How To Get Tons Of People To Tell You The EXACT Product They’re Desperate To Buy From You . . . And THEN “Pre-Buy” It BEFORE You Create It

Imagine creating your next product and KNOWING it will sell because your customers TOLD YOU they’d buy it before you poured your time into making it. In fact, let’s go a step further. Imagine your customers actually gave you money for this product before you built it and now they’re cheering you on and helping you create it, because they feel like they’re on a mission WITH YOU.

Now stop imagining and listen to this program, because that’s exactly what Clay Collins is going to show you how to do. I know you’re a little skeptical. That’s why, if you HIT PLAY, you’ll hear me asking Clay for evidence.

Clay is the creator of the Interactive Offer, a program that shows people how to co-create a product with their target market and then pre-sell it to them before they made it.

Clay Collins

Clay Collins

Interactive Offer

Clay Collins is the founder of the Interactive Offer, a program that shows people how to co-create a product with their target market and then pre-sell it to them before they made it.

 

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Full Interview Transcript

Andrew: Three messages before we get started. If you’re a tech entrepreneur don’t you have unique legal needs that the average lawyer can’t help you with? That’s why you need Scott Edward Walker of Walker Corporate Law. If you’ve read his articles on Venture Beat you know that he can help you with issues like raising money or issuing stock options or even deciding whether to form a corporation. Scott Edward Walker is the entrepreneur’s lawyer. See him at walkercorporatelaw.com.

And do you remember when I interviewed Sarah Sutton Fell about how thousands of people pay for her job site? Look at the biggest point that she made. She said that she has a phone number on every page of her site because, and here’s a stat, 95% of the people that call end up buying. Most people though don’t call her, but seeing a real number increases their confidences in her and they buy. So try this, go to grasshopper.com and get a phone number that will make your company sound professional. Add it to your site and see what happens. Grasshopper.com.

And remember Patrick Buckley who I interviewed? He came up with an idea for an iPad case. He built a store to sell it and in a few months he generated about a million dollars in sales. Well, the platform he used is Shopify. If you have an idea to sell anything set up your store on shopify.com because Shopify stores are designed to increase sales. Plus, Shopify makes it easy to set up a beautiful store and manage it. Shopify.com. Here’s your program.

Andrew: Hey everyone. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. This is a website where entrepreneurs who are proven come here to tell you their story, teach you what they learned along the way and they do it so that you can grab as much knowledge as possible, use it in your business and hopefully come back and be as generous with what you’ve learned as today’s guest is with what he learned as he built his business.

We have a big topic here and in fact, I’ll be honest with you and tell you that Clay, the guy who I’m about to introduce you to, wrote this headline. Because he’s such a great headline writer I’ve got to go with it and here it goes.

How do you get tons of people to tell you the exact product or program they’re desperate to buy from you and then get them to pre-buy it before you even create the product? Clay Collins, who I just told you about, is the founder of The Interactive Offer, a program that shows people how to co-create a product with their target market and then pre-sell it them before they made it. He’s also the host of The Marketing Show, a weekly marketing education program. Clay, welcome.

Clay: Thank you Andrew. It’s great to be here.

Andrew: Did you tell me you obsess on getting headlines right?

Clay: Yeah, last week my copywriter and I, my lead copywriter and I spent about 6 hours on the phone coming up with one headline, so it’s incredibly important. It’s the hook. I think in marketing the devil is in the details. Napoleon Hill said that general knowledge is of absolutely no use when it comes to making money and I think a lot of people just rip off a headline.

The other day I did some financial calculations and I figured out that if I could double the opt-in rate on my homepage we could double our revenue as a business. So I am not kidding, I’m spending two months creating one squeeze page because it’s that important. I obsess about a lot of things.

Andrew: I love to see that. I told you that many people in my audience are software entrepreneurs. Either they sit down and code themselves with a team of other programmers or maybe they’ve hired other developers to code for them, but they’re in the business of software. The way that they obsess about software it seems to me that you obsess on marketing and that’s why I want to have you on here so that we can learn from you about marketing.

You could tell us about how you’ve done it for yourself and I know that would be inspiring, but for the audience who’s going to be learning from you I’m sure they’re more curious about what have other people who have studied from you been able to do? Do you have an example of what someone who went through your program has been able to accomplish?

Clay: Yeah. So we’ve got examples of people co-creating a product with their market and then selling it to them from all kinds of different markets. Everything that comes from the traditional info marketing areas, membership sites, e-books, physical books, but also things like high-end commercial appliances. This has been used to raise funding for a non-profit that was about to go out of business.

So we’ve used this across the board. I’ll just give a couple of examples. One is from the high-end refrigerator market.

Andrew: So this guy is selling high-end refrigerators? Not software for refrigerators, not ebooks on refrigerators. He’s selling the physical product.

Clay: Like the actual thing.

Andrew: OK. He came to you to learn how to market. What was he able to do?

Clay: Yeah. I think he had a problem that a lot of people have. One, they don’t know if anyone’s going to actually want what they have to sell, and then, two, they don’t really have the funding. This really solves both problems.

Basically, he co-created a product with his list of clients, at least his market, they weren’t current clients yet. He sold a $50,000 refrigeration unit, commercial refrigeration unit, to them. He brought in $110,000 in profits, not revenue, but profits. This was two months in advance of the product being available.

Andrew: So, before he even had a product, he started talking to his potential customers. He started creating the product with them based, I guess, on their feedback. We’ll find out how to do that throughout this session. At the end of it, before he even created the product and handed it over to them, he generated both revenue, and as you said, a profit.

Clay: Absolutely.

Andrew: The idea here is that the person who is listening to us can do similar things. If they don’t have money to fund their business, that profit that they’re generating by co-creating with their users, profit that they’re generating before they even create their product is what’s going to be used to fund their product.

How about another one? I’m sorry, go ahead. Tell me a little bit about this, and then another one if you want.

Clay: I just want to add to what you’re saying there, and I’ll give you another one, too. I think that this is a third viable option.

A lot of people know about bootstrapping, and that can be really unfortunate. In my experience, if you have that nagging feeling in the back of your head that no one’s going to buy your product, you’re usually right.

So, a lot of people know about bootstrapping, and a lot of people know about getting venture capital. There is a third option, which is actually having your market fund the product for you. Yeah. So, that’s what we’re doing here.

The next case study comes from one of my clients, Kim West. She’s known as the Sleep Lady. She’s been on Dr. Phil and Good Morning America, and things like that. She was one of the pioneers in sleep therapy for children.

If you’re child isn’t sleeping, usually that doesn’t bode well for your marriage, for your job. You know, you can’t sleep at night. Things are horrible if you have a child that can’t sleep.

