How to Validate Your Product Idea With Pre-Sales – Matt Inglot – MicroConf Starter 2017

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0:15so who here is working on their first product wants to start a product something like that and who is wondering what the heck they should build and super nervous about whether anyone will actually buy it yeah so that was exactly my journey when I came to my first microcon a couple years ago and today I want to talk about how to research and validate your product and how to sell it and how to do so about like a crazy big list or anything like that but in tradition of microcon first a lifestyle slide you know so let's give you some context a few years ago I was in a

0:51pretty good place I had built up my web agency finally to the point where 20 hours a week was kind of a hard week of work for me so I was able to do cool things I was able to do go and rock climb for a month and Croatia with my wife just because and I was able to catch up on a lot of series of Netflix so given that newfound freedom I did what any self-respecting person would do I decided to start another business and so I decided to help freelancers because I had build up my own agency so I thought okay let's start a site called

1:23freelance transformation I don't really know what that transformation part of it really means yet but I'm gonna go with it and over the next couple years I went I created a podcast and launched that and then I launched the product and specifically last year I launched my first product an online course and the process was I researched it I launched it and then I built it and that's the important order its researched launched then built I got my first $4,500 in pre-sales and specifically today I want to talk to you about four things that worked exceptionally well four steps so I hope you can use those in your own product

2:02too if you've put up your hand earlier so first step I knew I want to tell freelancers so I figured it would help to have an audience of freelancers otherwise got nobody to sell to so I decided to start an email list and put my handsome face up on my website along with an opt-in form and then I needed people to get in the opt-in form so I went and I started guesting on podcasts and pretty quickly I was starting to build an email list and I had several hundred people on my list at the same time I also started my own podcast and I noticed people in the

2:37audience are gonna be wondering about that especially because some of you have been on it and the podcast was awesome to you it helped me connect with people that I never thought I could connect with it built an amazing network for me amazing Authority for me but I gotta say in terms of pure audience building it was guesting on other people's podcasts that really did it not starting my own because I didn't have an audience yet so I had an audience of freelancers that's a great first step but it didn't really know what they wanted I had some ideas of what I thought I should teach them

3:08but nobody had actually told me what it is that they want so I started surveying them and so what happened is they'd go to my website they get on the email list I'd send them like a PDF ebook thing and a couple days later I'd ask that they like the e-book that they have questions and so on that worked okay but it wasn't working great like emails were dribbling in people were telling me stuff but it wasn't really huge so then I had the good fortune of meeting Ryan Levesque from the book ask and I highly recommend that book by the way and he had me tweak

3:42my email sequence and he add me to you what I'm gonna call them a magic biggest struggle email works like this so now somebody would get on my email list and they would get whatever freebie I promised them but two hours later they'll get another email for me with the subject line hey and this was the email hey a couple of hours ago I sent you an email with the link to access your ideal client worksheet or whatever it was always offering them quick favor well you hit reply to let me know that I sent it in the right place and while I have you this is the magic part what is

4:18the biggest freelancing issue that you're struggling with boom tons of people were responding my email list is not wasn't huge it's still not huge and I was getting multiple responses a day from people sharing their biggest struggle and the first email that they would send me was kind of like well my biggest struggle is finding clients so okay kind of cool but doesn't give you much to go on but then I went to one step further with them and I asked them why is this your biggest struggle what specifically are you struggling with and that's when instead of getting a one sentence reply I would get a paragraph or sometimes a whole

4:52essay on this person just sharing everything that they were struggling with with their freelancing business it was it blew me away quite frankly okay so now I was getting some good market research so I went one step further I got on the phone with them or realistically Skype because we're not in the 19th century so I got in Skype with him the way I did that was when they sent me like that paragraph or essay or whatever I just reply back I'd love to learn more about your points below do you have 30 minutes to jump on skype with me and I gave him a link to

5:24my calendar to make it easy for them make it easy for me and I know we all like to hide behind our computer screens and like try to marketing automate everything never talk to real people and so on except when we're at micro cause if I got a say talking to real people it works it works so well so I get on these calls and we would just have these amazing conversations about what is it that you're exactly struggling with and just like drilling deep down in that and then I get to find out okay let's say I can solve all of these things for you is

5:56that something that you would actually be interested in buying what would cause you to buy it what would cause you to not buy it what kind of price would you pay are you interested and that gave me amazing data and to be honest a lot of these 30-minute calls they became 60-minute calls we just we just kept talking and and the people were all enthused to have them it's okay so I got got people excited and it sounds like I've got a lot of good data and through all of that I realized what freelancers are really struggling with is I mean a finding clients but be

6:28specifically how to get started how do I go from my full time job to full time freelancing income okay so now I have a product idea solve exactly that for them but I still had no money so there was no real proof that they were actually gonna pay me for this they may have just been smiling and nodding and okay yes Matt yes I'll give you money so I needed a way to actually sell this product and after a little bit of research I realized a good way to do that would be to try to run a webinar to my list so I did something specific I took the people

6:58that were like super affirmative that yes they would buy and then I combined them with like a slightly bigger list for my email list of just people that drip told me were really engaged subscribers so drip has a lead scorer so I used that and I emailed 60 people with a webinar and I invited them the day before the webinar and I sent a reminder on the day Huff and I got quite a few people to show up to his webinar so again this wasn't like this big fancy thing I had emailed like 60 people that's it and having some webinar attendees I needed to build a webinar so

7:34those were my slides not fancy not pretty just me working at PowerPoint at night but the cool thing about the webinar is I took everything that I had researched everything that the prospective customers had told me they were struggling with and I packed it in there and then I went and I ran my webinar and something surprising happened this is this is step 5 now profit I did not expect this but out of just sending that email to 60 people but 60 highly engaged people I got 9 students for a pilot version of my course so the course hadn't been built yet but they agreed to

8:14pay me 500 bucks each to be in this course and that was off at one webinar expected I'd have to run more like really work hard to fill that pilot no it failed and having those students I was then able to go and actually build the product now building an 8 hour video course over two months I don't know if I recommend that I think I bit off too much to her but it worked out well and I was able to work with both students get a ton of their feedback and take everything I had learned from running that pilot and release version 1 of a

8:47course which was completely now built based on the students feedback based on the validation and I was even able to take all their tuition money that they had paid me and spend it all on graphic designer so that of course even looked good in fact Laura Elizabeth designed the slides and she's in this audience if you need an amazing designer talk to her but suddenly I had a course and thanks to microcon and thanks to knowing I was hopping on a plane to Vegas and knowing I had to talk to you all I finally went and I launched my first product last week as an official

9:19version one so that was four steps thank you thank you really happy about that four steps that's it and if you want the slides if you want to steal everything I just talked about go to freelance transformation comm slash microcon if you can get the slides you can sign up on my list steal my email sequence whatever you want and if you want email me with questions or catch me tonight if you get a couple beers in me then I'll give you the second half of this talk the four things that I wish I hadn't done launching my first product thank you

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