[Music] hey everyone how's it going I actually attended Micro Comp starter for the first time last year is my first micro comm so it's a total honor to be here this year speaking to you guys I'm telling you some things that I know about running my business so I'm here to talk to you about nailing your first info product launch it didn't sound as cool as just nailing your first launch and didn't fit as well on the slide so we kind of condensed it down a little bit but I guess a little bit about me you know who the hell is adam Lavin why should you listen to anything I have to say about this sort of thing well I made a full stack developer like a lot of people out there probably you know I've always really wanted to take a software side product side project and turn that into a business you know build some cool SAS thing on the side hunker down code away in my cave for a while put it out there get rich be on the cover of TechCrunch that sort of thing so I don't know why I chose this picture this is me speaking at a tech conference this is where I normally do this sort of talking it was a cool venue and looked like a cool picture seemed like it would look cool up on stage I don't know so the very first product that I ever created was a SAS app called nitpick CI and which was a tool for sort of automating certain types of code review on PHP projects and my process for kind of creating this application was one day I had an idea to build it I got excited about it I opened my laptop I started coding away for months and months and months and then one day I put it on the internet and tweeted it out and expect it to get rich and that didn't happen here's a picture of my stripe revenue dashboard for that project so that came out in November 2015 in total it has done three thousand six hundred fifty dollars in sales from 19 customers ever all right not really like the best way to get started running a business and it's really hard to grow this sort of thing when you are working full time you know taking care of your family don't have a lot of free time to push this sort of thing and try and grow it so after it's kind of flopped I was looking for something else to do some other way to kind of start earning a living online and maybe buy back some of my own time so I'd be able to afford to invest more of my time into other software products so I decided to put together a book so I wrote a book called refactoring to collections which teaches PHP developers some functional programming principles and this time I really really really wanted to do everything that I could to make sure that this launch was successful so I started doing a lot of research reading but other people who had successful info product launches you know figuring out how to do this right and I launched this in May of 2016 so about five or six months after I launched the sass app and on the first day I did 28,000 299 dollars in revenue fix in the first three days it did 61 thousand three hundred ninety two dollars in revenue two weeks after I launched this book I quit my job and started working full time on another info product an info product that I was a little bit too intimidated to start working on when I had a full time job that was this course called tester and laravel which is teaching tester and development to laravel developers like a big comprehensive video course you can see here it was a little bit of ambitious product when you look at how it turned out 166 screencasts in 22 hours of content but I put this together and I released it in early access in November of that year so about six months later seven months later and on the first day this product at eighty two thousand nine hundred nineteen dollars in revenue I didn't do the same sort of launch period that I did for the other product but just for comparison in the first three days it did one hundred and fifteen thousand dollars in sales I've been working for myself now for just under two years with just these two products and in total total sales across this whole time period the refactoring book is in one hundred and seventy nine thousand dollars in revenue the TDD course is done four hundred and sixty eight thousand dollars in revenue for six hundred and forty seven thousand dollars in revenue in my first two years of business selling ebooks and courses online by myself so so I think I've been pretty successful at this stuff and I think I've kind of know what I'm doing so I want to share some of the lessons that I've learned and some of the approaches that I've used to make this stuff work so well with people here in case they're interested in trying to get started working for themselves using info products that's sort of that base so why an info product in general so you probably you might know who rob walling and is anyway ever heard of rob walling before so I was very fortunate enough to actually be able to be the one who captured this moment on camera will rob first hadouken to the stair step approach into existence but you can see even rob walling who's really smart really successful guy builds lots of great software products over his career recommend starting with one-time sale products but why right okay so one-time purchase products are way way way easier to sell than recurring products I know when I see something that's even like nine dollars a month it takes a lot to convince me to buy that but I spent $100 on a course before that I've never watched the videos for on an impulse buy you know how many of you have bought books or courses that you've never even opened the file right now is that something to aim for is that the sort of content that you want to create I don't know maybe maybe the hunt but it's easier to sell that sort of stuff people buy it sort of aspirationally I'm gonna get to it one day and everyone feels good about it there's lots of things that I've paid for where I get an invoice in my inbox for a $4 recurring charge and I didn't use the service that month I'm like oh I got $4.00 it's done and I didn't get anything for it it's it's stupid the other nice thing about like one-time purchase info products is that they can be finished SAS goes forever you're working on it forever you're always improving it you're always doing stuff to grow it an e-book once you've finished the last page I mean there's some work that you can do to relaunch and try and sustain income and stuff like that but for the most part it's done there's a finish line for this sort of thing you can put them together pretty quickly - my first book I wrote in nights and weekends a couple hours here and there between February in May so like three or four months not really a ton of time I had to put