Andrew: This course is about how to build a profitable start up, cheaply.
The course is led by, let me bring him up on the screen, Chris Guillebeau.
He is the founder of Unconventional Guides, a business with a goal of
helping people do more of what they're most excited about. And everything
that you hear today is based on this great book, "The $100 Startup", Chris'
latest book, "Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do More of What You Love
and Create a New Future."

Here's the big board with everything that we're going to be talking about
today in this session. I want to just bring your attention to a couple of
things here that I think you should pay a special attention to. First is
this section right here, Give Them the Fish. If you've ever sold any
information and you've found that people just weren't buying, pay special
attention to this section. In fact, if you've ever sold anything that
people didn't buy, I think you'll want to hear that section. You're also
going to want to especially pay attention to this section here, Position
Your Skills to Fit Your Niche. You're going to hear the story of this woman
who did something incredible in the PR industry, I won't reveal it, but I
want you to pay attention to that story.

If you're thinking of starting a company and not sure whether to stay put
or not, we're going to talk about why you should decide that early. And
we're going to help you figure out who to market to and, there's so much
more here up on the screen, when to start. You'll hear a story of someone
who Chris met on a past trip and how he started, and why starting quickly
worked for him and will do the same for you. You're going to hear and get
the specific rough awesome format and the way that you should be
guaranteeing in order to increase sales, the kind of guarantee that you
should give people. Chris, first of all, there's a whole lot on this. I'm
trying to pack it all in and explain everything that's coming up, and I'm
doing as good a job as I can with all this data. You really packed a lot
into this book.

Chris: You know, the whole goal is for it to be data driven. The whole goal
is to be something specific as opposed to, just go for it, because lots of
resources are like, go for it, which is great. But then what do you do, you
know?

Andrew: Yeah, in fact, you were in a situation like that. Let's tell your
story before we even get to all the people who you've profiled in the book
and whose stories you told. Can you tell people where you were before you
got started and what you ended up doing?

Chris: Yeah, it depends on where you want to begin from. Back in the day I
never really had a job, I was pretty much unemployable. Every job I got, I
didn't do very well at. The last one I had I was age 20, and I was working
at FedEx and there was snowstorm, and long story short, I just didn't go
into work. I was like, OK, I need to figure something else out. I didn't
necessarily want to be an entrepreneur; I didn't really know what
entrepreneurship was. I didn't have a lot of higher goals or anything
there. I just had to figure out a way to support myself, basically. I
wanted to find a way, legally, morally, to pay the bills. This was way back
in the day; this was the year 2000 or so.

At the time then, there was this great new website called eBay.com and I
ended up selling things around my apartment. Which was great because I made
like, $20 an hour. But then I ran out of things to sell around my
apartment. So I started coffee, I saw other people selling coffee. I
imported coffee and sold it, just all different kind of things. I learned
how to do some website design, I learned how to do some work with affiliate
marketing. Once Google Ad Work started, I learned how that worked. So I
went into all these hodge podge of things. It still wasn't very specific. I
wasn't actually building a business or anything, I was just, kind of
hustling for myself and finding a way to pay the bills.

And then, I spent four years overseas in West Africa. That was a big
turning point for myself and my wife, Jolie. After we came back to the
states, that's when I was, kind of like, OK, what am I going to do next?
How do I really want to contribute something? I want to make a good income
and support myself, but I also want to do something that's meaningful. So
that kind of lead me to where I am now.

Andrew: And you were able to do what? With everything that you're about to
teach us, you're able to do this, this and this. What's this business that
you built?

Chris: Yeah, so I wrote the book, "The Art of Knowing Conformity", started
that in 2008. And then, the side business that's related to it is
UnconventionalGuides.com, which you mentioned. And a few other projects
that are kind of peripheral to that, "The Travel Hacking Cartel", couple of
other different things. This business kind of started organically, it
started in response to a lot of questions that I had. I noticed my
community was asking the same kind of questions all the time and so I paid
attention to that. So this business basically supports me as I travel the
world. I work from about 20 countries every year. I've been on this quest
to visit every country in the world, and I'm almost done with that. So, I
do that. I meet fun people. I work all the time, but I do work I love. So,
it's kind of all related.

Andrew: Did you spend more than $100 to launch your company?

Chris: I don't think I spent any money to launch my company. Well, I have
to pay like
$10 a year for a domain. At some point I probably got an email list. I
think to grow my company I still... After it was successful, and when we
say company, we're being kind of facetious here because it's really just
me. I have a cat that works with me.

Andrew: [laughs] Which I saw. I don't know that we're being facetious. This
looks like... This is a real company here.

Chris: I'm not so sure.

Andrew: [??] People are buying them. It started out with a blog, but it's a
good business, a solid business.

Chris: I know it's a solid business. It just means I don't have like a lot
of employees.

Andrew: I see.

Chris: It's like a flat structure.

Andrew: OK. All right. Let's go to the big board here and take a look at
some of the ideas from the book, the ones that we specifically picked out
that our audience could use, starting out with find your point of
conversions. Here, let me bring up someone here who... You know, this
website?

Chris: That's right. That's the website of the V6 Ranch which is in
California, halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Chris: And these guys have a great story. They had a furniture business,
and the barn burned down. So, literally the business burned down. They
always had people asking, "Can we come and stay at the ranch?" They didn't
have like business for that, but they made it happen. So, they decided to
reopen kind of as a dude ranch. You can see on their website there.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Chris: As an alternate holiday. Instead of just going off to Hawaii, come
here and you can ride horses around and things, but what I notice when I
talk about them, it's really interesting because I always ask business
owners, like what's your business all about, how does your business help
people and try to focus on that question. A lot of business owners are very
descriptive, but in Barbara's case, Barbara and John are the co-owners of
this, Barbara said something like, "Our mission is to help people be
someone else for a day." And so, we say, "Come with us and be a cowboy. Be
a cow girl."

I thought that was so much more powerful than the idea of just saying,
"Come and stay with us and ride horses around, whatever." It's really like
getting to the core need of happiness. So, we talked about convergence.
They have this passion, this ranch that they're very passionate about, but
apparently with this passion they found a way to make it something useful
and valuable as well. So, that's really what convergence is about. It's
finding that overlapping circle between your passion and your skill and
something that other people also value.

That's what people miss sometimes in the whole follow your passion to the
bank thing is that there's lots of things that we can be very passionate
about. You're passionate about running. I'm somewhat passionate about
running, not as much as you. I don't know about you, but there hasn't been
a lot of people who come to me and say, "Chris, I'd like to pay you to
run." It's just something I'm passionate about that I do on my own or you
do, but in finding that overlapping part between your stuff and other
people's stuff, that's how people make a successful business.

Andrew: And so, for them it was V6 Ranch. Their passion was, from what I
remember from the story, they just loved horses, they loved the environment
that they built here. What others cared about was the getaway. Do I have
that right?

Chris: The getaway and the fantasy and the aspirational aspect of it. You
know, the return to another way of life kind of thing. I think all of those
things. Those are the deeper needs, but then they all kind of relate to a
desire for escape or a desire for happiness.

Andrew: OK. Before I go on to the next one, what's your passion then versus
what others care about? How do you fill in these circles personally?

Chris: Yeah. Great question. So, I started writing my blog partly about
this quest to visit every country in the world. I got a fair number of
readers fairly quickly, and some of them said, "Well, this is great for
you, but how does it help me?" That was a very valid question, I thought
because I thought, "Well, I'm not sure how it'll help. Maybe, there's a
certain inspirational element, but I'm not directly helping people through
travel.

And so, the business model came about by helping other people to travel,
helping people learn more specifically about self-employment. And so, once
I began creating some specific resources, OK, you want to get started
working for yourself. Here's how you do it. You want to take those next
steps. What are the next steps? Here's how you do it. You want to travel
around the world with frequent flyer miles. So, once I figured out how to
connect that, that's when I started having a lot more success.

