Mastering Product Launches: Strategies for Maximizing Engagement and Sales
In their conversation, Danny and Ziga dive into the nuances of crowdfunding, leveraging their combined wisdom to share strategies that have helped raise over $70 million. Ziga recounts his unexpected entry into the crowdfunding realm about nine years ago through a board game project, which garnered unforeseen interest and steered him toward a deeper engagement in the space. The dialogue emphasizes the paramount importance of email marketing in crowdfunding efforts, portraying it as an effective, owner-controlled channel crucial for broadening the reach before campaigns kick off. Moreover, they discuss the vital role of building a community, suggesting that the real value of crowdfunding extends beyond immediate financial success, laying a foundation for future projects through sustained audience growth. Danny and Ziga also offer pragmatic tips on using social media and email lists for efficient lead generation, the importance of reminding potential backers about campaigns, and the critical step of validating ideas early to ascertain a project’s potential for success, offering a comprehensive overview of their approach to crowdfunding.
Quotes from the interview
“If you want to really be successful at marketing, figure out how to create these no-brainer offers that make it impossible for customers to say no.”
— Danny Flood
“You only get one chance to get your launch right, and if you do, it can make an enormous difference. Avoid costly mistakes and get on the fast track to success.”
— Danny Flood
“Building a business is not just about the initial product launch but finding ways to engage your community and sell different types of products.”
— Žiga Berce
00:04
okay so when you see my screen do you see your face or do you see my face it’s showing my face right yeah okay how do I look through your eyes you all right got it um because it’s different on my side so all right well good afternoon everyone um I’m here today with my friend ziga how are you today great getting better so this is attempt number three we actually tried to host this initially on a YouTube live stream but I couldn’t uh get my friend here on to join me uh so it was just me talking to myself unfortunately which uh
00:39
I do often but not recording it and um I’m here today in Istanbul it’s a lovely Saturday afternoon here um it feels like summer today actually and you’re in Slovenia is that right yeah not not that summerish here well we actually had a horrid uh January of of weather so I’m really excited to see the sun coming out again um so we initially connected a few months back when I was in uh Malaysia actually and we connected because you’re something of an authority in the uh Kickstarter and crowdfunding space uh
01:17
and that’s how we initially connected because I I do a lot of launches all of the time for myself um tell me a little bit about how you started in crowdfunding like um how how long has it been and what got you started on this p yeah sure um I mean I started about how many nine years ago in 2014 uh where it it it was sort of like an accident uh me and a brother of mine we we were working on this board game and we were just having fun we never intended it to be like a serious project or anything but uh then we sort of put
02:00
it online and uh primarily because we wanted you know some other friends you know so we could arrange when we were we are going to play it but since it was a spin-off of a really popular computer game a lot of like random people started popping in our Facebook uh group you know we didn’t make it private at that time um and they started asking you know like wow that looks amazing where can I buy that and obviously nobody could because it was just printed on the on the paper and this kind of gave us the initial idea of going to
02:41
Kickstarter so um yeah this is when we decided to go and then like almost a year later we actually went and in between there was like preparation and preparation you got to know that especially back at that time um depending where you were in the world but here in Slovenia you know there were there wasn’t almost any campaigns there was I think like one or two campaigns launched before us and nobody actually knew how to approach Kickstarter or you know how to launch a project there you know it there was no knowledge so what
03:25
we did was we started calling other random people you know that had successful board games on Kickstarter we called some people from Croatia you know from from Germany and so forth and we I mean we asked them if we can have a c call with them and we asked them a bunch of questions and we started you know kind of getting an idea of um what we need to do to go to Kickstarter we obviously um at that time you know prepared the to the best of our abilities you know know we didn’t have like a huge budget we actually didn’t
04:03
have any budget um so we did most of the things ourselves or our friends that helped us you know create the videos and things like that and yeah we launched a campaign which was successful we sold about 200 games uh which was okay it wasn’t like a huge campaign but we learned a ton you know and all this knowledge I then later on you know um even even further down you know I I helped other campaigns I had multiple other campaigns and you know I developed it into a couple of things that I know now are like pillars for a
04:48
successful campaign and that’s really the first time that you are trying to do anything for the you know first time you’re you’re making a bunch of mistakes and a lot of things that you have to figure out um a lot of things that you notice in hindsight after the campaign is over like that’s what we should have done um and that just like when we do YouTube lives for example there’s a lot of things to figure out and so uh but but that’s usually how it is right it’s it’s not the prettiest uh type of thing is
05:16
that right yeah I mean it like I said it depends I mean some Industries you know or some I don’t know nowadays there’s almost too much knowledge you can basically get knowledge for for any topic right you just have to pick up which knowledge is relevant to you and which one will actually help you but at that time specifically for for Kickstarter there wasn’t uh a lot of information a lot of knowledge around it so yeah it was a bit different if I would go again you know I would do the whole campaign totally different so with
05:53
my knowledge with my current knowledge know I can’t imagine how we actually succeeded but you know those were different times it was um you could I mean you can still do like a small projects you know and have them successful but um you know yeah if you want a really really successful campaign then if you don’t do a couple of really important steps just forget about it yeah you know I always like to say in my growth hacking presentations u i talk about the knifin framework have you heard of that before which one uh the
06:33
knan framework it’s no it’s a division of labor into four different quadrants and so you have like simple complex complicated and chaotic work and um simple work might be like driving a bus or Farm labor or something like this and I always like to refer to growth hacking as uh chaotic type of work so um there isn’t really a university or a book or anything like this that can prepare you you for what you’re trying to do um and what I try to do in my Approach as a growth hacker and to to get the best
07:06
results online marketing um I am testing a bunch of stuff every day like everything is new I’m trying to improve upon the process and build the process so that uh I moveed from the chaotic you know realm where I don’t know what I can’t predict what the result will be to something that’s in the complex uh quadrant of work where um yes it’s complicated yes it’s complex um but we have a system we we figured out the important leverage points um to make this work and so that’s what makes
07:38
my life a little bit easier makes my work um a little bit more predictable and makes results repeatable so I think that initially in your journey um you started out just wanting to to launch this project you have these games and didn’t quite know what you were doing and you learned a lot from the process and then that was kind of the first step to making you an expert an authority on this subject and then I assume that you went and and I know that you’ve hosted uh crowdfunding um events and things in
08:08
your your native country uh and and you people kind of came to you looking to you as kind of like an expert on this so when you launched that first campaign how much did you guys raise like what was your goal and how how far did you get yeah we uh we wanted to raise uh uh $12,000 dollar and we just raised it it it was a bit over that but yeah okay so you did succeed at it actually no no no no the compaign was successful uh we uh yeah yeah I I’m just saying if I would have to repeat the campaign I think now
08:45
with all the knowledge I have now uh because we were learning as we as we were going you know at that time uh we could raise much much more you know but yeah the campaign was successful uh um I I later on uh I had a couple of other campaigns as well uh some failed obviously uh a lot of them uh succeeded and I was involved to to different extents with like over I don’t know 50 projects for sure um some just through mentorship where I mentored them you know some through being actively involved though that was mostly in the
09:28
beginning but yeah overall I mean even with our community we we’ve actually built the the largest crowdfunding community here in the region you know the whole balcon and central European region uh we’ve got all these countries connected through our meetups um and yeah we helped there’s three friends of us that each one of us had like successful crowdfunding campaigns and we help others now so yeah we we raised over you know 70 million in total with all the campaigns so um yeah it’s been it’s been
10:07
it’s been an exciting Journey you know so you’ve you’ve really dived into the crowdfunding uh industry like with both lately lately less um I mean I’m entrepreneur by cart I mean I started my like initial first projects in in in high school know I I was selling like uh notes for for uh for tests you know I did like crunch the whole um subject into like smaller nodes that you could learn from and I was selling them throughout the school so you know that was my first entrepreneur experience and
10:45
then later on I started you know building websites I’m a bit older generation so you know that was like the beginning of Internet you know dialup mods and and stuff like that so I’ve always you know um had different businesses um and I’ve had some success I had some failures and crowdfunding was was one of them I just saw crowdfunding as a great platform where you as a Creator uh can launch a project without much upfront cost verify the idea see if there’s any traction and obviously if it is then you
11:27
can throw in your know your hard-earned cash because if you’re going to throw in all your savings and then at the end of the day see that nobody wants to buy your products it it’s going to feel shitty to say the least but if you can Val validate that at least some people want to buy what you’ve built you know then obviously yeah you’re going to get some you’re going to get some cash you’re going to maybe ask your friends family went to some investors and go like okay I need this much money I want
11:57
to launch this thing there’s the potential IAL I can show it to these are the people that pre-bought the the the product or whatever you’re doing you know and I don’t even have it built right so um when you um let me tell me about some of the specifics like when you launched your first campaign sure what were you what were you doing and it take does take a lot of confidence just to launch a campaign in the first place because that that fear of failure can stop people from actually even making the attempt um and then when they do
12:27