She had been doing this for 15 years. She wrote the book on it. I believe, don’t quote me on this, but I believe she sold over 100,000 copies of that book. She wanted to show other people kind of what she did. It wasn’t like a medical certification program, or anything, but she got 750 people on an interest list using this process. She brought in $71,000 pure profit, at that point, to create a course on how to become a sleep therapist.

Andrew: OK.

Clay: It’s really phenomenal. If you look at the stats from her launch, each person on her list using this process was worth $95. That’s really incredible if you’re used to looking at these kind of metrics. Yeah. That was cool.

Andrew: OK. All right. I’ve got a sense of what’s going on here, and I’ve got a sense of the possibility. I’m also seeing that software entrepreneurs actually are using this. I shouldn’t say a whole lot of software entrepreneurs, but there are a good chunk of them that are. They’re starting to do a little bit of this, of collecting email addresses before they launch, of trying to pre-sell a minimum viable product, etcetera.

I want to have you here to teach us more specifically how we can do it right. You’re the guy who’s had the experience. Your students and your friends have seen results by going through this. So, let’s talk about it.

What’s the first thing that we need to do if we want to start co-creating with our customers?

Clay: Yeah. I think the first thing that people need to know is that just because this sounds intuitive, that can be dangerous that it does sound intuitive. A lot of people hear this, and they’re like, “I could just throw up a survey, ask people what they want, then sell it to them and make some income.” That can be a dangerous, dangerous business move. There are some very simple . . . I’m not an attorney, and I can’t give legal advice, but there are some very simple legal terms you need to follow. You can’t have someone give a testimonial for a product that doesn’t exist. You have to deliver within a certain time frame.

I just want to warn people against saying, “Yes, this is intuitive. It makes sense. Now I’m going to go and do it. I’m going to throw up one survey.” What you can do when you do that, just do this casually, is you can prematurely kill all interest, or momentum, that you would otherwise get for your product. So, this is much more than just surveying people and selling them something.

In fact, the biggest discovery of my entire marketing career is that if you properly co-create a product with your audience and be upfront, super upfront, I’m not talking about pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes, if you’re super upfront about the fact that you are going to make a product, and that it does not exist, you can have much higher conversion rates than if you just go out and say, “All right. I have this product. It’s done, anyone wants to buy it?”

It’s kind of like if you go on a date, this is like flirting, right? Maybe you’re touching them on the shoulder. I’m not talking about anything creepy, but you’re flirting the whole time. Then, at the very end, at the end of the day you can go in for a kiss that’s not creepy. Right?

What most people do when they create a product is it’s nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, they hear nothing from the company. Then they go in for a kiss and the customer’s like, “Why are you all the sudden hammering me with all this stuff?”

If you involve your audience and make them part of the story about how your product came to be, if they are one of the protagonists, or one of the players, one of the in this narrative about how your product came to be, they will be much more emotionally involved and they will be much more likely to buy it.

People support what they create. When you do this properly, they actually feel like your product was there idea. You need to put all ego aside because that’s really what it’s about. It’s about them, and it’s about them feeling good about their product that they buy from you.

Andrew: That’s reassuring because my instinct would be to say, “Hey, that’s a great idea. I’m glad it worked for Clay and a few other people, but if I say this, people aren’t going to believe that I’m really going to deliver it, so maybe they won’t buy.” Or, if I say I want to co-create it with the audience, then they might back away and not support it and wait to see if it actually happens, and only then buy it. Meanwhile, I’ll just be sitting here with nobody co-creating with me and look like a failure. So, why would anyone want to buy it when I release it?

I want to kind of explain the insecurity that I have in my head because I’m sure that the audience has got similar statements going on in their heads, too. I want to know how we combat that.

What about that, that very real concern that if you try to co-create, there’s a possibility that no one will co-create with you and the product won’t go anywhere and you’ll fail publicly, or that they won’t believe that you’re actually going to be able to do it, so they won’t buy it?

Clay: Yeah. One of the questions I get a lot about this is just that. It’s what happens if I go and I co-create, and then I pre-sell and nobody buys? I’m fortunate that I have never seen that happen, the reason being because when you do this properly – and I’m not just talking about a survey, there’s a sequence of events to train people to become hyper responsive to you – but, when you do this correctly it’s kind of like a tennis match. You go back and forth and back and forth and the momentum actually builds.

We actually have indicators that we’ve tested and we’ve run mathematical correlations on that we can predict. There’s about a 20% in either direction room for error, but we can predict how many units are going to be sold through some of these litmus tests that we have in place.

So, if you’re not getting interaction, and if people aren’t feeling you throughout this whole thing, then you don’t go in for the kiss. Right? If the date’s not going well, it’s just awkward, right? You just cut your losses and go home. That’s what this is like you’re courting your market.

Most people have a generally . . . with some of these tests I have in place, they have a really good idea about how it’s going to go before they go into the pre-sell.

Andrew: I see. I’d rather fail before I created the product than create the product and realize that nobody cares about it, and fail at that point, having invested all the time into it.

I was starting to ask about First Step. I’d like to follow along in some kind of sequence, but maybe before we dip into that, can you give me a clear overview? What is the process, without going into the details of it so that the person that’s listening to us can see where we’re going here?

Clay: Yeah. I would say there’s generally three phases, three main phases. When you start getting technical there’s more phases, but there’s three main phases.

The first phase is generating interaction. We take people up a response (?). When someone opts into our list, for example, if someone goes to the interactiveoffer.com, opts into our list, they immediately get an email from us that says, “Hey, it’s great to hear from. If you have two seconds please respond to this e-mail. Let us know how we can help you and how you found us. And if you have like another three seconds, let us know where you’re from.” And then respond to every single one of those e-mails. So they opt into our list, they immediately are invited to interact with us. We respond to every single e-mail personally, and so people get a hit of a good feeling from that interaction. All they have to do is reply to that e-mail. And then you escalate it. Maybe it’s a blog post. Maybe they reply to a blog post. We tell them our story and they tell us their story. Then maybe you escalate to a survey, and then you escalate to other things. But you’re slowly raising the bar for interaction and getting people comfortable with and used to interacting with you and being responded to after they interact with you.

Andrew: By the way you can probably see the smile on my face. I love this stuff. Let me hold off on going to the next steps. If you don’t mind I want to ask a few questions about this. First of all, that’s brilliant. When you send, when someone joins a list they’re thinking, ah, now I’m going to get spammed, no one cares about me. They just want another member on their list so that they can offer me whatever junk they have and make money off of me. If the first interaction you have with them is, hey, tell me how you discovered me and what I can do to help you? That’s magical. Especially if the person then responds. But if you get, I think we’re doing something like 150 e-mail addresses coming in a day just from the home page on Mixergy. If I e-mailed every one of them an auto response that said, thanks for coming in, what can we do to help you, and then had to respond to all of the e-mail that came in in addition to our customer service e-mail, we’d go nuts. How do you respond to all the e-mails that come in as a result of that?

