Andrew: This course is about how to turn your content into a product. The
course is held by Susan Su, who leads product strategy at AppSumo, the
store for entrepreneurs. Here are the topics that we are going to be
covering in this program, some of the super powers that you will be
getting.

You're going to see how to find hotspots. Hotspots are those areas that
people are so excited about that before you even make them an offer,
they're almost already ready to buy it from you. Susan is going to give you
a couple of examples from her own experience. We're also going to talk
about how to look online to see what people are talking about, what they
want to buy, how you should be creating your products, and what needs you
should be addressing with your new products.

We want to help you ensure success before you even launch. We'll talk
about... here's another topic that I want to turn your attention to, how to
make a contingency plan. Most people will make a contingency plan for
failures. Susan's going to talk about how to prepare for success and how
that's different from the kind of preparation that most people take.

All right, so we have got a lot to cover here but the first thing that I
want to talk about is what's possible and Susan, as someone who's done this
for App Sumo, and multiple other companies as well, as you will see through
out this program... you've see what's possible on the down side, and what's
possible on the upside. Maybe, we can start by talking about a cautionary
tale. In fact, the big problem before we talk about a specific mistake that
App Sumo made, and what we learned from it... Let's talk about the big
problem that people have when they don't create products out of their
content.

Susan: Sure thing. Well, thanks, first of all. Thank you for the nice
introduction, Andrew, it feels great to be here.

Andrew: Thanks for being here.

Susan: I think content... people don't realize because it is so easy to
create content on the web that's low quality, but creating really high
quality content is an extremely source intensive endeavor, and it's
something quite frankly... if you're doing good work, you should be
rewarded for it.

My belief is that you should be rewarded for it directly, and not
tangentially. When I say tangentially, I'm referring to ads and these other
kinds of monetization techniques that a lot of content creators have
resorted to because there is no other way for them to make a living.

I think that's, the driving passion behind all of this. Me and the work
that I have done over the past few years... I'm working with Ramit Sethi,
App Sumo, inside Network, inside Facebook,  and we've always believed, and
when I say we, I'm referring to everybody that I have worked with and
myself, that great content should have a monetary value assigned directly
to it and should not just be held to the whims of advertisers.

Andrew: Why not? I mean, when most people start a content-based business,
they're like,
"OK, the next thing that I need to do is, now that I've got a little bit of
an audience, to bring in some revenue. OK, the way to bring in revenue is
advertising," ...and they start to add ads to their sites. Why isn't that
the approach that you're going to be advocating and teaching here?

Susan: Well, this is the reason why. If you can see this, I just picked up
this magazine from the App Sumo micro kitchen earlier today. It's a
beautiful publication called "Edible Austin, Celebrating Texas Food
Culture, Season by Season." There are great photographs and the potential
for really great content.

For somebody like me, I'm interested in food. I'm kind of a foodie. I'm
interested in this gourmet stuff but as I flip through this publication, I
realize that this whole thing is basically an advertorial [sp] for various
businesses around Austin, Houston, and Dallas. That's okay, but if I want
to read product reviews, if I wanted to read business reviews, I'll just go
to yelp.

 I quickly realized that this publication is not useful to me. And that
possibly explains why it only comes for a quarter.

Andrew: I see, and what you're noticing more online, even more dramatically
is when people only look for advertising, what they end up doing is
flooding their content with advertising. It's either a lot of clear ads
around the site, or it's content that's really advertising disguised as
content and so on. That's one of the reasons why you don't want us to live
and breathe adverting. You want us to create our own products that we sell
to our customers.

Susan: That's right. It breeds a very strong dependence on those that are
paying you those dollars that are essentially aren't the consumers of your
content. This whole idea is getting the monetization channel going between
you and those that consume your content directly. It's a really nice
interplay. You're closing the loop between the content that you create, and
the people that you created it for, and you are exchanging money and value
back and forth for that.

Andrew: All right. I will also say this that, a lot of times, may be even
most times, advertising just not going to do it for you. There's not enough
revenue for smaller sites in advertising. But, if you create the right
product for your audience, you will do it. I mean, proof is I am doing it
right here with Mixergy. People are paying to watch this. All right. So, if
people do this, there are mistakes that we want to help them avoid it and
there are opportunities that we want to help them seize on. On the misstake
that you guys at AppSumo is, wait, let me bring up an image of a mistake. I
think this is still up on the site. In fact; yeah, there it is. What
happened with, what's Inbox Dojo, and why is this a cautionary tale that we
need to tell the audience about.

Susan: Well, Inbox Dojo is our line of email marketing courses and
templates and action guides, all about email marketing. And so, we've kind
of branded it as "Inbox Dojo" kind of goes with a pseudo-Japanese theme of
AppSumo and Inbox Dojo, the action course, that you see here at the
screenshot, is a bit of a cautionary tale. It's actually done decently as a
product, because we've really optimized the marketing side of things. But,
I would say it hasn't exceeded our expectations by any means, and the
reason why it's a cautionary tale I think, it really underscores a very
common pitfall for content creators. You focus overly on the content and
then you forget that it's actually content as a product. It's not content,
period. It's content as a product.

So, those who are creating products, may be it's a special ball point pen,
or a tool for people to design WordPress sites better. People who are used
to creating products for the sake of products, they're really going to be
looking at some essentials as product market fix, and does this, basically
everything to do with this, have a niche audience that's going to pay for
this product. I'd say that our biggest mistake with the Inbox Dojo product
was focusing too much on the content. We had our email marketing advisor,
AppSumo email marketing advisor at that time, a woman name Julie, very,
very talented. We thought that because Julie is here in town, she knows so
much about email marketing, she has all this great expertise, and we need
to create content around her expertise.