make the attempt and this is true in marketing General um people are hesitant to promote themselves you know they uh they feel like there’s something icky about marketing you know they they they’re worried about spamming people they’re worried about disturbing people uh and that’s really the one of the defining characteristics of an experienced marketer is they have thick enough skin that they just dgaf they don’t really care about uh how people are going to perceive them you know because they’re doing marketing so when
13:01
you did this campaign and I and I we’ll talk about subsequent campaigns but how did you get the word out there were you just like calling up your friends and family like saying hey this is my project or how tell me your approach there yeah amazing amazing question yeah I I I fully agree right now you know I’ve been in marketing for so many years that yeah my my skin is a bit thicker though I still I don’t think you ever get fully used to it you know like self-promotion uh it always feels like a bit weird um but yeah at that time it
13:37
was just awful I had to I had to push it I had to push through it it it it was just like it was so unnatural to me it was it was really it was super hard you know so I can imagine that a lot of people uh see the same thing and go like oh yeah that’s not for me and the funny part is is that after everything was said and done you know after the campaign was finished um and yeah I’ll I’ll tell you how I how I did it I did it in a bunch of ways one of them was also you know like calling all all my friends like at least once to two times
14:13
per week you know because obviously you can see who has donated and who hasn’t and I was just reminding them and at the end I was like I’m I’m I’m such an annoying breath and at the end of The Campaign I actually asked them I was like look uh look guys sorry you know sorry for being a pain in the ass and they were like no sorry we we actually forgot about it every single time and if you wouldn’t remind us you know we would never back it because got so many things on our plates and that’s when I realized
14:44
you know when you’re doing something you’re so into it right that you think that everything revolves around your campaign but other people have their own lives they they live their own lives and they don’t care actually that much about your project even though they’re your friends or family right so obviously they’re going to forget and you’re going to call them and they’ll be in a car driving to their work or somewhere and they’re going to be like yeah yeah sure I’ll do it as soon as I get home
15:11
obviously when they get home they forget right so it’s it’s a Perpetual cycle and um if you don’t remind them if you don’t keep on pinging them and that’s not just calling and sending emails you know the same goes for all other um uh channels as well like advertising or whatever you’re doing um people just don’t care they forget and uh yeah this this was a a huge Learning lesson for me you know to um not feel bad if I have to like say 10 10 times to the same person if they don’t want to they’re gonna tell you
15:48
they’re gonna like off man I don’t want to back it uh I already told you that just stop okay at that point just stop you don’t need to call them anymore but if they say they will sorry um just persist try to do it in a way that’s not annoying or or it’s like hey you know you said you’re gonna do this like what’s Happ what the f man you know yeah yeah be be friendly obviously you don’t wna you don’t want to tell them what the man yeah sorry this is an 18 plus uh okay uh yeah be nice about it you know
16:28
just say okay you manage to or just you want me to ping you again tomorrow or do it in a nice way but again one of the um yeah I just share share one of the most valuable lessons that I’ve learned and um as I was starting out my online entrepreneurial career I was back in University and I was listening to like a lot of uh interviews like this guy David D’Angelo he’s like a dating coach maybe you’ve heard of him um and he he interviewed this one guy and he he recommended this author uh called will
16:57
louns and she’s a communic expert and she’s written some books like um how to connect with anyone like 96 tips for connecting with people um and one of the things I remember from her is like she she uses a lot of like positive anchoring like neural linguistic processing um so you know anytime that someone receives your message like you want to make them smile somehow you know so you could be like giving someone the bird like saying hey F you buddy you know but you say it in a way that uh you know I think Winston Churchill said once
17:29
you know tact is when you tell someone how to go to hell so they look forward to the trip you know so it’s like being excessively polite and and being positive like using positive subject lines um you know making people feel good when they see your message um and that’s kind of like important especially when you you’re worried about how you’re going to be perceived when you approach people um and not giving them anything that they can take negatively and for me it was a valuable lesson as a marketer
17:57
um especially when you have to follow up with people you know twice a week or once a week um if you can be like the light in their day or the one thing that makes them smile that day uh they’re going to be more receptive to getting messages from you and backing whatever it is that you’re trying to do or get them to do it um and I think that also helps you know you have to be very tactful about how you do this um maybe even also giving them an easy out if they can’t pledge or something like maybe they can share it with their
18:26
friends or um refer people to you so I’ve I’ve done a ton of this uh Outreach over the course of my career um depending on what projects I’m doing and um and yeah so so that was one of the most important lessons that I learned when I was around like 22 or 23 um and it served me really well is is using that positive anchoring um you know never like being rude to people or saying like hey you said you were gonna you’re going to do this but you didn’t um and and I find that you know as a general rule
18:59
um following up if you have a warm lead you probably want to do that about once a week that’s like not too much but uh not too little and also if you have um a base of clients a base of customers or an email list um you want to try to connect with them about 50 times a year so about once a week is a good um media for con for communication you know like a Cadence for communication um and so that kind of like helps I help I find that helps to have these kind of Frameworks that I know um what I’m doing
19:31
you know like how often I should communicate with these people like when should I follow up with them um because a lot of people don’t follow up at all and they leave a lot of opportunities on the table like you said um people often forget they they forgot about what it is that you’re working on or your project it’s not the center of the world like it is for you um well cool all right so um what was the maybe just sorry Danny um yeah yeah I I fully agree I mean I don’t know if you know Ste FY from CL close.io he’s
20:01
like a he’s an amazing Persona actually and uh yeah he he said the same you know he’s he’s in the sales business you know and he said I’m not going to stop contacting you until you say yes or until you say no I don’t care what you say until you say one of these two words I’m gonna I’m gonna ping you to the end of the life you know and yeah that goes really align with with what you said and um I’ve been I’ve been doing that well sorry don’t do this in dating by the way you know or something like no
20:40
ask someone date or sales but yeah no I mean as soon as you get no as soon as you go look man I’m not interested um okay you know do you think that that that he actually does ping people until until they die because um you know I’ve actually got to the point where I appreciate a no um up front rather than following up with people um because uh you know I don’t want them to give me like a bunch of excuses and I’m still following up with them like two months later it’s it’s like a a dead lead by that point
21:13
right I mean it it depends um uh I actually do it as well you know for for different uh reasons you know at my job I’m also a uh growth manager so um I do customer interviews and I just keep on pinging the same people until they say either they’re not interested in the interview uh with me or you know they say yes you know so I I I have like these automation flows and this is what I do and the same when I was selling my services when I had my own marketing agen you know uh we would keep on sending emails until they said no look
21:56
man we don’t need your services you you know um and and sometimes things happened like after a few few months you know and uh with if we go back to crowdfunding crowdfunding campaigns usually last around 45 days they can go it depends which platform you you you choose but they can go a bit longer or um shorter I mean you could make shorter campaigns but usually um you don’t have enough time but you know let’s say up to two months so for two months you really need to be super persistent the first
22:31
few weeks more in between maybe a bit less you know and then at the end again you do like again a big push and you don’t send once per week you send maybe like I don’t know last week I would I would definitely send to to some of the friends you know at least three times if uh if you know they wouldn’t have backed by then just just clarify something um I’ve I’ve studied some of your lessons in uh our course the launch lab it’s a great course by the way and and I appreciate what I’ve learned from you
23:00
there um in your lessons I believe that you said that um the main way that you push these uh promotions out or or the campaigns out is through email is that correct well yeah I mean uh I find email like the best Channel you can you can control it it’s it’s yours to own once you get somebody’s email you know it doesn’t cost you a lot to send more email to them right um but it’s like what what I usually do is I use six different channels um when preparing for crowdfunding campaign I mean there you
23:45
could imagine a crowdfunding campaign like a product launch you know like a goto Market strategy just a bit more basic right because um you don’t need to over complicate it uh especially at the beginning if you you don’t have the product and a product Market fit yet so I like to use six channels and one is communities one is advertising one is uh media PR if you want to call it one are influencers Partnerships and events and I mean I can go into details of all of them but yeah communities is the the one
24:20
that we’ve been talking right now right so you try to build your community before you launch the campaign and you can build it on different social networks or through email or whatever but I would suggest everybody you know at the end before launching the campaign you try to push as many people from all these channels that you’ve build the community so far to email and the reason is because you know everybody knows that try and post something on Facebook you know a limited number of people will see the same goes for other social media
24:55
platforms you know you’re dependent on a third party to um to show your posts but with emails you can you can send as many as you like you know you can send um to many people as you like and it’s it’s it’s just an amazing Channel okay interesting um and so in the course uh we obviously have uh close to 45 lessons at the moment and I think we’re adding more soon you’re going to be adding a few more is that right um there’s topics on lessons on all these different topics like how to do PR how
25:31
to do email marketing how to do social media marketing building your communities uh we have all that stuff in there so tons of great content in there um but what I wanted to ask you was um let’s let’s talk more about email because you actually have a lesson that you teach in the course about your email backer formula and um I believe that it’s kind of like a I know that you’re recovering from a a cold but tell me tell me a bit more because um I know that in that formula um you have it very scientific like I I like