Andrew: I see. All right. So, if I can overly simplify it, what you're
saying is your passion here... Let's go back to this. Your passion, on the
left side, is to travel. They don't care about your traveling. It's good
for you, but they care about themselves traveling. And somewhere in between
is what you merged and created right here, which is a place for people to
hear about your stories, how you traveled, but also how they could do it
themselves, and learn from what you've experienced.

Chris: Right. And yes, correct. I try to provide a variety of resources and
solutions that answer those questions and those problems, and not all of
them are paid. I try to do a lot of stuff that's free, but then I also have
stuff that's paid for those who want that.

Andrew: I see. Yeah, actually very much of it is free. Then, of course,
you've got those unconventional guides that are paid. All right. Let's go
back to the big board. Next is, "Position your skills to fit your niche."
And I've got two different people here we can talk about from the book.
Scott Adams of Dilbert, or do you want to talk about WildKat? Who's a
better example here?

Chris: Let's talk briefly about WildKat. I think her name was Kat Alder.

Andrew: Yep.

Chris: Oh great, you have her website there. One of the principles of the
book, one of the things I learned as I talk with lots of different people,
the principle is skill transformation, which basically means, if you're
good at something, you're probably good at something else as well. And
often, those related skills are what you're going to create the business
out of.

So if you're a teacher, for example, you're probably a good communicator,
you're good at crowd control, you're good at discipline, you're good at
lesson planning and all these things that are related. Those skills may
actually be what you use to crack the business.

In Kat's case, you can see on this website, she's got all these employees
and colleagues, and she's running this business on several different
continents, I believe. But she got her start as a waitress in London. She's
originally from Germany. She was just working as a waitress in London and
she was really good at it. She was good at communicating with people, and
she got lots of compliments. She got big tips, and she was good at up-
selling.

One day, someone said to her, "You know, you would be good at PR." The fun
story about that was, she said she didn't even know what PR stood for. You
she had to go back and look it up. Then she figured out it was public
relations. So she started this public relations consultancy, basically
using the same skills she had as a waitress. But, of course, making a lot
more money and a lot more impact on the world as well.

Andrew: You know what? I wouldn't have thought that there's any connection
between the skills that go into being a great waitress and the skills that
go into doing PR. But once you find what that "thing" is about you, there's
so many other places that it could apply, and help you build a business.

Chris: Right, because being a good waitress is not just about bringing
food. It's about communicating about different things, being encouraging,
helping people make decisions and all kinds of stuff.

Andrew: What about you? What's your thing? I know what mine is. I'm
insanely curious.

Chris: You're insanely curious. That's good.

Andrew: Yes.

Chris: What is my thing? I guess I'm also curious, but I can't steal yours.

Andrew: [laughs] Sure, you can.

Chris: I guess I'm always interested in alternatives. I'm interested in if
there's more than one way to do something in almost every case, whether
it's higher education, travel or self-employment. So I'm always interested
in figuring out if there's alternatives, not necessarily the shortcuts, but
what else can people do? I guess my central message is, you don't have to
live your life the way other people expect you to. You can do good things
for yourself and for others. So I try to look at that through a variety of
different lenses.

Andrew: I see. And I see it throughout your site all the time. That's one
of the reasons why I love your site. Where's that manifesto? It used to be
right down here. Do you know the one I'm talking about?

Chris: Oh, go back to the home page.

Andrew: Oh, I'm not on the home page. OK. There it is. This is the home
page.

Chris: Yeah. It should be on the bottom there. There are two of them there.
Scroll up just a little bit.

Andrew: Scroll up just a little bit.

Chris: The middle section.

Andrew: Ah, OK. Yes. That's the one. "A Brief Guide to World Domination."

Chris: Right.

Andrew: All right. Back to the big board.

Chris: Sure.

Andrew: "Learn the formula for success." And here's what I've got. I've got
it here in my notes, right out of the book. "Passion or skill plus
usefulness equals success." So we need to have the passion, skill and we
need to be useful. And I pulled out a story, I think, of someone who we can
maybe talk about how this guy did it. Let me bring it down so the people
can see.

Chris: Oh, is this Brandon, maybe? Brandon Pierce?

Andrew: Yeah, Brandon Pierce. Man, you're so good with the names. I can't
even remember the names of every founder of every company that I've
interviewed here on Mixergy. Yes, Brandon Pierce. Do you remember his
story?

Chris: Yeah. He has a great story. This is a guy from Utah. He was an
engineer, and he played music and taught music on the side. Just out of his
own intense curiosity... He didn't have a good solution for keeping up with
billing and scheduling, and all these things that most music teachers are
not necessarily good at, or want to spend their time at.

So he created his own solution, his own little software interface, and then
he decided to offer it to the public, so it's musicteachershelper.com.
Basically, this service costs money, but it essentially saves the people
money because it keeps up with their billing, and avoids missed payments
and all these problems that teachers have. I forget how many customers he
has now, but it's at least a $300,000 a year business. It's on a continuity
model, so he's getting paid every month. He left Utah with his family, and
they moved to Central America for a couple of years. Now, the last I heard
from him, he's somewhere in Asia, just traveling together as a family,
running this business, location independently.

Andrew: Wow.

Chris: It's great. I find it very inspiring. So, passion plus usefulness.
He was passionate about teaching music, but he thought, "But this is
helping music teachers with this very critical need that they have,
providing this solution which works for them."

Andrew: You know what? It seems like, if you could just... We keep wanting
to come up with the fun product, the next Instagram, but those are really
hard to hit on. And those are really hard to make grow and to bank on. The
ones that seem to work, the ideas that I've noticed work really, more
predictably, are the ones that are usefulness. The ones that go to a
customer and say, can you use this? Will your life change? Will you make
more money as a result of it?

Chris: Right.

Andrew: Will you keep from losing money?

Chris: Right. Will it improve your life essentially?

Andrew: Right.

A: Right? So I would say the same thing. Don't think innovation so much.
Think usefulness. Yes, if you can make the next Instagram or the next
iPhone, that's great. But most of us aren't going to do that. But we can
still make the world a better place for a certain group of people by
creating something that's useful, and then that's how we can get paid.
That's where our business will be.

Andrew: You know what? I was very stubbornly resistant to that at Mixergy.
I kept wanting to do interviews. And I felt that if people listened to
interviews, then their lives would be better, plus the stories of
entrepreneurs who I interviewed are so fascinating that everyone should
listen to them. And I still think they should. But what I kept hearing from
the audience was, "Show me how I can use this. How could it improve my
life? Make it more actionable."

I kept saying, "No, you don't want me to tell you exactly what to do. It's
not possible. It's not possible that I could feed you every step." Well, it
turns out, it's true. I can't feed them every step, but they were right.
They do want something that's more useful, more actionable, something that
gives them results similar to what Brandon's doing Aries [sounds like], not
just playing music for them. He's saying, "Well, here's how I can make your
life specifically better, more useful."

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: He does it by giving them billing and lessons. I guess he also even
builds websites for them. Yeah, he builds...

Chris: Yeah. He does a bunch of stuff. I think he's branched off to another
creative [??] it's music teaching, if it's art teaching or something, but
basically using the same platform, and essentially franchising himself in a
different way. But that's a good point you make. I think often, what people
want and what they say they want are not always the same things. As we go
through our projects, as we build the Mixergy massive interview archive, as
I figure out what I'm supposed to do with my little business, we understand
more about the intuitive needs of our customers, our audience or community.
It just helps to refine things as you go along.

Andrew: All right. Let's go on to this idea, "Give them the fish." I've got
an example here, before I even show it, how you went from travel ninja to
frequent-flier master to travel hacking cartel, and I've got all those
screenshots to show people. First, let's take a step back and just explain,
what does that concept mean? "Give them the fish."

