3 Habits for Building & Growing a Product Empire – Nathan Barry – MicroConf 2014

[Music] [Music] there's a lot of talks here on really really tactical things and right now I'm not going to give you you know one weird trick to double your conversion rate or anything like that but I'm gonna talk about the things that really made a difference for me over over the long term so we'll just jump right in if you want to get good at something what's the best way to do that practice yeah like practice sometimes practice for a few hours a day you know one day a week maybe work on your product a couple times a month when you get inspired and you have all that motivation I don't think so but and we'll get into that but there's this idea that if you want to get really good at something you should practice it continually and so Jason freed of 37signals or base camp now has this idea that I just like you would learn to play the drums by practicing you would learn to make money by practicing that it's a skill the more you do it the better you get so he has this story of the first time he got someone he didn't know to pay him money and I think that is a truly a critical moment in any in any person's career of selling things so he created this product and I heard the story on Justin Jackson's product people podcast so Jason talks about how his very first product was an app he made with FileMaker Pro to help people organize their music collections and he put up a you know put it up on a shareware his site had a little readme file it said hey if you like this it send me $20 here's my parents address and one day he got in the mail a letter you know an envelope from with $20 and a printout of that readme file and he talks about that this is being an absolutely pivotal moment for him when he got someone that he did not know at all and had no connection to to pay him money so what we have to do is you have to start practicing making money Jason didn't start out with any of the big products that we know for now he actually had a lot of things in between audio file and what we know him for so I went through a very similar process and I'll show you some of my first products I'm not gonna go quite the full embarrassing side and show you all the screenshots I'll just show you the names so here's a few of my products that have made less than a thousand dollars I try to get into the WordPress theme business with legend themes hosting I've an iPhone app I think everybody should make like a Flash Cards iPhone app at some point I think that's a requirement if you sell on the App Store and so this was me learning and it took it took a long time I had a couple more apps you know that made in the several thousand dollar range commit I still have and then you know I'm just working up making bigger and bigger apps and you know I get into selling other books so this is the like my getting into what I consider successful products and then I have a couple books that have sold really quite a bit but overall I have had really a lot of products so this is all practice later on you know those products are starting to make meaningful amounts of money $20,000 $30,000 $50,000 but it took me quite a while to get to that point so because I share numbers and talk about the the blogging site or are I blog about all that and public with everything one thing that I hear all the time is oh it's great that you know you worked on this book and you were an overnight success because of it and when people never see is just all the products they that completely fail and so if you graph my product revenue over actually started working on products in 2007 but zero didn't look very good on the scrap so actually had a little product revenue in 2008 and so you can see that it took me quite a while to actually make any kind of money at all so you have to start somewhere you have to start practicing and you have to build up that skill of making money last see at microcon in Europe this last fall I had coffee with some of these guys and this team is they make their company's called source and they make a photoshop plugin called CSS hat I don't know if any of you have used it it's really really good if you're a designer a developer and you want to get code you know quickly at your your Photoshop style is out of out of Photoshop and into code and so what these guys did when they're all you know just barely out of high school or some of them were still in high school they did a I startup weekend and through that process they were building they built CSS hat you know they're Photoshop plug-in which if you think about it a Photoshop plug-in is a really small product you know they built that in a weekend they started selling it and they they've done really really well when they launched it they made I think it was ten thousand dollars in the first day or so and it was quite successful but they started with a small product they could have tried to jump right into SAS they could have tried to jump right into something that would require a lot of support or take a long time to build but they got something small out there and they started working from there here's a screenshot CSS hat so there's so many businesses that you can get into they don't require a lot of time maybe it's not the the the sass app or the perfect business that you want to be building down the road but you need to know that you have to start small and practice making money get all of those small wins learn how to get people who you don't know or who don't know you how to get them to pay you money and build from there so the next thing and when I when I figure out this lesson it was really quite a turning point for me but if we look back to my very first products I had quite the problem that I had was how do you get customers to know and care about your product or what you're selling even know that you exist let alone convince them that you're someone worth buying from and so probably those first three years that I represented in that graph who I mean that was all before I figured this out and I I got the answer to this question from a bunch of different sources all once and that's when it finally set in but the biggest one is from a gentleman by the name of Chris coiour and who knows about CSS tricks anybody been to CSS tricks calm quite a few people so if you want to learn web design it's a great place to go I really enjoyed Chris's site but when he started it back in I think 2006 to 2007 I was a web designer at the time I considered myself decent at CSS and I remember reading the first articles that he put out and kind of thinking oh that's cool but I already knew it and he was put out more