26:06
that you’re kind of a left brain person you’re all about the numbers um and you know your numbers and so you have this formula where like if you have $100,000 a goal um and your average reward price is like $50 you know exactly how many emails you’re actually going to need and um I do want to kind of dive into that a little bit more into the nuances of that uh but tell me like how do you go about um I guess building this email list but also like getting on Partnerships with other people’s email list because I know
26:38
that’s also important um walk me through how you you set this up if you’re starting with a client new campaign so do you want to talk about first of how to build an email list and then about the formula or well I I didn’t want to give everything away because I I wanted you to have a chance to to tell me about it a bit more um but yeah I guess uh I guess building the email list I mean I I have some I mean I do a lot of kind of slogging it out with paid advertisements and and um I don’t want to kind of get
27:09
into the basics because P I think people know how to build email list but um right now as of 2024 um I’m getting good return on ad spend by doing like Facebook form ads um and just having people opt in through Facebook uh and not going to a landing page because um the the cost per lead is very very low if they just opt in directly through Facebook um and so I’m I’m just doing like a a free offer getting building up my email list um maybe like $5 a day or $10 a day um that’s a really good approach for me but I know that in your
27:44
email backer formula specifically um you are talking about getting like 10,000 subscribers before you’re actually launching the campaign right um okay tell me tell me about the the methods that you do with your clients like I just gave an example there um to and how much realistically like the budget that you would need to do this um do you have any like strategies for um building a list without paid ads um any any tips here like for people yeah sure um let me just explain why uh maybe why the formula why why the
28:28
formula came to be um and obviously before you launch the campaign you want to know uh that it’s going to be successful you want some assurance that yeah what I’m doing it’s not for nothing obviously if you’re super optimistic you can convince yourself uh of that and then just start working and whatever happens happens but yeah for me the biggest question was you know can I know up front or how can I increase my odds of being successful because that’s at the end of the day that’s what you’re doing you know uh
29:06
nobody can tell you up front whether or not any campaign is going to be successful you know or if your video Will Go virally On on YouTube and and so forth you know what you want to do is increase the odds of that uh outcome happening right and this formula basically basically does that you know it it um breaks down all the regular um I don’t know conversions and gives you an idea on what you need in each individual step all the way to to you receiving the goal amount on Kickstarter that you wanted and basically how you do it you you work
29:49
backwards from it you say okay I need 100K um I I need 100K for this project to go live right and my average reward price you know if because on Kickstarter you have different rewards you kind of somehow need to put it in in one number let’s say your average reward price between five different rewards is it’s $100 right so you can divide that 100,000 by this 100 and you need to bring 1,000 backers so 1,000 people on average need to back you know $100 for you to have a successful goal and this is super straightforward forward you
30:28
know everybody everybody can calculate that but then you can go one step further and you can say okay so I’m talking about the kickstarter here but you can apply this formula and modify it for any any platform or for any other activity as well know but on Kickstarter generally on average about 30% of backers come from the kickstarter platform itself the rest you need to bring yourself right so those 30 % you can throw away so what you can do is multiply those 10,000 people by 7 that that’s 70% and now this number is a bit
31:08
low right and then there’s one other specific know most projects that raise uh 50% or more in the first two days are highly likely to be successful that means you know that they will be they might be successful you know they continue on the same path but might not be if something goes wrong but now you can also you know lower this this this threshold and go like okay cool um I only need 50% of these people in the first two days so you can again divide it by two or multiply it by 05 and now you have like a smaller group of backers
31:51
that you need but then comes the email part right a conversion rate on kick starter is about 1% so you need to divide this by 0.1 and now since you’re dividing it this number will obviously be be larger maybe we can we can calculate it I I’m not doing it uh By Heart right now but um it’s obviously going to be much bigger and this is the number of people that you need to bring to your Kickstarter page and obviously you’re not going to bring all of these people from email you can kind of then decide how many of these people do you
32:30
assume you’re going to bring from advertising how many from email and so forth and let’s say just to simplify super simplify let’s say that all of these people you want to bring from email then what you can do is if your list is good if your list um if you were building your list you know and people knew what they’re signing up and obviously the list isn’t like two years old you know or one year old you know it’s it’s fresh list people know that they’ve signed up for your specific
33:03
project they were super excited let’s say you can get like five to 10% conversions from email to uh to um to the visit of your Kickstarter Becker page right now you can again increase this number of Beckers that you need by this number and you will get the final number of people that uh uh the final number of emails that that you want to have um and yeah this this obviously um can be not enough if the email list that you were building was shitty or can be way too much and you will over overachieve your goal uh so in the in the second you
33:53
know um case obviously you’re going to be happy but it’s a guideline because now once you know that you need let’s say 10,000 emails to achieve your goal um it’s super simple you can start either doing advertising or leg gen on social media as you do or you know now you can find ways of getting these emails and then you can see how much it costs you to get get one email and obviously when I was starting out uh almost 10 years ago you know the costs were super low you know like I’m talking
34:29
20 cents per email or sometimes even lower now the numbers are between one and two uh two two two Euros two dollars whatever you want to uh uh whatever currency you use it’s it’s about the same um which is obviously much much more so um then you have a bunch of different ways of getting these emails obviously you can pay them through paid advertising as we discussed now but if you don’t have this initial Capital then you’ll have to find other creative ways and what I found out is that a lot of
35:10
times um you just have to put yourself out there this is what we’ve talked before no like different groups of people especially groups that have the potential buyer that have a buyer that you know might buy your product those groups are the best right it might be LinkedIn groups it might be Facebook groups I don’t know quora whatever no you got to find it’s super hard for me to say you know just like an abstract where these people reside because different people some are on Reddit you know some are on other platforms and
35:45
once you figure out where your audience is which obviously if you’re building a product for yourself um and you are the buyer then you should already know that um then you start you know trying to communicate in those groups and uh get some interest from the people that are there and then how you convert them to emails no again it’s it’s like we could talk only for the next one hour on how to do that but um yeah these are these are a couple of of ways to pay it or through like specific groups online Okay um I do know that
36:28
um and and you like like you said we could talk about this topic for hours um there’s so much I can talk about right now but I I do know that with some of my current fa um with the Facebook form ads I’m getting leads at about 14 cents per lead um which is not too much so um with one of the ads there’s about $100 that have been spent and more than 750 emails um so it it also depends on how you collect the leads and um who you’re targeting as well and I know that at least with one of my growth hacks and I don’t want to
37:06
like I said I don’t want to digress te theair uh but with Amazon this this was a really successful growth hack um that I used because obviously the first like five days six days the first week of any launch whether it’s on Amazon Kindle or Kickstarter um you want to get as much activity on your launch on your product as possible to get it up the uh up the algorithm to get it promoted on the first page and um this is the same with Amazon it’s the same you know getting a number one bestseller it’s the same with
37:36
appsumo and so one of the the growth hacks I was getting leads for less than three cents per click um from Facebook and I was just targeting people like in Philippines um you know like Nigeria uh India Bangladesh um because these leads were so ridiculously cheap uh to get these likes and these clicks um and sending them all to my book page uh during the first like three four days of the launch um because Amazon doesn’t care where the book download comes from and so it’s just about getting as many downloads as possible and so like I
38:13
don’t know anyone else that was was doing this because most most people usually Target you know us UK Australia and they’re probably playing you know paying like dollars per each click uh where I’m paying like three cents and so that was just an easy way to get onto the number one you know bestseller spot among other things um was just getting a lot of these free downloads and trying to get as many reviews from my network as possible so I had a number of different things I was doing to promote my books uh but that was such an easy
38:39
way to just get you know thousands of downloads on a small budget uh and and getting number one bestseller on the free list and then you know 99 cent promotions getting on the number one bestseller on the paid list and then raising the price and then you’re getting all of these people from the platform from from Amazon uh checking out your book which is suddenly surging in popularity your your book was free right yeah so so I do actually and I do teach this in the launch lab course U maybe you haven’t gone through that section
39:08
yet but um I do have like a launch timeline for launching books actually and and also launching on appsumo as well and I don’t have time on this webinar to go into everything um but when you do a book launch um and I also talk about crowdfunding books through like publishizer and crowdfunding um but if you’re publishing on Amazon on uh you initially launch for free you send all of the people um in your network who agreed to review the book to go and leave a review and um you can also get like professional book reviewers to go
39:40
and download your book leave a review um and then you gradually increase the price so if you go to number one bestseller on paid list um as a 99 cent download with after like the first week um then your book is like a a rising um I I don’t know the exact termin but like kind of like a rising star and um that’s when you start to get a lot of traffic from Amazon’s platform and then you can um slowly increase the price 299 $4.