Chris: Sure. Well, that's a good segue from the idea that what people want
and what they say they want, are not always the same thing. We often
assume, as business owners or blog sites, publishers, etc., that we know
best. We think this is what people want, therefore we should give it to
them.

The story that I take that from is this scenario of going to a restaurant
and it's the end of the week, and it's been a busy week. You go to relax,
and you have a glass of wine. Then the waiter comes out and says, "Our
special tonight is the salmon."

You say, "Oh, that sounds great. I would love that." Then the waiter goes
away and the chef comes out and says to you, "Good evening. I understand,
Andrew, that you've ordered the salmon." You say, "Oh, yes. That would be
great." And she says, "Have you ever made salmon before? Because it's a
little bit difficult." And before you can say anything, she's like, "OK.
You go ahead and wash up and meet me back in the kitchen. I'll get started.
We'll make this salmon together."

Obviously, this scenario doesn't actually happen, but if it did, you'd
probably be kind of annoyed. You'd think, I go to the restaurant, I pay a
big premium because I want everything to be provided for me. And I want to
just sit there and enjoy the service. I want to enjoy the salmon, but
instead, they're making me do that. So it comes from this whole expression
about, "Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day."

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Chris: "Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime." I think that's
a great idea if you're working with homeless fisherman, but if you're
trying to run a business, it's a terrible idea. Most of us don't actually
want to learn to fish, we want the fish. I guess what I'm saying from that
principle is, give people the fish. Figure out what they really want. Don't
take them back in the kitchen, necessarily. Bring them the fish on a
platter. Figure out what that core thing is they're looking for, and
deliver it to them.

Andrew: So, you did that. Here, let's see if I've got the chronology right.
You launched this, then you launched this, [??] I mean let's reach down. I
intentionally kept that because, well, actually there, that's the second
one, and then you launched this. Let's position that properly. There we go.

Chris: You should have [??] it's better each time too, but

Andrew: Sorry, it looks better each time?

Chris: Yeah, the design gets better also. But go on.

Andrew: It does. So, tell me about this transition and how it fits in with
giving people the fish.

Chris: Right, so in this first project you mentioned, Travel Ninja, I made
a huge mistake. I assumed that everyone wanted to come back in the kitchen,
with me. And, you know I go on all these crazy trips. I do like 16 segment
itineraries and I fly around the world and, you know, 300,000 miles a year,
and I made the big mistake of thinking: everyone wants to do that, you
know, when clearly they don't. And so I launched this product: "How to
Become a Traveler Ninja" and it's very, like, detailed and going into all
these technical things, you know, and telling people how to book their
around-the-world ticket with 16 segments. Anyway, I put the product out and
it didn't completely flop, but, the results were, you know, significantly
inferior to what I was expecting. I mean I think I sold, like, you know, 45
copies on the first day, and I was expecting to sell like 300 or more. And
then after that it just kind of fizzled, you know, one or two copies a day
for a while, and, like, I was expecting much better results.

So, at first I thought: well maybe people don't want information about
travel, right? I thought they did, but maybe I just got it wrong. And what
I realized later was: I just made it much too complicated. You know, most
people don't care about the details about how all these things work. They
just want it to be done, you know, for them. Until the next product:
"Frequent Flyer Master," did a little bit better job of saying: Hey, you
probably don't want to be like me. You don't want to necessarily go to all
these countries, but, you know, could you use a free plane ticket, you
know?

Is there somewhere in the world that you'd like to go? If that's the case,
then just buy this product. It'll be very simple. You know, we have the
ultimate guarantee. Basically, you're going to earn at least 25,000
frequent flyer miles for one free plane ticket. You know, you buy this
product for $50, that's what you'll get. So I was kind of giving them the
fish. And so that did much better. I think this one product was essentially
a $75,000 e-book. You know, during the first year - I have to double-check
that - but somewhere in that range.

Andrew: So that did $75,000 in the first year?

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: All right, so even your flops - I mean, I wouldn't call that a flop
- but even the ones that aren't grand slams do pretty well.

Chris: Yeah, well, that's a successful one.

Andrew: Yeah.

Chris: [??] Yeah, you know, that's great. You know, that's fine. You know,
like I said, I don't have a team. You know, it's a pretty small business.
So then, I went for the third one, I went to build a successive [??] but on
a continuity model. Instead of the number one suggestion, or the number one
feedback that I heard about "Frequent Flyer Master" was "This is great, but
we want more ongoing updates." And so, I had some updates built in, like, I
had an auto-responder series, but it wasn't hugely detailed, and I also
wasn't incentivized [SP], you know, to go and, like, add a lot more
information to it. And so "Travel Hacking Cartel", you know, kind of
similar promises "Frequent Flyer Master", like: this is going to be easy,
you don't have to learn, you know, all the details if you don't care. We'll
just tell you exactly what to do. But anyways on like a monthly continuity
model.

Andrew: I see. And this you just keep giving them more and more and keep
doing more and more for them.

Chris: Yeah. Keep giving them the fish, you know. And so lots of people
come in and try. We have a fourteen day trial. I think right now there's
maybe between 2,000 and 3,000 active members with it. So, I figured out as
I've gone along I figured out a little bit better about how to give people
what they want.

Andrew: That's impressive. All right, onto the big board again, and we did
give them the fish. Lets talk about creative business based on the right
passion, and, let me see actually here. There's something that I wanted to
show you. I didn't know that she did this.

Chris: What's that?

Andrew: How do you pronounce her name?

Chris: Mignon?

Andrew: Mignon. Mignon created a podcast called "Absolute Science," and I
didn't even know it existed. I love podcasts. Why it didn't it work? And
then, we'll show what she ended up doing afterwards that was right.

Chris: Yeah, well, it's funny that you say you haven't heard of it. That's
the thing, most people haven't, you know. And I hadn't either, until she
told me the story. She said: I did this thing called "Absolute Science,"
I'm like: oh, it sounds interesting but I'd never heard of it. According to
her, you know, she was, you know, she had a technical background. I think
she had an undergraduate degree in science or technical writing related to
science or something. And, she'd always been kind of a science geek and so
she created this podcast thinking, like, this'll be really interesting. For
whatever reason, it didn't take off. And she enjoyed doing it, she put a
lot of heart into it. You know, it just didn't tip, and so then, I think
you have another slide coming up, maybe . . . [??] . . . and here's the
podcast that probably everyone has heard of, Mignon Fogarty became grammar
girl, and she founded this whole quick and dirty tips network.

There's a lot of other podcasts associated with the network, but, by far
the number one is Grammar Girl. This really took off. She's done six books,
she has hundred of thousands, if not a million or more, listeners. This one
just, for whatever reason, connected more with the audience. Looking back,
she talks about, "Well, absolute science. I was also passionate about it,
but I found a broader, much more wide-ranging audience with Grammar Girl.
So that's what I ended up going with."

It wasn't like she was selling herself out. She was also passionate about
good writing and the Grammar Girl was also a good fit. It just became a
much more marketable thing than absolute science.

Andrew: And here's a formula that you put in the book, "The $100 Startup".
You say, "Passion plus skill", we talked about that earlier. And then,
"Problem plus marketplace is what you want to look for to find the
opportunity." And in her case, she found a problem. People didn't know how
to use grammar properly. Frankly, I'm having trouble with it in this
interview.

Chris: [laughs] Well, we all do. That's the thing. We all have trouble.

Andrew: Right.

Chris: That's why her show is so popular. It breaks down specific issues
into these little bite-sized segments. Each show deals with one grammar
issue. Most of them are in response to audience questions at this point.
She's covered a lot of stuff over the years. I don't know if she runs out
of things or what. Mostly, she just responds to a question and then gives a
couple of examples. Then you go away having learned. Your life is made
better through it, by listening.

