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The $100 MBA Show
MBA2625 How to Launch a Product with Just a Landing Page and a Camera
00:08:29
Ever wondered if you really need a fancy website, polished product, or a big team to kickstart your idea? Are you stuck holding off your launch, waiting for perfection, only to find yourself without a single customer? You’re not alone, and this lesson might be just what you need to simplify the process.
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If you're a listener of the show, you probably own a business or looking to start one. So the question is, are you ready to thrive with your business? It's time to let Intuit QuickBooks take things like unpaid invoices and tracking expenses off your plate to take things to the next level. If you're a longtime listener to the show, you know how much I bang on about how important your finances are, getting your numbers in order, making sure your incoming invoices and expenses are all taken care of. That's where QuickBooks comes in. It's an all in one business platform that can help you with day to day tasks like invoice, manage and grow your business all in one place. Intuit QuickBooks your way to money. Money movement services are provided by Intuit Payments, Inc. Licensed as a money transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services. It's smart to always have a few financial goals and a really smart one. You can set earning cash back on what you buy every day. And with Discover, you can get this. Discover automatically matches all the cash back you've earned at the end of your first year. Seriously, all of it. And we trust you to make smart decisions. After all, you listen to this show see terms@discover.com credit card. You don't need a finished product. You don't even need a full website. And you definitely don't need a big team. All you need to launch a product is a landing page and a camera. That's the exact play I ran when I launched my software company, webinar Ninja, and it worked. So in this episode, I'm going to show you step by step how to get your first customers before you even build your thing. Let's go. Welcome Back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenholm, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday to help you start, grow and scale your business. Most people wait until everything's perfect before they launch, but that's actually too late. They build for months and sometimes years without even a single paying customer. That's insanity. And, and that's actually a trap that you're building for yourself. You don't need perfection. You need proof of demand. Because it's so much easier to sell product that people are hungry for versus a product that people are just like, oh, that's okay. You need momentum and you need a list of people who are willing to buy. The strategy that you're going to learn is going to show you a way to build an email List a way to validate your idea and often it will give you cash upfront to build the product itself. So what are you going to need? Well, you just need two things. One is a landing page. And a landing page can be created by a lot of tools that are actually free to get started with like kit.com or you might already have this software or a landing page builder on your WordPress website. Or maybe you can use something like LeadPages. A simple drag and drop builder will allow you to build a page that has the important things that you need. And what are those important things? Well, you need a simple headline that calls out the problem. You need a short video that you can embed where you could pitch the value and then a clear call to action. A pre order or a sign up or reserve your spot kind of call to action. The second thing you'll need is a camera. And of course your phone is perfect. Okay. The phones we have today are like 10 times better than cameras that we used to use, you know, 10 and 20 years ago. You'll use your phone to film a quick one to two minute video that will explain a few important things. What are those things? One, what problem does your product solve? This is important because you want to be crystal clear about the problem that you are attacking with your product. Number two, who is it for? Who is perfect for this product? Number three, what are you offering right now? What's the offer that you want to give your customers? And number four, what they should do next. The call to action, whether it's joining the waiting list or pre ordering or whatever it might be. So you might be saying, Omar, what do I say on camera? What do I say on this actual video? Well, I'm going to give you a script template. It's very simple to follow. Here's a framework that you can use and you could just fill in the blanks if you are struggling with insert problem. I'm building something that will help you insert result. This is the result that they're going to get. It's not ready yet, but it'll be ready soon. And I'm opening early access for people who want to be the first to try it and help me shape it, help me build a better version of it. If that's you, just sign up below. That's it. Pretty simple. You're not selling a finished product, you're selling the vision of the result it will deliver. Let's say for example, I'm writing a book on the mental game of poker. I didn't write this book obviously, but this is, let's say, the product that I'm building. If you struggle with the mental game of poker, I'm writing a book that's going to help you win more tournaments by overcoming your fears. This is the title. It's not ready yet, but I will have it ready very soon. And I'm opening early access to people who want to improve their poker game and try this book first and help give me feedback. If that's you, just sign up below. Easy did you know that the pet industry is a booming $150 billion industry? People absolutely love their dogs, don't you? If you're looking for a new investment and love dogs, there's only one name you need to know. That's Dogtopia. Dogtopia is the largest, leading and fastest growing pet franchise in North America. With 300 locations. Dogtopia is the only pet services franchise that offers a reoccurring revenue membership model. Dogtopia offers safe, open play, daycare, boarding