is ready, are you 100% in, or are you a maybe, are you a definitely maybe or are you an out?’ And you collect as many yeses as is required for you to say, ‘Okay, this is viable for me now’. I’ll give you the example of my – I have a group coaching called Sololab and Sololab was born because I had enough listeners that said, ‘Hey, like the show, really like what you say, do you teach in any way?’ But there was enough that I was like, man, I can’t take on these many individual clients –
SHANE: Sure.
MICHAEL: – so, let me create a place where we can all hang out and be in this group mastermind and so, I called it Sololab. And I started talking about it on the show and started mentioning it and then I said, you know, I’m gonna create a landing page and just see what happens. So my strategy was, and this is what you do when you have a little bit of a platform, the conversation is the same but the execution is a little different. So what I did is, I mentioned on the show a few times, I said, ‘Hey if you are interested in up-leveling your business or creating your first business and you want to join Sololab, go to this page’. And I sent them to a landing page and when they got to that landing page, there was a little form to fill out that was kind of a quick little pre-qualification form; name, email, what are you interested in, what’s your favorite thing blah-blah-blah. And then they would hit ‘Submit’ and then on the following page, the ‘Thank you’ page, I had a scheduler. I used scheduleone.com and they would schedule a quick, 15-minute Skype session with me and I did that three separate times. So I had three separate days and I had something like 43 Skype sessions or something like that.
SHANE: And you just did this to like talk to those people in your audience and like –
MICHAEL: This is before I did anything.
SHANE: Yeah.
MICHAEL: This is before I lifted a finger, spent a dime, did anything. I talked to 43 people, I had a rough outline of what I wanted to do with Sololab but here was the crazy part is that after those 43 calls, I had a completely different implementation of Sololab than what I was going to do.
SHANE: Wow.
MICHAEL: In fact, the one I’d come out with was way more complicated, like it was way deeper and richer than what they actually wanted. You know what I launched with? A Facebook page, a group, a Facebook group.
SHANE: Just to get them in there, yeah.
MICHAEL: That was it. That was the only thing I launched with, a Facebook group and that was worth $297 a quarter.
SHANE: Just to get in? Just to join the group? Oh that’s genius, dude!
MICHAEL: Just to get in and at the end of that Skype, I said, ‘Are you a definite yes, a definite maybe, a definite no if I do this next week?’ I got about 15 yeses and from that I said, okay, if I can launch with ten people, this will be –
SHANE: A valid idea basically.
MICHAEL: Yeah, a valid idea. So I put it out on December 6th, I hit go and I got 12 orders right away. So, 3600 bucks in the first 20 minutes.
SHANE: Wow.
MICHAEL: And I was like, all right, I’m in biz.
SHANE: Now I can start making all those things that you –
MICHAEL: Now I can start, yeah, doing other things. But I’ll be honest, even with that, I found that the – at least with my group, and this isn’t the same with everybody, I don’t need much. I have a Facebook group, we do Google Hangouts on Thursdays and I do two coaching calls per quarter with them.
SHANE: Love it.
MICHAEL: That’s Sololab.
SHANE: Yeah.
MICHAEL: I don’t do any – I have very little sort of, creative content. It’s more of a place that you can go and mastermind your idea and be heard and be around people. So, to back the original question, if you have a little bit of a platform, you can pre-validate using that exact same methodology. If you don’t have a platform yet, you literally have to go talk to the people that – don’t email them, get them in person if you can or on the phone and talk to them.
SHANE: This is something I – just to kind of sum that up too, like I heard Timothy Ferriss say this one time, is, when you first start out, you have to do things that don’t scale, to validate your idea and then turn them into things that scale. So basically you’ve got time at the beginning to go sit down in a coffee shop before friends and ask them these questions. You’ve got time to get on the phone with people if you do have a small audience and validate that idea. We’ve got some friends over at screwtheninetofive.com, Jill and Josh Stanton, they did that to validate their last product. They did like, what was it Jocelyn? They did like 20-minute calls with people or something?
JOCELYN: Yeah.
SHANE: Ten-minute calls and they validated their idea; they did what didn’t scale, took all of the information, and turned it into something that did scale. That’s a great answer to that question, Michael. I think that there’s going to be a lot of value out there for our audience.
MICHAEL: Here’s – can I add a quick addendum to it?
SHANE: Sure.
MICHAEL: It’s critically important, in this process, that you know who your avatar is because –
SHANE: Yes, who you’re selling to, basically.
MICHAEL: Yeah, if you are not interviewing the people that are your real target market – that’s wrong, I’m countering myself. Target market and avatar are two different things. The avatar is within your target market but if you are not selling to – if you are not speaking rather to the person, your ideal magic customer takes you the least amount of work and that will pay you the most amount of money and be the most happy, then this – then it really kind of – I want to use ‘usurps’ – it usurps the whole process.
JOCELYN: Absolutely. We have come back to that time and time again on this show. We actually just did two or three long podcasts about that exact subject and it is really that vitally important. So Michael, thanks for that great answer. Where can people find you online? How can they get more information about your Sololab?
MICHAEL: Sololab is at Iwantsololab.com.
SHANE: Good domain, I’m loving that. That’s excellent.
MICHAEL: Yeah, action item baby, and then of course, the show is at solohour.com or on iTunes.
SHANE: Awesome. All right guys, that was a great show wrapped up with Michael O’Neal there, go check out everything he’s got going, there’s a ton of information about branding, just some amazing content, awesome podcast, love catching that at the gym or when we’re driving on a trip. Head over to solohour.com, check out everything Michael has and thank you guys so much for listening. But it’s not enough to listen, take what you learned today, go out there, take action and flip your life. We’ll see you next time.
JOCELYN: Bye.
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