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Quitting Slowlane road to go fastlane

A detailed account of a Fastlane process...

Hai

Beauty is Truth
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Mastermind
I reach a state where I could benefit from a Mastermind or even Mentor. Business Obligations become more dense and I would benefit from advice as well as help. Instead of having to read new books on business spending too much time with it, it would be probably better to get fast advice that I can execute on very fast.

Some things to do:
1. Read stuff on how to manage Money/How to manage Passive Income Streams(TMF mentions to stay monogamous at first, but I see many opportunities to get small revenues..)
2. I will need to hire people to help very soon(Hope everything works out). I hope to be able to grow rapidly with that. Tony Robbins mentions to hire people who do it better than you, because if you could do it, then the problem would be already solved(or something like that)
 
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Hai

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(F**k) Limiting Believes

I have been trying to be "successful" all my life. When it's time to pay off or when I think I hit gold or a breakthrough I just can't believe it. It might be too good to be true. I'm 10 miles from my goal/breakthrough and still I have this believe, that something will happen that will not allow me to have it.
Maybe I go to sleep and forget everything?

Bullsh*t!!!!!!


With this post I'm shutting these believes away and everything that comes from now on will be a story of great success.

I'm writing down everything I want to do and execute on it.

Dear Fastlaners I can't wait to report to you.

P.S.: I won't fail.
 
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Hai

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Repositioning
As someone who creates a new product, you need to position your follower in an advanterous way. Educate and change their believe.
You can even reposition a competition to your favour. Things can get outdated and you can position yourself as a new mindset.

All education material are subject to positioning. Something has invented it and takes advantage of being new like a new discovery.
 
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Justin Gesso

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Hai

Beauty is Truth
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Jan 1, 2015
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Copywriting
This is sensational. Thanks to @Thiago Machado, I have read Cashvertising and I can see endless benefits in applying what I learned. You my hero!

I´m able to write my own sales pages,
AS WELL as write great job applications!

This is a dealbreaker, you know?
I have the skills, but my copy sucks. That´s probably the reason I hardly got any gigs in the past months.
Learn to write copy, because it will elevate you 1000x above your competition.
 

Justin Gesso

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Copywriting
This is sensational. Thanks to @Thiago Machado, I have read Cashvertising and I can see endless benefits in applying what I learned. You my hero!

I´m able to write my own sales pages,
AS WELL as write great job applications!

This is a dealbreaker, you know?
I have the skills, but my copy sucks. That´s probably the reason I hardly got any gigs in the past months.
Learn to write copy, because it will elevate you 1000x above your competition.
Totally agree.
 
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Thiago Machado

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Copywriting
This is sensational. Thanks to @Thiago Machado, I have read Cashvertising and I can see endless benefits in applying what I learned. You my hero!

I´m able to write my own sales pages,
AS WELL as write great job applications!

This is a dealbreaker, you know?
I have the skills, but my copy sucks. That´s probably the reason I hardly got any gigs in the past months.
Learn to write copy, because it will elevate you 1000x above your competition.

Glad to hear, brother! ;)
 

Hai

Beauty is Truth
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The Front-End Product

This must be one of my most important posts here, because it signifies CHANGE.
There is one thing I´ve done wrong the whole time:
I didn´t sell a tipping-point hot products that has a high sales numbers rate to get a critical mass of customers.

In fact, what I did develop was a back-end product, and I´m keeping it in my repertoire. Just need to do something about the front-end product.
I´ve run the numbers and a good front-end product can give AT LEAST 200k in profit.

Here are the notes from Ready, Fire, Aim:

  1. Where: Traffic-do what everyone else is doing - Media placements
  2. What- Try multiple ideas, test multiple ideas, ->New Hot Products->Product Idea fits trend, several me-toos of hot products and improve them in some way(twist)->tipping-point and exciting
  3. Price - Optimal Selling Price(Front-End)->High-Quality Clients->What industry does, Cover fulfillment, but use market elasticity
  4. Copy
The goal is to get customers.
New Lead Front-End Product every 6 months.

