The best business is a productocracy.
You solve a problem.
It's damn good.
People beat down your door to come buy it.
They tell their friends without prompting.
The local news does a story on you.
It goes viral.
Everyone wants it.
0 advertising, a billion in sales. You've bottled up the cure for cancer and sold it. The perfect business.
The problem is 99.9% of businesses do not fall into that category.
Many businesses that could be a productocracy are not realistically possible to start in your situation, with no money.
And to build up a productocracy in your situation, you better have a damn good idea, or bust your a$$ so incredibly hard that your value skews are enough to make it a productocracy, something so good people tell everyone about it.
Ideally, we'd have one. Realistically, I start off my business strategies a different way.
I don't think about a problem. There's a lot of problems. There's a lot of things you can do.
....
Running businesses and talking with other owners, we all run into the same problem...
"How do we get more leads? How do we get the word out about our stuff?"
It's the thing that everyone who runs an intelligent business has a problem with, getting more customers. The one-man shop "self employed" folks that can't take on any real number of customers are usually not intelligent businesses. I mean businesses that actually want to grow.
And it's the one thing I see new business owners overlook. They don't think about how to deliver their message to their potential customers. Almost all of these businesses fail because of one problem... they couldn't get enough people to give a shit.
And they aren't even starting unique businesses. They are doing things that other people are succeeding at. The difference is they don't know how to get customers.
So now... it's the one thing I look for FIRST.
"How am I going to get customers?"
The method, the targeting, the offer, the cost per lead and cost of acquisition, that's what I care about.
I work backwards.
Example:
I can send ringless voicemails for 1.2 cents.
What can I do with that?
I can scrape a list of thousands of lawn care companies (I have experience running one) using a tool called apify for free. I can send out voicemails and texts to all of them and say "hey, I saw your landscaping company and I grew one just like it. I had a lot of problems that I had to solve, things like employees, advertising, developing systems, a bunch of stuff. I want to give you a free ebook on how to do X, Y and Z and how to grow your company, it's totally free". Send that off as a lead magnet and use that to land a sales call to upsell other things like consulting, courses, etc.
So in one single day I could tell thousands of people about something highly targeted towards them that offers value. Oh, and it would cost me.... $12 per THOUSAND companies reached.
I could do many things with this.
I could scrape 50 thousand companies and filter for only ones that don't have a website for their listing. I could say "you don't have a website, I build the best websites for companies in your industry every day and it's a problem you need to fix if you want to succeed in business in 2023". Send that out to 2000 businesses before lunch.
This is just an example of ringless voicemails with scraping software. But it's how I approach business. I need a way to get in front of my audience and deliver what I want to sell.
The method, that's what matters. How you get attention on your offer.
Do you have an Instagram with 150 thousand niche engaged followers? You're sitting on gold. One post and you're in front of everyone, ready to buy your stuff.
I'm working on using software that scrapes every single user in a facebook group, searches them and sends them a DM. You think that will help as a local service business? Join a community group and run your system and get who knows how many people signed up all basically instantly for free. Rinse and repeat.
The method. Don't overlook it.
Technology is beautiful. It's leverage. You need to be creative in how you'll get your stuff in front of enough people for cheap. It's just as important as solving a need.
You solve a problem.
It's damn good.
People beat down your door to come buy it.
They tell their friends without prompting.
The local news does a story on you.
It goes viral.
Everyone wants it.
0 advertising, a billion in sales. You've bottled up the cure for cancer and sold it. The perfect business.
The problem is 99.9% of businesses do not fall into that category.
Many businesses that could be a productocracy are not realistically possible to start in your situation, with no money.
And to build up a productocracy in your situation, you better have a damn good idea, or bust your a$$ so incredibly hard that your value skews are enough to make it a productocracy, something so good people tell everyone about it.
Ideally, we'd have one. Realistically, I start off my business strategies a different way.
I don't think about a problem. There's a lot of problems. There's a lot of things you can do.
....
Running businesses and talking with other owners, we all run into the same problem...
"How do we get more leads? How do we get the word out about our stuff?"
It's the thing that everyone who runs an intelligent business has a problem with, getting more customers. The one-man shop "self employed" folks that can't take on any real number of customers are usually not intelligent businesses. I mean businesses that actually want to grow.
And it's the one thing I see new business owners overlook. They don't think about how to deliver their message to their potential customers. Almost all of these businesses fail because of one problem... they couldn't get enough people to give a shit.
And they aren't even starting unique businesses. They are doing things that other people are succeeding at. The difference is they don't know how to get customers.
So now... it's the one thing I look for FIRST.
"How am I going to get customers?"
The method, the targeting, the offer, the cost per lead and cost of acquisition, that's what I care about.
I work backwards.
Example:
I can send ringless voicemails for 1.2 cents.
What can I do with that?
I can scrape a list of thousands of lawn care companies (I have experience running one) using a tool called apify for free. I can send out voicemails and texts to all of them and say "hey, I saw your landscaping company and I grew one just like it. I had a lot of problems that I had to solve, things like employees, advertising, developing systems, a bunch of stuff. I want to give you a free ebook on how to do X, Y and Z and how to grow your company, it's totally free". Send that off as a lead magnet and use that to land a sales call to upsell other things like consulting, courses, etc.
So in one single day I could tell thousands of people about something highly targeted towards them that offers value. Oh, and it would cost me.... $12 per THOUSAND companies reached.
I could do many things with this.
I could scrape 50 thousand companies and filter for only ones that don't have a website for their listing. I could say "you don't have a website, I build the best websites for companies in your industry every day and it's a problem you need to fix if you want to succeed in business in 2023". Send that out to 2000 businesses before lunch.
This is just an example of ringless voicemails with scraping software. But it's how I approach business. I need a way to get in front of my audience and deliver what I want to sell.
The method, that's what matters. How you get attention on your offer.
Do you have an Instagram with 150 thousand niche engaged followers? You're sitting on gold. One post and you're in front of everyone, ready to buy your stuff.
I'm working on using software that scrapes every single user in a facebook group, searches them and sends them a DM. You think that will help as a local service business? Join a community group and run your system and get who knows how many people signed up all basically instantly for free. Rinse and repeat.
The method. Don't overlook it.
Technology is beautiful. It's leverage. You need to be creative in how you'll get your stuff in front of enough people for cheap. It's just as important as solving a need.
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