and spa services for dogs. Want a strong franchise model that is recession resistant and number one in the industry? Check out Dogtopia because every dog and dog parent deserves it. Go to Dogtopia.com to learn more. That's Dogtopia.com Listen in today's Fast moving business world, your team needs to stay connected with your customers. Without missed messages, without missed calls, without a slow phone system. Because the reality is if you miss a call, you miss a customer. That's why I'm excited to tell you about OpenPhone. It's the number one business phone system that streamlines and scales your customer communications. How do they do it? With OpenPhone, your team can share one number and collaborate on customer calls and texts like a shared inbox. Pretty cool. Any teammate can just pick up right where the last person left off, keeping response times faster and more efficient. Plus, with their AI powered call transcripts and summary, you'll be able to automate follow ups, ensuring you'll never miss a customer interaction again. You gotta check them out and see why. Over 50,000 businesses trust OpenPhone to manage their business calls and their texts. And get this, Openphone is offering my listeners 20% off your first six months at openphone.com MBA that's O-P-E-N P-H-O-N-E.com MBA and if you have existing numbers with another service, Openphone will port them over at no extra charge. Open Phone no missed calls, no missed customers. Let me give you a real life example. When I actually apply this to my business. When we had the idea for our software company back in 2014, webinar ninja, which was a webinar software to help creators and coaches easily run webinars. I didn't just start coding and start building the software. I started selling first. I needed to validate first to see if this is a product that people actually want. I created a simple landing page with mock ups of what the software could look like. And I recorded a short video explaining, you guessed it, the problem that it solved, how painful it is to run webinars with clunky software, and that our solution would be different. Because of these reasons, we offered early access and pre sold 250 beta spots. We sold out in 72 hours. And that was a really big green light to say, yes, this is a good product to build. That pre sale gave me three important things. One, proof that people actually want what I'm about to create so I'm not wasting time and money. Two, clear green light, like I mentioned, to move forward in that direction that I actually presented on the landing page. And number three, and just as important as the other things, the capital to hire a developer and actually build my thing. That launch changed everything. I had no product, just a landing page, a camera, and a bold offer. And from that moment, we built Webinar Ninja. We grew it to over 30,000 users over 10 years and then got acquired by Proprof. So changed my life forever. So the lesson that you probably are picking up is that you need to validate first, build second. If no one signs up for your email list, for your waiting list, or buys your pre sold item, you're probably learning already that you need to validate first, then build second. If no one signs up for your waiting list or buys your presale product, good. You just saved yourself six months of building the wrong thing. Or even longer than that. If people do sign up and respond, that's your signal. Go build it with real confidence and real customers waiting. Now, let me give you a pro tip that I learned along the way. If you're not sure what to say in your video or your landing page, start with the questions your audience already asks. Do I need X to get started? How is this different than Y? What happens if I sign up now? Do you have a money back guarantee? All kinds of stuff like that, right? Use those to build your messaging and speak to the real concerns you know your customers are going to have. Look, what I learned is that you don't need to wait for permission. Okay? You don't need to have it all figured out. You just need to take the first step and show people what you're about to build what you'd like to build for them. Because the truth is, the best time to launch your product isn't when it's finished. It's when your audience is hungry for the solution. By the way, this is not just my story. This is also the story of Richard Branson, who's the founder of Virgin. His airline, Virgin Atlantic, started because he was at the airport and his flight got canceled and everybody on that flight was irate, they were so angry. So he said, hey, what if we all chartered a flight? We all chipped in and we chartered a flight and we got into a private jet. He did the math. He ran the numbers. He said, okay, we can actually charter this flight and all get home on time and be even more comfortable. And that was the MVP version, the minimal viable product version of Virgin Atlantic. So build the page, press record on that video and see if your idea can walk before you make it run. Thanks so much for tuning into the $100 MBA show. If you want to continue to learn from me week after week, I have a newsletter called the Three Things Newsletter that I think you'd love. It's more practical, real world strategies, but I go even deeper. I share three things. The first thing I share every week is something to think about, something to help you grow your mindset to something to do so you're getting some action done and compounding and getting some momentum. And number three, something to learn so you're skilling up every week. No fluff, just actionable ideas to help you grow. Just go to100nba.net and sign up for any of our freebies, any of our guides, and you'll be added to our weekly newsletter automatically. Again, it's absolutely free and it's my way to coach you from afar. Thanks so much for being part of the community. If you found this episode helpful. Share with a friend Anybody you think would benefit from this episode. Whether you want to just send it on WhatsApp or put it on your social media or private message or even just share it over dinner. Yep, just talk about it with a friend or a loved one. Thanks so much in advance. I'll check you in the next one.
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