So, we were obsessed with the idea of the content. We were sort of enamored
with the content potential of Julie and of email marketing overall. We
didn't stop for a second to think, "How many people could actually use this
expertise in their day to day lives? Which customers does this type of
expertise, actually speak to?" We didn't ask ourselves that question
because, we were so focused on this, the concept of all this great content
that we could put together with Julie. And so, we forged ahead with
creating the action course. We made very fancy videos, and the content's
very interesting, and it's all great, the quality is there. The quality of
the content is there. But, why didn't people buy? Because, it just wasn't a
fit for the types of customers that we have on our AppSumo distribution
list. For some people it was too advanced, for other people, you know, it
was only right for a certain scale of their company, that Julie was doing
these large scale email marketing campaigns, most of our customers did not
have access to such large scale campaigns and so that just wasn't a fit.


Andrew: I see. So, what you're warning us again, and what you are going to
show us how to avoid as this program continues is the idea that you create
content and that the content shouldn't come from internally. It should come
from outside. You should see what needs people have, you should see what
they are clammering for, you should see what they're excited about, and
then create content around that, but it can't just be only because
you have an opportunity to create it.

Susan: That's right.

Andrew: OK...

Susan: So, I'll...

Andrew: And that's a component of which you still want to care about it,
you still obviously want to know about it, but it can't just be because you
care and you know about it. Other people in the world have to have an
interest, a passion for it, a need for it, and you're going to show us how
to identify that before we create our products.

Susan: Yeah.

Andrew: OK.

Susan: So, we'll get into this a little bit later, but, one of the first
tactics is to create content around your own experiences. So, if you don't
have the expertise, (?) sort of step zero and we definitely had that for
the email action course but then, we sort of look outward at the
marketplace and see, "Are there actual customers that need this? Does this
solve somebody's problem, or is this just us speaking because we have
beautiful voices?"

Andrew: I see. All right, and an opportunity, if we get this all right, is
this. This is another product that you worked on at a previous company that
you're a part of inside Facebook. What's the product that you guys created
there?

Susan: I'm so proud of this one. The Facebook Marketing Bible is a product,
a subscription website that costs $75 a month recurring. It's really,
really powerful there. You can tell that it's a big part of the business
just by that alone. It started out as very simple blog posts in 2006, 7,
and 8 that were packaged up into a PDF because there was so much interest
around those blog posts.

For a long time it stood alone as a PDF that was just sold on the site, one-
off, and there was so much interest in that that we decided to turn it into
a subscription website to capture that recurring audience interest and
willingness to pay. That is what you see here today. The Facebook Marketing
Bible at Facebookmarketingbible.com.

Andrew: I've got numbers a little bit here up in my notes. Are you willing
to talk about the size of the revenue that you guys did there?

Susan: It's actually been a little while since I've had access to the exact
revenue numbers, but I will say that it started at zero because it was free
blog posts, and then once those were polished up into a PDF it was enough
to sustain at least one full time person working on it. Inside Network was
acquired by a publicly traded company in May of 2011, and the Facebook
Marketing Bible was one pillar of our revenue strategy that lead to a $14
million acquisition of a company that was essentially just six people with
no funding. It was pretty good for a media company.

Andrew: Basically, it was a blogging company with a great subscription
model on the side.

Susan: Yeah. You can go to the blogs and you'll see ads up on the side, but
I'll tell you ad revenue is not the main attraction.

Andrew: We see what's possible. We see why we want to do this. Let's talk
about how to get started here. The first thing we want to do is go after
our own experiences to really be aware of what we know. We see that that's
not the only thing we need to be aware of, and if we only think about that
there's a danger that you guys experienced when you created the Inbox Dojo
product. But, it does start with what you know and your own experiences,
right?

Susan: Absolutely. I have a little story from my personal life: A few years
back, about five years ago, I was scheduled to have reconstructive jaw
surgery. I've always been a little bit of a research nut, and I had
decided, prior to that surgery, just as an experiment, to take only natural
methods for jaw surgery recovery. This is something I decided for myself. I
was interested in it, and because I'm a research nut I decided to apply all
my free time in researching how you naturally recover from jaw surgery
without using even so much as a single Tylenol pill.

When it comes down to creating content around your own experiences, I just
want to highlight that your own experiences and things like what I did with
my jaw surgery research equates to a bunch of time that you spent in doing
that research and acquiring those experiences and acquiring that expertise,
and that time that you put into it is valuable to other people and can be
monetized.

Anyway, back to the jaw surgery story. I had decided to start a blog
because I had been doing all this research, and I thought, "Gosh, what's
the point of keeping all of this to myself." It's kind of convenient for my
parents to check in on me, but, really, I never wrote this with my parents
in mind because my mom and dad didn't really care about vitamins and
surgery, but I thought other people might care about this.

There were a bunch of different signs that let me know people would care
about this; I had done some Google research, read a lot of the other blogs
that people have about surgery recovery, and I saw that there was a bit of
a gap. The other side of it was that I was doing all of this research and I
didn't want it to go to waste in my own notes. That's how I started the
site. It ended up being fairly popular. I realized I could use some of my
knowledge to help other people.

Andrew: This site that I've got up on the screen, that's your site. This is
what you did with everything that you learned about jaw surgery and how to
deal with the pain.

Susan: Yeah. I would edit things every once in a while, but I did not take
a perfectionist approach to it. I was quite a bit younger than I am now. I
didn't have a ton of content experience. I hadn't worked with Ramit yet at
this point or Inside Network or App Sumo or anything. I just put it all up
there, almost exactly as I took notes on it, put up some pictures. And
people really took to that because it was notes that they didn't have to
take. It's kind of like a cheat sheet.