40:06
99 where you’re getting 70% royalties um and make a lot of money that way uh so so I do have that timeline actually mapped out in the that section of the the course um but what I wanted to ask you though if we go back to building this list and let’s talk about the preparation right um how much you know like let’s let’s say like your goal is that you need to get like 5,000 um email subscribers to re hit a $50,000 goal um how much would you budget to do that and how much time in advance would you spend
40:40
to build that email list so that it’s ready to go for the campaign yeah yeah uh great question it’s it really depends I’ve I’ve I’ve seen so many no really I’ve seen so many campaigns what what I usually say is that you can have your campaign from zero to finish in let’s say the minimum three months so for example two months of preparation one month of campaign a bit more let’s say and you know I’ve worked with people that that that that were working on their campaigns for like a
41:18
year or or more right so it depends how how fast you move you know what kind of product you have you know the more uh the product is complex like like it tech product usually the longer it takes um if it’s super simple and obviously the budget right if you want to raise 50k or if uh now nowadays a lot of like small individuals go on Kickstarter with like tiny projects like 5K 10K you can launch like a uh and I’ve seen some people actually making a living out of that you know there’s this guy that does prints
42:01
like I think he launches one print like huge prints like I don’t know let’s say five time five uh meters right um maybe you can convert that to to fits uh um really really huge prints and he basically launched launches them every like one month or two months and he’s got like a bunch of campaigns but he does doesn’t want a lot of money he wants like I don’t know 5K so each month 5K so he he made a he’s made a process of that and he can be basically launching every month and just earning
42:39
out of that but then you have some other campaigns you know that really want to make an impact have a big project you know raise 100K uh 200k whatever you know uh for those you need more time but to get to uh but to get back to your question um yeah the most important part is the preparation and in the preparation phase you’ll see how aligned you are already with your potential buyer because if you are unable to generate email lists you know that’s that’s your first test before you launch the campaign if you um
43:20
advertise if you go on uh on um these uh groups or you know you try to use different channels the ones that I mentioned before um and if you’re unable to build your list you know there’s a problem somewhere maybe your product is maybe you cannot communicate the value of your product you know so the marketing issue uh or maybe there’s just no interest for that specific solution right so um you know the obviously when you start something you think that’s the greatest thing so you kind of have to be objective or you got
44:03
to ask somebody you know outside of your Social Circle and then it depends if you really really want to launch this product then obviously you can pivot and change it and modify it and maybe you figure out that you cannot communicate well your product and find a person a marketer that will help you communicate it better and this all all of this can take time and it can take again uh longer to start building the list but if you have a goal of five 5K um emails then it’s super simple you know you you start by
44:43
spending a little bit of money you know on advertising and if you get some traction and for example you’re getting leads for $5 per email so obviously that’s too much it’s you’re going to need to spend five 25k you know no you said yeah 5K um 25k uh just to get all the emails right to get the goal of 50k so that’s you know with without any other expenses if you if that’s access if that’s acceptable to you then okay just throw in 25K and and go for it but otherwise no you try and optimize the campaign try
45:23
to lower this cost try to find different channels and if you see that you’re that you’re progressing well that in like one week you went from five dollar per lead to let’s say $3 and then in then the next 14 days you went to $2 and it’s dropping and obviously somewhere it’s going to stop but you know if you’re in the range that it’s acceptable to you just start keep on doing that uh and then it depends on the budget you know if uh if you can throw in 25K today and get uh 5K leads tomorrow obviously you
46:03
can launch if everything else is ready obviously you can launch by the end of the week right so um I’ve seen different campaigns with different budget some with zero budgets and with like super interesting products you know everybody that saw them were like whoa sign me up I don’t even understand it but just sign me up this looks ridiculously amazing right I want to add something if I may just interject yeah um yeah and what you’ve just mentioned is is so important getting that validation of the idea um
46:33
well in advance so that you’re confident that people already want it before you start putting all the wheels into motion and in marketing they say that it’s a mess to guess but a lot of people in marketing do a lot of guess work you know and and I’ve uh I’m not above it myself you know when I’m creating advertisements I don’t before um like last year I was I started doing some Facebook ads for a new product and I didn’t know exactly if the targeting was G to how they would respond to the offer
47:05
for example um and so I have discovered some some ways that I can get that validation and I know that the idea is the best um like for for example um when I had my blog uh open World magazine I was publishing every week new content um and I can see which content was getting the most responses you know so I published an article about like sleep hacks for example and I thought wow um this post just blew up all of a sudden and so I wrote a whole book about sleep hacking and that was my most commercially successful book launch that
47:36
I’ve done um you know I’ve published probably 10 11 books um but that was the most commercially successful because a lot of people were engaging with that it was getting a lot of traffic and so just from putting feelers out there putting out content um I’ve had other content like of travel hacks that did really well and I thought wow I can really build something on this um and I do actually have a hack that I use for Facebook ads and this is kind of how I figured out what works with Facebook ads uh I I have a a software
48:04
that will post in a lot of groups on Facebook like 300 different groups or something and um it’s called Uh Su social if you want to check that out and um what I realized was that when it posted in the different groups like some of the groups were really engaged and they really interacted with these posts and so um I posted like a giveaway of like AI tools for example and um there’s this group like SAS marketer where I got like 100 plus comments and so that really helped me to understand like who I wanted to Target with this offer for
48:35
example so finding that product Market fit um and and also putting out these ideas um to wide communities wide um you know if you don’t have a good network of like people that are interested in this kind of stuff you can go on to Reddit and um see what what people think about your idea uh so like I’ve started doing co- livings for example and um I would go into Reddit like digital Nomad Reddit and say like who’d be interested in coming to this thing in Nepal if we set up a co- living in Nepal um and I got
49:05
like 400 comments on that post so I knew that I had something that you know people were responsive to um but the point that I’m trying to make is that most people don’t actually know you know they they just want to guess like these are probably the people that would be interested in this um they probably live in like Cincinnati um maybe like 45 and op um but but they haven’t actually gotten the voice back from the market you know they haven’t gotten enough voices saying like dude you got to launch this
49:38
right yeah um look I have three examples maybe I can just quickly go through them uh let me just share the screen okay just so not to be so abstract because we’ve been just discussing yeah and I actually wanted to ask you like some examples from some of your successful campaigns or the most successful campaigns you’ve launched as well so um if if these are a couple of bows uh that would be great they’re not but they kind of relate to what we’ve been talking about yeah I’ll just okay can you see the screen yeah
50:15
all right cool okay so yeah this is uh let me let me this these are four like campaigns I kind of cherry Peck to to to give you an idea of what is going on so um this is a bird body it’s like the most successful Slovenian campaign that launched uh uh you know during the Corona and it’s like bird house with like Ai and abled camera that sends you notifications on your phone and everything so once they launched they obviously didn’t have a a lot of money they raised um yeah as you can see four four 4 million Euros
50:57
um and yeah once they launched they got so much traction that during the campaign you know they they had to go and raise uh Venture Capital just to keep on you know advertising because the RAS was I think at the beginning it was like over 10 I’m not sure I don’t remember the exact numbers now but later in the campaign it was around six and basically means the return on ad span so for every Euro that you put in the ads that you get like six back or 10 bags or whatever um just give me a second please um so how how did they um
51:46
validate this idea or know that it was it was a winner beforehand they they didn’t uh that that that OB they started we were working with them uh in our community and basically yeah they pre-launched as I as I started talking before you know they started Gathering emails you know they got initial traction I think they got about uh 5,000 emails uh and yeah a lot of them started converting and once they launched the campaign you know the um they just keept on Advertising it and since they advertised it you know people were just converting at
52:28
super high rate so once they figured that out you know they ran out of their own money I think they they put in like 20K of their own money you know and and it was just gone but they received a a bunch of money on Kickstarter but the problem that’s one of the problems with with crowdfunding and a Kickstarter if you would be doing that on your own platform you could obviously resend all this money that you already earned um but but on Kickstarter you only get it after the campaign is done so obviously they ran out of the money but there was
53:02
still so much potential so uh what they did they went to get some Venture uh capital and they got it and they could continue with but again you know they they only could get this money because they came back with the numbers and they were like look we threw in 20K and now we have 200k on Kickstarter you know so quick question and this is where your expertise would come in on in particular um is there any advantage in launching like a smaller crowdfunding campaign like let’s say like $5,000 you’re by
53:36
yourself it’s brand new confirming the idea and then you know maybe doing like a bigger one a few months down the line um with like all the bells and whistles and such you know where you have uh your a more Complete product uh build out let’s say yeah um because I mean all all of us entrepreneurs we start out with like the minimal viable uh product you know it’s the seed of the idea so so let’s say like you you do a small campaign just to get your feet wet and you decide like if you wanted another crowdfunding campaign