something together and they put money in the bank really really fast it's sort of the opposite at SAS with that like slow ramp of death in infoproducts you kind of have this terrifying cliff of death but at least the cliff has all this money at the beginning that you get to take and footage of your bank account right so they can be really good for just sort of building up capital and being able to bankroll your time so you can invest into other things so here's a tweet I saw the other day from Brennan Dunn who's like a super awesome smart genius info product guy who's working on a new software product and even this guy says selling subscription software is hard and that courses are easy in comparison so it's a good place to start even if you want to eventually get into software because I still aspire to get into software but now I have the ability to kind of look for ideas work on stuff and not be spending all my time at my day job and not having the free time to work on this sort of thing on the side so how do you get started so the first step is building an audience right I don't I'm not gonna get too deep into all this stuff because this could be like a whole talk but it's really really important that people trust you and think that you're the right person to teach them about something if you're gonna create an info product to sell to them and I think the other thing that's really important about having an audience is that in my experience having a large audience can basically make up for any other deficiency in your marketing strategy in terms of success I know people who do everything wrong with their product launches but have massive audiences and still make tons and tons of money a huge audience with a terrible launch strategy is going to make you more money than no audience and the perfect launch strategy so a lots of ways you can do this right if I had to distill it down like one sentence I would say be helpful on the internet and that comes in the form of blog posts tutorials screencasts creating podcasts where maybe interview people that know things about things there's lots of things you can do to just be worth following and provide value to people but I do want to share one specific tactic that's worked really well for me so my buddy West's boss who is a successful course creator the lives locally to me he credits his success to specifically focusing on helping people where they already are and the way that he does that is on Twitter so he creates tweets like this where he tries to figure out some interesting tip or useful tidbit of information that he can condense into a tweet and put it right in someone's timeline it's not a link to go to a blog post to read about a tip it's trying to help the person while they scroll it's right there so they're more likely to engage with it if they think it's valuable they'll follow him or retweet it or whatever so you can see like tweets like this for him get like 247 retweets 1,100 likes I do the same sort of thing but for a different audience so I focus on the laravel audience and I've been using the same sort of approach to share little tips and stuff and just figuring out ways to take what maybe would have been a blog post and turn it into a tweet and try to provide the same value right where the person is so I may be asking yourself well you guys already have audiences this wouldn't work for me I don't have an audience so I want to share a little bit of a micro case study with you that's kind of wild but pretty interesting this is my buddy Steve sugar has anybody ever seen Steve on the internet before handful of people so you can already tell this story might be getting interesting this is a screenshot of Steve's Twitter profile from September 2016 he had 436 Twitter followers and you can see the sorts of things that he tweeted about were oh I picked up this new album today and it was pretty cool nobody cares Steve phottix was the worst customer service they're the worst he's not providing value he's just doing typical social media updates right the way everybody is at social media but he wanted to start growing his audience so we got to talking and figure it out well you know what you're a really talented designer why don't you focus on trying to help developers get better at design using this sort of hot tip medium on Twitter so this is one of his early tips on Twitter this is when he only had like maybe 800 followers or something 18 retweets 246 likes that's pretty good engagement compare that to a tweet this is June 2017 by the way so this isn't even a year ago compare that to something that he put out last month 326 retweets 2200 10 likes and now if we look at Steve's Twitter profile in less than a year and a half he's gone from 436 Twitter followers to 20,000 300 Twitter followers Jeffster I'm trying to be helpful in helping people we they are that's how he's built his audience and it's worked really well for basically everyone that I've talked to about this tactic and our specific audience of developers anyways because developers hang out on Twitter that's kind of the community so the next step once you kind of started building an audience putting some of your ideas out there picking the right ideas how do you pick the right idea for an info product so step one is have an idea it sounds a kind of silly right but if you're putting content out there you're trying to help people you're going to start sort of noticing like what do people think of you as Authority and what do people respect you for what sort of questions do people ask you and you're just gonna have ideas put yourself out there share the stuff that you know ideas will come to you in my experience trying to sit around brainstorming figuring out the perfect idea has never worked for me I just kind of have to do my thing try and be interesting share interesting stuff and wait for some insight to come where I think I might be the right person to make something that can help teach people something so some concrete ideas though what are you already putting out there that people seem excited about what sort of content are you putting out there that gets the most engagement that people really seem to get you know excited about or what are you excited about that you think others will get excited about what do you what do you think you're maybe a little bit ahead of the curve on this has always worked well for me I am big in the laravel community but I pay attention to a lot of other communities and I try and notice things that are going on there that I could sort of bring back what do people think you're better at than they are so what sorts of questions are people asking you hey how would you