Andrew: Yeah. All right. So that's how you got started. You just identified
something that a lot of people wouldn't even consider a skill, wouldn't
consider knowledge that others would want. But you said, "Hey, I put in all
this research. I know something about this that other people can know
without having to spend all this time that I spent researching".

You started off with the blog, and then . . . Can I skip a couple of these
points right now, just to talk about this one for a moment because I think
it ties in with what you just talked about?

Susan: Sure, yeah.

Andrew: One of the tactics is to look for hotspots. And you did that with
your site, and noticed . . . Here, let me bring this up here. We're looking
at 68 comments. And they're passionate comments. These aren't just people
saying, "me, too" or "first". They're really interacting with this. 68
comments over what, and then what did this show you?

Susan: In my journey, learning about jaw surgery, I quickly discovered . .
. Well my own personal biggest fear was getting all puffy faced. That's the
first concern you have when you're thinking about getting your wisdom teeth
removed or you're going to have jaw surgery, which is much more serious
than getting your wisdom teeth removed.

And you have to go out in the world, and we're all a little bit vain. And I
personally was very vain and concerned that my face was going to be
swollen. Being that I had [??]to take only a natural approach to [??], I
decided, "Well, I'm going to figure out what are the top ways . . . "

I researched online, I talked to my surgeon, whom I already had access to.
I wanted to know the top ways that I could reduce or eliminate swelling as
fast as possible, using only natural methods, after the surgery. I wanted
to get back to work.

So I research all these methods, and I decided to just go ahead and put it
up as a very, very simple blog post. It was literally five numbered steps,
with some bullet points under each one. Not perfected at all, just threw it
up there. I started to really see the traffic pick up on this post. And
that shows that there were people searching for it, there were people
coming to the post. So there's broader interest out there.

But then, in looking at the comments, gosh, 68 comments is a lot for a
niche topic such as 'Five Natural Methods for Reducing Swelling After Jaw
Surgery'. That was the title of the post. 68 comments, and they're all
paragraph long comments, people asking a lot of follow up questions,
thanking me for the material.

That alerted me to the fact that not only was there wide spread interest,
because of the traffic, but there was deep user engagement with that
content. People actually were reading through the entire post, and then
after they read through the entire post, they had follow up questions. So
there was more that I had not answered. They liked it . . .

Andrew: What kind of follow up questions could there be? You told them what
to expect and how to deal with it. What else are they wondering?

Susan: Well, like, "What about this little [??]?", but turned out not to be
an [??], because other people would ask the same thing. Or, one of the
things I would talk about was products they could use. "Could I use this
brand of the product instead of another brand of the product?" Or, "You
recommend going on 20 minutes walks each day. What if I don't have 20
minutes? How much time . . . ?" All these really tactical questions. People
were really taking to my advice, but they wanted to know exactly how they
could implement it. So just going deeper on those five points that I
already presented.

Andrew: I see.

Susan: I was really happy to field all of these questions, but it created
somewhat of a problem for me. Because I had never had this kind of
attention online before, so I was really flattered. I set about answering
every one of those questions by hand, by email, one by one.

And I realized that I was spending a lot of time every single day,
answering questions, repeatedly for strangers on the Internet, that ended
up being the same questions over and over again. And that was the second
sign to me that there could be something more done with this blog post
rather than just leave it up there and have people put questions and
comments, and then I would answer them personally via private email. That
just seemed very inefficient after awhile.

Andrew: You know what? That happened to me, too, with interviewing. I think
somewhere after I did a hundred interviews on Mixer-G, people came to me
and said, "What mic do you use? What camera do you use? What software do
you use to edit?" And I just got frustrated answering all these things.

And I think I even did a blog post about it, I did a post on a question and
answer site on it. I did, everywhere. I told them as much as I could. And
then they'd still come back with more questions and that's what made me
think 'I'm going to start writing down all these questions.' I think I was
like I never know, at the time maybe I was emailing them to myself with a
label and I'll put something together around this so I don't have to keep
answering over and over.

But once you tap into a topic, I guess the people see you as the expert in
it and maybe that you're known for. Maybe people will start coming to you
with all their questions.

Susan: That's right and not to diverge too much but I really love your
story about that product recommendations for Mixergy. It's funny because
there's something about putting a wrapper around it and calling it your
questions answered. That really changes people's behaviors in interacting
with that content.

So I too, I had, actually you ask me what kind of follow up questions
people ask. Well, out of the following questions we're pretty much answered
right there in that first post but people just wanted some other format for
the material that I was presenting. Or, much more commonly, they would ask
for these follow up questions and then the follow up questions would be
answered elsewhere in my site but they just didn't look for it. Or you
didn't even have to look so it was right there on the side bar.

But they just they wanted to ask. They wanted to have it kind of tied to
that five methods blog post. And so I thought 'Gosh, if people really want
to hear it five different ways, then I can put it together as a PDF', which
I did. I used that initial blog post. It's really simple. It ended up being
longer than I thought. Put it into Microsoft Word and it was a lot more
pages than I thought it would be so I didn't had a lot to add and then I
looked at the most commonly asked questions. I even just copied and pasted
some of those emails right in there. Added some additional images so that
it would look nice and engaging and I saved to PDF or export it or whatever
the tool function is and I had my first Ebook for that site.

Andrew: I'm going to come back in a moment to a question about guilt
because once people see some of the methods that we're going to talk about,
they're going to think 'Ooh, is that really enough of a product?' I want to
get them over their insecurities but let's show one other one here for this
topic on how to find hot spots.

This is another site that you work for. Previous one was your site. This is
site on, whose blog post is this? This is Ramit Sethi, right?

Susan: Yeah. So way back in, I think this was 2009, is that right? Is that
what the date says on there?