54:08
like I’ve actually worked with a client um to do crowdfunding and she actually did like two different crowdfunding campaigns and the second time we we raised like half a million um the first time it was like smaller like 30,000 I think yeah um do do you see as that is that like a good approach or or what’s your thoughts there um no I I wouldn’t I wouldn’t launch a campaign just to launch then the same one later on though uh I I can show you one one other example I only have these three but I
54:39
will show you one more um which is basically that and also what I talked about before once you launch a campaign you already built a community and uh as you remember on on the list of those channels the the community was on top and it’s super important so um I by that by the way um let me ask you another question there what before you show the other example um you mentioned the community so let’s say like you’ve built a list of 5,000 emails um specifically for the crowdfunding campaign um what are you doing after the
55:20
crowdfunding campaign let’s say it’s a successful you launched your product um what are you doing with that list afterwards um which one the crowdfunding the the backers or the the original that you’ve built and probably not all of them are backers well well let’s say both because I mean you put all the work into building that list right sure so so those could be like your your life lifetime customers right yeah okay let let me get back to it I just want to go through the two examples just quickly um
55:52
so yeah this one is one of the examples where they obviously got a bunch of traction they they knew how to capitalize on it they went to get some money and just really made like an impressive campaign you know like um this is one that you know I don’t know if you know Brandon Sanderson you probably do this is the most successful Kickstarter campaign but he’s a writer he he already had like a huge community so when he went to kick Kickstarter he only just pushed it to his community and now this is like
56:26
look it’s like almost 200,000 backers which is insane everything uh over like 1,000 backers or 5,000 backers it’s it’s mindblowing and he he got like 200,000 backers so that’s the power of existing Community you know that he already had and one of the like obvious flops now that obviously was a super successful companion or they they got like 13 million raised uh is cooler scholer which obviously then as a product you know they they they weren’t able to deliver it but you know if you check this they
57:07
they created two campaigns and this is kind of related to what you asked me before and the first campaign was unsuccessful it was cooler scholer again but it wasn’t successful they raised I don’t know yeah they raised yeah just barely be below their goal right so they didn’t get any that money no no no the first campaign you know the second campaign was actually for the for the time being it was the most successful Kickstarter campaign I I still think it’s the first one was all all or nothing right so so they didn’t
57:37
hit the goal yeah that’s how Kickstarter works it’s always all or I think if you don’t hit the goal okay yeah Indiegogo is is like Indiegogo yeah Indiegogo you have options yeah but on K start so imagine CL yeah but then they did even better the second time though EX look man it’s like that’s 20 times better right so yeah what what I wanted to say is first a couple of things why don’t be discouraged if your campaign fails and the other thing is they already had like 300 backers so these are 300 people that
58:13
wanted this stuff so once they relaunched another campaign obviously these 300 beers you know not all of them probably but majority of them they backed again the product and you know um you already have this ball rolling faster because all of the them will back sooner at the beginning of the next campaign so there’s a bunch of things that are important and what I wanted to say is yeah um not launching a campaign just for the campaign sake like a smaller one and then build a bigger one I wouldn’t do that unless you have two separate
58:54
products you know like a simpler product you launch that one first and then uh let’s say six months later you launch another campaign and yeah that would make sense and uh there’s uh let me let me search yeah can I ask you a question and and maybe a few people are thinking as well um in that failed campaign you know 94,000 out of 115,000 how much do they spend to like execute that campaign because they’re obviously out of pocket right they they spent a loss um for the advertising the marketing yeah I I’m not sure I I wasn’t
59:30
a part of that I’m sure a lot of people are wondering like out would of like the funds raised how much of it is actually profit how much do they actually spend to you know what I mean so yeah obviously it sounds great when you say 13 million but even just to get to this point like they must have burnt through a lot of cash the first time and then to do go the second time again um you know you might have been in the red for a little bit there right yeah I mean I would say on average um Kickstarter campaigns it depends on the complexity
59:59
of the product so if the product is um super complex then obviously you want that money uh for the production of the real product you know so depends what you consider profit if you consider profit after you deliver all the rewards you know I would say that most compaigns are um yeah a bit in the red you know they they either Break Even or they’re in the red so Kickstarter as a business model it it’s not a good option it’s a great option for building a community because you can launch another and another and another
1:00:46
campaign and it’s going to be just easier to get more and more people and obviously all those people can you can you get contacts you can upsell them cross sell them different products that that you have if you have multiple products but um for a business model if you would want to use a Kickstarter then I would suggest like a super simple product like the guy I mentioned before that launches a huge print every month that might work out because then maybe you you you get like I don’t know um 10K each month on your Kickstarter a lot of
1:01:25
them are recurring buyers so you don’t need to spend much to acquire them and the product is cheap so you might have like I don’t know let’s say 20 30% margin so let’s say 3K you you pocket every month so it might work in those kind of projects but in these big big projects where you only have like a prototype because you don’t want to spend too much money on the the real product and then you have to build the real product work with the factories and everything yeah if you’re lucky you’re going to
1:02:00
break okay it’s very interesting to me because I’m like a totally different type of entrepreneur um that I don’t sell physical products and um I’ve always bootstrapped my businesses and so um there’s a some distinct differences there because um um one I’m spending my own money I’m spending my savings that I’ve made over the last you know 15 years on on these marketing campaigns um and two uh anyu that I sell is pretty much 100% profit because it doesn’t cost me anything to produce it um you know to
1:02:30
ship it is might be digital um or it might just be lever leveraging my own skill set you know whether it’s coaching or um at the very least I I do these like Retreats you know these like masterminds um where we have the rooms and stuff but I have it worked out with the landlords so it doesn’t cost me anything um so it’s it’s very interesting to me and this is something that’s like totally different like it’s not my um field of like selling physical products and um and this type of stuff
1:02:54
so so even though um I don’t haven’t launched any campaigns that have like you know 40 million or something like this um everything that I make is is profit so it’s a bit of a different pathway and I do feel like a lot of people that watching that are watching this maybe they are just solopreneurs um and they have something simple that they want to launch um you know maybe they’ll keep their cost down and it’s just helping them to get that first start uh to creating a successful business in the
1:03:20
long term and so um I actually um I sent this can I share my screen with you so sure I I did notice some commonalities here because I I sent this checklist to a friend and I wanted uh turn on my screen sharing uh let’s go to my window maybe maybe while you’re searching for it I I uh there’s a bunch of even Slovenian compan companies that are now big you know they they have like I don’t know let’s say 100 employees or 50 employees or whatever you know okay not big in grand scheme but uh you know they’re
1:03:58
quite successful let started on Kickstarter you know because once you get the validation that you know people obviously want your product it’s much easier to to take the risk now so crowdfunding is good for der risking stuff so if you’re not sure that this physical thing that you’re trying to build and it might cost you I don’t know 20K just to build right will make it on the market um you can validate it beforehand and if you reach your goal and if people you know grab it and start uh and want to
1:04:34
have it you know it makes sense to make a business around it and then you can grow that business obviously you know um how however you want so it’s not at the end of the day after you finish your crowdfunding campaign it’s it’s just the beginning of the business side so exactly yeah and so much we can talk about this based on your experience my experience I don’t want to get too sidetracked but you see my screen right yep um so you know I published um over the last decade or so I published a
1:05:04
number of books on Amazon and um one of the reasons why like I I use this platform um so I say I did a lot of language books because I love to travel um you see my my hack Sleep Book over here my dror growth book um but one thing that I noticed was that when I’m selling books on on Amazon um in particular um I’m a bit Limited in what I’m able to do right because I’m selling books for like $4.
1:05:33
99 um I’m selling only one type of product and I’m only getting a specific royalty per sale and it’s all through Amazon’s platform but what I realized was that if I go to one of these sites like publishizer for example right so publishizer a lot of people don’t know about this a lot of authors don’t know about this um it’s actually a crowdfunding platform for books in particular and so uh you can see like like this one for example so so the value here for me was that I could make a lot of money before I even went on to
1:06:00
Amazon you know just by selling different types of products and price points and different reward levels um so I’ve done a few publishizer campaigns and you can see over here on the right like you can see different types of packages that you can sell so it’s still a book launch but you’re able to build out a whole product uh line of products right um so if you look at this guy for example he uh he’s selling a lot of these high ticket uh Consulting packages so the book is basically the star of this
1:06:32
campaign but um a lot of people in his network will probably want to you know get more than just the book and so they have the opportunity to spend more and so that’s really one of the the the big value here you know the value ad is we’re talking about building a business right um if you’re launching a book you’re selling a book on Amazon for $7.99 $9.
