what's going on, welcome back to the game. We're talking about making more money, making more impact in all of that fun stuff along the way. So today I want to talk about creators. I wanna talk about people who have audiences and that could be in the form of email lists that can be form subscribers or followers, but fundamentally an audience of people who know, like and trust you. I wanna talk about the big mistake that I think a lot of creators or audience havers make when attempting to monetize their audience. Now, I will probably make a different podcast at every time about like what to sell if you're gonna make your first offer to an audience. But for today, I wanna talk about the actual mistake that occurs. And so if you have an audience or would like to have one, this is a big one for you. And I will promise you this, which is once you see this, what I'm about to share with you, you will never be able to unsee it. If you listen to this and realize that, oh shoot, this is me, I've made this mistake. The good news is you're just like everyone else. So don't worry about it. But you can take steps to unwind it, which I'll talk about as well. Okay, so here's the situation. So let's say we've got influencer, influencer X, all right? And he's got an audience of, let's say, back country rednecks, awesome, cool. That's the audience. He decides, okay, I'm going to sell something to my audience. And so he sells widget number one. And so he launches widget number one. He's very excited about it. And we're going to assume that he did the basic math of, okay, what percentage of my audience will I convert? What's the lifetime gross profit per customer? And I want to maximize whatever object I have, or whatever widget. If I'm picking between four or five different widgets, to the thing that will make, that will sell the most potential units at the highest lifetime gross profit per customer. All right, let's just assume that you did that basic math, which by the way, if you did that basic math, it would put you in the advanced category, because you'd be amazed at how many creators don't do basic math. Let's assume you did do basic math, and you do have widget number one, and it is doing reasonably well. The creator then gets the creative idea to take this wildly next step, which is, hey, Alex says, if having one product's good, having a second product must be better. I should do more, right? Isn't that what that is? More products? No, that'd be new, by the way. (chuckles) Every sold yourself on your own idea, you sell yourself on your own BS, all of a sudden everyone's quotes align, like, you know, all of a sudden you read biblical scripture, and you're like, oh, this actually means I really should raise my prices. It's like, a particular activation, like, everything now reminds you of that thing. So, you then say, I'm gonna look at my original list of things that I was thinking about selling when I decided to sell widget number one, and I'm gonna pick from the remaining list to sell widget number two. Now, why are we doing this? We're doing this, because the creator says, "Ah, I wanna make more money." And, you know, I already have a certain percentage of people who are buying thing one. So, I'm gonna sell 'em thing two. Duh, right, makes sense, obviously. We'll just sell 'em something else. There's two problems that occur. Problem number one is that widget number two that you attempt to sell is typically the second best widget, because you didn't pick it first. Now, you may make the argument, I have new information, I'll learn a little bit more. This actually would have been better one, fine, maybe. The second problem is that you've already made some sort of ask of the audience, and unless your product was exceptional, in which case, by the way, side quest, it's not an ask if the thing you deliver on is exceptional, the problem is that the world has normalized, myself included, the give, give, ask, the give before you ask ratio, because honestly, I have to assume that most people suck at product. Most people's products are not that good. But in an ideal world, when people buy that product, the next time you have a product, they wanna buy it even more. And so, it doesn't seem like another ask. It seems like yet another give. People aren't upset if Apple comes out with another iPhone-esque product. Now, I wanna be clear when I say iPhone-esque, I mean, new and amazing thing, not iPhone 28,000 version, right? Hopefully, this won't sound self-aggrandizing. But if I came out with another book, and then the day after the book, I said, hey, by the way, I have another book, the likelihood that people would buy the second, the next book after that, if they enjoyed the first book, or the one that I just did, maybe to make this realistic, let's say I waited six months, or I waited three months to launch the next book, then the likelihood is that people would just buy that one too, because they got value from it. And it doesn't feel like an ask. All right, so I make this as a clear point to differentiate this whole, or at least, add nuance or color to this concept of giving and asking. Okay, back to the second widget. So you have your second widget, and it's not as good as your first widget, and you've already used up some cool goodwill, so you get a lower conversion on a lower widget. And so then, of course, you do this launch, it doesn't make as much as you want, it makes a little bit, and you're like, okay, but you know what really grown our business, 'cause I did this for a whole year now, 'cause this is our second year, and I just finished my second year. Widget one was year one, widget two was year two. You know what I could do to this business? I think I could come up with a third widget to solve my audience. Ah, a third widget, more products! And so you come up with a third widget, the same thing happens again. It's the third best thing to sell. You've already disenfranchised the highest buyers in your audience, and you go to a smaller conversion on a worse