Andrew: Yeah. October 30th, 2008.

Susan: Oh, my gosh. Oh, the time. How the time passes. So back in 2008,
Ramit, I guess he got, he's never been a big proponent of frugality or
saving a couple of dollars here and there and that sort of has been his MO.
It's why [??] when you can always make more. But back in 2008 he decided to
do a 30 day experiment called the Save 1,000 dollars in 30 days Challenge
and for some  reason, well, it's not a mystery. People are always
interested in this and they're interested in tactics for saving money but
this series really, really took off, not only in terms of traffic which
again is sort of a sign of the broader interest level in this topic, but
also in the engagement. This post that you have a screenshot in here,
Andrew, has over 300, is that three?

Andrew: No, in this case, for this, this is a wrap up of the post and it
has 243 comments.

Susan: Oh, my God. That's a lot.

Andrew: And this is just him pinpointing to the post that are part of the
series on the 30 day challenge. So people were really engaged. It's not
just 243 comments, which is a whole lot but it's also as you experienced on
your product, really intense. Look at number two here. It's "Good idea,
Ramit. I also hate tons of frugality." and he just goes on for more than
most people would write on a blog post, commenter number two, K-A-C-P-E-R.
So it's that kind of engagement that you want us to look for.

Susan: If you can get 243 people to write a response to your content and,
not only write the response but have a thoughtfully benign response that's
formatted with line breaks and additional questions, then you might just be
able to get some subset of those 243 people to pay you a few bucks for a
deepened version of that very content.

Andrew: And this is what he ended up doing with it. Let's see if I can I
bring up his site. This is his product. I think it was his first major
product that's called the Scrooge Strategy and he said this product came
about as a result of the excitement that he was seeing from what we just
showed.

Susan: Yes. This was one of the first products that I worked with Ramit on
and so it's the beginning of our very, very wonderful relationship working
together and it really came out of all this interest from the 30 Day
Challenge. He just very smartly saw that there was an immense amount of
interest, and that there is something that could be done there. I mean, 243
comments on just the wrap-up post alone. So, he decided to package up all
that he had written and all that he had learned from the 30-day challenge,
into a product that he called "The Screwed Strategy", which was savings
tips delivered, I think once a day.

I can't remember the frequency now. I'm sure it's changed since then, but
it's a subscription service where you get very useful and proven savings
tips emailed to you. A lot of people have written in to him saying, "Oh,
I've saved $872 using these techniques," so it's definitely helping people.


But the main take-away here is that it wasn't invented from scratch. It was
based off of content that he'd put out there for free, saw that there was a
lot of uptake on it, and he didn't have to reinvent that content. He
basically just deepened it, just like I did with my "How to Reduce Swelling
After Jaw Surgery Post". Then, even more people found enough value that
they were willing to pay him $10 a month, $20 a month, $30 a month for that
subscription.

Andrew: All right. So, we see how to look for hotspots, let's go back to
what I skipped over before, which is, "next big tactic is look for the
screaming need." You give an example of a mutual friend of ours, Charles
Hudson. What did Charles Hudson do? Let me bring up this screenshot. How
did he find a screaming need?

Susan: Well, my last company was called Inside Network. It came from those
blogs about Facebook and social gaming. Charles was our research partner at
Inside Network. He and Justin Smith, the Founder of Inside Network, worked
together on a research series called "Inside Virtual Goods".

Where this came from was, back in 2009, virtual goods, while already quite
an established industry in other markets like Asian, China, Japan
especially, it was just growing here in the United States. So, people
didn't really know very much about it, and yet it was already a $5 billion
market in China.

That's a lot of money, and so I think a lot of investors here in the U.S.,
where there are more investment dollars, saw, "Oh, gosh. Well, there's this
$5 million market in China," and now it's starting to grow in the United
States. Charles and Justin saw that there was essentially a screaming need
in the investment and gaming community for knowledge and expertise around
the virtual goods industry.

While they didn't necessarily have all the expertise they needed, they had
enough. Then, most importantly, they had all the connections to those who
did have direct experience with it so that they could conduct interviews
and deepen the research, and create a research series, which ended up being
"Inside Virtual Goods".

So, they were just the first guys to really do it, and because of that,
this post that you have in the screenshot here, "Watch 'Inside Virtual
Goods' on CNBC," because they were really the first to market with that
type of knowledge, they got a huge amount of press attention. Then also,
actual sales attention too. People were clambering after this information,
and it ended up being a huge part of the Inside Network business, that,
again, went for the $14 million acquisition in 2011.

So, this post is highlighting us kind of tooting our own horn a little bit.
We were surprised to get the call from CNBC saying, "So, we hear you've..."
It was right the next day, "We hear you've released this report about
virtual goods. We want to know why people are paying for virtual goods and
how it's going to become a multi-million, multi-billion dollar industry."

Now, of course, since then Zynga has gone IPO, Facebook. All of that has
been very much connected to virtual goods. So, Justin and Charles, they
really did have the right premonition about where it was going.

Andrew: When the company sold, you said $14 million, their big sources of
revenue were these two products that you just showed us, "Inside Virtual
Goods" and "The Facebook Bible", right?

Susan: Those were part of it. I would say we divided everything up broadly
into research and advertising, and events. We had a conference line as
well. Well, the margins were great on advertising in some ways because we
just had our editorial team to sustain.

But in terms of the growth factor, I can tell you that after three years of
doing that business, the biggest areas for growth were the subscription
research reports and sites. Not advertising and not the conference
business. The conference business.is fun. It's great to go out there and
meet people, and be on stage. Advertising, it's nice to have on sites, and
if advertisers are coming knocking on your door, then don't turn them away.
It's not going to be the thing that doubles or triples, or quadruples,
quarter over quarter the way some of these other parts of the business have
the potential to do.