1:06:56
99 9 but if you’re doing like a a crowdfunding campaign or a publishizer campaign um you have the opportunity to sell different types of packages Consulting coaching and if you’re looking at this as like the the start of a building a business um you want to have different types of products to sell to the same customer base and it’s the same with Kickstarter too like or or e-commerce um you want to find new products to sell to your existing base of customers and if you’re building this list of 5,000 emails or um let’s let’s
1:07:27
say something small because not not everyone’s gonna get like 40 million backers for their Kickstarter campaign um let’s say you had like 700 backers right um these are like your 10,00 true fans and so if you want to build a successful business from the launch you find new products to offer them you find ways to reward loyalty maybe a monthly subscription plan um where they’re buying products you know the the um the business model the the razor and Blades model have you heard of that before so so they buy the the blade and they
1:07:56
always have to buy razors um you know to replace the razors for the Shaving um so they’re buying new products every month and that’s really the the key to building a successful business over four years five years from the crowdfunding campaign and so that’s one thing that I noticed is that you know like I can make good money on Amazon during the launches um but I can only sell one price point I can only sell one type of product this is the very first book that I launched back in um I want say like 2015 or
1:08:25
something uh byon Island it was all about um you know lifestyle design and um kind of like the 4our work week 10 Ferris type of stuff and um you know it’s selling for 772 in Amazon Kindle but if I had gone back again I would have done a crowdfunding campaign because um there’s so many other things that I could sell I could also get the contact information all the customers um you know build a list because the money is in the list and what I actually wanted to show was just this e-commerce checklist that um I actually emailed to
1:08:55
a friend like last week um because she’s just starting her own uh tea business where she’s importing teeth from China and I kind of just like gave her some of the most important um points to remember um because she’s she’s selling them in Russia she’s selling them through this platform called Yandex and the advantage of selling through these big platforms like Amazon um Amazon Kindle Yandex um is that you reach a lot of people but they still own those customers and so as I told her like as much as you can um
1:09:27
you should try to be able to sell directly to the consumers and try to get their contact information um buying like taking them from the platform like Amazon Kindle um Kickstarter whatever it is these big platforms appsumo getting all of their contact information getting their email addresses getting the contact information creating a database so that you can continue to communicate with them for months and years on end um so I give you an example when appsumo first contacted me if you don’t know appsumo
1:09:58
docomond entrepreneurs on their email list and you can promote your products on there and I’ve made a lot of money promoting my stuff on Amazon my digital products my information products but initially they just contacted me to to feature my book which was uh Dr growth on there and I was not getting any of the email addresses from any of these people so this got downloaded like 25,000 times for free but there were like oh we got pushed back from people in the past asked you know if we send them a landing page and oh my God it was
1:10:28
the biggest missed opportuni Z so I would not do that again um but you got to remember that if you’re launching you need to try to find a way to get as many of the email addresses contact information even if you’re launching on on appsumo Amazon um to get as much contact information because if I had gotten the 25,000 emails from that book that was was being you know launched on on appsumo and let me let me go to the partner portal because I can show you the actual stats here um if I go down and I have all of my uh products on here
1:11:01
that I’ve launched through app Sumo so um I have my courses and things some different books and things that um I launched so this this is when they did the paid book um so that got 300 sales um for that book some of my courses and things here so you can see the sales um but if I go down to just that freebie that was down here I think it’s at the bottom yeah so so close to 20,000 downloads just from that free campaign so if I had gotten the 20,000 email addresses for free from appsumo that would have made a huge difference um for
1:11:34
me uh and I think I launched this back in like 2022 2021 oh my God Z can you imagine if I had that and and when I launched all my courses it would have made a big difference and so um I think that’s one of the most important things when you first initially go onto these platforms like Amazon appsumo Kickstarter whatever it is um getting as much contact information as possible um and then I I kind of just like gave her some you know other tips here for building a longterm successful business um remembering that
1:12:04
Brands stay and the long-term of your success depends on offering different types of products and higher price products to the existing customer base rewarding loyalty um finding ways to turn your customers from satisfied to enthusiastic and turning them into customers for life you know like long-term recurring customers um and so this is one of the biggest and and I’m okay sharing my failures here because this is one of the biggest Miss opportunities here um was all of these people were downloading this book um
1:12:37
directly oh zika can you m can you mute uh excuse me mute your mic um so so all of these people were were downloading my book directly throughout Sumo and I was not getting anything from this so this is one of the biggest missed opportunities for me um but what I would have done in hindsight is I would have sent them all to my website which is uh school ofgrowth hacking.
1:13:01
com and um what I could have done is I could have just uh sent them to one of the products on my um on my website and um if you have your own website one of the advantages is that you’re able to actually get all the contact information even if it’s a free product so they don’t actually have to opt in or anything but anyone that purchases even one of the freebies on my website so this is a WordPress website it and if you go under ebooks I actually have a lot of uh free ebooks so um I can just promote these free ebooks but when they
1:13:32
check out I get all their information so a lot of these um are being sold or or for sale um so I’m actually logged in you can actually see they’re all free right now because um I have a membership so I get everything for free um if you create a membership on the website you can get a lot of this stuff for free as well um but even if I was giving away my Dr growth book uh and they were getting it for free free they they check out they go to add to cart um they still have to put in their information and so
1:13:59
if I were to go back and do another free book promotion um with a platform like appsumo um instead of having them download that PDF directly from appsumo I would just have them download the PDF this way and then they can go to the cart and get it for free so just one little thing you know just where they download the product could have made a big difference in my business now I’m not sweating it too much I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my career I’m still going I’m still plugging away um but that was
1:14:26
a big Miss opportunity for me and um if you’re watching this I would definitely recommend you know find the ways like we’ve said uh to to get all of the information from these people um and and I’ve talked about some ways to do this a lot of ways in the course uh if if you go get the full course you can see everything so um in in your book for example like books are a great way to get a lot of people introduced to your work um and I’ve done this for some of my clients to get them to be like the
1:14:53
expert in their field um after the title page of the book and you can’t see it in this preview for some reason um you can actually include an offer where they can get more from you and then you can collect their email addresses even if they’re coming from um from appsumo and so um I have a ton of growth hacks in the course um you know a ton of growth hacks when it comes to books or information products um if you’re curious we can give you a coupon a coupon code will we’ll include that um in the description of this master class
1:15:23
this webinar that we’re putting together here um and I hope that you’ve gotten a lot of value from this uh just this free webinar that we’re recording here um and zga I know you’ve been been muted for a little bit there anything that you you wanted to add yeah I know I uh I fully agree I I mean on Kickstarter usually you can um you can get all the information down because obviously you need to send the reward somewhere so uh that’s not a problem but I had a similar experience with udmi where I have a
1:16:00
bunch of my own courses and I also have about I don’t know 15,000 uh students there whose uh emails and contact information I don’t own uh and can’t get so yeah I can fully relate um I don’t think these are the mistakes I think these are tradeoffs some platforms allow you to grow super fast with little investment but they usually keep the clients or you know their information on their site and you cannot access them uh other things like your own website you know you’ll have to bring all the traffic you’ll have to do
1:16:44
all the works uh but at the end of the day you’ll you’ll get you know all the contacts and everything so there’s always a tradeoff between sort of like Simplicity and speed versus what you’re getting out of it but yeah I mean it’s it’s good I will say that I mean you’re talking about udemy right so so I’m I’m not as familiar with udemy because I do have one course on there but I don’t do much with it um but if I’m speaking about Amazon in particular um Amazon does have all of the the billing details
1:17:14
they they keep that private so you don’t get the information of the customers um however you can use the books like I said and you can include offers like after the title page the book to to download like the Audi book for example or um and and I can show you if I share my screen again uh I actually sold a lot of paid products by giving away free books and so this was a a marketing strategy that I didn’t have to spend any money on um I’ll just share my screen again but uh one of my books uh was this
1:17:45
book called hack upwork and it was all about freelancing online um and in that book I had an offer after the title page where uh I was selling this uh this package here this Elite so so I it was actually something different I had another product on here I think it was like Elite freelancer product um okay I don’t I don’t have it yeah so maybe it was this one um and I had a few different ways that I was selling this freelancer package uh and one of them was just promoting it through my hackup workbook so I we’re
1:18:20
talking about getting like you know close to $110,000 downloads of this ebook um you know during the first month of the launch and I had an offer where I said you know like this is just the beginning if you want to take a freelancing career to the next level uh Go download this package where I have like swipe files um you know 36 I have contracts um done for you templates um standard operating procedures like how to communicate with your clients manage consultations how to close them um and so I was getting a lot of sales you know
1:18:50
like um the just just in the initial weeks of my book launch uh for the higher pric product and um just just by sending putting a link in the book uh along with a coupon code and so that was a very effective uh marketing strategy where I think I got maybe like uh close to 100 sales of this higher product higher price product just from the the free downloads I was getting off of Amazon and this is just on gumroad so so this is very easy if you have digital products um you can upload it here and um what one nice thing is that it just
1:19:22
works you know you have no technical issues like you might encounter with a website uh so so everything is is working and you can start selling your your digital products your information products and so these are just like companion things um that you can include either in the front end of your funnel or later on in your funnel so um you know I’ll show you just an example of an ad I have running here uh if I go to my Facebook um and hopefully I can find this because I often have trouble finding my ads uh let me
1:19:51
see um and and basically what it is is just like this AI tools uh spreadsheet that I’m giving away so so sometimes I can see people that have interacted with my uh advertisement um and uh I think I think I sent it hold on let me let me stop sharing my screen for a second I’ll pull that up here give me a second here and so what what I’m saying is that you can actually use uh these like digital products to uh upsell people you know like consulting or or you give away something that doesn’t cost you anything