apply this tip that you shared to this problem that I have if people think that you're better than them at something well that could be something that's worth teaching people I talked about this a little bit already what have you learned kind of outside of your watering hole that you could sort of bring back you know you can be like the Christopher Columbus of programming knowledge that's sort of like my angle anyways so everything I've put out so far honestly I'm not inventing new ideas my first book for example was combining a lot of knowledge from the Ruby communities and JavaScript communities and then real fun program in communities and bringing that back to PHP and sort of curating that into something that was easy to learn from or my TDD course was the same sort of thing taking stuff from the Java community the Ruby community and just packaging that up in a way where the people I'm teaching don't have to go through all the translation and effort that I had to do to sort of turn those ideas into something that I could apply where I am or what did you have to figure out by yourself but you think was really helpful to learn you know what did you have to work really hard to figure out well if you have to work really hard to figure out figure it out then maybe you can make it easier for other people okay test your idea so a lot of the advice you'll hear is as soon as you have an idea the first thing you should do is put up a landing page trying collect emails and see if people are interested in it and that's not a bad way to go it's a good way to go it's an important thing to do but I don't think it's the first thing that you should do first of all if that doesn't work if you don't have an audience because no one finds the landing page no one's going to sign up because they don't know who you are they don't trust you but even then I think there's other things that you can do to test ideas before you try and commit to a product that say I'm gonna make this thing if enough people sign up here's the sorts of things I do again Twitter is kind of where I hang out and this sort of thing can work in message boards and stuff depending on the communities that you're involved in but for me it's Twitter so I'm working on a view j/s component design course right now and before I sort of committed to it I started trying to test out some of the things I thought were interesting that I want to teach in this course through just these tip tweets so I tweet something that tried to encapsulate some interesting idea and just see does it take off do people think it's exciting this tweet got like almost a thousand likes so that's kind of a good indicator that like okay people find this interesting maybe this is new to people once I start seeing that things are working in like a tweet format I try and take that to something a little bit more in-depth or longer form so what's been working for me lately is putting together really in-depth high quality blog posts so in this case I took a lot of the same information that was in that tweet and other tweet said but I don't and put together a really comprehensive like tutorial step I said guide to this stuff because there wasn't anything out there and that was the best for this idea so I put that together and try to see okay do people go and read the blog post are people excited about that what sort of feedback do again and that did really well too so a little tip here once you're when you're trying to validate ideas and this way just sort of dropping little tests and seeing what sticks make sure that you are cataloging any good feedback that you get about this stuff from people because it's gonna be really useful later for marketing stuff that you do so for example I tweet something out and someone quote tweets it and said you know this is the guy that I wish I had when I was learning about this if you're working with you new experience whatever read this you know stuff like that that's great stuff to put away somewhere so you can reuse it in another places stop to redefine the product so you have like an idea a topic that you think you can teach to people how are you gonna package that up into something that people can buy from you and actually learn from so I can give you some advice on this in general there's like two main formats that I've played with anyways which is written format and the mikvah do format so like an e-book or a video course and other people will do courses too that include multiple types of content maybe worksheets videos a bunch of different stuff that's also a great way to go but I'm gonna kind of think of it it's like books and courses it's kind of the two categories that I think about things in so the first thing that you should think about is for me anyways I have to plan really really small for the very first book that I wrote the only way that I could convince myself to get started was telling myself that I'm not even making a book like my plan was to make like a 40 to 50 page mini book with just some of my favorite ideas around this topic in it and that sounds really achievable right it sounded like I can probably do that in two weeks of nights and weekends it's like writing a really good blog post or something because what's gonna happen because it's always going to turn out bigger than you think it's gonna be there's gonna be more content than you planned it's gonna be more work than you planned so try and plan for something not too ambitious because it's gonna turn on bigger than you think at least in my experience short books are still books my book is 150 pages and it's full of code examples there's not that many written words in it really and the pages are quite small but that's a feature in a lot of ways people don't want to read a 500 page book on something if they can read something and it only takes some four hours to get through the whole thing and they have all that information but has value to a three hour video course is still a totally sufficient video course okay other tips books are a lot easier to work on especially if you have limited time so if you're working a full time job but you only have 45 minutes here or there you can write in 45 minutes it's very hard to record a video in 45 minutes you can work on them in spurts you know they're easy to go back and edit you'll have to block off big chunks of time to work on and so I don't think I could have done a video course as my first product while I was working full time but there's a lot of people out there that are already making video tutorials and stuff and putting them on YouTube and whatever so if you already have experience with that and you're quick at that that can still totally