Transcript

Alrighty. So in this video, I'm going to talk about the three pillars that I use when I'm coming up with a new offer, three activities and the order in which I execute those activities. Most people, when they come up with new offer, they think product first. And as an engineer, I always catch myself thinking technology first product first, and it's good to be product focused. It's good to have those skills for sure. Cause they come in handy. But if you start with that, if you go product heavy too early, you might end up in some trouble. So I'll tell you a story of when I came up with this new offer just around Corona buyer's time. This is like March. I was actually thinking about it earlier earlier on, but this this new offer was around helping businesses build remote sales teams.

Okay. So I knew how to do it cause I did it myself, but I wasn't sure if there was demand. I wasn't sure if I should invest a ton of time into mapping out everything and, and making a product and service around that. So what I did first was I did marketing first, so I just whipped up a little video, a little iPhone video and I threw it out into the, the world. I blast it out to my list. I put it on a social stuff. I ran some ads to it and I just wanted to see if there was demand was the point that I was talking about. Did anyone even care? And sure enough people cared. It was pretty, you know, good time to start talking about that. And so I got initial interest and then I immediately got on the phone to sell.

So I did my marketing first. That's the first pillar. Then sales is the second pillar. So I got on the phone. I spoke to some prospects about this offer and I was designing the offer on the fly. So I was mapping out all the jobs that this offer needed to do. And the efficiency gains, it had to be better, faster, cheaper for the customer or else. Why the heck would the customer buy it? Right. So I was designing on the fly and I was coming up with what I call a spec sheet and then I sold it and I collected full payment. And that's how, you know, you have something that should be built. So once I had that full payment and that customer I've had a few customers, actually, then I went into the cave and just started building. And that's where the engineer skills come in handy.

And the product development skills come in handy three weeks, just don't talk, didn't talk to anybody. I was completely isolated and built the product. And then I got the case studies with those initial customers and this was all inside of a month. So I could have just started with the product. But if I didn't design it first as selling, it would have been wrong. And if I built it before I even knew there's demand, well, it would been a big waste of time, right? So those are the three pillars. So you've got your marketing, your sales and then your engineering. And you can see how fast you can move. If you can do those three jobs. If you have those three skills. Another example of this is my first business. It was an auto detailing business. One of my buddies calls me up, he's walking walking around and he sees this guy washing his car.

And he's like Nick, like I think, cause we knew how to sell door to door. I learned how to sell door to door when I was 20 years old. And he goes, Nick, I think we could sell like car detailing or car auto detailing door to door. And I was like, all right, that's a good idea. So, but I didn't do anything with it. I needed to test it and sell it first. So I got one of my designer buddies to whip me up. A little flyer, took that flyer, printed it out, took that flyer to like 20 doors and just pitched it. And I was designing the service on the fly and within 20 doors I sold like two or three jobs and they're like, great. Yeah, this is a great idea how much? And I was like, well, $200. And they're like, can you come tomorrow?

And I was, I was designing the service on the fly as I was selling it. And then after I got those customers, then I had to go learn how to do the detailing and learn the process. And we had to buy all the equipment. I had to take all the courses and figure out how to do the job that I promised when you're building with purpose, you can move really, really fast. And that business, the first day I went out and sold it, I sold like $1,100 worth of equipment was like 600 bucks. And then I hired a guy to help me do the jobs. And I paid him like 150 bucks or something like that. So in the first day that was profitable. And then that business went on. I just did that. A bunch of times I hired a sales team, hired more detailers, invested into more equipment invested in the process more. And there you go, first profitable, a successful business. So that's the method that I use. I got to kind of hold myself back a little bit with the engineering before I know there's demand. And if you can do those three skills, marketing sales engineering, and you can do them all together, you can move really fast and you can solve a profitable business models really fast. So that strategy worked for me. Hopefully that strategy will work for you.

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