Abigail Pumphrey (0:00)

At the end of the day, I just want to eliminate risk for you. I want to make it so that you know that something is going to work. And really the only way to do that, the only way to ensure demand and validate your idea, is to put it in front of people. Welcome to the Strategy Hour podcast brought to you by Boss Project on. I'm your host Abigail Pumphrey and I'm dedicated to supporting online businesses. I don't believe in one right way to build a business. I'm here to help you build business your way. One that supports not only the life you have, but the life you want. I'm on a personal mission to help you become financially free. I'm taking all the lessons learned as I turned a layoff into a seven figure online business. I'm here to help you prioritize your life every step of the way. Whether you're creating your first digital product, growing an email list, or scaling an already profitable business. Settle in. It's time to talk strategy. Ever wish you could get the full behind the scenes of what goes into your favorite educators launches? Well, now you can. I was tired of watching people scrambling over what to say, how to present their offers, or ask for the sale. So I did one better and decided to hand over my full two week launch plan. The entire marketing strategy, email copy, social posts, literally all of it. Head to bossproject.com box for more details. I don't want you to miss out this. It's bossproject.com box what if I told you you could sell a digital product before you ever create it? And not only is it possible, I think it's the smartest way to launch. The first time I launched a digital product I took a huge gamble and I put all of the work in in advance. I built the thing, I made the templates, I built the sales page. I I made every aspect of this digital product and I poured a lot of time and energy into it and I didn't know if it was going to sell and I'm so grateful that it was so successful and I, I love that it went well. Being able to make $8,000 in the first month I sold my first digital product is seriously such a blessing and I'm so grateful. However, I have definitely launched smarter since then and the first time I tried this strategy I was like this is such a game changer because so much changed as a result of doing it backwards. At the end of the day, unless you have mountains of evidence, for the most part, most people don't know if someone is going to buy in advance. If you are a multi billion dollar corporation and you have mounds of data and years and years of history, then sure, you can do a lot of predictions. But when you're brand new or you're just getting started, you don't know what your best messaging strategies are. You don't know your best launching efforts. There's just a whole lot that's brand new. And because of that, especially in the beginning, I think it is so important that you try this strategy that you launch backwards. The first time I launched this way, it made a world of difference. Not only did I not have to do the work in advance, but it gave me the confidence and the clarity to create exactly what my audience needed. I got so many insights just from the process of selling the product that ultimately it changed the thing I developed. At the end of the day, I just want to eliminate risk for you. I want to make it so that you know that something is going to work. And really the only way to do that, the only way to ensure demand and validate your idea is to put it in front of people. Imagine for just a second spending weeks or even months creating something only to hear crickets once the door is open. Pre selling avoids that heartbreak altogether. Not to mention, I know a lot of you, a lot of you are the kind of people that put off building the thing. You know you want to do it, you know you're excited about doing it, but something about it is just too important. And so you keep putting it off because you want it to be right. But when you pre sale, I promise you it's going to give you that built in motivation to get it done and to prioritize it. Because there's nothing like a paying customer that's going to keep you focused and accountable. In my opinion, one of the more valuable parts of pre selling or launching backwards, whatever you want to call it, is that you get to create alongside your audience and incorporate their needs and their questions as you go. I have absolutely built a product from start to finish, only to realize there was a hole in the process. They were getting stuck. They were getting stuck. And if I had just slowed down enough to watch how they move through the product, it's something I could have noticed even sooner and corrected for sooner or potentially built from the very beginning. In my opinion, when you focus on selling first and then finishing out the development, you are going to do a better job. You just are. You see who you're actually serving, you understand their personal needs, you can tailor the end result to exactly the things that your ideal client is going through during a backwards launch. Especially. Especially for the very first time I'm selling something, I have my thank you page be a survey. So after they purchase, the very first thing I'm having them do before they log in or do anything else is I'm having them fill out a survey so I can understand who they are, what their biggest obstacles are, why they purchased, and what they're hoping to get out of it. And when I go back and I read the results of those surveys, I have such a clear understanding of what someone's perception was. Because that's the other thing that I think is really ironic is