articles and I was kind of thought he's not that much of an expert because I already know what he's talking about there was a little arrogant but he keeps writing articles and basically what happens is we're both learning new things you know I'm working a mix of freelance and and like full-time web design jobs he's doing the same thing we keep learning and as I learned something new I applied on the next project it's Chris learn something new he writes about it and applies it on the next projects and keeps going and I didn't really think anything of this until Chris launched a Kickstarter campaign and what he said is I want to redesign my website so I want to take a little time off from my work re and redesign CSS tricks comm I think to live during that you know to survive during that time I need about thirty five hundred dollars so if you guys my dear audience will be kind enough to you know put up that much money in a Kickstarter campaign I'll redesign the site and I'll create some tutorials along the way and teach about this whole process so Chris goes on to raise eighty nine thousand six hundred ninety seven dollars a little above his thirty five hundred dollar goal and I saw this and went wait what remember we both were both designers we've been improving at the same rate we have the same skill level we're both now advanced CSS coders I guess so what was different between what was going on it it clearly wasn't skill level and when I came back to is that when well Chris was teaching I was just working I was just implementing what I was doing and I know so many people who are doing really really impressive things now that you never hear about because they're they either don't think they're enough of an expert to share it or or maybe they don't care about that kind of thing but really all you all you do and all Chris did was he learned something new and put it out there and he wasn't you know I guess what you'd consider an expert in that area would be someone working on the CSS spec you know or work in in those meetings in the working group or working for a browser or something like that and that wasn't Chris at all he's just somebody who knew something and started share and that turned into a huge amount of revenue for him so Jason freed has the same idea that he talks about where he says emulate chefs you have all these secrets you know for chefs it's the recipes that's what they put together what they craft and perfect and most people keeps those entirely secret there's probably a bunch of people here who would be like I tell you those numbers but I don't I don't know you know they're trying to keep their businesses C secrets to themselves they don't want that competitors stealing things chef's on the other hand the ones you've heard of say take everything you know I'm going to I'm not just gonna tell you my recipes I'm gonna write them down and you could buy them for twenty dollars you know and that's their crap that's what they've perfected over the years and they're basically giving it away and they go a step further than that and say let me bring in cameras we'll get in a studio and I will you can look over my shoulder and you can see exactly what I'm doing and how how I make this and so those chefs aren't worried that people are going to you know take their secret recipes that are now you know that are now public and open a restaurant across the street and put them out of business instead they know that by putting out all of that information by being public about it they're going to get more people to come to them they're going to have more fans the restaurants are going to be booked out weeks or months in advance instead of feeling desperate to try to get more people so a huge realization for me is that the people don't teach because they're experts they become experts through teaching so Chris quarry did not start as an expert he became an expert over time he built an audience and and that's how you know he was able to have such a successful Kickstarter campaign his his audience was just thrilled to pay him the moment he gave them an opportunity to and as far as giving away secrets like chefs do I think of a handful of companies that you know there's lots of companies that teach and but then there's a few companies like I'm thinking of a buffer where they'll give away they'll tell you everything you know they'll go much further and they'll say here's exactly how much all of our team members make you know you can go view the Google Doc and you'll see like there's 60 other people viewing this Google Doc right now of exactly you know how their customer support person whatever her name is how her salary gets calculated based on everything and it's fascinating that they're willing to give away these level levels of secrets so there's lots of people in this room like Reuben from bid sketch Heaton KISSmetrics who understand that teaching is a fantastic way to draw in an audience to get people to trust you and then to take it further you know like like buffer you know Josh is sharing all of his numbers being totally public about it and that's something that his audience you know really really loves and and that's going to get a lot of attention and make him really a lot of money over time so you know like I said earlier I kind of got these lessons from multiple places at the same time I'd read Jason saying emulate chefs and you know I heard it you know that you should be teaching and sharing and and I'd seen so many examples but it wasn't really until I saw Chris and his Kickstarter campaign and they had all these that come together and happen at once that I realized oh that's what's going on and from then on I became determined to just teach everything I know and so you look at people who who are teaching and they're you know they don't necessarily have the most revenue but they're willing to learn new things every day and they're willing to to share it and so I'd really really encourage you to be much more open and much more public and I you'll see fantastic results from it so there there's a problem that I see a lot in the bootstrapping space and comes back to there's this guy I know back in Boise and I've known him for quite a while and he's had this idea for a product and he's been working on it for a while I should know where Hannah for a long while it's a side project you know he's got a great software development job he's he's paid really well he's quite comfortable but he's been working on this idea for seven years and you know he big developer he was able to write the entire thing himself he built it out and then he kind of sees been improving it and it's not quite ready for