Clay: Well, so back in the day when it was just me and we were completely boot strapped and it was like me in my one room apartment back in the day, I would do all these myself. But luckily the volume then was as such that that wasn’t a problem. But we have a team now, you know, and they’re amazing. Everyone who works in this company is full time and they’re for the most part in North America. There’s one person in Serbia and another person in the Philippines. But all our customer support is in house. We have three full time people that do these kinds of things. so we make sure that everyone is responded to and everyone is heard. Sometimes people want to hear from me personally but the responses are so custom tailored and so heart felt and so genuine that it’s not a problem. In fact we have customer support people in our company that get fan mail and they become like kind of the super star of the company instead of me who’s the public face. And that’s just a wonderful thing to happen and it’s a lot more scalable. I have no interest in being a guru.

Andrew: What are some of the? I understand, when you’re starting out you could respond. If anyone’s starting out with a new website the biggest issue isn’t how do I respond to all the people who are interested in buying from me and getting to know me. The big issue is, I don’t have enough people. And so if you don’t have enough people then it means that you have the ability to respond to the few people who are coming into you. When you get bigger you’re saying, hire staff and let them respond. But you also don’t want to just write a new response to every person who comes in. You have to have some kind of system for getting quick responses out there. What are some of the responses that you get from your audience to that intro e-mail and then how do you respond back to them?

Clay: Yeah, so typical response is, you know hi I’m Joe, I’m from North Carolina. I create software and I would really like to double the number of people who buy my product in the upcoming year. and that’s incredibly valuable information. All those responses are logged. And we respond with, hey that’s wonderful, you know. If we have some connections in North Carolina we’ll talk about it. You know if there’s a huge contrast between weather maybe we’ll say, hey I just saw a snowstorm hit, or whatever. We’re doing okay here, I’m envious, or I don’t know what we’d say there. When it comes to the software piece, we’re not trying to sell anything at all. Although most of the time when we do get these responses we do have the perfect solution for them. But how we respond is we’ll say, you know, hey check out a couple of episodes of the marketing show. And we link to them directly that maybe it could speak to what they’re doing. We usually try and visit their website specifically and make a few comments. So yeah, this is an investment but it’s also something that we believe in very strongly.

Andrew: Amazing, alright. So what you’re doing is you’re training your audience to give you feedback and you’re training them to expect that you pay attention to their feedback and respond to it. As you said, the first thing you do is ask them for that feedback and then respond to them. Then, in time, you do it through surveys and other mechanisms. That’s that first step, generate interaction. What’s the next step?

Clay: Once you have this foundation, this basis of interaction, that’s when you get into co-creation. The best way to do this, usually, if you’re starting out completely from scratch is to actually create a free product for your market. You ask them hey, if I could create a product just for you, what would it be? You know what, I want to give people some swipe copy if you’re cool with that?

Andrew: Absolutely. You’re telling me that you’re going to give them the copy that you use? That they could just copy and paste and, of course, adjust a little bit and use for themselves?

Clay: Yeah, yeah. I’ll give you copy for two things right now. The first thing I’ll give copy for is that welcome email. They can adapt this for themselves. This is tested, this is proven. This gets a high response rate. The second thing I can give are the survey questions that we use. We’ve geeked out quite a bit with survey questions. We measure conversion rate on surveys and such.

Here’s sort of an example of the email that we’ll send out to people. Again, it’s available at Theinteractiveoffer.com if you want to mimic our latest version of this.

Andrew: OK, and by the way if anybody wants to go and see your process in action and see how you respond to a new subscriber and how you respond to that new responder’s email back to you they go to where?

Clay: It’s Theinteractiveoffer.com.

Andrew: Theinteractiveoffer.com. OK, yeah go ahead. What are we going to see?

Clay: The subject line would be welcome to the family. Then, in parentheses, please read. Welcome is all in caps. It says first of all, you’re in. Welcome to the interactive offer family. If you have a second I’d like to get to know you a bit. If you can do just one thing for me today I’d really, really appreciate it if you’d just hit reply to this message and drop me a quick note to say hi. If you have a moment I’d love for you to quickly tell me where you’re from. If you have an extra 30 seconds I’d also like to know what ideal outcome you’d like to help me bring into your life. Anyway, since we found each other I’ll be hooking you up with all kinds of cool stuff in the days, weeks, and months ahead. Take care, Clay.

You’ll notice that the second thing I asked for was actually for them to tell me what they’re looking for. Here the most important thing is just that they hit respond. I don’t care if they only tell me where they’re from. That’s enough. I just want them to get used to doing this. It’s a very low [period of] entry. Literally hit reply, tell me where you’re from. That’s all we need to start this off.

Andrew: I see. I saw another marketer do that and I didn’t understand why he did it. Now I’m getting it. He probably went through one of your sessions and learned directly from you. OK, so then what happens after that?

Clay: In the co-creation phase that’s where we kind of start a conversation about what people are looking for. That initial conversation is all about what kind of free product to make for them. Now this works across the board. This could be for software, this could be for physical products. The first free product that you give away should, unless you have a bunch of money to mail people something, it should be a digital product. The survey questions we ask are, oh here they are. I have this all in a little Mixergy folder. Keynote is going to load this up.

I’ll just talk from memory here. The first question is what free product would you love for me to create for you if I were, let’s see…

Andrew: I can see already how it’s slowing down our system a little bit, by the way. Weird how that happens with Keynote.

Clay: OK, the three question survey is, and people should totally swipe this, we’ve spent a lot of time honing and refining this. What free information product would you love for me to create just for you? Actually, I don’t encourage people to put just for you anymore because it can be a little misleading. Because we can’t create a custom information product for every single person and I used to assume that people understood that. We got a couple of people who were like wait, you didn’t make this just for me. Just what free information product would you love for me to create for you? What’s your biggest fear and frustration? Third, what’s your ideal, perfect outcome?

There’s a lead up to this. We don’t just say hey, I’m going to make a free thing. Could you please fill out this survey. This is embedded in a narrative and I can give some more examples later on, but we’re talking about why we do this, how we’re sort of at a position where we’re looking to do something new and to serve people at a higher level. There are at least 3 emails that lead up for asking for a survey. We don’t just do this out of the blue and drop it on people, there’s a lead-up to this.

Then after we get the survey responses we actually go back to them and we say, we think understand what you want, but we’re not sure and I don’t want to create this unless I know this is what you want. So we actually restate back to them, is this what you’re looking for? Then we ask people to put in our comments if it is what they’re looking for.