It´s easy.
Where are the customers. What tipping-point hot products do they want. How can you price them for CMQC(qualified)
 
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Hai

Beauty is Truth
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Launch "fail" and Business Mastery

After a long time of hustling I think that the results are rather mediocre and I´m focusing more on developing working consistent business systems and learn all I can do on running a biz starting small as well as optimize for time-efficiency.

Time to go back to the drafting board.

I still have some theories on why I failed and will try to optimize for results by testing.
The most important thing for me at the moment is to build working systems that can run rather efficiently.
 

townhaus

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"As soon as I can get leads, I will start educating myself and produce."

Wrong! Educate yourself as much as possible about your idea. If I were a potential "lead" and I asked you an important question that you were not educated on, I personally would find someone else.

He doesn't need to know as much as possible, just a bit more than 90% of his leads would do (which probably won;t take too much time), enough to impress most of them when they ask questions.
 
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Hai

Beauty is Truth
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Here is what is happening next:

Find your open road: -forget the big idea, go for better and improve
The tribe has spoken: -they tell me which direction to go
Be someone´s savior: -execute WELL(commandment of entry) and innovate
Customer Service: -if the product is mediocre I can still fix it´s shortcomings with excellent customer service

My business seedling?: Content System

What do my customer´s want?
I think I didn´t listen well enough.
 
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Hai

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Business System

I made 1k from my launch. I considered it a failure, because I expected 20k from it.

But what if I could get the same numbers of leads every month and launch to my new customers every month?
What if I could get 1k every month from that system?

I got banned from my biggest lead source(guess I lost CONTROL here) so I will need to find another good traffic source again.
 

Hai

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Validation
I sent out an email to my readers asking for their opinion on my future business model.
Got a response from someone who does branding services.
He gave me some cool insights on how to improve the model and gave me his honest opinion,
which reminds me that I probably should look for local entrepreneur meetups as well to meet cool people, who are way more experienced than I am.
 
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Hai

Beauty is Truth
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Imaginary Need( vs. Actual Market Need
A need is imaginary when you are recognizing a need for a prospect, but the solution already exists. Instead of cloning the product to sell to the prospect, you just refer them to the solution.
An actual market need is something that people didn´t find a solution for yet.

Need vs. Benefit
Also, what I found is that in copywriting, it might be better to sell the NEED instead of the benefit. If you only look at the benefit, then you ignore competition. Make sure that the copy really hits a NEED.
 

Hai

Beauty is Truth
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Reselling in MMOs
When I was still gaming, my MMO-Shop was pretty popular. Here is why it worked:
-products were scarce
-I was always available, when they needed a certain item
-I was consistent with the shop
-products were useful

Margins/Prices were pretty high. Why did they still buy? Because they didn´t find it anywhere else or knew they can get it from me without searching.
 

Hai

Beauty is Truth
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Funding
Step 1: Work on side hustles to get enough funding+stable income
Step 2: Work on another side hustle as practice for fastlane biz
Step 3: Have enough experience to execute well on fastlane biz
 
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Hai

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Huge Market vs. Small Niche
Law of effection requires scale and magnitude.
You can achieve scale with a huge market. Even small inventions can have large effection if it hits a nerve with the general market. Tailoring small niches with simple products doesn´t effect enough people.
The more niche your product is, the more magnitude it needs to have to leverage effection, which means that it needs to be so good to justify a high price as well.

You know James Jean?
He tailors/appeals to fashion, art, painting and graphic novels.
It´s so broad that it effects a lot of people. General painters are too niche. They don´t have a way to leverage.
 
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fhs8

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One thing you also need to be aware of is that you can go after a couple of ideas at the same time instead of one. I'm not sure if you've changed business models in your posts since they're vague on what you're doing. If you're working on a bad idea then sometimes it does make sense to give up and work on another one or at least drastically change it. I think that whatever you're working on will be a total waste of time if it involves collecting emails. It's not going to make you millions or even enough to make a decent living.

Did you honestly think you'd make a living from collecting emails on a sales page? Name one multi-millioniare who makes a living based off of a sales page. When asking people on advice they are going to say nice things to not hurt your feelings. Very rarely at a restaurant for example do you hear people tell the waitress that the food is complete crap.
 