work for you courses are easier to sell at a higher price so books have sort of a fixed market rate that people kind of expect to pay for them right if you try and charge one hundred and fifty dollars for a PDF I have a hard time paying for that at that price even if I know the value is there because you're sort of conditioned to think a book is like twenty to forty dollars you know there's ways that you can increase the price of a book product that we'll talk about but in general courses are easier to sell at a higher price but they're a lot harder to produce in the limited free time that you might have if you're working full time on another job okay next step putting up a landing page you figured out you want to make a book or you want to make a course you know what the topic is gonna be you've done some work to validate that idea by putting out other free content and seeing what sticks now it's time to put up a page that you could use to collect email addresses and get that next little level of validation to make sure that people actually are interested in this in this topic as a product and not just as a tweet or a blog post right so I'm gonna walk through a coming soon page that I have up right now and talk a little bit about some of the elements that are there why they're there and you know that sort of stuff so again I'm working on this advanced View course so this is the landing page that people see when they show up I start with a headline that's like the title of the product some information that kind of explains to people what they are going to learn what benefit they're going to get so in this case it's learned how to design simpler more flexible components that are both more powerful and easier to maintain now the big call to action here is to sign up to the list right I've seen people screw this up in a lot of ways a lot of people will just put up a form that will say sign up if you are interested that's it you know I mean that's not a lot of incentive to sign up like if someone's already following you on Twitter or whatever they're gonna know when you release this product I hope I hope you talk about it when you release it on Twitter so there's not really a lot of incentive to sign up if you just say sign up if you're interested so you have to figure out a way to make people want to give you their email address so when you're first putting up a landing page you might not have any free content to give away or anything but if you do something like what I have here you can still kind of promise free content previews as you get stuff done so in this case my kind of call to action here sign up for free screencasts and a big discount when the course is released in May so there's a reason for people to sign up even though they're not gonna get anything today necessarily next start getting in a little bit of content so I always try to start by using a little bit of evidence that I know what I'm talking about so in this case I'm linking to that guide that I put together that was on the same sort of topic so if someone hits this page cold which most people won't most people are already gonna be in my audience but if they do hit this page cold they can kind of see okay this guy wrote this blog post maybe my going to go read that and check that out before I read the rest of this page or at least I can look at it skim through it and be like okay this looks like the real deal like maybe I can trust this guy the next thing is dropping in like little bits of social proof in places so this is that tweet that we looked at earlier just turned into a quote and thrown on the landing page the guy who tweeted this he's nobody special he's not a big influencer or anything like that but it still helps a lot to just have evidence from someone I can often when you buy stuff from Amazon do you check the reviews first before you buy anything right it's not like Jennifer Aniston's review and Amazon that's convincing you to buy something it's someone that you've never heard of or never met but you just trust them because they're a regular person like you and if they like it well maybe you'll like it next is just kind of outlining what I'm planning to do and so talking about the sorts of things that I wanted to include what it's going to B I don't get too into depth with these sorts of things like I don't try to do some crazy big page there's lots of different things that you can do here there's lots of stuff you can look into four different copywriting and landing page design techniques but this has worked for me just kind of keeping it simple at the end of the page I liked it for another signup form because a lot of people are just going to hit the page and sign up right at the top some people are gonna need a little bit of convincing and want to scroll and read so I'll drop another one at the bottom with a little bit more social proof if I have any to convince people to sign up if they enjoyed what they read at the end I always throw a little Who am I section that just kind of says in case you don't know who I am here's me on Twitter not just me as a name which is used folks people go to Twitter see that I have an audience see that people think I know what I'm talking about so maybe send the other stuff I've worked on in this case I already have two products so I linked to those I host a podcast I link to that I created a pretty popular open-source project so I'll link to that anything to sort of give me credibility right link to my blog conference talks I've done stuff like that not everyone is gonna have all this sort of stuff to link to but this is a way that you should sort of be thinking about it trying to figure out what can I do here to convince someone that I can be trusted and then I know what I'm talking about so the more you can do here the better okay so a little bit of a side note here should I pre sell my product that's the question I get a lot I've taken kind of both approaches with this so the first product I released I finished the whole product launched it and it was done and I was in the second product I released it an early access once I had about twenty percent of the content done and then continued to add new content to it after people had already paid me and I had new customers coming in and stuff like that so how do you decide if you should pre-cell your product so there's a lot of advantages to pre selling your product first of all it's the best form of product validation you can ever get someone's willing to actually give you money for something before you've actually created it well then you know that people are interested in this thing right so if you really want to be sure that people are