widget, and so what happens is like, let's see, the first thing sells 100, and the second thing sells 50, and the third thing sells 30. You just have this little, it's like you're dropping a marble, and they just keep the little bounces get smaller and smaller. And so unfortunately, a lot of creators, or people who have audiences, will fall in this very vicious cycle of just like they keep launching stuff. What I wanted to explain is the fundamental mistake. Instead of trying to find new products to sell your audience, you wanna find new audience to sell your product. I'll say that again. Instead of trying to figure out new products to sell your audience, you will likely be better served, trying to find more audience to sell your product singular. What a lot of people who have audiences fail to realize is that all it does is give you an artificial boost in the beginning, you sell through the audience, okay. And so it gives you an artificially inflated beginning. Now, if that product isn't good or it's not recurring, then you're gonna be in a little bit of world of hurt because now you're like, okay, what would I do now? Now you have to make your regular call to actions and you sell kind of a maintenance level, which is purely predicated on the amount of new subscribers and followers you generate from your organic content on a regular basis. You then just know that you add call it a hundred people a day to your following and you convert 1% or 2% of those followers and you get one or two sales a day, depending on the price point. And that's it, that's the game. And then you get really sad because you're like, oh man, the launch was so big. Now it's not that big. So I should launch the second product. And of course we know where that ends. I have seen so many influencer businesses that have like nine businesses that all make zero dollars. Not really, they make some money, right? But you think that in your infinite wisdom, you're going to somehow, I'll compete every other person in the space that you have for each of those verticals because you just had one launch to your audience. And then of course, because sales are coming in the way they used to, you over hired and then you have to cut back there. And then of course your reputation suck first because it's not as good as it was before. There's also less excitement. But then you're like, well, I can't cut the team because some customers there, right? It's just a big mess. So what do you do? First things first is you recognize the fundamental truth that I just said, which is you likely need to find more audience to sell your product if you truly believe in the product rather than trying to find more products to sell your audience. If the product is good enough, it will expand beyond the audience because you have word of mouth. You will also be able to run advertisements to colder, colder traffic. And if done well, that product will actually bring you more, more audience. There's a reason, by the way, I spend so much time on the books. I know that a huge percentage of people actually find me through my books. Someone recommends the book to them at some random conference. They read the book and then they follow my stuff. Then they enter my audience. And so the product actually creates audience members who then increases the likelihood that they purchase other future products from you in the future. And that is the point. It's more so that you only know and you have to recognize this as a skilled efficiency. You only know one way to get customers. And you're probably also a little impatient. The inverse of that would be somebody who knows multiple ways to get customers and who is patient. It would then follow that you say, okay, I have this product that I believe a lot in. It makes more sense, instead of making a second product, that I simply take all that effort, make this product better, that's the back. And then the front, it makes more sense to instead of promoting a second product to that audience, to try and make even better content to expand that audience and or run advertisements or do outbound or whatever your next would find affiliate partners that can send you more traffic, whatever it is, to expand my audience. And if the product is good, the product will reinforce your position, ideally, positively in your prospects and then soon to be customers' minds. And I think this is like one of the fundamental mistakes. I mean, the reason I'm making this podcast, I saw some dude who, I wanna say like a couple of years ago, had a, I wanna say like low to medium following, it just launched service after service after service and it has like six different businesses now from an audience that now is dwindling because the guy just sold everything, anything that wasn't nailed to the floor, he sold to him. Right, and the stuff wasn't good. You know how he knows it wasn't good? It couldn't be good, no one's good on their first shot. Right, it takes so much effort to make a good product or a good service. It takes years, it takes iterations. I think the real real is that if you do have that big audience instead of fucking launching the whole thing, sell it to one to five percent of them, see what they say, get feedback, get some testimonials, improve the product again, sell it to another five percent of them, right, you create this exclusionary process where you slowly ramp up revenue, you add more people at the right pace and then you're able to basically grow into a sustainable revenue level that's significantly higher than the launch and then crash model. Now, you're like, wait a second, Alex, you launched your book. I sure did. Fundamentally, you have to be able to do a lot of execution at scale in order to pull this off and I'm not saying, yeah, I guess I am saying, I think it's unlikely that you have the skill set on your team to be able to do this and this is just me saying this from having met a lot of your teams. So yes, it takes operational skill and intelligence on your team to be able to pull this off