Andrew: Yeah. Let me show this. This is also a screenshot from the book.
I'm going to let people read this in the book itself, but I want to
highlight this section.

What she did was, her passion was clear writing and the use of the English
language. The skill that she had was she communicates well. She understands
grammar rules in a fun way. The problem she was solving is the perception
that studying grammar is difficult or boring, and I still have that
perception. The opportunity was to educate an audience through stories and
examples. I'll just reveal the top there, so that people can see what I was
looking at right down to there. This is the formula that I read.

Chris: Yeah. A good example is your perception that studying grammar is
difficult or boring. I might still have that perception too, but she's
created this fun little avatar, Grammar Girl. You just download a podcast.
You listen to it. You're not committing to a whole course of study. You're
just committing to little bite-sized things. She overcomes that obstacle
that way.

Andrew: Even the length of her programs, from what I understand, is
specifically picked to keep it interesting and keep it moving.

Chris: Yeah.

Andrew: She doesn't do hour and two-hour long programs the way I sometimes
do. She keeps them in short bursts.

Chris: Well, everyone would listen to a two-hour program on Mixergy, but I
don't know if everyone would listen to two hours on Grammar Girl.

Andrew: I think they would. She's fantastic.

Chris: They might.

Andrew: [laughs] So, thank you. All right. Next big idea is, "Decide to
stay put or travel." This is a big one for you. How does it... Before I get
into the example that I pulled out that I want to talk about, in fact, I
think there are two people that we should talk about here. Why is this one
a big one for people to decide? How does it influence the business?

Chris: Well, I think...

Andrew: By the way, who is that? I see that on the side, you're playing
with someone.

Chris: Yeah. She keeps jumping up on my desk. This is Liberia [SP], my
assistant. Whenever I start talking in my office, she thinks I'm calling
her.

Andrew: Uh-huh.

Chris: [??] Sorry about that.

Andrew: So, you've got a cat who actually will come when you call her.

Chris: Yeah, but not when I want her necessarily. That's the problem.

Andrew: I see. [laughs]

Chris: [??] and stare. What was your question, sorry?

Andrew: The question was, why is that an important question? I know that
for me, for Mixergy, it's an important question. It shapes the way that I
run the business. I want to hear from you why it's important for others.

Chris: Great. I think it's important because not all business models are
created equal. Some businesses are much easier to operate remotely,
location independently or whatever you want to call it, than others. It's
not to say that one business is superior to the other. In the book, I talk
with lots of people who have retail businesses that have established shops
or something, and that's fine. That's great. But if you have a retail
business, you're not necessarily going to be able to travel the world all
the time.

The other thing I think is important is, people have this perception that
you can just go anywhere and start businesses and things. At least the way
it is for me, I spend a lot of time at home working on things and building
things. Then I'm able to travel. I'm able to maintain things. I can't
necessarily initiate a lot of things while traveling, so if it's your goal
to travel more, I think it's good to figure out a little about the business
model before you hit the road.

Andrew: I'll get to the examples in a moment. But I'll tell you that the
reason it was important to me to decide that Mixergy needs to operate even
as I travel, not so much because I want to travel all the time, and I get
to travel a lot. But it's because the previous company I had, Bradford and
Reed, had a floor of office space in Manhattan, which I thought, "Yay, this
is cool. This is what I want. In fact, I want more floors. I want to go
bigger and bigger." What I found was that there's a certain lack of
flexibility, inflexibility to build into a business that operates like
that. It's hard to let go of things. It's hard to let go of frankly people
when they're just not appropriate anymore and I wanted the flexibility and
I said, I'm going to build a business where if the economy goes bad I don't
have to worry about letting go of a floor of office space.

I want to know that I've got a business that if a new idea comes around I
would quickly maneuver and jump on it. Or if one that was working for a
while is suddenly bad I can avoid it. It gives me tremendous flexibility
and it's one of the decisions I made. It's one of the decisions also, here
let me go onto this, that Kyle Hepp made, too.

Interviewee: Yes, I think her name is Kyle.

Andrew: Kyle, excuse me.

Interviewee: Kyle Hepp. She's a photographer who is based in Chile. I don't
remember if her husband is from there or not, but together they live in
Chile, but they travel all over the world doing wedding photography and I'm
trying to remember the exact story. I think she was a runner like you, and
she actually got hit by a car or something, and fortunately she was OK, but
of course she was injured and she had a job doing some content writing for
AOL or something and then she lost that job.

Andrew: And her husband was laid off.

Chris: That's right. Her husband was also laid off so they kind of went
through this terrible month and then they took a trip. They said they never
really traveled, they didn't have a proper honeymoon and so they said, well
we're going to figure everything out, but let's take our first big trip
together first. I think they'd been married a couple of years or something
at that point.

Then, they were in Italy together and she sent out some feelers and said,
hey wedding photography, we'd love to do this. As I recall, I think while
she was in Italy she got the email about booking a job for like $5000 and
that was her first job that had come in and she was so excited. Then she
tells her story about using the hotel phone to call both her mom and her
dad separately and a phone call costs like $100 from this hotel room in
Italy, but she was so excited that she did it.

So then they went back to Chile and just thought, well, we'll just do this.
We have some other bookings and we'll do this until the money runs out.
That was two or three years ago. Now all she does is travel and do the
wedding thing.

Andrew: I wouldn't think that someone who is a wedding photographer would
be able to travel at all.

Chris: Yeah, and she said she was surprised, she was thinking, I'm based in
Chile. I do couples in America and elsewhere who really want to hire me and
pay those costs, but what she found is she had a certain style and she was
also blogging and building community and referral and word of mouth, so she
found that in fact they would value that.

Andrew: Let's bring up one other person. This guy has an incredible story.
Let's bring up Brett's site, there it is.

Chris: Oh yeah, that's great and I could probably tell you the story better
than the last one because I forgot some details there.

Andrew: Oh, we had it here in the notes. I think you did great.

Chris: OK, thanks. Thanks for pulling that out. Brett Kelly, he's a self-
described geek and he was a big fan of Evernote, the free software and he
noticed that there was no English language manual for Evernote. It was just
pretty simple. You can use Evernote without learning a lot, but there are
lots of little tips and tricks and things.

Andrew: I'm actually running this, believe it or not, all these screen
shots, when I plop a screen shot in it's coming right off of Evernote.

Chris: Great.

Andrew: It's in Evernote. I see that. There's a lot you could do to it, you
could do with Evernote, but most people don't know. So yeah, so he wrote a
book about it.

Chris: Right. So he wrote this book and he decided to sell it for $25 and
at the time he was going through this situation. They were living in
California, it's expensive and his wife is working a couple different jobs
and trading off with the kids at night, so they didn't have a whole lot of
time as a family and he said, OK, I'm going to put this up.

He had never made a product before by the way, so one, he had never made
his own information product, he also didn't have like a huge list or
anything. He didn't have a big audience. But he made this and put it up and
his goal, I think he had something like a $10,000 goal over the course of
the year.

Long story short he had $10,000 right in the launch, like a few days in,
and it never stopped selling, it still sells. It sells like $300 a day,
which is virtually all profit since he made, he owns it, and so I kept
having to make corrections in the book about him, because at first he told
me it was like an $80,000 a year business so I had that. Then a couple
months later he comes back and he's like it's actually like $120,000 year
now. Then it's like $150,000. I'm like fine, I'm just going to say it makes
a lot of money. That's great.

Andrew: I think the copy that I saw and I've got a copy of the book before
it was released, a copy of "The $100 Startup". It says here, let me see, I
think it's $160,000 in revenue he did with it. He told his wife that if the
book sold $10,000 then she should quit her night waitressing job and she
was able to do it.