interested in this thing before you make any well that's one reason to pre-sell second you'll make more money the reason that you make more money doing this sort of thing in my experience is that you have more opportunity to keep talking about the thing while it's available for sale it's a little bit hard when a product is already done to keep promoting it and promoting it as saying buy this buy this buy this book coming off as sort of spammy at least in my audience but if the thing isn't done yet I can send out updates I can say just added two new lessons to the course today and linked to the course and it doesn't feel like I'm trying to just push people to buy something but it does kind of keep that mind share and new people see it new people go and buy it because it's already available for sale next you might have more motivation to finish it everyone's different but for a lot of people if you already have people's money even if you're starting to get a little bit burnt out or feeling like oh man like I'm sick of working on this project if people have paid you money you're good probably going to get it done because you don't want to not deliver on what people have paid you for right that would really suck you just don't want that so for a lot of people this can work really well and just keeping them motivated to get to the finish line another good reason is that if you already may be a freelancer or something and you sort of control your own time and you do a lot of client work well if you have like a successful sort of pre-launch pre-order thing going on you might be able to afford to do a little bit less freelance work and buy more your time so you can spend more time finishing the product disadvantages though the first one is that selling multiple tiers is is trickier in my opinion it seems weird to put up like three different packages for sale we'll talk about multiple tiers later in more detail if they're really important take my word for it now but it's harder to say like okay well if you buy the really expensive one today you still get the same thing as whoever bought the cheap one it just I don't really love that it seems harder to get people to buy the more expensive packages which are gonna make you a lot of money if they're not actually getting anything different than the people who buy the cheap stuff because the product is needed on yet second you can't easily change the scope of the project which is this is a big one for me because every single product I've ever put together I wanted to include more than I ended up including because eventually you get to a point where it's like oh my god am I ever going to finish this thing and cutting scope and deciding you know what I'm not going to make these videos I'm not going to include this chapter it's a good way to sort of make it feel attainable and kind of motivate you to get to the finish line if you pre sell and you promise too much you can end up in a situation like I ended up in where it took me almost a year and a half to finish the damn thing after I had opened up early access and by the end of it I was like so beat down and it was just it just wasn't a good situation to be in I've never been happier than the day that I finally finished the content it felt like a huge burden lifted off of me because I felt like I had to deliver on everything that I promised because that's what people paid for the other thing is that it's like taking on debt if you have a successful pre-launch you make like fifty thousand dollars in the first day you have a fifty thousand dollar loan that you have to pay back in like three months it feels like and that can be really really stressful for a lot of people myself included so looking at it from like a purely objective point of view like a very roboticle mechanical way pre-orders will make you more money they will validate your product better you know it's a good way to go but from just a psychological point of view it can be really stressful and it can be really hard I know like when I launched my first product and it was actually finished already that was such a great feeling I just put it out there put it up for sale people started paying money started coming in I was just sitting back like oh my work is paying off whereas the other product that did even more money on the first day I was just kind of sitting in my basement like holy I gotta finish this thing or people are gonna be so angry and it just wasn't a great feeling it didn't have that same like exciting launch feeling that I had for the first product okay building your email list so you got to build an email list building an email list is important you want to be able to talk to these people so how do you do this well the first thing that you should do which sounds really obvious is to tell your audience that you have this landing page that they can sign up at right obvious but there's a one little tactic that I think is worth sharing that has worked really well for me which is to announce that I'm going to announce the landing page before I announce it and put it in people's heads that hey I'm about to announce this thing that I'm working on it'd mean the world to me if you could share it I really want to spread this as much as possible and this tweet itself doesn't get a ton of engagement but a bunch of people see it and then when you do announce it well I get 136 retweets 542 likes for a page telling people I want to take their money at some point which is pretty cool so then you announce it to your existing audience wherever they are in my case is mostly Twitter and also an existing email list that I built up from other products I'll let them know that I'm working on a new product too and this is where you're gonna get usually your biggest spike in signups for an info product like this and my experience anyways everything is really front loaded so how do you try and keep people signing up because the worst thing that can happen is you get a few hundred signups on the first day and then no one signs up ever again because they don't know about it you know what I mean and that happens to a lot of people so some strategies for trying to sustain signups to something like this before it's released the first thing that you should be doing is sharing progress with your list right so what what I try to do is every week or so I try to send out an update where if I can I include maybe some free content from the course so in this case this video wasn't even from the course but they did a live stream to test out an idea I wanted to put in the course and I linked to the live stream but most the time I'm sharing some free content as well as any updates I'm like oh god