on an existence basis. But my launch was a book. I spent all my time into the book beforehand. I had high confidence that the book would be good. I already, I vetted it and vowed it with other readers that I know I trust their opinion would give me good feedback to make it simpler, to make it streamline, to cut out irrelevant stories or parts that are like too advanced or whatever it is, right? I don't see that process, that product iteration process from creators because they tend to be more marketing heavy, not product heavy. And this is obviously something that I've taken a long time in my career to recalibrate. I've spent a lot more time in the last call at four or five years old product because I realized once you know how to sell shit, once you know how to advertise, you realize how incredibly empty it is because you have to keep doing it again and again unless the product's good. And so in the beginning, you suck at product and you suck at marketing. Then you learn how to market and sell and then you start selling stuff. But you realize how little leverage you have when you have to keep selling every month. You have to keep reloading, you have to keep hunting in the first every month to make your nut. And that's tough. I hate thinking about the amount of sales that I did 10 years ago that I don't get paid from today. And when I say get paid from, I just use that as loose hand for if I had had a better product at that point or I consistently reinvested in that product, those people might still be with me now. And so the secret to very big businesses, here's the real real. The secret to very big businesses is just you don't lose customers because it's amazing how big a business can get even if it sells a small amount of customers but doesn't lose them for 20 years. That's the real, like that's how it works. And I'm shouting this a little bit because it just took me too long to get. And a lot of these podcasts I just make to yell at my younger self just to be clear. And so you just gotta figure that out. If you have an audience and you're trying to make more money with them, make the product as good as possible, consider slow ramping it instead of launching it so you can get to a sustainable level and then look at finding more audience rather than finding more products to sell your resisting people. And right now I'm telling you, you won't be able to unsee it. The amount of people who have like nine different products in their profile, you know what I mean? They've got, you know, five businesses but they've got like seven employees. They're just stupid. It's just stupid, just dumb, just so dumb. But it's a novice mistake. It's a naive mistake. It's ADD, it's entrepreneurial ADD. The thing is, fortunately, unfortunately, it's super normal. I would say it's more common than it is not. You know, you get your rocks off bragging to people who don't know anything about business by saying that you own four companies. Anybody who does know anything about business is like, oh, this guy's super distracted. Not as an entrepreneur when I want. So, and the reality is that you also don't have four businesses. You're CEO of four businesses and you're running all of them which means you can't run any one of them well. Also, while maintaining your media, which is probably the biggest part of your business, which you're spending all your time on. This is a bit of a cautionary tale. This is actually inspired by a real person that I saw and I ended up going into a deeper conversation about this and I was like, you know what? I'm gonna make a podcast about this 'cause I think it's important. And so, if that's you, I need you to look at yourself deeply in the mirror and say, if I could only do one of these businesses, which one would it be? And if I took all the time I put into the other three companies and just made this one better, how much more money would I be making? And sometimes the answer to that question will make you feel sick to your stomach. Good, change. Because at the end of the day, the whole process of entrepreneurship is the learning process. And yesterday is gone. There's nothing you can do about it. Fundamentally, it's sunk cost fallacy to keep something simply because you did it before. The only thing you can control is what you do today and the day you realize the better version of your business is the day you should act on it. Everything else is emotion. With that being said, maybe this is a very frightening podcast for some people. Maybe your boss has five businesses and has done the exact same thing selling to the audience. The skill to solve for is focus, patience, and learning to iterate on a product, rather than create new products, and to increase the size of your audience via making the existing channel better or bigger, or finding a new channel altogether. And so if you're like, "Well, what do I do instead?" Those are the four steps. Have an amazing rest of your day. Make money, change the world, go capitalism. All right, back. - If these kind of higher level strategies and in-depth tactics that I've shared on my podcast are things that you would like us to personalize to your business to help you get to the next level, and you're a million dollar plus business owner, then I'd like to invite you out to a scaling workshop at my headquarters in Vegas. And just to give you some context, the average business owner in the room does just about $3 million in revenue, and we turned down about 65 to 75% of applicants that apply on a weekly basis. And so we try to keep the room really legit, and the scores that we get in terms of NPS so Net Promoter scores have been kind of off the charts, and so people seem to really like it and get a huge amount of value from it. And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acq.com/go, all right? So I try to make this URL as easy as possible because it's the type it in. So it's acq.com/go, as in geo, go versus stop, go. That's it, so acq.com/go, and I hope to see you in Vegas soon. you in Vegas soon.