Andrew: What you've got here in the notes that you and Jeremy, our
producer, put...actually no, this is April Dykman [SP] who put this
together with you. I'm looking here at the notes with her, and it's
interview a couple of dozen CEOs. That's what they did. They also did user
surveys on Facebook. They wrote a research report on what's going on in
this phase. And they launched October 2009. They got on CNBC soon after,
and they've released ten editions so far. This is basically what that
product is.

Susan: Yes.

Andrew: All right. And they found that screaming need. They built it.
Anything else before we go onto the next big idea?

Susan: I would say that this also is a great example of how it does need to
be a successful content product. It does need to be based on experience.
Both Charles and Justin had direct experience in the virtual goods
industries, and in gaming. They wouldn't have been able to conduct that
research successfully, or have those connections, or do that analysis
without having worked in the field, in the trenches, literally, so that
they could create the right kind of content.

A lot of it was sort of based on the stuff they had seen working in their
own start-ups, and then used these expert interviews to fill in the gaps.
It's very difficult to create a successful content product if you have
never really done the work yourself.

Andrew: OK. All right. Next big idea? There it is. You say use Google
Analytics and Google Trends to find those big opportunities, and here is an
example of what you are noticing. This is Facebook marketing as it appears
in Google Trends, which means that people are just searching for it more in
2008 than 2007, and just rising 2009, 2010, 2011, and so on.  What did you
use this specific search for? And how are you using Google Trends to help
you identify topics to write about and to create content about that you're
selling?

Susan: This connects to the Facebook Marketing Bible. In that one it was
quite important to be early to market, and Facebook marketing, I think, it
was just an intuitive sense that Justin Smith had that it was going to
become this big topic, and you should create some material on it before all
the "me toos" were creating material on it as well.

This Google Trends search highlights that he was very right about that. How
I would use Google Trends now, today, is really looking at the kind of
wording that people are searching for on a regular basis. Again, your
product has to be very much rooted in experience, direct experience that
you have. Otherwise, you're not going to be able to create the right kind
of content. Justin did have that.

If he had called it something else besides Facebook Marketing, say Facebook
Fan Counts or Great Facebook Pages, would it have taken off as much as
Facebook Marketing, the Facebook Marketing Bible? I'm not sure. People are
going to be looking for content products that are called what they expect
them to be called. In this Google Trends example, you can see that those
exact words, Facebook Marketing, in that exact order, that's the term that
people are most interested in, and not the term that's really growing in
interest from 2007 till today.

Andrew: I see. OK. All right. We're hunting for potential ideas here, but
we're also using this to understand how to name our products based on those
ideas.

Susan: Sure. It's naming and then it's also just validating your
positioning.

Andrew: I see.

Susan: The same products, the same kind of content can fare better or
worse, depending on how it's positioned to the target audience.

Andrew, I just wanted to just speak briefly about Google Analytics too.
Just when it came back to my own post about [?], I had mentioned that, the
high traffic to that one post really signaled to me that more could be done
there. Google Analytics, there's so much data on it now as part of that
product.

Back in 2008, there wasn't so much, but really all I needed was the number
of page views the certain post was getting, and then very importantly, how
much time people were spending on the site, and how much time people were
spending with that post. I had noticed there is some content that people
just being on for many minutes at a time, just reading through. Maybe they
were leaving it open in the tab, or maybe they were just really into it.
That's when they were typing out their long comment reply to my post. Those
are all basically signals of interest and engagement, and should be flags
for exactly where your productizing efforts on your content.

Andrew: So, Google analytics, of course internally, Google trends
externally. I just did this search on Google Trends, to see how Facebook
advertising, as a phrase, compares to Facebook marketing. We can see that
Facebook marketing is one and a quarter times more searched for than
Facebook advertising, so clearly that's what you want to name your product,
Facebook marketing as opposed to Facebook advertising bible. Am I using
this the way that you're suggesting?

Susan: Absolutely, that's a great little comparison there. It's very clever
that you did that, Andrew, because Facebook advertising and Facebook
marketing are essentially the same topic. If you call it Facebook
marketing, you're going to capture more of that general interest that's out
there if you position it as Facebook advertising.

Andrew: And in my mind, I'd think that Facebook advertising is the way
people are searching for it, because that's the way Facebook is promoting
it, and also, it's just the way that you expect to promote products, by
advertising, but marketing is much more popular. Anything else before we go
on to the next big tactic?

Susan: Let's move on.

Andrew: Let's go to the big board. The next big one is "Release a simple
version." You guys do courses. Actually Noah Anatsumo [SP] told me that
Anatsumo courses are more popular than products. You might have different
data than I do, and maybe mine's out of date, but that's what I heard, so
that's what you are hearing. How does that square with what you're hearing?
What did you see on the inside?

Susan: People do loads of products. It doesn't really surprise me, but some
of the tools are really great, so it's a delightful surprise that the
products those really great tools that we're having on the site.

Andrew: By products, you mean the ones that you create internally, courses
like the copywriting course, the business blueprint course. Those are
outselling products like Clickee the analytics (?) for example.

Susan: Yes. I think there's a little bit more of a broader appeal. I think,
just in general, that there are more people that need to learn how to
structure their businesses and how to use the tools before they can get
into equipping their toolkit with every little tool that they need.

Andrew: You asked me to talk a little bit about this, and I will. This is
the first product that Noah Anatsumo created, and I helped him do it. You
can see. The first thing people notice is that I look pretty serious with
my vest on, my collared shirt, and my background perfect, and my
professional mic, and Noah's just sitting there with a hat. The course was
based on his experience finding interns. Other people were asking him how
he gets interns to help run his company. (?) was in a coffee shop.