these videos done this week we've covered this topic it's the best way to do X Y & Z you're really excited about how this turned out and yeah so you should be doing this to keep your list engaged and keep them excited about the product but sending these emails to your list isn't going to add new people to your list right so how do you add new people to your list well any time I'm going to send out an update like this I share it with my Twitter audience beforehand a few hours before so in this case you know I'm sending out the first to preview lessons for the course this morning this is what it's going to cover it's gonna be coming out at this time go sign up if you haven't already if you want to get these lessons I do this constantly sending out another free skin cast this afternoon this is what you're gonna learn or sometimes if I don't even have free stuff to send out I'll just show behind the scenes stuff that doesn't even seem interesting but people are still excited about it like this got 126 likes and all this is a screenshot of my Vimeo account showing like the videos that I've uploaded so far where's the previous one only got any six lakes and this was like I'm gonna send you some free that's gonna be really helpful but always linking to the landing page and getting people there so they can they can sign up and this is what like my signup chart looks like for this course right now so you can see it's super super front loaded but there's still these little spikes throughout the rest of the time frame and these are where I'm sharing updates on Twitter and stuff that big one is where I was sending out the first two free lessons another strategy is to repurpose content so if you're working on this part-time it could be hard to find time to create new content specifically to market the course or the e-book but what I do a lot is I'll take a chapter from the book and I'll massage that into a blog post or I'll take videos from the course or one video from the course and turn that into a video that I post on my blog as well so for this course I'm working on right now for example I posted this blog post recently which is really just a lesson from the course with a new title slapped on it that made it make more sense as a standalone thing instead of just part of one of the course modules and I mentioned you know in this screencast taking from my upcoming course which there's a link you can go sign up for it blah blah blah blah you learn something cool at the bottom I throw another call-to-action to sign up to that same list directly from the blog post and more people will sign them through this stuff now for me this stuff doesn't work as well as just sharing updates and stuff for social media but it's easy because I already have the content and it does help a little bit so I might as well do it so getting the actual thing finished so this can be really hard especially if you're working on a part-time what's worked for me is to make public promises to my audience so I'll do things like this I'll send it a tweet saying I'm gonna send out an email on Monday where it's going to include XYZ that I haven't actually done yet and if I promise this to people then I have like some accountability even though really do people actually care probably not but I care because I don't want to feel like I'm lying to people and this kind of keeps me accountable and keeps me motivated to actually deliver stuff so I'll do this with screencast even I'll say this week I'm recording the screencasts for this topic I'm gonna send out something free on Friday and I haven't recorded anything yet but now that I've said I'm going to send out something on Friday well a better damn well get some stuff recorded so I can send it out on Friday another thing is to email it consistently on a schedule for my audience once a week is pretty good if I kind of have it in my head that I better email people once a week so they don't forget about what I'm working on and I can keep keeping people excited and engaged I'm afraid to go a week without emailing people and I'm also afraid to email people an email that doesn't have anything interesting in it so this is just another way that I kind of keep myself accountable and make sure that I have something new to share with people another strategy we talked about a little bit already is just to reduce scope if you find you've been working on this thing for six months and it feels like there's no end in sight but you feel like what you have already is substantial the best strategy to get to the finish line is to figure out a way to move that finish line closer to you and I've done this on every single product and it's been a great way to kind of get that motivation back to finish the thing once I can actually see the finish line and I know okay I got it one more we could work on this thing figuring out pricing okay so tiered pricing super-important let's talk about some different options for tiered pricing and and why they work so the first option is to not do tiered pricing do a single price I did this for my testing course because I sold it in early access and it felt kind of weird to sell multiple packages so what I did is I just opened pre-orders for just the top tier so just the single price turns out people were willing to pay that price which is 139 dollars at the time so I just never made the cheaper tiers which was fine so single tier products can be fine if you charge enough if you're making a book that's $29 you're not going to make enough money to make it worth your while unless you have an enormous audience or you're trying to create a book just for credibility or for some other benefit that isn't directly monetary can be necessary if you're pre-selling because it's weird to presumably tears nice if you can't figure out how to create extra packages or add extra value we'll talk about this in the next couple slides in general perform multiple tiers so it's not another option is to tiers there's a couple different ways you can do this but here's one way that I think is interesting that my buddy Wes does he creates two tiers for his products where the real product is in tier and the first here is like a crippled version of that that only really exists to push people to the second one in price Anchorage so in this case the two products only ten dollars apart but the second one has twice as much content so if you're going to use two tiers you know a good way to do it can be just as a price anchoring strategy where the first product isn't the real product it's just there to make the second product look like a better deal the second tier is usually the real product and prices are usually pretty close works