customers yet he's making some progress he's talked to a few customers getting there that's taken a couple of years and then he got to the point where you know what that code base is getting a little bit old I could write some of those things better now you know what there's this great new library let's rewrite it with that so as sad as it is he's been working on this one product for seven years and there's it's so easy to have ideas and have things that that you're working towards and you totally underestimate how much work they are to get done and so you just you know you you run the risk of becoming that person who always talks about his ideas talks about the company is going to build the side project that he's going to to run and without ever making it happen so there's a way around that but first I think there's a few people here who have read my blog so can anyone tell me the name of my first book anybody okay so it is the first book that I publish is called the app design handbook it's about designing iPhone applications but it's actually the third book that I started writing but see so what were the first two books and that doesn't really matter what they were what matters is that they never got finished in fact they never got past an outline and a couple pages because I really wanted to write a book and I thought those first two ideas were really good but what would happen is I would work on it when I was really motivated so I get excited I'd write out the outline and I'd start writing the book then I take a break to do something else for a little bit and come back to it and be a little less excited but I'd get you know another page written and then my motivation would just kind of died out and it wasn't until I learned this much more valuable skill that I actually made any progress but there's from a gentleman by the name of Chris Gila beau and he said something that really stood out to me he said I can write a book every year a hundred plus blog post 50 or so guest posts at least two to three business projects and and when he says business projects he generally means actually more full-length books and a few long-form essays or magazine pieces and he's talking like writing for you know CNN for their Travel section and you know writing all this stuff he says it's not too hard I can do all this in a year you know the people who say it takes two years to write a book Chris is like yeah I can write a whole bunch in a year and the way he said he does it is he just writes a thousand words a day so instead of City you know instead of working for huge amounts of time and putting in you know amazing amounts of effort he breaks it down and makes slow consistent progress every day so I adopted this idea because I want I really wanted to finish the app design handbook I was tired of being that person who talked about ideas and talked about the book who's going to write the products I was gonna make and never actually finished it I'm sure you guys know you know someone back from high school or college who had all those big plans who've never executed on any of them and I did not want to be that person so it took Chris's idea and I started writing a thousand words a day well actually like any good software person I first built an app to help me write a thousand words a day and then got to actually writing it so this app is commit and I wrote that first book took me a little while to get a habit going but wrote a thousand words a day after the first book I assure that and thought great that was a success and the next day my phone pops up says we're gonna write a thousand words today but no I finished the book that was the goal you know I I shipped something that was important to me and and then I thought you know what there's no way I'm going to break his streak of at that time it was about 75 days in a row so I kept writing and I wrote another book and I kept writing wrote another book and I wrote a whole bunch of blog posts and now I guess I'm stuck like at this point I have 600 days in a row or it's a 620 I think now and so I guess I'm just never gonna stop writing a thousand words a day but it goes back to that teaching for me writing I can put out all those ideas I can teach my reach ghost grows from that a lot more but Joel Spolsky has this idea where you know he's applying the same concept of software where he's talking about just making a little bit of progress every day that the idea that your product should be better at the end of the day than it was at the beginning even if it was a tiny little bit of improvement you've made progress and so when you're willing to do that when you're willing to put in that time and that really consistent effort really impressive things can happen so someone else that I really like her name is John Lee Dumas and he he has a podcast called entrepreneur on fire and the remarkable thing that he's done is he's published a podcast episode every day 7 days a week I think for 550 days in a row and he's seen amazing business growth because he's willing to put in that consistent effort and put things out so often for my own app convertkit things really for a while really stalled out and got you know revenue wasn't growing the product wasn't improving and I found you know that decreased my motivation even more but what I realized is that I was working on it when I was motivated and so when I started to see things improve again you know I started to see revenue increase I started to see more more progress was when I decided that you know what I'm just gonna make the product a little bit better every day I'm not gonna wait until I have time to sit down and you know code out an entirely new feature or redesign the screen to make progress I'm going to add a minimum every day make something a little bit better and I'm going to slowly chip away at this because to be honest making products is really hard it's a skill like making money that we get better at over time but you need to make that consistent progress in order to in order to see the benefit long term so the next one is something else that that I see a lot kind of in our in our world and that comes from the quest for passive income and when people think okay I'm gonna I'm gonna get passive income or I'm gonna build this business or you know I'm just trying to get the six thousand dollars a month it just it takes to replace my job what they tend to do is and I did this is that you come up with some interesting niche and you build a little product and you get it to the point where it's making five hundred or a thousand dollars a month and then you go cool that's there now we're gonna go all the way over here and we're