Chris: She did it. Right. So, now he works at home and she works at home
and actually the odd twist is Evernote actually came and offered him a job.
So Evernote locked [sounds like] the product, and he works for them as
well, also from home. They gave him a job, and he gets to keep all the
profit from the book, so it's a pretty good deal.

Andrew: And they promote his book, too.

Chris: I know. It's amazing...

Andrew: [laughs] It's a great deal. All right. And it's a business that's
very flexible. I looked at every part of his business. He runs it using
just, basically, off-the-shelf solutions. The site, of course, is
WordPress, as anyone can see. I think he was using, the program just
escapes me, for a shopping cart.

Chris: Oh, it's E-junkie or something.

Andrew: E-junkie. Exactly.

Chris: Yeah, it used to be E-junkie, which is amazing. E-junkie literally
cost $5 or $10 a month to use. Like I say, he just put this up without a
lot of background in it, and it's done very well.

Andrew: There's E-junkie right there. That's all he's using.

Chris: That's right.

Andrew: All right. Has he been doing any traveling, by the way?

Chris: Has he, Brett?

Andrew: As far as you know? Brett.

Chris: He's just starting to travel. Actually, he wants to travel now. So
he came to the World Domination Summit last year, and I think he went to
Mexico. He got a "WDS" tattoo, which was kind of random. I was like, "Wow.
True fan."

Andrew: WDS? Really? Your tattoo is on someone's body?

Chris: I didn't put it there. [laughs]

Andrew: Wow. That's impressive.

Chris: It's crazy.

Andrew: All right. Wait, I got chose. I meant to say choose. Choose your
target... I know what I did. I connected these two.

Chris: Hmm.

Andrew: From the new demographic...what's the new demographic?

Chris: A traditional demographic is what we've always thought about
demographics: someone's age, their gender, their background, their
geography, their socio-economic status, income, etc. The new demographic is
also called psychographic. It's about grouping people together based on
shared values, interests or world view.

A lot of the businesses that I talk to tend to do that. It's one of those
things where if you live in a small town, you have this certain hobby.
Until the widespread adoption of the Internet and globalization, you didn't
necessarily know a lot of other people who are into that. But now, we can
connect with people all over the world based on these shared interests.

My whole project... I do a lot of stuff with travel and self-employment,
but really the broader message is one of freedom and independence,
nonconformity and thinking for yourself, while also making the world a
better place. These things are not very prone to traditional demographics.

I had a hard time in the beginning explaining. They were like, "Who is this
project for?"

I'm like, "Well, it's for these fun people who want to change the world."
They're like, "That's not our target market."

A lot of businesses these days, I think, are finding more success in
focusing on that psychographic. I don't know what you consider your
demographic, if it's people that are interested in learning and growth, or
if you think about actual demographics. I'm not sure.

Andrew: You know what? I don't think of demographics so much as
psychographics. Demographics would force me to say, "Well, I'm looking for
guys who are 20 to 35 years old. Or maybe 20 to 25 years old, and they
would be the target for me." But it's more psychographic, as you say. I've
got a couple of examples here from your book, "The $100 Startup", that
explain it.

For me, there is a certain person who just loves self-improvement, who sees
self-improvement as acquiring super powers. They want to read a book and
then go out and use it, and see their lives change because of it. They want
to know that they need to improve their memory. They read a memory book.
They go and use it, and they see real results. People are impressed and
their lives get better, and they generate more revenue from it.

Chris: Yeah.

Andrew: Or same thing for people skills. That's who that psychographic is.
Here's someone else, Charlie Jordan, who created Kinetic Koffee.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: Let's zoom a little bit so people can see it. Instead of saying
that he wanted to have, say, whites between 20 and 35 years old and, and
location... I don't even think he went with location. He did something
else. Who did he target? Do you remember? I've got it here in my notes.

Chris: [??]

Andrew: I won't put you on the spot. I'll tell you exactly who he targeted.

Chris: Thanks.

Andrew: Kinetic Koffee Company focused on outdoor enthusiasts, and that's
why I got that shot.

Chris: Oh, right. OK, yeah.

Andrew: So that gave him a whole...Well, I'll let you tell it.

Chris: No. You can probably tell it better than me. I was confused. I think
it's a husband and wife duo, or at least they're partners, and I think
Charlie is the woman, as I recall. I could be getting this totally wrong.

Andrew: No, you're right. I've got to tell you, that confused me, too. I
said, "I'm going to go and hunt for screenshots. I'm not going to ask
anyone else to do this. I'll go look online." And thankfully, everyone in
your book is totally Googleable [sic]. There was never just this John Doe.
There's one person, we'll see him later on, who I don't know if I got the
right person. You'll tell me. But everyone was totally Googleable [sic].

Chris: OK.

Andrew: And yes. I was a little confused by this, especially since in the
photo, you can't tell if Charlie is a man or a woman.

Chris: Right. Right. So I think I talked with her partner, her husband...

Andrew: I know I can zoom a little and see. That is a woman. OK, yes.

Chris: I think her partner's name is Mark Ritz, as I recall.

Andrew: Jordan.

Chris: Yes, who knows. (?) what I'm doing.

Andrew: I thought . . .

Chris: So, I think you said something about targeting outdoor enthusiasts
and targeting [??] . . .

Andrew: No, I take it back, I'm sorry. I don't if it's Jordan. I'm looking,
here, at this and it say's her name is Charlie Jordan, the former . . . Any
way's, the bigger message here is that they targeted a psychographic with
their coffee company. What was that?

Chris: The thing is, coffee is very difficult compete in. There are coffee
shops everywhere. There are distributors everywhere. They had always been
very active in the outdoors, specifically, cycling, as I recall. Instead of
trying to get their coffee in every grocery store, they tried to get it in
every bike shop and not just every bike shops but then every wholesaler
that sells to bike shops, bike events, triathlons, things like that.
Basically, they took their coffee, which is s great product but there's
other kinds of great coffee out there and they applied that, specifically,
to that psychographic people who identified with the outdoors.

Andrew: And here's another person who did that and we don't have spend,
well, here we go. Jason Gillespie.

Chris: Yeah, Glassby, maybe, I'm not sure. I think it's Glassby.

Andrew: Glassby.

Chris: Yeah. Here's a good example, the whole Paleo craze, it's, kind of,
like a love, hate it kind of thing. I'm not Paleo, myself, but I really
like, anything there's like a craze, where's people are really excited and
passionate about it, there's often a number of business models that can
come from it. With Paleo, specifically, a lot of people are identifying
with it but it's complicated to follow, like, there's a lot shopping that's
involved, there's a lot of preparation, you have to plan. It's hard to be a
Paleo without a lot of planning and timing that goes into it.

Basically, he created a membership site, a membership program, called Paleo
Plan, to help people. Once you make this commitment or you're trying to
follow this diet, he tells you everything you need to do; what you need to
shop for, different recipes, how to make them, if you have more time, if
you have less time. He's really catering to that market that is interested
in change following this formula but doesn't know how to do.

Andrew: I see and that's actually one of the pieces of advice that you give
people. You say, 'Look, not only choose the right new demographic to target
but also once you do . . . One way do it is to latch onto a popular hobby,
craze, or passion that people have,' and in this case, he, specifically,
did that, he said this Paleo diet is really big. Another way that you say
to do it is to ask people and, here, you've got a list of questions, here
are some of the kinds of questions that you suggest that people ask and you
say you could use Survey Monkey to ask it. These are the kinds of questions
that you want us to ask people to figure out, well, to do what.

