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In today’s Q&A, we are helping Amy figure out when her product is good enough to launch and the steps she should take next.
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Resources Mentioned in this Episode
- Today’s expert is John Lee Dumas from Entrepreneur on Fire
- Today’s question is from Amy at meditatewithamy.com
- Flip Your Life Program
- Podcasters Paradise
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 John Lee Dumas of the Entrepreneur on Fire podcast and Entrepreneuronfire.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: Hey guys, welcome back to our Expert Q&A, great to back with you again on this Thursday. We have an awesome guest today, we wanna welcome back to the show, John Lee Dumas. John, welcome back, man!
JOHN: Smoldering, smoking, the flame is still there.
SHANE: The fire keeps getting bigger; we talked to you a little while ago and every month, it’s just getting bigger dude. You know what I’m saying? This is amazing. I mean, you’re gonna have a bonfire out there on the beach pretty soon. All right, let’s jump right into our question Jocelyn.
JOCELYN: Right, today’s question is from Amy Paterson of meditatewithamy.com, and she says, “How do you know when it is time to stop working on a digital product? I’ve written an e-book but I’m too much of a perfectionist to stop fiddling with it, and just start marketing the thing. I have a feeling that as soon as I make it available for sale, that I will find something horribly wrong with it and be mortified, and no one will ever buy anything from me again. Should I just set a deadline and say no more changes after that? When is enough, enough, and how do you know when it is time to launch?”
SHANE: I love this question man, because we – you know, we have like dozens and dozens of people and we see it in our Flip Your Life course, and we see this over and over again. You know, people get to that point where they almost get that digital product created, and then they rewrite it where they start over, or they keep working on it and we are like, ‘Oh, what are you doing?’ So what is your perspective on this John, what do you think about when to launch a product? When is enough, enough? When do you put yourself out there to the world?
JOHN: Okay, I’m like foaming at the mouth for this question; and I’m glad you guys have like the tough love like Sundays or whatever you do –
SHANE: The tough love stick, baby, we bring up the tough love stick right here.
JOHN: Yeah, this is like a tough love, like super-bowl right here because this is like such a sticking point for me, because so many entrepreneurs fail and fail and fail because of this very question that they just run in circles around. And my first answer to Amy here is, you’ve waited way too long already. You’ve already wasted a ton of time, in my opinion, in my experience, which I have had experience wasting a ton of time in a similar situation, multiple times before because until people actually pay with their wallet, they actually vote with their wallets for an idea, you don’t even have a clue if your audience is starving enough. They’ll tell you all day long; ‘I want this, I want X, I want a Y, I want a Z’, ‘Oh yeah, if you create this, I will definitely buy this.’ Believe me, I know you have a great relationship with your audience and believe me, I know that you think you are making the right product for them, but you don’t know for certain. And I have had over 950 guests on Entrepreneur on Fire who will verify this fact. You do not know for certain until you actually have somebody pull up their credit card, or log into their PayPal account, and actually make a transaction. So, I never ever create a product – I don’t put a single minute into the actual creation of the product until I have a base of an audience, and I call them a starting audience, that is actually committed financially to this. Now, let me kinda give a couple of examples here: so – again, I could give a number of examples of how I didn’t do this when I was first starting off and failed miserably, but I just think you get the point that I have failed miserably on this many times. So finally when I figured it out like the way to do it, and a great example is with Podcasters’ Paradise. People were saying, ‘John, we wanna learn how to create, grow and monetize our own podcast.’ And I said, ‘Okay, if you want to really learn how to do this, what do you want in there?’ ‘Oh we want tutorials, we want a Resources page, we want access to you, we want a Facebook group.’ So I was taking all this information down, and I could have then just gone into a closet, and just spent months creating this community, this product and then open the doors hoping that they were being honest. But instead I said, ‘You know what, I’ve heard this song and dance before. You know, this is not my first rodeo.’ So, I’m saying, ‘Hey, you said this is what you want; here is the outline of what Podcasters’ Paradise will look like. It will have tutorials on how to create, grow and monetize your podcast. It will have a Resources page, it will have a private Facebook group, it will have all these things but it has not been created yet. And it won’t be, unless you take out your wallets right now, and prove to me that you really want to be part of this community. You will be the early birds, you will be the founding members, you will be able to lock in your rate now for 50% off.’ So I’m giving them a lot of reasons to take the step forward, to put their money where their mouth is. Their mouth is going, now put their money where their mouth is, and I’m giving them an opportunity by giving them a great deal, and a great opportunity getting it now. And when I did that, we had 35 people join at 200 dollars, for Podcasters’ Paradise.