gonna go to some other interesting little niche that has a little painful problem that we can solve I'm gonna build that up and that's gonna get to two thousand dollars maybe it can get bigger but now I have another idea and I'm gonna go to this other you know interesting niche that I can find I'm gonna build up another product and the idea is that if this one's making a thousand this one's making two thousand this one's making you know two or three thousand as well that great you can replace your you've replace your day job you can quit and work on your product business full-time I don't like that model at all actually I think that it prevents you from building something really great because any work that you put into focusing on this little niche over here and you making this product better is not helping you sell this one over here they're completely separate silos so I say now I don't like that model but I did it like I think many people in this room and I ended up with a whole bunch of products that had totally different audiences and didn't have much overlap so just as a little exercise I I laid them out kind of as a Venn diagram where you think of each each circle for a product represents the audience the more they overlap the Moral overlap there isn't that audience so here's a little graphic there's some overlap between my two books because they're both about design my other book Authority is about writing and marketing books and so there's a little bit of overlap there then I had this iPad application one voice which was really for speech-language pathologists then I had this other SAS application that was for sign language interpreting agencies and any work that I put into you know the SAS application did not help the iPhone app sell they all made money but it was really a pain to make progress on it because they didn't benefit each other in any way so I actually killed off everything that wasn't fairly closely overlapping and so I don't have a single audience now but I've two that overlap so I like to talk about two things I like to talk about design and marketing and so I ran through numbers on my email list I have an email list of about 17,000 people and you know so I want I tagged everybody as they came in based on what interests they had and so sometimes when I come out with a a product or a blog post if it's pretty designed heavy I'll just send it to the people who are interested in design or vice versa she'll just sense something that's more marketing focused so there's about ten or eleven thousand people on the design side and there's about eight thousand people maybe nine thousand people on the marketing side and when you'll notice is that those two numbers add up to more than seventeen thousand and so that difference is there's about an overlap between the two groups of about 3,000 people who exist in both groups so the work that I put into promoting a design book does help promote the other products and the same way I can talk about the sales you know the the sales or results from a launch teach and share that information and it does benefit my other products and that's really helpful so what you can think about ideally is having a single audience where you have different products at different price points that all serve within that audience so maybe the outside circle is your email list an inner circle would be a book getting further in from that could be a SAS application that's for you know even fewer people and then even you know in from that could be an expensive training course Brennen done is a fantastic example of this you know his entire audience is targeting freelancers and he has he has the whole range from from the free email course to the $1,800 workshop with a SAS app in there and everything else someone else that I really like his name is sean mccabe and he you you can kind of see it in the background a little bit but he does this fantastic hand lettering and illustration work and so he's been creating that for a while and he has through effectively three different products or categories of products everything on a site is focused on design but he started out with a store which is in the middle so he'd make these these great illustrations and these clever posters and he'd sell them in the store and that makes some amount of money and then for the designers in his community or you know reading his blog he created a private community where they can pay you know I think 15 dollars a month and get some of his time have a place to gather and all of that that's still targeted at the same audience and then most recently he launched a course called learn lettering that actually made $100,000 in its first week which was really impressive but it's all of these things are focused on the same audience so he's able to have a suite of products and he's able to build multiple things you know he's not as some people might think of it stuck working on one thing for a long time he's able to experiment try out you know cuz building new products is fun but Shawn keeps it all targeted within that same audience so that any work he puts into promoting his store is also going to somewhat help benefit his course orange community going back to these guys the vu and the team behind source and the Photoshop plugins they didn't stop with just CSS hat their first plugin and they didn't switch to an entirely different market with their next thing instead they focused on designers people who want design tools and they made more photoshop plugins and they've gotten into training and other things now they have a suite of products they can cross sell they're running an impressive business now and they're doing it all by focusing on one audience so the habits that have helped me to build a product empire are first to start small practice making money make consistent progress each day serve a single audience and to teach everything you know so the for my talk thank you guys hi Nathan hey so do you build a landing page first to check the demand for the book that you're about to write and then make a decision or just right away anyways so I see two different ways to validate a product they both have their advantages the the easy way and and they're both great ways to go the easy ways to put up a landing page drive as much traffic to it as possible and ask for an email address and then you can you can make assumptions based based on quality of traffic and that kind of thing and you can make yes okay maybe one out of every twenty people who puts in an email address is going to purchase ok there's interest that's great and that's what I typically do for a book now something bigger like when I