Chris: It helps you to understand some specific information. Here's the
problem, often when we have a business idea, we talk to our friends, who
aren't necessarily the best target market. We talk to our friends and we're
like, "Hey Andrew, I have this idea." Most of the time your going to be
like, "Oh, that's great. Good idea." That's what our friends do but if we
can dig a little bit deeper and say like, "OK. I've got this situation,"
like, trying to make this diet product. What's your biggest problem with
your health? What are you trying to improve the most? What's the number one
question you have about fitness? If I'm an authority in some area, what can
I do to help you with travel? What can I do help you build your business?
The more specific you ask; you get some really insightful answers back.

Andrew: We, actually, got a really, this first one here, I'll leave it up
on the screen for a moment, this is, "What is your biggest with . . .?,' is
a huge one for us and I wished that we would've asked it sooner and more
frequently. It's, 'What's your biggest problem with your company?' and we
asked that question and there's two things that we learned from it and
that's why we're doing this session, here, today, you and me. The first is,
we got emails from people or we got responses from said, "What company? I
don't even have it. I'm trying to figure the next one is or what the first
one should be," and who knew. I though my audience was all entrepreneurs
and probably is a majority entrepreneurs but there's a big chunk of people
who say, "Hey, my biggest problem is I don't know how to launch or what to
launch," and that's why so much of we're talking about here is related to
that.

The second is revenue. We hear in the world, so much, that in start up's
you build an audience and so on and I forgot the thing I keep telling my
audience, that it's important to bring in revenue and they keep reminding
how important revenue is to them, especially, right now. It's a bad
economy; you want to bring in revenue to keep the business going. We've
learned to do more sessions like that. In fact, when we first were looking
to do courses, I sent an email to the audience saying, what is it that's
your biggest problem, what do you want to know and they told me that. A lot
of people said, "Hey, I want to launch, " a lot of said, "I want to
generate revenue," and we put a couple of course out on that and then we
stopped. I wish we would've kept at asking those same questions. Let me on
the board.

Chris: But then you did and you had the feedback. That's why you ask,
right? You ask because you're probably going to get some results that
surprise you and that's good.

Andrew: And then the other big piece of advice that you have there is put
together a possibilities list and decision making matrix. I put this
together, here let me bring it up, this is yours. I put this together when
I was trying to figure out what to do with Mixergy next. How do we bring in
revenue with it? And for me, well describe yours and then I'll talk a
little bit about mine and how it lead me to doing courses.

Chris: So, this is just a model when you have competing ideas, you've got
all these things you want to do, which most of us have no shortage of
ideas. So it's kind of a subjective matrix but it's a way to kind of look
at everything together and say OK, what's most important now, what should I
do? So I kind of list the ideas here on the left, here's some things that I
was thinking about maybe a couple years ago and then across the top I kind
of rank them on a one to five scale based on what I assume their impact
will be, what's the significance of it, how much work is it going to take
to do, that's effort, profitability, how much money is it going to bring
in, and then fit with vision, that's kind of just overall alignment, is
this in line with everything that we're trying to do? How similar or
different is it?

And then I look at those numbers and so mostly I'm just looking at the
trends there and a couple things I saw, I had this, what I thought was a
great idea to do small liable workshops and I thought "Oh, this would be
kind of fun" but then once I kind of put it on the list I was like well,
it's kind of undesirable compared to the other things. And then I thought
empire building kit, publishing guide, those kind of ranked towards the
top. And so it doesn't mean that you won't do any of the other ideas. It
doesn't mean that you'll do them in order, one through five, it just kind
of helps you to see what your priorities are.

Andrew: Yeah. And I did this exact thing. I actually did it with Noah
Kagan, who is the founder of App Sumo, I said 'I wasn't sure what to do
next', he brought up a Google Doc Spreadsheet and the two of us just put a
list of all the possible ideas down, every single one, every time I said
'Oh, we shouldn't put that on', he said 'No, Andrew add it on there'. And
we did the same kind of columns. How easy is it to launch? Which I wouldn't
have put on if it was just me doing it because I thought you want to do
whatever you can, it doesn't matter how tough it is, you'll find a way.

But the truth is you want to find something that you can actually launch,
otherwise, it's going to be one of these never going to happen ideas. So we
did the same thing and that's how we ended up doing courses. Alright, let's
go onto the big board again. Next big idea is when to start and, of course,
the answer is now. And I wanted to tell this one example of someone who did
it early. This is Jen and Omar.

Chris: Jen and Omar from Columbus, Ohio. They were two young designers,
they had just gotten out of design school and they were working day jobs
but they also loved maps and they went on this road trip. And they were
like it would be nice if we had, they weren't even planning on making one,
they were like we should buy a map of all the places we want to go and
color things in. And long story short they didn't find one that they liked
and because they were designers they made their own. They printed 50
copies, or something like that. Fifty was the minimum so they printed one
for themselves and they gave a few away to friends but they still had like
40 left.

And so, they created what was originally just a one page website selling
these maps. They got mentioned on a couple of different design forums and
within a day or two those maps had sold out. So they also had no intention
or idea of starting a business necessarily but in response to that demand
they created more maps. They did a couple other designs and now this is
what they do full time from their apartment in Columbus.

Andrew: I just recorded an interview with the founder of a company called
Cheddar Media, was the previous company. He built this up and he took it
out. It was widgets for bloggers to put on their websites and he was either
going to monetize it by running ads on it or charging bloggers. And he
finally had this thing built and he takes out the bloggers and they say "We
don't pay for anything, there's not much money in blogging, most people
give us stuff for free" and so he goes, "Well, what if I do this?" and they
go "Well, if you do this and this and this maybe I would pay you $7." $7?
And maybe? And so he realized all right that's not going to work.

So then, he said the second option is advertising, I'll give it to as many
bloggers as possible and I'll go and I'll get advertising revenue. So he
went out and talked to advertisers and said would you advertise? "Yeah".
"How much would you give me?" and the price that they gave him was
shockingly low. And he went back and he figured how many bloggers would I
need, how much traffic would they need to have, the idea got $300,000 of
investor money to build it up, friends and family type investors, we're not
talking about he didn't go to Sequoia, the guys who backed Yahoo!, the
people who 300,000 is important to had to shut it down, explain to them why
it didn't work out all because this took a while to launch. And I hear that
over and over again. His second company he actually ended up launching with
nothing more than an Excel spreadsheet. He said I'm going to take an Excel
spreadsheet, we'll do a lot of it manual and I'll see if anyone wants to
buy it before we build the product.

Chris: Much better approach the second time, I think.

Andrew: Right. And that's the way that I see over and over in my
interviews. You need to launch. I could give you another example of Scott
Case from "Startup America", who had a similar problem. He spent, I think
it was, a year building his first product, right out of school. He took it
out. It took two years of just trying to hustle and getting people to buy
it.

I said, "What's the mistake that you made? Why couldn't you sell it faster?
You're a great salesman."

He said, "Well, Andrew, we just spent too long building it. We got out of
touch with our customers. We should have just given it to them for free in
the beginning, or sold it to them at a low price, and then gotten
feedback."

Chris: Yeah, something. Mm-hmm.

Andrew: Tell me if I got this image right. You told a story in your book
about Nick, I hope I'm pronouncing his name right, Gattens [SP].

Chris: Yeah.

Andrew: Is he the guy that you told the story about in your book? I found
his tweet.

Chris: Yeah. [laughs] That's the same dude. Yeah.

Andrew: Look at that. You know what, I have to say, it just goes to show...

Chris: How do you find this stuff, Andrew? That's amazing.

Andrew: You're telling stories about real people. Usually people, I'll go
through their books and it's always "a friend of mine" or some researcher
somewhere, and I can't go and back it up and substantiate any of it. With
you, I was able to go out and...

Chris: It's amazing that you did that. Yeah. So, this guy's touring with
the cover band, Rush. That's a little side story. I met this guy on book
tour. I think I met him first in Kentucky, and we talked about his job. He
was a photographer.

