Creating Products That Sell Themselves

All right, welcome back, all you beautiful people. All right, we’re continuing the series that we started at the top of the week, which is all around the seven figure launchpad. This is the crash course where we walk through everything you need to know to start a business. If you have an idea that you wanted to go and become an entrepreneur for a while now, you just don’t know what the next steps are. This is going to help you. Or if you are already an entrepreneur, you already have a business, you’re making some progress, you’re making some sales, you’re doing five, six figures, and you’re like, this is awesome. I love this. But I want to scale.

I want to go to seven figures, I want to go pro, I want to go to eight figures and beyond, and I want to be a world changer. But then this is for you. So this is, I believe, episode number four in the series. Maybe it’s episode. Yes, episode number four, the beginning of the series. We started by outlining the escape velocity framework, which just says that there’s three parts of every business that we need to solve for. We need to solve for you, the entrepreneur, which is the pilot. We need to solve for the business, which is our vehicle, aka our rocket.

And then we need to solve for where we’re trying to get to our destination, our goal. So that’s the escape velocity framework, but we have to solve it in the reverse order. Right. So we need to solve the destination first, then we need to solve for the entrepreneur, then we need to solve for the rocket. So that’s what we did in the first episode. We laid out, how do we get crystal clear on where we’re trying to go? What’s our desired outcome that we’re trying to build towards? And then we walked into what are we doing as the entrepreneur to train ourselves to develop the skills, the habits, the rituals, routines, the mindsets, the beliefs of a seven eight figure entrepreneur, because that is truly more important than the business itself, because if you have those skills, they can never be taken from you. Right? Even if the business, the rocket, blows up and you have to start all over. If you have the skills of a seven eight figure entrepreneur, if you have the mindset, the beliefs, the habits, the rituals, routines, all of that, then you can just go and start another business.

So that was yesterday’s episode talking about, what are those skills, foundational and executive skills, that we need to have as entrepreneurs that are going to help us get to that place. If you haven’t already, I recommend you go back to the beginning of the series, you listen to these episodes in order because it’s all going to stack atop one another and hopefully get you to the point where by the end of this, you have every. All the little pieces in place that you need to be able to go and start building your rocket and go to the moon and beyond. Now, this is just the beginning, though, because, like, the thing with business is that there’s so many different ways that we can take information and apply it to our unique context. Your unique context is obviously unique to you. So if you need help figuring out how to actually level up as the entrepreneur, how to get clear on the destination, where you’re trying to go with your life, or how to build your rocket, if you need more help with that, then that’s what the beyond the Apex accelerator program is all about. Weekly coaching calls with myself and my team, a whole slew and archive of trainings that will help you at every single level of the game as you level up to eight, nine figures and beyond. If you’re interested in that, go to beyondtheapex.com dot.

You can apply and if you’re a good fit, we’ll be in touch. And let’s get to today’s episode. So today we’re going to be talking about not the destination. We’ve already talked about that when I talk about the pilot. Now it’s time to talk about the rocket. And the rocket is the business. This is the vehicle we’re going to use to get to our destination. Right now, every business, if you really just want to boil it down to its most simple parts, I think I got this from the book traction.