well with video courses where it's easy to just cut content to make a cheaper version next option is three tiers so this is what I did for my book and this worked really well I will walk through kind of what's in each one of these learning a little bit a long time so I'm gonna try and get through this little bit quickly great for books if you can come up with the bonus content because books have that market right right you want to be able to make a lot more than $29 per customer to make this worth your while makes it easier to evaluate the product on its own so if you can include some bonus content people aren't gonna compare it just to an Amazon book anymore they're gonna try and evaluate it as its own offering and see if it's valuable to them good pricing strategies usually 1 X 2 X 5 X that's what I've seen a lot of people do and it's worked well for me it'll make you a lot of money this is what I did for my book the first package $39 just the book second package book plus some screencasts that were just videos of content that was already in the book $79 next package was the source code to my failed SAS application included with the other stuff because it included some stuff that was relevant to the content of the book so here's how this broke down for me the first package made $7,400 the second package made twenty four thousand eight hundred dollars and the third package made twenty nine thousand dollars even though it's sold the fewest number of units so this pushed my average sale price up above the price of the second tier so basically I was able to sell a book for an average of like seventy dollars per customer instead of twenty-nine because I threw in some of this bonus content which wasn't really as valuable as the book you know any mean but it was enough to get people to evaluate the product as its own offering and stop thinking about it's just PDF that they might buy for their Kindle or something so launch discounts so remember when I showed you that landing page we're talking about promising a big discount at launch a couple things to know about discounts at a launch period that I think are good to know if you want to really optimize things just kind of buy enough to be appealing I've seen people do like a 15% discount at launch that's not enough to get me to buy that launch instead of buying it four weeks later if I'm not super excited about the product already you stepped discounts I'll show you an example of this in a second but for my first product I made the mistake of just using a 25% discount on every single tier it's smarter if you can discount the heavier ones by more to try and push people up to the higher tiers third is reverse engineer your non discounted price from your plan to discounted price don't take a price that you want to charge and then discount it pick the price that you want to charge and then figure out based on the discount that I should be giving to make this appealing what should the real price be it will help you charge more Patrick McKenzie Shoto because you're more likely to sell it for the price that it's actually worth we all have a tendency to undervalue our own work so here's an example of how I would have priced my book launch knowing what I know now first package have been $39 regular price discounted by 25% to 29 next one would've been 119 discounted to 79 so 35% next one would have been 249 discounted 45% to 139 and this will really help push people up I've used this approach when I've done like Black Friday sales and stuff and it's worked a lot better than the original discounted price and then I had okay so nailing the actual launch how do you actually launch the thing this is actually like the easy part of the whole thing but there's a few steps so build a sales page this doesn't have to be anything too fancy I'll quickly walk you through a sales page for one of my products most important thing well actually we'll talk about the pieces of this but I'm just going to go through this as if I was scrolling so here's kind of what it looked like here's kind of the pieces just kind of take him in pretend you're scrolling through this site just kind of outlining some of the content what's there it doesn't try too hard to sell you on it because you're gonna see this page coming from an email most likely we're going to talk about some of the individual pieces though after you get through scrolling portion this is just kind of what's there so the first thing important still include an email signup just because the book is done or the product is done doesn't mean that you should stop collecting emails a lot of people are tire kickers and they're gonna want to just check out free content once you have your email and you can use that to offer them you know let them know more about the product try and sell it to them put them into an email sequence unless your customers are European then you get fine 20 million euros and go to jail now but no big deal it's still important to include an email signup even though it's done so that's why I have here sign up to get for free preview lessons people sign up they get the course preview this works as a really good sort of top of the funnel for me to pitch these people in a discount later which is a whole other talk but this is really important use testimonials and social proof now if this is the first day that the thing is out you might not have testimony that's in social proof of this product but if you've been putting out content to test the ideas you can use that stuff as social proof for the product so in this case I send out preview lessons and this guy was like just watch the two lessons effective immediately I'm stopping working on my product until I'm done watching this course he hasn't actually seen the course but I can still throw this on the sales page because it's still gonna help people trust that the content is good short tears from highest price to lowest price this is sort of like a visual design hack but I feel like it worked really well for me I show that most expensive tear at the top and it makes sure that the visual communicates that it looks like a bigger thing it's not just like a book with a couple little bonus images it's like wow this is the real thing and then at the bottom there's this like piddly little book thing if you just want the book fine just buy it but this is the real thing this is what you want so announce the launch details so I usually send out an email a couple days before the actual launch I'm gonna link to a site where you can read all the emails that I sent out for this launch so we won't go into the full details of it but basically sent out an email saying okay I got it done here's