Then we say, OK we’re going to make it, but we’re only going to make it if this many people sign up on the list to receive it when it comes out, because I’m not going to spend all this time making it and then nobody wants it. There is so much back and forth embedded into this.

Andrew: OK. The survey question, is that free-form or drop-down? You want them to just write whatever they want?

Clay: It’s free-form, yeah. And usually what a lot of people expect when they do a survey, it’s the entrepreneur’s fantasy and it never happens, is that people are going to say, I would like a software program that does these 5 things on the first page. This is what’s going to be listed. It’s going to cost $24.95 per month and here are the exact specifications, but that’s almost never what happens.

What you’ll usually hear is a lot of depressing stuff. Usually I have to sit down with a beer and really decompress after reading survey responses because you’ll hear people asking for magic bullets. They’re blaming everyone but themselves for their problems. They’re in fantasy land. It’s important to know that. It’s important to know what’s frustrating people.

Usually people will tell you what frustrates them. They will not tell you the solution that you need to provide. That’s your job, or the entrepreneur or founder’s job to come up with that. Usually you get a lot of just crazy stuff here. That’s fine, it’s important to know that.

Andrew: So how do you make sense of all this free-form information that’s coming at you? It’s so random that it’s hard to go in and create a 5-column spreadsheet and start adding numbers. It’s hard to make sense of all this random data. How do you do it? By the way, before you answer I think you should tilt the lid of your laptop down a little bit. There you go.

I know it makes it a little harder for you to see the computer, but it makes it much easier for people to see you and I want people to see you very clearly as they listen to this answer.

Clay: So the first process is just to read through everything and highlight it. I’ll actually print this out. I’m not a huge fan of paper. Paper and I are enemies of each other, but I’ll usually print this out and I’ll get a highlighter. The responses will become my best friends. I will literally read this every night. I’ll go through it. For about a week I’ll just sit with it. I’ll highlight stuff and I’ll start organizing responses.

Trends don’t usually emerge on the first read, but if you read between the lines and you look deeply at what’s going here, one or two main frustrations or problems usually emerge. In fact, that’s always the case is that one or two, sometimes three huge things will come out. Usually one will have more pain or need associated with it and that’s what we’ll go with.

It’s not something that just jumps out at you. It’s definitely qualitative analysis, but you need to hang out with those survey responses, make them your best friend and get to the point where you can literally recite back in someone elses language how they think about problems. Because as people who kind of know about what we do, we’re usually incredibly disconnected from the language that other people are using.

Other people’s language is completely incompatible with how we think of the problem so it’s very easy to forget. This is information that just kind of slips through our cognition, so it’s really important to just get super, super, super into what’s going on here and compile the responses that kind of conform to that number one thing that sticks out. Read them out loud and get to the point where you’re just intimately aware with what’s going on.

Andrew: All right. I see then what we do with the survey. We then create a blog post that says, I think this is what you guys want. What do you think of the way I understood what you’ve asked for, and then they give your their response in the comments. And that’s how you sharpen your idea of what they want and then you say, now I know what you want but I’m not going to create it unless, I thought you were going to say unless a certain number of people buy it. Instead what you said was, unless a certain number of people join a list or tell me they want to hear when it’s ready. You didn’t say buy it….

Clay: Some people want the free thing. Like I’m going to make this.

Andrew: Oh because the first thing is a free product, okay.

Clay: Right, at this point it’s just an info product. You can transition to software or whatever, but there’s usually some information that any market is looking for. It could just be, it could be a buyers guide, it could be like with Hein Refrigeration stuff, it could be, you know, I don’t know that market particularly but it could be the top three things you could do to reduce your commercial refrigeration bill and say, whatever. There’s lots of things you can do here. And so you create this product and people sign up and say yes I want it. If enough people sign up for that then you go ahead and you create it for them and then you release that when it comes out. So there’s tons of back and forth and you’re doing something here that people rarely do. And that is you’re actually getting like three levels deep. You’re not just saying, fill out this survey. You’re saying fill out this survey, is this what you want? Yes. You know, do you still want it? Yes. Okay I’m going to make it, it will be ready in like a week or three days or whenever it is. You’re creating another open loop. There’s some positive expectancy. Then you come out with it and then you actually take that info product off the market like one to two weeks later. So you’re creating all kinds of back and forth here and it’s just remarkable what happens when you do this.

Andrew: Oh, interesting. So you don’t leave it on the market, you take it off, you create a sense of urgency about this product that you’ve just released. Alright, I want to go to show me the money territory here in a moment. But let me stick with this for one more question. And that is, your system is automated. Meaning if I come in today I’m going to see the same process that someone who signed up yesterday saw. Except I’ll be a day behind in their, in the e-mail system. How do you with a system that’s that automated create this feel where you’re asking people to fill out a survey and you’re creating a product for them. Or can you even?

Clay: Yeah, you really can’t. And so we only do this when we’re coming out with a new product, which is actually very infrequent now. We don’t have a lot of products. We have like two. And I’m a huge fan of not having a lot of products. But now, so I do this now with high consulting clients and I work like in community forums and I help other people through this process. But this is event in marketing, this is not evergreen marketing. So this isn’t something we would ever automate. That would feel disingenuous to me. But yeah.

Andrew: All right, fair enough. So that’s the second part. First part is generate the interaction, start creating that conversation with the audience. The second is co-create a free product. What do we do next?

Clay: Yeah, okay, and then you ask them. And this isn’t going to be exactly. There’s actually, there’s like fifteen steps to this. So people say they want it then you say I’m going to make it, I’m going to release it on this day. Then you release it, people consume it, you promote the hell out of it. so people usually are downloading this like crazy, they’re tweeting it. Nothing’s for sale yet. You haven’t even talked about anything being for sale yet.

Andrew: Why are they tweeting it? What’s the interest that they have in tweeting it?

Clay: Well, again, this free product already. They feel like part of the story of how it came to be. They asked for it. You said alright I’ll think about it if the demand’s there. They show that the demand’s there. They know that you’re going out of your way to do this. Now there is a commercial intent but this is a viable product that stands on its own. This is not creating marketing to drive interest in another thing. This is something that is incredibly valuable in and of itself, it stands alone, and they are incredibly grateful to be part of this. And when I do this I’m incredibly grateful that they are too. So, they’re just paying me back by letting other people know about it, by talking about it on Facebook, by sharing it with their friends.

Andrew: Okay, alright. What happens after that?

Clay: So after that, you. The weird thing about these marketing campaigns is that I actually just follow my own process every single time. So I’m like, what’s step number four, and I’m looking it up in the books.