Yeah, I think it was from. Traction really just boils down to three things. It has a marketing function, which is I need to get customers, I need to make people aware that I exist. You have an operations function, which is I have product that I need to develop and I need to deliver to those customers. And then you have a finance function. The finance function is just to make sure that the money stays in the bank, everything. The wheels stay greased, that, you know, we’re legal, we’re compliant, and all that stuff. Right? So those are the three legs of every business.
You have the marketing, the operations, and the funding. Finance. Now, when I talk to most five and six figure entrepreneurs, people doing maybe say, $50,000 a year or maybe $200,000 a year, and I’m like, what’s the biggest constraint? What’s the issue that you’re facing in your business? Almost unanimously, they will say I need more customers. And it’s true that you do probably need more customers, but the way that you go about getting those customers at that level is usually wrong. So before we dive into the marketing function, we’re actually going to, we’re actually going to talk about the other, the other side of the function, which is operations, which is product development. Because here’s the truth, is that if you actually had the greatest product in the world, you wouldn’t really need to push it, you wouldn’t need to sell it, you wouldn’t need to market it. People would talk about it, they would share it with their friends. If it truly was the best thing in the world that solved that problem, it would probably be growing and selling itself.
And the way that we know you don’t have the best product in the world right now is if you’ve ever sat down on a sales call and had to convince or influence or persuade the other person to see the value of your product or service, then it is not yet the greatest product in the world. Right? Vast overgeneralizations here. But generally the best marketing is a fantastic product. And this is often the thing that we overlook in the beginning is we don’t spend enough time on developing the product. And so later we have to spend endless hours of our life trying to market the thing through advertising, organic content. And we’re going to talk about all that stuff. We’re definitely gonna talk about that. But first we need to get the product dialed in.
And once you have that world class beater product, now you can scale, you can focus on adding fuel to the fire. And I like to think about this as the product is the shell, the operations of your business, that’s the shell of your rocket. Your marketing is the booster rockets. And then the finance function, that’s the fuel that’s going to. No, no, I got this wrong. The finance is the GPS, it’s the navigation, which is gonna help you direct yourself towards your target. The marketing is the fuel and the booster rockets that are going to get you up in the air, right? So we’re going to put that in there, but only once we actually have the shell of the chassis of the rocket. Good to go.
And that’s the product. So what I want to share today is I want to talk about what I call the five P’s of product or five P’s of business, whatever you want to call them. It just happened to be that there was all these P’s that I kept coming across. And if you walk through these in a systematic way, you will find that it helps you get clear about your product you’re offering and dial it in. So number one, the first five, the first p of your business is the prospect. Your product exists to solve a problem. For a prospect, it’s important to remember that no business exists except to deliver value to another human. No human in the equation, there is no business, right? There is a person on the other side that has a problem and that maybe that’s in person, maybe it’s another business, right.
If you’re b, two b. But there’s another entity with humans behind it that has a problem they are trying to solve. So the first step of the equation to creating this product that will sell itself is to get really clear about your niche, get really clear about your avatar. Who is the person that you’re solving the problem for? Who are they? If you can get into their mindset and describe their worldview as well as they see it, then they will believe you have the solution to their problem. And that’s the second p in this equation, which is the problem that that prospect is experiencing. What is the problem that Aunt sue has that makes her want to buy your baked goods? What is the problem that Jerry, who is trying to hang a shelf in his garage, has that makes him want to get your drill right? The more clear that you can define their problem, the more they will believe you have the solution. Now, the mistake that we make often when we’re creating our product or we’re trying to sell our product is we think all about the features and we sell things based off of, oh, it does 2000 rpms and it has this much torque and blah, blah, blah. We talk about the features, but not the benefits, right? The benefit of a drill that spins that fast and has that much torque is that it’s effortless to put a hole in the wall.
It never strips, it never grinds. So when you grab it, it works every single time. It will go through drywall, go through wood, it will go through whatever you want it to go through so that you don’t have to suffer brain damage just to do a simple thing like hanging a picture, right? So the benefit, not the feature, is what gets people to commit to buying your product to solve their problem, right? So this is what we’re starting with. We start with who is the person that we’re trying to solve the problem for the prospect? What is the problem that they have? Number three. Now, this is where the product comes in, which is what’s our offer? What is our solution to that product? And there’s all sorts of different products, right? There’s services, there’s widgets, there’s all sorts of products. And only you know for yourself what you are uniquely situated to deliver to the marketplace. But ideally, your product is solving the problem for a particular prospect. The more clear you get about who that person is, the more you’re gonna be able to use the language that speaks to their heart and makes them go, hmm, you know, out of all the special snowflakes in the world, that person, that company understands me.

I want to do business with them. Now, the fourth p in business here is the promise. What is the promise your product delivers? And this is what people are buying, right. The promise is that the drill will work every single time, is that you are never going to overspend. When you buy our product, it is that we will have 24/7 service. Like, what is the promise behind the product? The more clear you can get about that and the more you can articulate that that could be one of the most powerful selling points when it comes to what is the feature, not the. Or what’s the benefit, not the feature of this thing. So we have our prospect, the problem, the product, the promise.

So what is the promise of the product that solves the problem for a prospect? The last piece of this equation that I want to talk about is the profit. And profit is important because how we price things dictates how it will be received, how it will set the expectation of the consumer. If we price it to be the price leader, to be the cheapest option, they will come into our product with a certain expectation of experience. Right. If we price it high, we’re going to give ourselves more margin, and it’s also going to set the customer expectation in a different place. Right. The profit, though, is important. What I find is often we under pressure price ourselves because we don’t believe that the promise of our product solves a big enough problem for our prospect.

And so we believe we need to cut on the expenses to convince them to buy the thing. But if we have truly identified a pain point that the prospect is willing to pay to solve, then by positioning our product and our promise in a way at a premium, it leaves us more margin to work with. It makes it more likely that we are actually able to deliver on the promise that we’ve set. And so my encouragement to you is pretty much wherever you have priced yourself in the market right now, your product, wherever you’re thinking about pricing yourself, increase it. You will get fewer sales. In a lot of cases, but sometimes not. Sometimes you’ll get the same number of sales, but the quality of customer that you will get will be higher. The likelihood that they will achieve the result is higher and you will have more margin to work with to reinvest back into everything else that you need to invest into to get your rocket off the ground.

That could be more marketing for more customers. It could be to dial in the product even more, to do more R and D, to work on the fulfillment so that the customers are getting an incredible experience from beginning to end. You can only do that if you actually have profits to work with. So these are the five P’s of biz. I flew through them very, very quickly. It is prospect, problem, product, promise, profit. Think through those. Think through those as you’re developing yours.

And what I would say is focus on one product at the moment until you get to $1 million of revenue. Just focus on selling one product. You can get there on one product. If it’s a fantastic product, just focus on that. It’s way easier than introducing operational complexity that comes from having 5678 different products. Because we think we need to upsell. We need to have a Downsell. Just focus on the one for now, make it as damn good as you can and then charge a premium for it.

Solve a big problem and you will be well on your way. Okay, so that’s gonna do for me, guys. In the next episode, what are we going to be talking? We’re going to be talking about the marketing side, how to attract, how to nurture, how to convert leads into customers. So when you’re ready, go hop over there. I’ll see you in that episode. And that’s it. That’s all I got. So I don’t know why you’re still watching.

We’re done here. See you guys later. Sapper folks, my friends.