went to make convert kit which is a SAS application that's all if if that goes wrong there's a lot more money and time on the line than there is for a book and so in that case I did pre-orders and I think that's the ultimate validation where you ask people will you pay for this and if you can't get people to pay for a product before it exists when you're like pitching them one on one you really got to work on finding a market a different market or we considered building that product entirely so I would say yeah a landing page for every product collecting email addresses do that no matter what and that's one way to validate the other way is ask people to pay you money hey Nathan my name is Kazim I'm just wondering in terms of being open did you start being open once you were targeting more than entrepreneurial community and found that they value that or was that something that you would advise in other industries it definitely works in other industries but this is something I struggled with for a while and Jason freed and I were actually talking about this at one point and I have a video somewhere where he's like Hebrew till he's frustrated in the conversation because I'm just not getting it that because I keep thinking like kind of along the lines of your question like well that works basically we're saying to him is you guys can talk about how you build Basecamp and all of that because you're targeting web designers and if you coming back he's like we're not just targeting web designers we're targeting you know all small businesses and then he was referencing you know the articles that he writes for ink magazine and all these other things and so he came up with a bunch of examples as to how they're teaching and sharing is drawing in in a big audience but it's definitely true where you can have an audience that they're you have nothing to teach them and I ran into that problem with my iPad app that was for speech-language pathologists I have nothing to teach speech-language pathologists and so if teaching is a marketing method that you want to try and I think you really should then you should definitely consider going after a market that you're a member of so if you're and and this is just fantastic for long-term caring about your audience and all that but you know I'm a designer and I sell a lot of my products to designers so I'm an entrepreneur I sell products to entrepreneurs and there's you know there's a lot of of range in that but if you list out you know all of your own characteristics and and that could range from everything to the ones I mentioned you know I can also add things in I'm a father a husband a snowboarder you know there's a lot of a lot of attributes that you have where you could choose any one of those and target an audience that you're a member of and if you do that it's way easier to teach Thanks if if you don't if you haven't made your first dollar yet do you think it's better to focus more on validation of a quote-unquote good idea or if you can just get something out within a couple of days that might make twenty dollars which which approach is better to do it right and and follow the validation the kind of stuff and start small stay small or just to you know get something out there and try to get someone to buy it for a dollar or whatever well if we're taking the advice from anybody like all the people who to be their product ideas back when I did web design you should build like a big marketplace first I think it's good to start small but you don't want to work on something that you don't care about or have any interest in so if you think you if if it's a problem that you want to solve and you can get it out quickly I think that's good you know I talked about all the the early products that I had that didn't make it anywhere you could put a big practice label all over all of those that was me practicing making money I cared about all of them I thought all of them could be the thing that you know carried me for a long time and they just eventually fizzled out it's just it's it's hard to know but I would balance it based on how long it's going to take you to make that first dollar if your big idea is gonna take you a year before you think you can make any money off of it and you're not experienced I would stay away from it you know go with something like an iPhone app a wordpress theme a photoshop plugin something where there's an existing ecosystem that you can sell into 'men sell in a marketplace and it's much easier for you so with regards to breaking the streak and the commit like what do you do if your get really sick or your wife is giving birth or something like that or or do you just break the streak and start over um so I've been a little bit flexible with it we're writing a thousand words for every day so sometimes things that happened where I've missed a day so I just write 2,000 words the next day and if I go on vacation usually what happens is I'll do a little bit well on vacation because I like it but you know I'll build up in advance and so I'm like quite a bit ahead and then I you know usually it'll be I maybe a day or two behind by the time I get home and then I'll catch up the great thing about making rules like this and your own habits that kind of thing is that it's your thing so you can you can do it how you want and make the rules as flexible as you want the important thing is that you just keep making progress I've been riding for the last couple months and I found that I do a lot of editing for the stuff I write so do you write the thousand words and then you spend a couple hours editing how's your edit cycle work for me if I do a lot of editing that can count as my writing for the day like really a lot of editing because editing is a painful process and it's another thing you know if it's your rule then or your habit you can make the rules so you know whatever works for you if you want it to be if you want editing to count it's great I did a video course and for Photoshop design and so I you know did a whole ton of recording videos and and that counted so I get to make the rules so anyway thanks again Nathan thank you [Applause]

Channel: MicroConf

Views: 6,907

Keywords: 3 Habits for Building & Growing a Product Empire, Entrepreneurship, Boostrapped SaaS, Startups, Startup Community, Indie Startups, Business Conference, MicroConf, SaaS, Micropreneur, independent funding, Entrepreneurs, SaasS Videos, Startup Videos, Startup Education, Software, Infoproducts, Founder, Co-founder, Technicial Founder, Non-technical founder, Nathan Berry

Id: Xj_8_EdZZD8

Length: 38min 45sec (2325 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 26 2020