1:20:31
to produce it and so I do have that that ad pulled up here so let me share that again and um here’s the advertisement so you can see my screen right yeah uh so so this is just a front end offer and it’s basically just a digital product which is just a spreadsheet of you know close to 500 AI tools and resources um and so that’s the initial offer and so this is converting a lot of leads for me you know very effectively and didn’t really cost me it’s basically something I found online and um and it’s
1:21:05
it’s getting a lot of really inexpensive leads and so once they get into the funnel um the secondary promise is that I will help you to 10x your productivity and profit potential in 30 days and so that’s where the the follow-up comes in so initially they just want that and I said hey I hope you enjoy this by the way you know here’s how I can help you get even more value uh and then that you know prepares them for joining the course um getting coaching for me and everything else that I’m going to sell
1:21:30
on funnel so so basically what I’m saying is that you want to think about how you you you have like your low ticket offers um what you can give away for free to get people giving you their email address and then how you can upsell them through middle pric product and then how you can go to like like publishizer for example we saw this guy is selling Consulting packages for $7,500 and so you know if you don’t know how to do all this stuff you can copy and paste everything into chat GPT and say like hey can you help me build out some
1:22:01
different price products um and so even with like physical products um so for example my friend is selling te’s right so I I kind of popped her information into chat GPT and I thought what are some different ideas for um some different types of products that you can sell here and um so so one was like a a subscription uh box service so like um you know like subscription model to build Customer Loyalty uh T tasting Events maybe like a surprise tea subscription box uh you know where they get a different type of tea every month
1:22:39
um and so these are just some different ways like you know where she’s selling these tees and maybe making only like $5 um per sale on this platform um you know after expenses to to actually getting you know selling directly to the consumer s getting them buy every single month um and you know doing tea tasting events where you get more people into the funnel um engaging local communities and potential customers uh and personalized experience that sets apart and to create new customers um and so you know just different ideas where
1:23:10
where you know it’s not just about the initial product that you’re selling at that one price point um but finding ways to build a brand and get your customers buying all types of different stuff from you okay that’s that’s all I got yeah yeah uh it makes sense obviously you want to you in at some platforms it’s harder to get a contact and you you then have to kind of find a different ways around it you know by offering like extra uh candy or extra that you know they can they can only get on your website after they
1:23:49
leave the the email so yeah I mean we we we kind of started with the email and I yeah it’s super important to to get it because it’s once you have it you know um it’s so much easier to to send push or sell any any product that you might create in the future so yeah yeah you got to get the contact information and I I do have a lot to say about this because um you know Keith farazi he says the he wrote the book never read alone um and he has like this rule of three where he says that you also want to communicate with people
1:24:30
through three different forms of media to deepen that relationship so um you not only want to get the email addresses but you also want to get them seeing your face you know maybe subscribing to your YouTube so they get to know you better maybe like following your Instagram so they can see your lifestyle post and stuff so don’t only stop there you know Build That Brand out and and focus on building a long term successful company using your launch as the starting point to build that relationship and um I will add you know
1:25:02
one other interesting anecdote because um since we’re talking about email addresses uh I did do like some Grassroots campaigns back in like 2012 for President Obama actually where they drove us out to Las Vegas and um I was reading like they gave us a script to read to people we were knocking on doors in Nevada and um I had people like closing the door on me e you know like like because I had the kind of Bor stript is like I’m here on behalf of organizing for America and I basically started to change the script I was like
1:25:32
I’m here on behalf of the president I need to talk to you for a minute uh do do you have a minute of time so like I got their attention right I was here like President Obama sent me to your house and um sometimes they like you know I want to go back to my TV show and the guy’s like you know like he’s slowly starting to close the door and I told him well all right the president is coming here next week and you can get free tickets for the event I just need to get your email address and so it’s
1:25:58
like all right I can do that and so that was an interesting enough offer where I could just you know take out the entire script and say like who wants tickets to see you know President Obama like that’s a no-brainer offer um and so that’s what you kind of want to figure out how to do if you want to really be successful at marketing is how to create these no-brainer offers and I often tell my clients that it’s kind of like imagine you’re talking to somebody at three in the morning or something you’re knocking
1:26:22
on their door e offer good enough that they’re going to want to jump on it right away or they’re going to say like you know get out of here I got to go back to sleep I got a meeting in the morning um and so most offers are not really good enough uh to pass this test but if if I were to wake you up and like I call you on the phone at three in the morning zga I found flights to Japan uh it’s it’s only like $50 you know it’s an error fair but we have like 30 minutes to jump on this because it’s going to go
1:26:48
away like all right send me the website let’s sign up let’s go right because that’s that’s an offer that uh is good enough that you’re going to want to grab it right away and so you want to try to get good at engineering these no-brainer offers um and that’s a big part of validating your ideas and being successful um at getting sales yeah I mean I think the yeah sorry it’s it’s getting a bit Rowdy here around here um yeah offer I think yeah if you got something good then you you always need
1:27:26
to support it with a with a great offer you know the same goes with crowdfunding uh the rewards how you price them how you structure them and today we didn’t even touge the the strategy about the rewards and there’s you know a bunch um and the same goes for everything else as well you know uh you don’t need to be the cheapest you just need to be you know you just need to had the best offer and the best offer usually people think it’s it’s it’s the cheapest but it doesn’t necessarily mean
1:28:00
that you know what what have been the most um successful rewards that you have offered and and for your clients I mean uh throughout the years I found out like this structure where you where you structure the rewards in a certain way and this works best so not like a specific reward usually what you want to do on crowd in on on Kickstarter is to offer the main reward as soon as possible because let’s say you’re making like um you know phone covers and um you don’t want to talk about oh I’m G to
1:28:35
give you a t-shirt for $20 and then you can get a a phone cover for like I don’t know 50 because it’s super special uh you want to immediately talk about that you know you don’t want to distract them with all these other products or whatever you have so um how you do that is then you kind of psychologically manipulate them you know to to feel Under Pressure because uh even the crowdfunding campaign itself is time limited it’s what I said before like between 45 days and and two months and the longer the period you know the
1:29:15
less pressure people feel oh it’s two months at the beginning of the compaign it’s two months I’ll come back they never do so you want to have a shortest time possible so to have this time pressure but if the compaign is 10 days long then you probably won’t reach everybody so it has to be like sort of a sweet spot that’s time pressure the other one is obviously you know other other ways of pressure and you got like these early bird rewards which are usually quantity limited so you got like
1:29:44
I’m only going to send you sell uh 100 pieces uh for this price and then the price will in increase right so now even if they if even if people come to your uh crowdfunding campaign and they say okay it’s two months but there’s only 10 rewards left in this like early birth tier now if I come back in a week they’ll probably be gone so I want to get it by this the lowest price possible and you motivate them to do that so then you have uh this like um a way where you can structure and I usually use like
1:30:23
three three rewards for that like the first one is super early birth like ridiculous price but super limited like let’s say 10 pieces for like I don’t know um let’s say 40% of the the price or 30% you’re basically you know losing money on those uh but it’s super enticing everybody sees it and go like yeah I want to have this for this price then the next reward is uh early bird which is let’s say um 30% off and then you have your main reward I’m just you know I’m just pulling the percentages out out of my
1:31:00
head obviously you need to calculate something that makes sense for you um so once the super early birds are gone now when a person comes to your website you know they see an early bird and they see the full reward and let’s say there’s only five more early birds left so they already missed the super early birds right they don’t want to miss the early birth as well because then you know the the price will be full price right so now you kind of pressure them into backing the the project whenever that
1:31:35
happens I’ve been on the receiving end as well it’s not like I’m immune to it and I know it but there’s a a tiny trick that you can do on on Kickstarter and that not a lot of people know is that you can always increase the number of early birds so so once those five know okay let’s say you had 100 and now you you’ve sold 95 and you only have five more and you can go and just increase it but let’s say five so now you have 105 and then uh in three days when those almost ran out you only have like two
1:32:10
rewards left you increase it again and again and again so basically what you’re doing is selling just the early birds you don’t care about the the the regular price the regular price is just the anchor people don’t want to pay that they want to pay a bit less right and they will pay immediately for the early birth they’re not going to wait one week or by the end of the campaign because they will be gone they’re convinced that they will be gone because it’s just three more and they already miss the
1:32:42
first one which was super amazing you know so that’s one of the tactics that prove to be limited quantities exactly but increasing them you know increasing them slowly so they feel like they’re the last person to get it by this price and it’s uh and it’s yeah this I no when I um also on appsumo you know appsumo does this very well where they have like three days left on the deal or something like this yeah and I noticed that just when I launched my products on epso I I probably have more than probably a dozen or so um anytime
1:33:18
that there was a countdown timer on the product like I got a huge boost in sales like I was it was crazy um just that sense of urgency and also um I know if and I do talk about appsumo a lot in the launch lab course um but in particular on appsumo um and and this is just like this a website kind of like Kickstarter if you look at their website uh I’m not sharing my screen with you again let me let me share my screen with you um because we can kind of architect how these websites work and and their algorithms so uh let me know when you
1:33:54
see um so so what uh those countdown timers also did was they helped me to get onto the homepage as well and so I think that not only helped me to convert a lot more but uh also got a lot more viewers because you see like this ending soon here um where it says offer ends in two days they these products are getting a huge spike in traffic and sales um because of these countdown timers um and then also if you can find ways to get into sections like this like what’s hot um where I assume that these products
1:34:29
are sending a lot of traffic to their Pages because uh Appo will not do that initially for you just like Kickstarter won’t but I assume the formula is pretty much the same if you go to Kickstarter and um you see like what’s hot I assume that it has a lot to do with these people setting a lot of traffic within the first week or so and getting a lot of traction um to get on the homepage and also in the newslet right yeah yeah like I said you know there’s the time Factor every every Kickstarter campaign ends eventually so