I said, "Hey, how are things?" He said he was going to have this business
and he has a little website. I always like to hear about what people are
doing. So I had my iPhone with me and I'm like, "Oh, let me just pull it up
and take a little look." I think he was asking me for some advice or
something, and so I said, "Let me see the website.", because he said,
"Nobody's buying."

I said, "Oh, let me see. Let's take a look at it." Basically, I go pull it
up and he's got this great portfolio, but there's no way to buy. There's no
PayPal button. There's no, "Here's how you can purchase." It was one of
these obvious things. You're like, "Well, maybe no one's buying because
there's no way they can buy."

So we talked through it some more and basically, he said later, "I realize
I had everything ready. I just, for some reason, had this internal block. I
wasn't ready to put something out there for sale" which is very common,
actually. A lot of people have every step but that last one.

The follow-up was, I saw him a few weeks later in West Virginia. There were
five people there for that gig, which was crazy. There was a Rush cover
band playing on the other side of the room, which was...

Andrew: Ah, now I get what the tweet is. OK.

Chris: Yep. That was the tweet. It was pretty bad, but it was good to see
Nick because he was all excited, and he said, "I got this story to tell
you. You know, after we went away from that meet up, I realized it wasn't
some technical issue. I thought it was a technical thing, like I just
couldn't get the code on my site right or something. That's why I hadn't
put it up for sale. But I just realized I had this block, and I had to over
come it. So I put the PayPal button on, and a couple days later a stranger
came to my website. They clicked the buy button. They gave me $50."

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Chris: He talked about just how empowering that was and he was like, "That
$50 meant so much to me because a stranger had just valued my work and
chosen to exchange money for it."

I hear this over and over, how empowering it is to get that first sale. The
sooner, the sooner, the sooner you can get that sale, rather than spending
$300,000 and waiting for years, and then testing something to hear it's not
going to work, the sooner the better. Then you can do so much more after
that. Then you can tweak. Then you can do continuous improvements. You may
not even pursue that business or whatever, and that's fine. But that first
sale is so valuable.

Andrew: Yeah. And it's so easy to put a button up on your site from PayPal.
You just log in. They give you these buttons. You put them on. And you can
tell them exactly what happens after the button.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: All right, so that answers the other question. Get the first sale
as soon as possible, so let's go back onto the big board. Here's the next
one. So we talked about, know when to start, get the first sale as soon as
possible and then market before you manufacture. And here's one, actually,
where I couldn't Google the guy.

Chris: Right.

Andrew: It's the only time where you said, "The friend."

Chris: Yeah. This guy doesn't actually want to be known.

Andrew: OK.

Chris: That's probably the only case where you couldn't do it. As you said,
you have the text here, which is great. It helps me remember. Basically, he
created this specialty guide for the high-end car industry, except he
didn't actually create it. He just put an advertisement in a magazine. This
goes back a few years, before a lot of online advertising.

Andrew: Uh-huh.

Chris: He just said, "I've got this guide. It's going to be great. It's
going to tell you x, y, z. Here are the benefits, etc." But he didn't
actually create the product, and then he received two orders. This was a
high-end thing, so it was, what did I say, $900 or something?

Andrew: Yeah.

Chris: So he received the order and then he basically spent the next month
making the product. He wrote to them and said, "We're improving the
product. We're creating a 2.0 version. Of course, if you want your money
back and you don't want to wait, you can get it. But, please wait. If you
can wait a little bit, we're going to give you something that's amazing."

So both people, of course, chose to wait. Then he created the guide and
delivered it to them.

Andrew: [laughs] And he knew exactly how much he was going to make, a
minimum of what he would make because...

Chris: Right. Exactly.

Andrew: ...he made the sales first.

Chris: Though the lesson isn't necessarily to always do it that way. I
would say the lesson is, think about your marketing as you manufacture. If
you're creating some online product that's going to have a sales page, I
would say write the sales page first. Write the sales page. Craft the
offer. Figure that stuff out, then get busy creating the product. If you
focus on the outcomes and what you're really going to deliver to people and
then create the product or the service based off of that, it's going to be
a lot easier than making this amazing product and then figuring out how to
offer it.

Andrew: It's so intimidating for people when they put it off, thinking that
the process needs to be created, then figure out what to sell when it
should be the opposite, and they're just intimidated. It shouldn't be that
intimidating. You should just write it out.

Chris: Just be basic.

Andrew: As you talk.

Chris: It can be very simple. It can be very easy, and just then you can
tweak it later like everything else. But if you can't do that, then I think
you have a real problem. I think you have a problem with the product or the
service itself. If you're really not sure how this thing is going to change
people's lives, then you've got a bigger problem. All right?

Andrew: Yeah. Years ago my brother and I created a software company
together. Before we ever did Bradford & Reed, the greeting card company, we
had this little software company that we ran out of my parents' house.
While he was building it, I would write the offers that we would send out.
And then, if something looked good on a bullet point, then I'd go back to
him and say, "Can you build that" And his answer almost always would be,
"No, I can't." "How close can you get to it because I've got this bullet
point that I know it's going to be effective?

Chris: Yeah.

Andrew: All right. Back on to the big board here. Make them an offer they
can't refuse. Be like the godfather or be like these guys. Again, I'm
pulling this right off of their website. Tour Saver? Do you remember their
story?

Chris: Yep. These are two guys from Alaska. It's a long process how it came
about, but basically they created this coupon book. If you're visiting
Alaska, everything in Alaska is expensive to begin with, and this coupon
book will get you all kinds of two for one deals, like genuine discounts,
not like cheap things but things that will actually save you money. I
really like how they did their pricing. There were some existing coupon
books. They sold for $20 or less, and again they didn't have very
significant discounts, but these guys, Scott and his business partner- I
forget the partner's name - but Scott's the guy I know. He really focused
on getting like highly valuable, genuine deals, and then they priced the
book at $100.

Their pitch was, you buy this book for $100 and just one of the coupons is
going to pay for the cost of the book. And then, if you use one more,
you're saving money. So, they've essentially established now a monopoly
over this business. I'm not sure how many copies they sell or what the
exact numbers are, but it's their full-time business. They've been doing it
for a number of years now. Every year they put a new edition, but it also
drives repeat business.

Andrew: And as you were telling the story, one of the things you said that
they could have done was reduce the price, but instead of reducing the
price and using that as a hook which would have been the easy way out, they
said, "How do we make it such a good offer that it's a no brainer?"

Chris: Right.

Andrew: It was something like, if you're going to buy airline tickets
anyway, this is going to save you enough money on the airline tickets that
it pays for the book and then, of course, you have all of those other
discounts that you're going to save money with. That's the kind of thing
you're looking for.

Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Andrew: All right. Let's go on to the big board. There it is. All right.
Use the rough awesome format, and I've got this up here on the screen. By
the way, one of the things that I like about the $100 Startup is you don't
just have these big ideas. You give me specific ideas followed by specific
points of action as you'll see, as the audience will see in a moment, and
then specific examples of people who are real people who have done this.

So, these aren't just ideas that should maybe work, that should work in
theory. They work for people. All right. Here it is.

Chris: Right.

Andrew: Sorry?

Chris: I was going to say, you can go ahead and find those people on
Twitter.

Andrew: Right.

Chris: Like you said, no, it has to be specific because there's so much
generic information.

Andrew: Right.

Chris: It just has to be like your interviews. It has to be very actionable
stuff.

Andrew: I try. You're impressive as hell as you do this. All right. Here it
is. This is the ...

Chris: Right. OK. I forgot. I totally forgot the rough awesome format until
I saw it here.

Andrew: This is the format that we use to do what?

Chris: This is the format that we use to persuade or to sell or to convince
people of the value of something, so either in a sales page or any kind of
pitch. Whatever your pitch is, points one through four, the first thing is
... Let's use the coupon book as an example since we talked about it. So,
point one, this thing is so awesome. This coupon book is really great, and
here's your primary benefit. You buy this, you're going to save so much
money. Point two, seriously it's really awesome.