I was staying at my office, recording this with him, and when he released
it, I have to tell you, Anaiba, I apologized to him in a bathroom at the
conference about that. I was upset with him. I said, "Noah, how can you
release a product that looks like this? This is not really a full course.
It's you in a hat, at the coffee shop. The reason I was wrong was that this
was the first product that he created. He was testing to see if people were
interested in it. Clearly they were. It ended up doing well. I'm so
serious. I took another screen of this to see if I could find myself less
serious, but I'm very serious when I do these things.

It gave him an indication that people were interested in it. People ended
up surprising me by complementing the information in there, and frankly, I
can come back and use the information from that course when I hire anyone.
I don't think we've hired an intern, but when we hire part-time people to
help with Mixergy, I go through that internship program and I basically do
what he said, for finding interns. I do it to find all the people we hire
here.

So, it clearly works. The audience loved it. It was a first shot, and he
was right to just test out something simple. By testing out something
simple, he got feedback, and he got to improve, improve, and improve.
Today, he has you in the company to help create products. He's really
gotten serious about this.

Susan: Well, I think one of Noah's greatest strengths, and one of my
favorite things about him as a person is that he's really hell-bent on
delivering value, even from the very beginning and thing is when you are at
the beginning of something you might not have a ton of resources to deliver
the highest value on every single aspect of your product. I mean, so, in
the case with the Mixergy interview, he decided to invest all of his
resources in delivering value in terms of the content. But, may be not
finding this...

Andrew: Mass production value.

Susan: Sure, exactly, or taking a shower to fix his hair that day, or
finding like, a fancy outfit to wear. He wasn't going to spend his time on
that stuff. Instead, he decided to spend his time on making a really,
really, really, good interview for you that you could use, that anybody
could use and actually change their intern acquisition strategy. And so,
now, actually it's funny, because now, if you did it, if you were to do a
Mixergy interview with Noah this week, you might find that he looks a
little bit nicer. But, that's just because it is very iterative, right, so
he has figured out some of that beginning stuff, the actual material and
the content and now that that's to a degree he's satisfied with, that's a
very, very high degree of quality. Then, he can sort of go on to adding
more production value to things.

Andrew: And so, I've got to tell you, too, another thing that happened
there. I don't think he had an affiliate program at that time, but he
wanted to pay me every time this product was sold on his site. And so, the
way that he did it was, he was still collecting payment via PayPal and
PayPal, when you create a button to sell it, it's very easy to create a
button to sell, but it's also very easy to add an item number to each of
your products that you are selling...

Susan: Right.

Andrew: And they basically just walk you through doing it. So, what he did
was, he had his Gmail account which collected all those emails from PayPal
for all the sales. He created a filter that if, any time this product name
came up in his inbox, he would just forward it to me, and then I would see
how many of those emails came in and I'd know how much revenue he was
generating from this one product, and I could multiply by my percentage and
know how much I was collecting every time the product sold. What I mean by
that is, he just started out so simply, he just said, "Let's just build
what we can, we'll improve it later, we're not going to sweat it", and it
worked out beautifully for him. For a long time afterwards, for months and
months, even after he got really strong with quality and production values
of his programs, I was still getting those emails because people were still
buying.

Susan: Yup.

Andrew: So, I apologize to him, I do say now, this is the way, absolutely
the way to launch something for the first time. What do you say though,
Susan, to someone who sees this and says, "I feel guilty, just creating
this or I feel like I have this high standard, I feel guilty creating",
where was that? The product that you created about jaw surgery, which was
just a PDF created in a word processing program. When they feel guilty and
they don't want to do, what do you say to them?

Susan: Well, I had a little experience couple months ago, where I was at my
yoga studio. I was in the bathroom, I kind of looked around me and I
noticed that there was toilet paper, there were paper towels, and there was
a box of Kleenex and suddenly, I had been thinking about this very
question, I was working in a content business at the time, and I was
feeling a little bit of that guilt because I thought, "Well, what are we
doing? Is this good enough?

You know, they could find this information, if they really tried, they
could find all this information, out there on the web, and maybe interview
some people to supplement it", and so I wasn't really feeling confident in
the material that we were packaging. But then, I sort of looked around and
saw the toilet paper, the Kleenex and the paper towels, and I thought,
"These are all paper, these are all paper pulped products, packaged
differently, and priced differently and yet here they are, housed in the
same bathroom and I am going to use all three of them and find utility and
pleasure really in having access to all three of them. I will go to Safeway
or wherever it is and buy not only toilet paper but also paper towels, not
only toilet paper and paper towels, but also Kleenex, and I am happy to pay
stratified prices for all three of those."

And so, that little bathroom experience really showed me that packaging is
part of the product itself. So, it's not just your content, and I am not
talking about packaging in terms of a fancy design or a fancy InDesign
template instead of a word doc. But really the fact that your delivery
method for your content and for your knowledge is just as meaningful to the
consumers of that content as the content itself.

Andrew: But at first what we're saying is, release a simple version and in
that simple version, the design is not going to look nice. It's basically
going to be their equivalent, I should say, of a PDF that's printed out of
a word doc, or, of course, that's created in a coffee shop, with a ski hat
on. And know they need to do or they know, at least, that it's worked for
me, it's worked for you, it's worked for Noah at AppSumo. But they need to
get past the feeling of guilt of releasing that simple first version. What
do you say to them about how to get past it so that they can just release
it or if they're on the fence, how do we push them towards this approach?