SHANE: Love it.
JOHN: And that was 7000 dollars before I had spent any time besides just creating that quick outline that I did of what paradise would be in theory. I got 7000 dollars, our money point, as I call it, was 5000 dollars. We had to get to 5000 dollars to prove that concept and there was enough people out there to make this worth our time ‘cause this was going to be a lot of time and a lot of effort. We then spent the next 45 days creating Podcasters’ Paradise with everything that we were getting information-wise, with our beta testers. They were helping us out along the way, creating this product by the way, which was huge; they were giving us great information, and user experience, and interface questions all along the way, which was intrical to the success. Then we opened 45 days later, at 400 dollars as we promised. So our founding members felt great, they have got in at half the price and part of the building, and then we had this other great launch now with a proven beta group. And they could have testimonials, they were in the community so it was already thriving, and that was on day one. So, picture the difference there; now I’m opening day one with already 7000 dollars in the bank, with a beta group that was committed to making this a good product ‘cause they invested in it, and was giving us feedback and testimonials. So now I have a thriving, buzzing community on day one which started a great launch of Podcasters’ Paradise into the five figures. And since then, we actually just crossed the 2.5 million revenue mark for Podcasters’ Paradise just 18 months later. But that never would have even come to fruition if I hadn’t had that first proving ground audience. Many products and services before then fizzled out that could have turned into this because they went about it the wrong way. So, Amy, you’re waiting way too long, you should have launched the minimally viable product as soon as possible with some beta users. And there’s a great quote by Reid Hoffman before I turn it back over to you guys, “If you are not embarrassed by the shipment of your first products, you waited way too long.”
SHANE: That’s awesome.
JOHN: That’s Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn.
SHANE: Love it. That’s amazing. We were lucky I think, because we learnt that lesson of make – I spent a lot of time making something that crashed and burned, and well, actually I learned that lesson as I was trying to start my online business and Jocelyn was like, ‘You’re failing miserably because –’ she came in and made a product extremely quickly and sold it to a beta testing group. And then she was smart enough to say, ‘What do you want me to change, tell me why it was good and I’ll make you another one next month.’ We were off to the races at that point, and we have launched every product like that since then. We pre-launch everything now; like if we don’t have 25 people to tell us they would actually give us money for it, we are not gonna waste our time making that. No way.
JOHN: Yeah, your time is incredibly valuable and you know, nothing against you Shane, but Jocelyn, you always struck me as the smart one.
JOCELYN: I have no comment.
SHANE: Basically Jocelyn just keeps me around to run through walls, that’s pretty much why I’m here, you know, what I mean?
JOHN: I hear you brother.
SHANE: I push the boulder down the hill and she makes sure it hits the right target, you know what I mean? That’s all we do.
JOCELYN: That was a great answer John, and I love it. I can’t wait for people that listen to this because so many people start out on online business need to hear this. They need that brutal, honest truth. So, thanks so much for giving that.
SHANE: All right man, thank you so much John for being on the show again brother; we appreciate it. Thanks everybody for listening to our Expert Q&A here on a Thursday. Make sure you tune in Saturday for another Q&A with S&J and next week, for our podcast on Tuesday. Until then, get out there, take action and flip your life, see you later.
JOCELYN: Bye!
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