Maybe, the secondary benefit is you're going to learn about something you
weren't familiar with. You're going to find some different opportunity.
You're going to have a great trip.

Then, you have to start thinking about the objections and the concerns. So,
point three. By the way, you don't have to worry about anything. You can
get your money back. This product has been around a long time. You can
Google us. You can read what other customers have said. Whatever the
concerns are, that's where you respond to that. And to wrap it up, see,
it's really awesome. What are you waiting for and that's all about urgency
and taking action, buy now, this offer will end or here's why you want to
take action now as opposed to thinking about it and waiting forever.

Andrew: So, if we're writing that marketing letter or the web page that's
going to sell the product that we're going to create, we haven't even
created it yet, but we want to start taking Chris's advice and write out
the offer. This is the way we do it. First, we think of the primary
benefit. What's the big benefit that they're going to get if they buy this?
Then, we think about the secondary benefit. In addition to that, there's
also this great reason to buy it.

And then, we think about their concerns, and then we ask for specific
action. That's the way that you want us to think about any ad copy or any
way that we're making a promotion in an offer.

Chris: Yeah. And by the way, the secondary benefit is always interesting
because it kind of reinforces your attraction to something. You're like,
oh, this coupon book looks great and then your just having one other thing
kind of just makes it better. It's like, not only will I save money, I'll
also hear about all of these different offers.

Andrew: I think it's something like, I think, at least, like going through
their website, it was a travel guide.

Chris: Yeah.

Andrew: Not only are you going to save money, but you're also going to know
where to go in Alaska and what to do.

Chris: Right. Exactly. You can go see things together, bam, bam, and you
don't have to worry because look at what everybody has said about it.

Andrew: Right.

Chris: They have a good reputation, and isn't it awesome? Order now.

Andrew: Right. Right. All right. There it is, and let's go back up to the
last big point. Offer an incredible guarantee. I've got one that you do.

Chris: OK.

Andrew: This always got my attention. One plane ticket every three months
is what you promise people, not promise, guarantee that they're going to
get when they join the Travel Hacking Cartel.

Chris: Correct.

Andrew: So, how can you? Tell me about that before I can ask my question.

Chris: So, it's just like when we say, "Think about the sales page first."
I always think about the offer first, and when I thought about the Travel
Hacking Cartel, I was like, what would be the world's greatest guarantee
for this? If I'm guaranteeing that you can learn about free travel and not
just learn about it but take advantage of it, what do you want to do? Do
you want to earn these miles so that you can go somewhere? The miles exist
to serve the purpose of traveling.

So, I thought, previously I had a product where I did one free plane
ticket. This time this is a continuity model I keep on paying every month.
So, I thought, OK, you'll get four free plane tickets a year, 100,000
miles. You can use them however you want. Like if you want to fly first
class to India or something, that's one ticket, but the point is you're
going to earn all of these miles, and all you have to do is if you're
subscribed and you devote a good faith effort to spending 30 minutes a
month following the deals and information, then that's what you're going to
get.

If you don't, you email me and tell me. We'll figure something out. I'll
credit you the months. I'll credit you miles. I'll do personal consulting.
Whatever I have to do or if you just want to cancel, I'll make it easy for
you to cancel. So, I'm trying to reassure the objections. I'm trying to be
like, this service is great, and if you have some concerns, we have the
world's greatest guarantee.

Andrew: How do you even do something like that? How can you guarantee that
someone's going to get something that you can't give them directly? I
understand if you're selling apples, you can guarantee the apples will be
there.

Chris: Well, it's somewhat on a good faith basis, and that's what I say to
people that ask about it. I say, well, if you're having trouble, like I
know we can do it because we've done it for so many people and there are
all kinds of examples, but it is on a good faith basis. If you're really
not able to make it work, then you can write me and I'm going to help you
personally. And then, in that case, I'll be, let's talk about your
situation. What kind of programs are you part of? What are your travel
goals? Have you seen this deal? This is going to help you. So, then we kind
of do it step by step. Most people are not going to need that. The point is
if you qualify for the service, then you'll be able to do it for yourself.

Andrew: All right. I'll bet you there are a lot of people watching this or
saying, you know what, I don't care what the offer is, the guarantee just
sold me.

Chris: Right. Well, the whole idea is the guarantee plus social proof plus
you put everything together, and different people respond to different
things.

Andrew: I see. All right. You want that incredible guarantee coming from
us, something so good that there's no risk for them.

Chris: Whatever you can do that is the most powerful guarantee you can
think of. I always hate to use Zappos as an example because everyone does,
but everyone does because they're so good about there's this whole thing
about you can return your shoes 364 days later if you have a one year
guarantee. Apparently, people do that, but it's the same thing. How can you
do that? Well, they do it because most people are honest. They do it
because it's the cost of doing business and it generates good will for
them, and every publication in the world writes about it for them.

Andrew: All right. Before I go them to check out your site and to get the
book, do you have the book to hold up?

Chris: Do I have the book? It's right here.

Andrew: Oh, you do have the original one.

Chris: I don't know.

Andrew: There is, "The $100 Startup".

Chris: I'm not so good with the camera. Anyway...

Andrew: You've got it on the screen here. First, let me say this to the
audience, we always go through, a lot, a lot of different tactics in these
sessions and it's easy to say, 'hey you know what Andrew didn't cover it
right' or to say' Andrew gave me too much I don't even know where to get
started', and to be overwhelmed and to not do anything. So I've got this up
on the big board here for a reason.

Pick just one, any one of the ideas that we've covered here today. Let me
scroll up so you can actually see some of them. Just pick one and use it
and I guarantee that you're going to see a result or you call me up and
Chris up and we'll give you free consuta- [SP], no. [laughs] but I
guarantee that you will get a result if you pick just one, think about your
product. Is there a way that maybe you can give the fish to people instead
of asking them to fish for themselves? Is there something you can do for
them that you ordinarily would expect them to do for themselves? Is there a
way of thinking of the demographic, or the psychographic, or the person who
you're going after that can help you get a leg up?

If you haven't launched and you're saying to yourself, "Hey, I came to this
with a $100 startup and they didn't tell me where to put my hundred dollars
or whatever. Maybe you can recognize that you're making an excuse and just
say how do I get my sales? My first sale as soon as possible, maybe it's
even before you manufacture that you make your first sale. Maybe that's the
thing that helps you. Maybe you've been trying to think of how can I redo
my ad copy and you just didn't have a format and staring at that screen, a
black screen has got you just full of writer's block. Well then maybe the
rough awesome format is going to help you. Maybe you want to experiment
with an incredible guarantee.

Pick one, let's go back to this, just pick any one of these ideas and use
it, and then build on it and build on it and if I had to suggest one to
use, I would say pick the easiest one because that's the one that's going
to get you some momentum and get you results quickly.

All right, and finally I said I was going to show it up on the screen. I've
got all these tabs up on the screen, including the one for "The $100
Startup". This is an incredible book full of great ideas so why am I
leaving it, because I'm going to Google $100 Startup. Let's bring up the
Amazon page for it . . . and there it is on Amazon. I recommend the Kindle
version, I always like reading digital versions. Also check out
unconventionalguides.com to see the pages in the guides that we've been
talking about and to see how Chris presents his different guarantees and
uses the marketing that he talked to you about and of course
chrisguillebeau.com is where I first connected with you and learned from
you. And I recommended if you're on here guys just go right to the bottom
and select this, The Brief Guide to World Domination. Let me do a better
job of highlighting it.

Chris, thank you so much for doing this session with us

Chris: Of course, thank you for having me.

Andrew: Thank you, and thank you all for watching, looking forward to
hearing how you picked that one first tactic and used it.