Susan: Well, I think the part of the process comes from people fearing that
the customer won't get value out of something unless it's perfect, and I
don't think that's true because we know from the Noah case that people can
get value from somebody in a ski hat, talking about their intern strategy,
if the strategy is really needy and proven, and it's delivered in a way
that that audience person can hear it and process it. So, the key is really
just that it has to be formatted such that the consumer of the information
is actually able to take action with it. So, with my blog post about jaw
surgery, clearly the blog post was engaging, got all that traffic and got
all those comments, but it wasn't enough in that format on the blog for
people to really take the correct action that they needed to take to solve
their problem.

And so, when I pulled it off the blog and put it into a word document,
saved it as a PDF, it wasn't so much that I added all those fancy designs
to it. I certainly didn't do that, I did it in half a morning on a
Saturday. It was more just that I thought about what's the way that I can
get people closer to taking action, and if downloading the PDF and paying
$15 for it, or, are things that people will do that will get them closer to
taking action on something because it makes it feel more real to them,
then, that is just as good as spending two Saturdays perfecting the logo.
So, I think it's about focusing your efforts on not just creating a minimum
viable product, and that's just fine, too, it is about doing that, but it's
about figuring out what's just the right trick to making it useful and
actionable for that consumer.

Andrew: OK, and right, and useful and actionable doesn't necessarily mean
the best design, it doesn't mean the best software that's used to create
it. Often, it's just the right ideas that you've presented for people, and
frankly, if you would have sat with Noah, and asked him how to hire an
intern, whether it would have been a coffee shop or a high end restaurant
in the middle of New York City, information would have been just as good,
and that's what you are going for, when you are buying a product and later
on...

Susan: Yes, so...

Andrew: ...you can improve the design, I think.

Susan: Absolutely, yeah, and I think that what Noah has always been really
good at is providing tactics that people can sort of take off the shelf and
use right away. So, what it comes down to again it's just about things
being actionable. I mean, when it comes to contents that's on the web that
people will pay for. If you want to read for pleasure, then you're going to
go and read the New York Times Magazine or some piece like that. But, if
you want to, if you're paying $20 or $50, for some "How to?" material, then
you really want to be able to walk away with a "How to", you really want to
be able to take some action from that. And so, Noah knew correctly to
invest his time and making something actionable, whether it is providing
the right tactics, or whether it is putting into a PDF so that people
actually use it, rather than making it beautiful.

Andrew: Right. Back to the big board for the final big tactic, and the last
one is make a contingency plan and I thought when I first saw this that you
were going to tell us how to be prepared in case this doesn't work out, how
to recover and start over, but I guess starting over is just going back in
doing these tactics, if it doesn't work. What you want us to talk about is,
what you want the audience to know about is, what happens if it does work?
What does happen? Why should we even make a contingency plan for that? If
it works great, I put all the money in the bank and I think about how to
create another one, and repeat the process again, also. Why do I need a
contingency plan for success?

Susan: Well, success happens. So, a couple of cases where people didn't
make it, I think the contingency plan for success, what it really comes
down to is velocity. So, if you're seeing some initial traction on a
product...

Andrew: You're saying that if you're doing well and you're starting to get
velocity, what do you do? How do you capture it?

Susan: Well, don't slow down.

Andrew: Don't slow down is right. So then, what do you do? So, you're
saying, you have a hit product, don't just take it for granted, don't move
on to the next product, what do we do with it?

Susan: I think a lot of times success can cause people to rest on their
laurels a little bit.or, at least, if you don't have a plan, you have to
spend that time after the success has happened, to figure out the plan.
What you really should be doing is spend that time into making the plan
happen, not figuring out the plan. The plan should be figured out ahead of
time.

So, that's why I call this "Make a Contingency Plan for Success." You
already know what you're going to do. You already have your emergency step-
by-step, if the impossible should happen and a lot of people should want to
buy your product. So, instead of having to spend that next phase figuring
it out, you already can immediately put your time and resources and energy
into making it come to life.

Andrew: I see, so you launch a product as we discussed earlier. The thing
does well. You want to capitalize on it. Give me an example of who did that
well. Should we talk about "Facebook Marketing Bible" and what you guys did
there?

Susan: Yeah. We didn't do it very well. I'll tell you, that's a great
example of what can happen when you don't make a contingency plan for
success. So, we launched the PDF version of "The Facebook Marketing Bible".
It was back in 2000, early 2000. That was in 2008 still. It sort of slowly
took off, and then in 2009 it really started taking off, the rising title
of (?). Facebook was getting bigger. Facebook marketing was becoming more
of a substantial industry, and so that PDF started becoming really popular.


Now, we actually ended up selling it as a one off PDF with pretty much the
same revenue numbers every single month for a full year before turning it
into a recurring revenue subscription site. So, just imagine if we had made
a contingency plan for success.

The plan would have looked like this, "If this PDF takes off, then we will
create a WordPress site. If the WordPress site does well, then we will
create a subscription around it. If the subscription does well, then we
will do these kinds of price optimizations. If the price optimizations do
well, then we will invest in the kind of partnerships and do courses."

So, that could have been the road map. Instead of creating a road map, we
were so focused on just getting that initial success that we forgot to
think about, "What happens if it takes off? What is our contingency plan
for success?" Then, as a result, we ended up sort of leaving all this money
on the table for way longer, way longer than we should have.

Andrew: So, let me see if I understand. So, if you create a PDF and the PDF
does well, what's the next step? You're looking for partners? You're
looking for creating a membership site with recurring revenue? What's the
process? What should we do if that first PDF does well?

Susan: So, it's just about sort of deepening your monetization. The first
step is creating that PDF, and if people are buying it at a certain price
point, one thing you can experiment with is just adding some zeros onto the
price point.

Andrew: Ah, I see. So, first experiment with changing the price and see if
you could generate more revenue with the same product? Maybe you under
priced it at first?