Andrew: I noticed even in the conversation. I’ve done this enough that I can see when the person who I’m interviewing his eyes are going certain places on the screen. I think some people in the audience think that when your eyes go down that you’re not paying attention or when they go to the right that you’re paying attention to someone else. I know what you’re doing is you’re searching that part of your screen where the steps are or the other part of your screen where the script is because I do it all the time too and the bigger the screens the more our eyes move when we search for that information. Generally speaking, without getting into the specifics that it seems like you don’t have in front of you right now, what’s the next big piece?

Clay: So the next step is basically to reassert all the positive social proof, because at this point if you’ve done this right and you’re really tracking with your audience, they’re like super fucking fired up about this. You’re fired up too, you’ve gone back and forth for a couple weeks, you’ve made something great, you’re released it, you’re taking it down, all this stuff.

Then a little bit after you take it down you say, holy crap, and only saying this is true, I’d never advocate false scarcity, we’re above board the whole time, but holy crap, there’s been a ton of interest in this free thing I’ve created. People are asking for a lot of things that I’m just not able to deliver in this free report. Usually what happens is you track every single response that you get to this free thing that you put out.

A lot of people will say, hey, on page 4 you said this. That is awesome. I would love more information about that. Or someone will say, 6 minutes into this video you did this thing and this really lit me up. Or they’ll say, I fucking hate this thing on page one, so you’re tracking everything that people are saying about your product and you’re putting it into a spreadsheet or Evernote or something and you’re tracking all of it.

That gives you another level of interaction and another level of feedback. So you go back and you say, the interest is huge and from what I see there is tons of interest in this other thing. So I’m thinking about releasing a course on this or I’m thinking about making a product or I’m thinking about doing X, Y and Z.

I have no idea how much it’s going to be, but if I do I’m going let an initial group of people, a set of founding members, or founding buyers or ground level or whatever you do, you’ve got to have some name for it. But I’m thinking about letting an initial group of people in at some kind of discount, but i want your feedback. I want you to respond. I want you to be the group of people that let me know if this is what you want and I’m going to reward you with some kind of discount.

Andrew: I see.

Clay: Is anyone interested? And usually people are like, hell yeah. People love being involved at a deeper level. People love Beta testing software. People love being one of these ground level people who saw it from the very beginning.

Andrew: All right. And then it seems like it’s the repeat of the co-creation of a free product except what? How is it different from the process that we took before when we created that free product?

Clay: I’m actually just going to pull up the steps here. It’s the same except you’re not surveying again. You’ve already gotten the survey data, you got the response to your interpretation of the survey data, you’ve gotten their feedback on the free thing that you gave away and you’ve gotten their feedback to should we do this?

So at this point it’s really just about creating either one. What you wanted to create all along and connecting it to their language and their world view and what they’re looking for. A lot of people do this successfully. A lot of people have used this process on products that already exist, but they’re relaunching, but they need to tweak the marketing, they need to tweak the offer, they need to add more bonuses.

They need to kind of like re-purpose it and actually make it work, so people will do that. Or you create your product exactly from the frustrations and fears and all this stuff that came from the survey data and you create a product that directs that, that addresses that head-on.

Andrew: I’m kicking myself a little bit because I realize that this would’ve been an easier way to create some of the early products that I created. The first thing that I did was, I think one of the first products anyway, was a free guide to how to do interviews because I kept getting the same questions over and over again and every time I put up a blog post I guess people felt there wasn’t enough in it or they felt it wasn’t substantial enough, so I created the book on my own.

From that, I created a course based on the feedback that people gave me about the book and I realized if I would’ve done it in a more structured way instead of trying to imagine what they wanted to know in the book I would’ve given them more value. If I would’ve listened to how they responded to the book in a more organized way then I could’ve shown them in the course clear answers. I think I did a good job with it, but I could’ve done a better job.

More importantly, since it was one of my first products I could’ve generated more revenue, which would’ve motivated me and inspired me to keep doing more of what I was doing. I see that I can even use this now and I’m trying to think of how I can use this and where I would use this. To sum up the three big points, it’s generate that interaction. Really train people that this is a conversation that they’re co-creating with you and that you’re listening to them.

The second big idea is co-create a free product with your customers and you walked us through the process of that. Then you also say, co-create a premium product and you gave us a few ideas about how to do that properly. It’s no longer the same survey process, etc., but you’re going to get in on the ground floor. If you pay less than most people will in the future I will give you more insight on what’s going on and I’ll create this with you in mind for other people who will pay more later.

Clay: Totally.

Andrew: OK.

Clay: I’ve never seen anything convert higher than Interactive Offer. I’ve seen Webinars convert higher for the people who actually show up for the Webinar, which is usually a small percentage of the people who sign up for it, but in terms of the number of people on your list, I’ve never seen anything convert at this level. People support what they create. It’s amazing.

Andrew: I want to learn a little bit more about this, but there’s something that I noticed in your about page that I wanted to ask you about.

Clay: Totally.

Andrew: This is your personal side. I went to the about page and it says that you do just one thing per day?

Clay: Yeah.

Andrew: What do you mean by that?

Clay: So for example, today I’m doing this interview and that’s what I’m doing. It’s very difficult for me to do more than one thing per day. I’m definitely an entrepreneur. I don’t know what percentage of entrepreneurs have ADD, but it is very fucking difficult for me to do more than one thing per day and when I do that I end up feeling torn in two directions. I end up not doing a very good job, so I just restrict myself to one thing per day.

There’s definite downsides to that. I am not very active on social media. I’m very bad at a whole lot of things as a result of this, but I think the things that I do do, I’m much better at. So this works for me. I don’t know how well it works for other people, but I could live no other way.

Andrew: So one thing per day. We actually are going to be spending a lot of time you and I together today because we’re also going to be creating a Mixergy course today where you’ll go into more depth about what you discussed right here and you’re going to show your computer screen and really walk people through this process.

This is it and actually when I read that the first time on your about page I guess I didn’t register that now that I know that today we’re going to be spending our time together that’s a lot of pressure on me. I feel like boy, this guy is dedicating a whole day. I’ve got to make sure it’s really valuable to him. What happens after you’re done recording this interview and recording the course? What do you do?

Clay: So I got up this morning I got up and just to put this in perspective I listened to the top 5 Mixergy interviews in terms of comments. I talked to my copywriter and we talked about how we can put as much value into this interview as much as possible. We’re going to create this course together. Then I guess at the end of the day I’m just going to review what happens and maybe talk to my business partner and call it a day.

Think about what I could’ve done better, stuff like that. Maybe follow up with you with some copy to make sure that we portray this or we write some text around this interview in a way that it’s going drive paid views and things like that.