Hai

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Can you elaborate with the "email collecting being a waste of time"? Yea, I´m changing quite a bit. To sell info products I need to keep marketing. It´s still trading time for money, but can give some good revenue for future endeavors. Learned a lot about what I did wrong.

You know that it´s a progress and good things can happen if you stick with it and grow.

Sorry for being vague with the last posts. I´m trying to post some actual progress in the future.
 

fhs8

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Can you elaborate with the "email collecting being a waste of time"? Yea, I´m changing quite a bit. To sell info products I need to keep marketing. It´s still trading time for money, but can give some good revenue for future endeavors. Learned a lot about what I did wrong.

You know that it´s a progress and good things can happen if you stick with it and grow.

Sorry for being vague with the last posts. I´m trying to post some actual progress in the future.

Email marketing used to work well in the 90's. It's 2016. The conversion rate of promotion emails is very low. Out of 1,000 emails you'll maybe get 10 conversions if you're lucky. Can you make a living off of 10 conversions? Of course not. You'll never be fast lane based on what you're doing. Give me a scenario where you'd be able to make enough money to afford your own place based on what you're doing.

You're making progress to something which clearly can't support you.
 
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Hai

Beauty is Truth
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Last year was the first foray into business development and marketing. I started with dabbling in self-publishing, app creation, comic creation and went on to making my first online course which was supposed to take only 2 months to create. It tool 4 months to create and I spend additional 5 months in learning marketing and sales(thats what the books say). I thought I would solve a need. But the need was not to create the course but to refer people to the sources. My course does provide excellent info, but it is in fact red ocean, even though I thought it was blue. Learned tremendously from my mistakes.

What could have been done better?
1. Dont create demand from nowhere.
It is tremendously expensive. Even if you market, you need to have the right channels or else it doesnt work. My niche doesnt work with fb ads and google ads. It lives from content.
2. Invest in great execution.
If you have poor execution no one wants to work with you. Your ability to connect with influencers in your market, which is important, is directly in proportion to your execution. Your market is your investor..
3. Get sales. Before you spent every dime in your product, get presales to validate. You dont want to burn money for nothing. Thanks @AndrewNC.
4. Go blue ocean. To not misinterpret this, you need to find a real need that no one solved yet.
5. Know your market
You should know the market size if your goal is a monetary goal. To grow you need to know this.
6. Targeting
Target market, but Im not sure if you should lasertarget to a person yet. Definotely good to solve problems and get first sales.

What is happening next?
I dont want to stay beeing the poor passionate person who spents every dime in a business that doesnt work. The thing I worked on can only stay as a side income and I could even make it drop a bit of passive income with little more work.

Im working on getting the funding for education and experience and working on an idea that will solve an actual need, and even with disregard to my passions (hobbies...). Without money you cant experiment and experimenting is important.

The goal is to have stable income, and executing on a stable business/product that actually solves a problem.
Risk is expensive, which is why I say stable. Anything you do you should validate ASAP with sales or else it is a waste of money and time. Investors dont like risk neither do I.

I know that I pushed my course to the edges, but it also taught me that a product that solves a great need doesnt even need to much marketing.

Product is 50%, Marketing 50%
Product 20%, Marketing 80% is simply wrong in my opinion. Only marketing "gurus" would say that?

I like the MJ and Elon Musk-approach to product-centric businesses.

Also focus on process. If you focus in your process then the "fastlane" will come. But first you need experience. Because fastlane is a result of your progress and experience. Be the best you can be. and have fun going this journey.
 
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Hai

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It doesn´t matter what business model you pursue. Ecommerce, Amazon, Game Development, Mobile Development, Online Courses...At the base of all are products that solve people´s problems.

I´m going back to entrepreneurial basics. Forget about the money, and think about how I can impact the lives of people.
Even with all this "advice" it´s important to note, that gauging market size and competition is part of this process. This is something I learned the hard way.
___
I´m over one month into my first job ever, which is minimum wage. 12h of commuting+mindless work. Now I know how it feels like.
Already planning my escape...
 
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