1:35:02
you know the last few days um you get a bunch of backers and then you can do some extra things with you know limited Awards um and I mean with with every platform you’re kind of tied to what they offer so that’s that’s about it on Kickstarter if you’re doing or if you’re creating your own landing page then obviously you can do whatever you want so yeah I I will say that so in in the course I I talked about the you know the timeline for Amazon launches and Kindle launches and there’s a specific formula
1:35:36
for like what you need to do the first week or so the first two weeks um what the price has to be um how many reviews you need to get and also with appsumo they do have a very specific formula and it might be this way with Kickstarter as well but I know with appsumo um it depends on how many reviews you have for your product so if you have like 20 reviews 25 reviews um will put you in their newsletter for example uh if you have 20 reviews uh they’ll put you on their social media page and so if you want to get a lot of sales it comes down
1:36:10
specifically to how many reviews you’re able to get in the rating and so for me I love that because it was very linear I had some specific goal to shoot for and it was quite easy for me to at a low price point you know get all my friends to sign up write reviews increase the price and then get into the newsletter get on to the homepage and that’s when you start getting a lot of sales and basically getting sales every day right with nothing wrong with that um and you didn’t actually so so up uh you you can put a timer and then
1:36:49
it’s not the end of the the deal but it just increases price right so it it’ll say ends in two days and then the price goes up $10 you do another timer it goes up another $10 and stuff and you can keep getting sales so so that’s what I liked is that you you you figure out how the platform works that’s when you’re able to start getting a lot of sales and um you did give me an actual another idea um as I was listening to you when we were talking about rewards um I think a lot of people will
1:37:15
also guess when it comes to rewards like they don’t know if the reward is going to do well or not but what you could actually do before you launch your your crowdfund or whatever it is is um you can validate the rewards themselves as well right so like let’s let’s go back and let’s look at this guy for example um and let’s say like he he posts on his some Facebook groups like he has a Facebook group or a group that he’s a member of and he says like hey guys I’m thinking of doing this you know five
1:37:41
full coaching days five Zoom meetings um blah blah blah blah blah if I were to organize something like this would you guys be interested you know would you want something like this like demonstrate the benefit uh and then so what you could actually do is if if you like using chat GPT to come up with all of your rewards for example um you can say like hey guys um if I were to do something like this would you guys be interested um and so that’s a way that you could actually validate your rewards in the months before you actually do the
1:38:11
launch right um and I I do know like a lot of coaches a lot of Consultants who do this really well like uh there there is this guy I’m connected to on on Facebook and he’s like a a Tik Tok uh consultant you still see my screen right I guess you muted your mic um yeah but what this guy does is he’s always creating like these helpful resources and tools for Tik Tok and he’s getting a lot of leads just from Facebook so um he’s built this tool that like Auto downloads um videos from a Tik Tok
1:38:49
profile and then he gets a lot of people let just say yes please and stuff so he’s really like Master at putting these offers out um for these downloads and these free things um which will like audit Tik Tok or something that’s useful for Tik Tok um so like and he’ll offer people like sneak preak or free download um and he’ll get a lot of comments on um these just social media posts so like you know 116 comments so he’s getting all these leads for free all the time um and it’s just like you know the the best
1:39:20
performing uh Tik Tok ads like the best performing Tik Tok headlines um you know the best performing Tik Tok viral posts and so forth um and so I’ll I’ll often see people like this who are creating these ads whether it’s on their profile um they’re creating these posts that are G A Lot traction or in a Facebook group where they’re getting like 400 comments um and getting all of these free leads you know so let’s just look at that and so the lesson here that I want to basically uh share with people watching
1:39:50
this um if you can find like these posts like basically you have a template here of something that is already validated and so you can use a template like this and then substitute it for uh whatever it is your industry is or your field um and create something similar that’s basically just like a free product it doesn’t cost anything to produce it and um you can also do this with your rewards like if you have like a a low ticket reward or high ticket reward um you could say like hey this is my idea this is the reward
1:40:22
um you know would you want this and then you can see a lot of people are uh interested in this and that’s just a really easy way to validate your ideas for free using Facebook um if you don’t have a lot of you know 5,000 friends on Facebook there’s a lot of groups that you can go to so for example um I’m in this group’s Tas marketer and you’ve seen my advertisement that’s that’s converting really well um on my Facebook ad but before I did that ad uh I was doing a lot of organic posts sorry for the
1:40:52
picture there with the shortless picture um but you can see like this is one of an example of one of those posts where it says I put together a spreadsheet who wants a copy and this is that post in the group so I didn’t post this in my profile I just post it in another group and I got a lot of leads uh just from that free organic post so the lesson again we’re going back to this idea of Ideal validation um you can take a lot of your rewards that you you have and um if you want to do like high ticket
1:41:18
rewards uh and low ticket Rewards so maybe like $20 $10 um what you can do is you just get that validation of your rewards and not just the product itself um but seeing like how much interest there is and that’s how you know with like 90% certainty that what you’re putting out into the world is going to be well Reed so you eliminate that insecurity you step into their campaign with a high degree of confidence um you know you see that zga and I here uh we’re making sure that what we’re going to launch is going to be well received
1:41:50
we have like 90% success rate in the first place by hearing the voice of our customers you know seeing the voice of what the market is talking about what they actually want um before we invest a lot of time and money into these launches so we’ve almost kind of like given a full Master Class just in this recording would you say yeah I hope uh people got some value out of it how long have you been a marketer ziga uh 10 years 10 years okay so you put in your 20,000 hours would you say yeah probably at the beginning even
1:42:40
more before that I was I was a product guy I I build products like I said I I build websites and and things so I do also have some techn techical knowledge and I kind of pair it with with marketing so like a really specific um um skill set so you’ve been at this for a while it’s safe to say and between us I think we probably have around like 30 years of of experience here because I started uh both my parents are entrepreneurs so they got me like hustling from like eight years old nine years old um where
1:43:19
my my mother was a realtor and she’s like go around in the driveways and and put this notepad on people’s uh doorstep you know which has like all of her contact information like you want to sell your home talk to Tony you know here’s the the details and it’s got the notepad so it’s something we’re giving away for free that’s actually useful for people you know like to write down their groceries and stuff like this um so you know it’s it’s not easy to put 30 years of combined marketing experience into an
1:43:48
hour and a half presentation I’m sure that we can go on for 10 hours just kind of talking about these different topics and sharing case studies and stories um but I’ve been having a lot of fun I hope that you’ve also had fun um and everyone watching this uh has enjoyed it and taken some notes as well uh again if you guys want to get more you still see my screen right zika yep okay um so we do have a special offer for you if you’ve gotten all the way to the end um we have a a discount code you can go and get everything from
1:44:23
zga and me uh at the school ofgrowth hacking.com we’ll have a a link to that in the description and we have um at this time 43 lessons on everything that you need to know like we’ve eliminated all of the guest workor on how to be wildly profitable in your launches uh how to launch on Kickstarter other crowdfunding platforms Amazon appsumo how to crowdfund information products like uh books how to create viral launches how to build your network that supports your launches a whole bunch of growth hacking
1:44:58
tactics and how to really be a wildly successful marketer I know that if you guys go and enroll in that course um we’ll have a money back guarantee if you don’t like anything in there if you don’t get a ton of value 10 times more value just email us we’ll give you a full refund uh and you keep the course but I know that if you download that it will give you uh everything that we’ve learned so that you can be way more profitable in your launches because you only get one chance to get your launch
1:45:27
right and if you do get it right it can make an enormous difference you can avoid the mistakes like I’ve talked about where uh I had a chance to get 19,000 emails from appsumo but didn’t you’ll be able to eliminate those costly mistakes that zga and I have made and get on the fast track to success right away so it’s been uh really fun we’ve kind of gone through it’s been more than uh almost two hours I guess two hours now that we’ve been on this presentation um but there has not been a dull moment
1:46:00
right yeah I hope so yeah yeah I agree I mean like like I said at the beginning the first time I was launching a campaign you know uh it took me one year to learn everything uh you can learn everything yourself um it might take you one year it might take you more might take your less but what Danny is talking about is that yeah this is just going to speed up all the mistakes and all the knowhow so much faster that um I think it’s worth it so if you go and you uh go to school ofgrowth hacking.com if you click under
1:46:44
the uh Marketplace and go to courses um you’ll see that I’m currently logged into my memberships so uh if you have a full membership for the website you actually get all of the courses for free which is an insane value we have a whole bunch of courses on um how to growth hack your marketing how to set up your marketing funnels how to be paid to travel which I’ve been doing for the last 14 years um how to te hack time to be more efficient we have courses on AI uh affiliate marketing lead generation
1:47:16
everything you need to have a more profitable business and um you can go and check out launch laab it’s at $97 and we have a free discount coupon uh for you we’ll include that in the description as our way of saying thank you for joining us on this webinar and you can go and get more information on that this wonderful course that ziga and I have put together for you to help get you on the path to a six-figure seven figureure business by leveraging product launches so thank you so much again ziga is there any other piece of advice that
1:47:50
you want to give to people before we uh sign off here no not really I think uh there’s going to be a bunch of jams in the course that we recorded so uh I would rather leave it at the at this now but yeah and if anyone wants to get in touch with you if they have any other questions or they want anything more from you what’s the best way to do that should we just give your contact information or or maybe they connect with you on Twitter uh I’m most uh active on either LinkedIn or on Instagram though Instagram is more
1:48:27
for like fun and personal stuff but yeah either through email or through Linkedin it’s it’s the best okay we’ll put that contact information we’ll put everything in the description of this lesson and um yeah thank you guys and and don’t um you know watch this video and sleep on it um I want you to think of this as a first step in your journey so go ahead and take action take a look at some of the resources that uh zigga and I have prepared for you um have a look at the website we have a whole
1:48:57
bunch of free resources and um courses on there and I really want you to look at this as the beginning of your journey as a a long-term wildly successful and profitable entrepreneurship Adventure so thank you again for watching this all the way to the end really appreciate your time and uh Take Care thank you ziga I really appreciate it Denny take care and talk to you soon all right take care bye