Andrew: I really admire this approach to life, because it means yes, you’re doing fewer things, but what you turn your attention to gets done really freaking well. I remember when I talked to Alexis Ohanian. He and I were going to go up on stage at a conference here in D.C. and I said, Alexis, you’re wearing the shirt, the jersey of the local hockey team. You thought about what you’re going to be handing out people and you connected it to D.C. and you did all these little things. Where did it come from?

He goes, you know, frankly the night before I sat back, I smoked pot and I just started thinking of all these different ideas that I could come up with. What I wondered was, I said you know, Alexis is a guy who sold his first company. He’s kind of got a lot of space to do things like this and to really be creative.

How do you Clay, running a company, having all of these people contacting you and all these other obligations, how do you take the time to prep for something like this and then to do a postmortem after the session is over. Then, of course, how can we do it based on that?

Clay: Yeah, I made a very key decision early on in this business. I’m not, I heard Gary Vaynerchuk, he was doing a video the other day and he said “I’m an entrepreneur first.” He was putting his daily [grape] show or something. He was like I’m an entrepreneur first and before I was doing this I was doing baseball cards and after this something else is going to come. I’m not an entrepreneur first. I am someone who runs this business first and foremost. I’m going to be running it for the next 50 to 70 years. I made a decision early on that has been incredibly key.

About a year after I started I brought on someone who is now my business partner. I brought her on for a large sum of money. I literally could not, could not, afford to pay her first month of salary. But the month she came on our income tripled because I was able to spend more time doing what I was good at, which is marketing. I was spending maybe a half an hour to 45 minutes a day doing marketing initially and now that’s all I do.

I’m a huge proponent of hiring people full time and not fucking around with human resources. Getting the best possible people you can get. I have an amazing team. I have a fucking amazing team. I have amazing customer support. I have an amazing business partner. We have a full time person who does partnerships. We have a full time person who helps coordinate content. That leaves me to do one thing per day.

It’s not something that I’ve always been able to do but it’s something I’ve always aspired towards. I think as I bring better people on board the percentage of my time where I’m operating in my area where I’m gifted increases. I’m just trying to expand that part of my day, day in and day out. That’s the decision I’ve made.

I feel very strongly that when it comes to internet businesses a lot of people are engaged in this human resources race to the bottom where we’re trying to find people for $2, or $3, or $4 an hour in the Philippines. What we end up doing is we end up doing a [mech]. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that movie Avatar but you know that point where there’s that soldier and he’s in this larger machine and when he moves his arm the machine moves its arm. When he takes a step that thing takes a step. I think what so many founders end up doing is they end up creating a [mech] business. It’s just a larger version of them and nothing gets sold if they’re not there. The right arm doesn’t move unless they’re moving their right arm. That’s just not scaleable.

Hey, at the end of the day I think we really suffer from, and you’re getting me on one of my rants here, but we suffer from a vision bandwidth problem when we first start. I know we want to have the best customer service in the world but I do not have a vision for that. We brought on someone who did. I know we want to have the best partnership program in the world but I do not have a vision for that. We brought on someone who did. When I’m not thinking about that at night someone else is obsessing about it.

Andrew: How do you find that? You know what, I was going to go back into more marketing questions and I hope I have time to ask you more marketing questions. But how do you find someone who can handle your whole business for you and then another person who can handle your customer support for you? And so on.

Clay: I think from a logistics point of view, well we’ll talk about the logistics point of view in a second. From a mindset point of view we need to get away, in my opinion, from this whole idea of getting shit off our plate. It’s like we have this crap, we hate it. I’m going to unload all the fucking shit I hate and I’m talk about it as if I hate it. I’m going to unload this on someone else and say I’m just going to give this to you. Take my crap away from me. No one wants to do that.

I think the first thing is that we need to, instead of looking to get stuff off our plate, we need to look for people who genuinely have a vision for the stuff that we shouldn’t be doing. That we don’t have a vision for. Also, I really truly believe that huge vision people and people who are the best in the world at what they do are somehow, I’m not a spiritual person but I believe that they are in some ways magnetically attracted to other people with huge visions. The size of your vision, to a large extent, will dictate your ability to attract amazing people. That’s always helped out.

In terms of hiring people, we generally hire from our list and our customer base. It’s kind of a running joke in my master, who’s going to get hired up next time. Because we do that.

Andrew: I’ve noticed that you do that, actually. I think there’s currently on the homepage or on the blog page of your site a request or a post about a new job opportunity.

Clay: Yeah.

Andrew: All right. What process do you go through to filter people out so that you find that one person who, if it’s going to be customer service, thinks about it the night before they come into work, obsesses over it on the weekend, and reads books about it in their spare time?

Clay: Well, I think a lot of people are self selecting. So we’re very clear that we only want to hire lifers. It doesn’t always work out. There was one case where it didn’t work out. But for the most part we’re very clear that we want to make a lifelong investment in you. We’re looking for someone who isn’t going to hop from company to company but is going to stick with us for the long haul, because we have a long haul vision for our company. And I really believe that the value of someone to your company is almost exponentially over time. It’s like marketing. If you spend a bunch of time on five marketing campaigns, you’re not going to do very well. If you focus on one and hone it and tweak it and refine it, split task, things are going to go well. So we’re very clear in that we’re looking for lifers. We’re looking for someone who actually has a vision for what they’re doing. We ask them to create a video. We invest a lot. My business partner and I will interview them and we’ll go back and forth for a long time. The last person we hired I think we were having conversations with them for over a month. We probably had over 15 conversations with them before we hired them because we wanted to make sure they were a good fit. So it’s really just about doing the work. I really believe in being incredibly upfront about what you’re looking for and making sure that they have the ability to manage up, to manage you. I’m a crappy manager and I want someone who cares about what they do more than I care about it. So they’re going to call me at 3 a.m. in the morning because they’re pissed that I didn’t do something, and it needs to be done the next day in order for them to meet their goals. So I could go on and on and on about this. But we just invest in it heavily.

Andrew: All right, how about . . .

Clay: Also, my business partner has a background in HR and she’s interviewed over a thousand people over her career. So that helps.

Andrew: You can give her name, right?

Clay: Yeah. Her name is Tracy Simmons.

Andrew: Tracy’s fantastic. She’s the reason that you and I are here doing this interview. I think I asked her if I could interview her, and I hope to have her on at some point in the future. She’s incredible and I know that it’s hard to find someone like that. I hope I’ve done a little bit of good in helping people understand how you did it. And maybe we can even do more and more sessions in the future about how to find these great people and just keep developing them. I did a session on that, actually, I’ll tell you, Clay, a while back. And I got a lot of negative comments on it, where people felt, ‘Andrew, this isn’t what you should be focusing on. How to hire, how to retain employees. It feels a little too big business.’ I think people just don’t understand the importance of it.