Susan: Absolutely, because changing the price on a product, that doesn't
require you to build anything. It just requires you to maybe change some
parameters in PayPal or whatever you're using for checkout. It takes you
less than a minute, or maybe less than five minutes, you could change the
price on your website and in your email or wherever else you're advertising
it. So, that just takes a few minutes to do and you can get a big lift from
that. That would be step 1.5.

Andrew: Okay.

Susan: If you change the price and it's still doing well, then I would
start thinking about, how can you turn this one time revenue into repeat,
recurring revenue. So, there's a couple of ways you can do that. One is to
monetize a membership site. I would say that's a little bit more of a
costly investment because you actually have to build the membership site
and you have to make sure all the hookups to your checkout system work.

But it's not impossible. I can assure you that a lot of people out there
who are far less talented than the Mixergy audience on today have done this
very thing and are making money off of subscription sites.

Andrew: It's so easy, you don't even have to code it yourself. You just get
WordPress, WishList Members, the plug-in.

Susan: Yeah.

Andrew: You start off by tracking people through PayPal the way that you
did it apparently, the way that Noah did. Then, when you're ready to move
on beyond PayPal, you can insert a shopping cart to it using either one
shopping cart or Premium Web Cart. You tie those into... In fact, at that
point, once you've started to collect revenue from PayPal you're fine. We
have a whole course on this side.

Susan: Yeah.

Andrew: I want to repeat the question. But it's fairly straightforward to
set up a recurring revenue model.

Susan: It's not rocket science. The hardest is part is actually just doing
it sort of in tight sequence with past success. So, if you have a PDF
that's doing really well, then what you want to do is there is going to be
some sales momentum around that PDF. You want to be able to put that sales
momentum straight into a membership site instead of letting it languish
sort of flat for many months. So that's why I say it's so important to make
a contingency plan for success, because you want to make sure that your
escalation path is very tight. That you're not letting something sit there
at a certain level for seven months or ten months without growth. That
every time you see growth, that you're kind of moving it up higher on the
ladder, so that you've always got the next thing that you're pushing your
product towards.

Andrew: I see. And you eventually, you said how many years afterward did
you guys launch this? Was it two years after you first launched the PDF?

Susan: Looks like almost three years, yeah.

Andrew: That's a lot of people, lost revenue.

Susan: I think so, yeah. Because it's a lot easier to maintain the site
too. So it's not just the revenue in terms of sales, but it's also the
operational costs that you incur from creating a PDF every month over doing
it on a site.

Andrew: Any final words on contingency plans before we move on to the final
section, here?

Susan: I would say that it's a common symptom for all boot-strapped
companies and start-ups especially. You'll see that people are so used to
managing risk that they forget to think about, 'What do I do for the
wildest success, what do I do if my wildest dreams come true?' It's very,
very common for companies to use PayPal too long, for one really specific
example. PayPal is not necessarily the best system for checkout, and a lot
of times, depending on your sales volume, you can end up paying really high
fees. There's going to be a natural time where if your company's doing
well, you should probably move away from that and go on to the next tool
that's going to be better for your business. The contingency, a small arm
of the contingency plan for success in that case, would be to know what
that is before it's past due. I think it's just a very common thing for a
lot of companies, and I encourage people to be thinking about that up front
instead of...Have at least 20% of your planning time devoted to thinking
about, 'What happens if this really takes off,' instead of just all of it
devoted to, 'What happens if this tanks and I can't pay my staff next
month?'

Andrew: That is a way, a lot of times, we entrepreneurs think. Final word
is this, guys. What I've heard from people who've used these course and
gotten the most out of them, is that they pick one idea and they try it
first, and they build on it and build on it, and usually at the end of
these programs I tell you to pick one and do it. I'm going to suggest this,
don't do it. Pick one and just think about how you're going to do it. Think
about how you can use it in your life. Think about how you can use it in
your business, and my bet is that if you just start thinking about how it
will work in your life, that you're actually going to start to take action
and it's just going to happen for you.

Maybe it's going to Google Trends and doing a few searches based on the
topics that you're aware of. Maybe it's looking at your own analytics or at
your own comments and figuring out what are people especially excited
about. Maybe it's finally releasing that simple version, and saying, 'You
know what? If Noah and Andrew can be in a ski hat and just record a
conversation with some screenshots and call it a course, then I can come up
with something simple.' I don't know what it is for you, but think about
how you can do it, what you can do with what you just learned. If you think
about that, then I believe, and I think that you're going to see in your
own life, that you're going to be more likely to take action on it.

Susan: So Andrew, I just want to say one last thing, which is that, a lot
of people think, "Well, I'm just little old me, I don't have anything
special to say, I just go to my cube job all day long." They feel very
disempowered when it comes to creating products from content, because maybe
they don't have any content at all. But I'll tell you, everybody has
content. Either it's on a fancy website, or maybe it's in emails that they
send to their friends that they help out with HTML stuff every so often. Or
maybe it's all in here still, but everybody has content. We all have skills
that we've taken time to learn and perfect, and we all have special things
that we do that other people don't do.

I would say, if you're at a loss for where to get started, look at the
places where you've spent the most time in the past three months, special
skills that you've invested time to acquire, and think about who else that
can apply to. How many other people out there are looking to get really
good at Excel? I know it sounds boring, but there's a whole huge market for
Excel skills. Could you create a product around that? How would it be
different? Who would it be geared towards? Could it be Excel for high
school girls? Maybe.

Andrew: Ah, I see what you mean. All right, Susan, from AppSumo, thank you
for doing this course with me. Everyone else, thank you for watching and
being a part of this. I'm looking forward to your results, and send them
over to me after you get them. Bye.