everything that it's going to include here's what the prices are going to be and this is the day that it's gonna launch in this case that was two days before when I was actually going to launch it so included all the package of pricing details complete content list if you have it if you have more free content you can share that's always good to launch the thing so this is the easiest easiest easiest part in the most fun part you send out a really simple email that just says it's done all the information is on the landing page everyone already knows the pricing and stuff because I saw the other email go buy it then you just sit back and hope that it goes well hon you make a bunch of money and if you've done all this stuff properly and you built an audience then you should make that money so it's just simple email not much to it everything's on the website go check it out I like Tuesdays I have no evidence why seems like a good day to launch things Monday seems too early every other day seems too late Tuesday seems fine morning Eastern Time works well for me because I have a lot of customers in Europe as well so trying to manage the time zone stuff is tricky but yeah morning eastern time has worked well for me leverage early feedback so you're not done you still have more emails to send first people who bought your book buy your course are gonna check it out they're gonna think it's awesome they're gonna give you feedback catalog that stuff couldn't put down Adams book 24 hours later I'm already done can't wait to share with my team what do I do a couple days later I send an email to everyone who hasn't bought it yet with all this feedback that I got from people who have already gone through this stuff and then a bunch of more people by sent him another free preview if I have something else don't be afraid to give away too much free stuff this book I gave away like 60% of content for free to the list it was fine no one complained lots of people bought it closing the watch controversial piece of advice you want to send out an email at the end saying this is the last day to get at this price a lot of people will buy it whatever right I'm a pretty obvious thing to do you need to inform people that this is a last chance to get a discount the less obvious thing that goes against a lot of the advice I have seen from other people is I don't recommend specifying a closing date in advance the biggest mistake I made in my book launch was saying for the first three days it's discounted on the third day I was still getting sales like every five minutes and then I may not I'd changed the pricing and then no one bought it and I was like why did I do this I had a money host that was just like firing money at me I was just like oh he kind of gets us under control we're gonna turn this off I don't want this money so what I do now is I just say during the launch it's going to be discounted I don't say when the launch is gonna end I just kind of assess the situation I see winter sales starting to slow down maybe after two weeks cells have dropped off then the Monday of the third week I'll send out an email hey this is the last week of the launch it this is your last chance to get at this price now I have like another full kind of like smaller launch week almost instead of just like one day and I make a lot of money doing that too so here's a link that just goes to a github gist where I have a bunch of links to resources and stuff that I think are helpful tools things like that I'm going to keep it updated as I talk to people and find out what people are interested in learning more about so bookmark that and that's all I got thank you very much madammadam all right great talk Adam we have time for one maybe two questions so who's got a question anyone who got a question okay so we'll take maybe someone over here and then maybe someone over here Adam lots of great content thank you so much my question has to do with when you were sharing numbers at the beginning of the presentation you obviously had these you know these big spikes at the beginning when you were launching but it seemed like you had a fairly significant longtail of revenue on both of those products was there anything you did to re prime the pump down the road so those charts were actually just for the first three days so it wasn't super long tail [Music] things that have worked for me is with the TDD course because I really spent early access I was able to update people consistently saying I've had a new content I've added a new content that gets new people seeing it buying it stuff like that especially because it was still at like an early access price for the book sales definitely dropped off very significantly when the launch period was over which is why I feel like I made a big mistake by closing it after three days I had to sort of scramble to figure out ways to try and get people to buy it who would have bought it at the launch discount but because I stopped it too early they just never got around to it and so I sent out like an email saying hey I've extended the launch just for people on my email list because you know I heard from people who said that they they missed it and it wasn't quite enough time for them to get approval from the boss or whatever which is true in a lot of cases but also sort of a lie and a dim feel really feel great about it I don't like lying to my audience but I also don't like artificially limiting the amount of money that I can make when this is what I'm trying to do for a living so that's why I think of that as a mistake because it forced me to do some things I really wasn't super happy about in general what I do with my my products now I haven't actually done this with the book yet but I do with the course still is that email signup on the landing page is like super key because it gets people and gets on the preview lessons that drops them into an email sequence where I keep sending them free content for like two weeks and if at the end of two weeks they haven't bought already I do some API wizardry to create them a coupon that expires in five days and this is something that I took from Brennan done and he has a great article on sort of trying to do the sustainable info product stuff but basically they get an offer to buy it at a significantly discounted price that's gonna expire after a certain period of time to get them to make a decision basically okay we don't have any more time for questions but all the speakers are going to be around at lunch and doing workshops so if you've got a question for Adam you can grab him after this mic has a few announcements before lunch yep thank you very much Adam thanks [Applause] you [Music]