Clay: I am not kidding. It was me, and no one else, and I could not afford her, and I hired her, and our business tripled. Because I wasn’t trying to manage some VA and I could focus on what I was doing. And so I think it’s vitally important. I think it’s underrated. People want marketing tactics. This is the best one I know of. But HR is super important.

Andrew: Ok. How about one other marketing tactic for the person who just said, ‘Andrew, why did you get into his background? I need to find out how to market. You’ve got Clay on. Don’t waste my time. Get more good stuff from Clay.’

Clay: Totally. Totally. So I’m going to just share something that’s incredibly important. This is something that we’ve been able to do. And I’m just looking for it right now, if you see my eyes going down. So this is sort of a contest we run when we’re getting into the pre-sale, the ‘show me the money’ part. And we use this contest to gauge interest and also to increase conversions, and also this is the metric that we use to figure out if something is going to sell. So we’ll create a contest during our launch where we’ll ask people to tell us why the product that we’re coming out with, that doesn’t exist yet, is the perfect product for them. And if they win this, then we give them a free founding membership or whatever. They get it for free. And this does a number of things under the hood. The devil is always in the details. But what this does is incredibly important. First, it generates social proof. So people can see that all these other people are responding to the survey and saying why this is the best product for them. So that’s the first thing it does. It generates social proof. A lot of times, if people see that other people want something, they’re going to want too, even if they didn’t initially want it.

The second thing it does is it gives you language to use in your sales letter. You know why this is the perfect product for a whole bunch of other people. Like one third of my sales letters are written by my customers because I just kind of take it and re-use it. I have to organize it and stuff but about one third. That’s the second thing it does. The third thing this does, and this is a little sneaky, but it creates what’s called consistency and commitment. So if someone just sold themselves on your product, they just realized[??] the perfect product to them, they just had to go through the logic and think about why it’s good for them, and they’re much more likely to buy the product when the product comes out because they just sold themselves on it. Additionally, this gets people to consume your marketing materials, because in order to answer this question, they actually have to consume the blog post and the things you have written about doing this. So it drives up consumption as well. You know, I’ve listed, like, eight other things that this does in the past.

Andrew: You love smart marketing.

Clay: What’s up?

Andrew: I’m smiling big as you’re describing this because smart marketing is just so frickin’ fun. You love online marketing, I know this about you. And I can see why.

Clay: You know, at one of my…I put it in every presentation, I have this picture of this kid, like, coloring and it says, “I f***in’ love marketing.” And I really do. And not to get off track too much, but I believe that we neglect the value of marketing in actually delivering value to our customers. Marketing is really the psychology of making a decision because 100% of the people who don’t make a decision whether or not to buy your product, aren’t going to buy it. So getting a decision out of anyone, either way, is going to drive up conversions. And what marketing does it opens up a space for people to make a change in their life. And that is a huge reason why it’s so valuable. People generally don’t take action on things they get for free, often. And marketing is about getting people to actually step into a new place in their life where they can make a change in a way that’s going to substantially help them. So, yeah, I totally love it.

Andrew: All right. Let me do a quick plug for Mixergy Premium and then I’m going to ask you a question that I think will give people insight into the way you think. Let me read this. This is an email that I got from Alexandros Mathopolous[SP]. He’s one of my younger viewers. He says, “Hello Andrew, I’m very excited to be contacting you. My name is Alexandros and I have just subscribed to the premium membership on Mixergy. I just wanted to give you some feedback. I’ve been watching it for, like, 48 hours and I love it.” He’s 16 years old and very interested in business and he says, “I’m getting a lot from your website. But I do have some advice,” he tells me. “I think that you should try to get some more younger people to interview. There’s a whole group of very successful teens online that have opened their own businesses online. If you’re interested, I can introduce you to an amazing person who has many connections in this teen group of entrepreneurs. Just let me know. You can reach me,” then he gave me his email address.

So first of all, I keep giving out the names of people who are Mixergy Premium members so that you in the audience know they’re are real people out there who are buying it, who are benefiting from it. And not just benefiting from it in their business, but really enjoying it. Here’s a guy who is 16 years old, must have, like, entrepreneural ADD plus teenage ADD and he’s 48 hours straight enjoying this instead of, I don’t know, playing video games for 48 hours straight or watching TV.

So the entrepreneurs that we have on, like you, Clay, are really interesting people. And second, you can see what it does. How it fires people up to be full of knowledge and ideas that they can use. It’s almost like, I’ve seen people pause some of our courses on Mixergy Premium and go and do it because they can’t wait to try what they’ve learned. And that’s the power of really powerful, strong ideas that are actionable, not just interesting but actionable. And then finally, what he said here about introducing me to someone who can get more teens on here, absolutely. He and I have been talking and we will have more teens through the contact that he mentioned.

So all this is to say, if you want to get fired up like Alexandros, go to mixergy.com/premium. If you’re already a premium member, you’re going to get all these courses where real entrepreneurs show you exactly what they do to build their businesses. We”re going to get Clay on to teach what you just learned here today in more depth. And, of course, if you have any feedback, I love it. I want feedback. Some people apologize before they send me feedback. They say, “Andrew, I hate to say this, I love your stuff, but I think you could do better if you do this.” Don’t apologize. I want it. So thank you, Alexandros, and I hope to see many more people join Mixergy Premium, which is at mixergy.com/premium.

Clay: That’s awesome. My business partner and I just bought the yearlong thing. I think she bought it a couple of weeks ago, and f***intastic, fantastic. I cannot believe the value that you’re giving away for the current pricing. I have seen people charge 800 dollars a month on a membership site for what you’re giving away at a lower rate. So it’s a no brainer to me.

Andrew: Ah, you know what. To hear that from you means so much to me. I love that, I love hearing that. And of course if anyone has negative stuff I want to hear that too so that I can improve it. But when I see that you, Clay, are a member and feel that passionately about it it makes me feel good. I feel like, I don’t know. Like a little kid in a garden who grew something and said, do you like it? And you say yeah. And also you’ve got all this knowledge in your head. If what we’re doing on Mixergy helps you, then I know it could help the audience of entrepreneurs who are experienced and….

Clay: Outstanding.

Andrew: Alright, so here’s the thing. You were saying, Andrew, I can really sell because I’m a marketer. I can, I’m going to do your course, I can really sell it. And I’ve got, and you started using all this lingo that I wanted to introduce my audience to I said, you know what Clay? Instead of doing it in the interview and selling it using your tactics, do you mind talking about some of the tactics that you could use here and breaking them down so that my audience instead of being influenced by it, can use it to influence their own potential customers and get them to buy.

So what was it? You talked about open loop and a couple of other things. What would you do?

Clay: Yeah so. There’s a few things. So there’s a NLP principle called open loops. And that’s when you sort of discuss something and you say you’re going to talk about it later. So, you and I are going to do course together on how to do kind of some of the things we talked about here. And I would have, if I were going to engineer this interview to sell that, I would have made references to things that were going to be covered. Like, I’d talk about something in a way that creates desire, and without like teasing, without being like slant, like hitting people over the head I’d say you know and here are four or five things. But in order for you to really understand this you really need to see the swipe copy. So and you know I can’t technically display my screen here and show that to you, but Andrew and I are going to be actually looking through how to do this. And like Napoleon Hill said, general knowledge is of little use in the accumulation of wealth. And I really want you to see specifically what this does and how you can do it. Because there’s a lot of things that conceptually make sense, but unless you actually see them you’re not going to understand. Just like you can conceptually understand how to put together a puzzle, but if you don’t see the box top you know you kind of don’t have the idea, like, what it really looks like.

So I would have done that. I would have constantly been seeding the next thing we’re going to do. So I’d be just kind of hinting at the fact that I have clients. I’d be hinting on, you know, about different things that are going to be covered in different places. I’d also be talking a lot about decision making. Because marketing for me is really the psychology of decision making. And the most important thing that you can do if you want to create sales is to create a fork in the road where people decide to go one way or the other but they cannot go on like they did before. So like, for example, when you hear about, when people hear about co-creation and pre selling, they literally cannot think about producing a product and selling and product like they previously did. They have to make the decision, am I going to pre-sell or am I not? Am I going to do co-creation or am I not? And they may decide not to, and that’s totally fine, but they made a decision. And that is way more powerful than anything else you can do. I don’t care. When I do marketing I do not care whatsoever about whether or not people buy. I care about whether or not they make a decision. Because the conversion rate on people who make a decision is so much higher then people who don’t. And if everyone in the world, all 6 billion people made a decision about my product, you know I’d be a trillionaire.

Andrew: So how do you get people to make a decision when we procrastinate when it comes to decisions, when we don’t feel comfortable deciding and cutting off one path and taking the other.

Clay: Sure, so you imbed dichotomies into everything you do. So let me just, I’ll just pull out an example from, like I have this webinar that converts at around 30%. So 30% of the people who show up for this webinar end up purchasing my product. And that whole thing is based entirely around dichotomies. So in that I talk about how the system is broken and how like 80% of published book sell less than 100 copies and from what I’ve seen, everything I’ve seen, most online products do much much worse. So people have two decisions, or so people have two choices. They can either you know go away, create a product, get some sort of funding, and spend most of their time marketing to their investors instead of marketing to their customers and hope it works or they can co-create with their audience. They can know that it’s going to work. They can get paid for it in advance and create a product with the knowledge that it’s going to work. It is a whole lot more fun to create a product when you have six figures in your bank account to make it but if you don’t you’re constantly overwhelmed with this perfectionistic attitude about I have to make this product better and better and better and better because I’m anxious that when it comes out people aren’t going to like it. Then that product never comes out and you didn’t meet your budget. Then generally people don’t like it because…

Andrew: You just keep creating this dichotomy and I’m thinking if I were going to do this then maybe every time I talked about what Mixergy Premium was or what Mixergy in general is about I would say, “Look, you could either figure things out for yourself and you’ll make a lot of mistakes but if you’re smart you’ll eventually get there. Take you longer, be more painful, but I believe you’ll eventually get there. Or you can take another path which is let other people who have solved the problem show you how they did it so that you don’t have to make mistakes or take as much time. You decide which way you are. Some people need to make those mistakes and need to experience it all on their own. Other people love learning from those who have done it before and if I just keep emphasizing this dichotomy I’m forcing my customers or my listeners to make a decision – which way am I – am I in Andrew’s camp and potentially a buyer or am I not.” That’s what you’re saying and that’s what people in our audience should be doing too?

Clay: Right. So at the end of everything you’d say, “So now that you have listened to this interview you have two choices. You can either listen to what Clay’s said, try and take action based on conceptual knowledge, or you can see the swipe copy, take it, apply it into your business, do it verbatim like he’s done it, how it’s worked with 100’s of people, and actually thousands of people, and just apply it yourself. So you can do it one way or the other. The choice is yours and that kind of thing.”

When I do a webinar about this here is what I say. The whole webinar is based around three choices. Do you want to post sell or do you want to pre-sale? We make them make that choice. Do you want to solo create or do you want to co-create? They make that choice. The final one is do you want to receive last or do you want to receive first. Actually that’s sort of a heated thing but I could talk about that for awhile too. Finally the things is you have two choices – you can join me and we’re going to do this together over the next six months or you can receive last, solo create, and post sell. That’s fucking terrible.

Andrew: All right. You know what? I’ve seen that done to me when I’ve read marketing and I didn’t realize it until you said it here. That dichotomy is one of the best parts of this interview. Actually, you kept probably watching me smile throughout this interview because there are parts I’ve seen on your site, I’ve heard or I’ve seen done to me on other sites, and I just didn’t understand it. It’s so interesting to see it all broken down right. If you’re listening to us and you’ve gotten this far you’re probably curious about how to get more information. I’m not selling because I’ve got any percentage interest in Clay selling you Porches. I’m just going to say I love this stuff and I want you to just be exposed to more of it and if you are, Clay, where do we send them to? TheInteractiveOffer.com if they want to see this part?

Clay: TheInteractiveOffer.com.

Andrew: TheInteractiveOffer.com. You also do a marketing show which I saw before the holiday which one of the things that I admire about you is in a short video, unlike me where I need a full hour to do this program, you in about four minutes, you pack a lot of marketing punch. That’s at the marketing show. Where can people see that?

Clay: That is at MarketingShow.com.

Andrew: You didn’t need the “The” for that one? It’s just MarketingShow.com.

Clay: I would have paid for it. I was happy to pay for the “The” in TheInteractive to go away but we got MarketingShow.com. We also own MarketingConference.com and MarketingCommunity.com but those are not used. I also believe in investing in domain names.

Andrew: I see; and that gives us a sense of what you have in mind for the future. All right, Clay, thanks for doing this interview.

Clay: Andrew, this has been spectacular. I have a great deal of respect for the amazing community and movement you’ve done here. It’s a huge honor to be on Mixergy – one of the highlights of my career and something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time so thank you so much for having me.

Andrew: Wow, that means a lot. Thank you for doing this. Thank you all for watching. Let me hang up and I’ll call you right back.

Clay: Okay, sounds good.

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