sometimes we build something that we feel like is so obvious, and when someone else looks at it, they're anticipating something else entirely. And so the way you get unhappy customers is when they think they're gonna get one thing and they get something else. It's like ordering a Diet Coke and then a Dr. Pepper comes out. You know, that first sip is just. You literally just want to spit it out. It is awful. The same feeling happens when someone has a different perception of what they're buying. And the first thing they see is not at all what they expect expected. You can correct for this in advance to prevent that from happening altogether. It's like ensuring you get the order right. You can do that by slowing down and understanding what people are anticipating. Now, I will never understand why there is so much pushback around doing this strategy. In the online business world, I have seen a lot of people say not to do this. They talk about how irresponsible it is to build the plane while you're flying it. I couldn't disagree more. I couldn't disagree more. Every other industry, every other industry does this. Not a single one is going to produce the product before they validate it. And in a lot of industries, you're always going to pre order. So think about it. Every time you go to a restaurant, unless it's a buffet, which happens, I'm not saying they don't exist, but nine times out of 10, when you go to that restaurant and you sit down and you order, they're making your meal then. Now, it's not to say that they don't have some things prepped and ready to go to make things smooth. The equivalent of that would be you already predetermined your curriculum and learning objectives and you have an idea of what you're going to produce. That's like having your ingredients ready. Then they make it and they bring it to your table. The same is true for the first time someone builds a physical product. What do you think Kickstarter campaigns are? Those are pre sales. Those are pre sales. When you buy a custom car. No, I've never done that. But maybe someday. If someone goes to buy a brand new vehicle and they want to pick exactly the bells and whistles they want, they are pre ordering it. You want to build a house, you need a contract and a down payment and construction documents and approvals from the city before they even break ground. Every other industry is doing this. Every other industry is pre selling. It is normal business practice to do this and it is going to lead to a better product. Do you tend to enjoy your food more when it's made fresh or when it's been sitting on a buffet line for three hours? I just say getting something where you're truly paying attention to your audience's needs. Game changer. But if you're going to pre sell a product or you're going to launch backwards, what do you need to have ready before you go? Because clearly you have to have something, right? You can't go into this with nothing. The first thing you're going to do is identify the problem you're solving. You're going to have to focus on a specific urgent problem that your audience is facing. Now, here's where people make a mistake is they assume every problem that their audience is facing that they want to fix. Sometimes people want things to stay broken. So you have to focus on a problem that is so urgent and so top of mind that they are desperate to fix it. It's a need, not a want. Because at the end of the day, you're not even selling a product. You're selling a solution to their pain point. So understanding their pain is essential. But I need you to run it through what I call the grandma test. Okay? It's a very simple concept. If you can't explain what your digital product does or who it's for in a way that your grandma understands, it's too complicated. Now, if your grandma is no longer living like mine, it can be your mom, it can be your aunt, it can be a friend from church, it can be anyone. But I will say someone who is typically out of your demographic, not your ideal audience, not in your industry, needs to understand it. And I think that's the key. Because sometimes we'll go and ask a peer in our industry, hey, what do you think about this? And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. They have way too much background knowledge. Way too much context. It needs to make sense. If someone doesn't even understand what you do and what it does, by really boiling it down to something like this, it's going to make it easier for you to explain what someone is actually buying. So here's an example. This course teaches busy moms how to plan healthy meals in under 10 minutes a day. That is a promise. That is what this product does. That is the solution you're selling. So if you need to understand if it's going to potentially work, put it through the Grandma test. And if you need to actually go, ask somebody and not just ask yourself, would they understand it, Ask somebody. Especially the first handful of times you're doing this. Ask somebody. Hiring with Indeed, your search is over. When it comes to hiring, don't go searching for the 1. Just meet your match with Indeed. Get unparalleled access to job seekers with over 350 million unique monthly visitors globally, according to Indeed Data, and an extended reach through Glassdoor. I love that Indeed makes it easy to hire. When we've hired in the past, the process was full of unqualified applicants. With Indeed, we can target the right candidates for the right position, leveraging over 140 million qualifications and preferences every day. Indeed's matching engine is constantly learning from your preferences. So the more you use Indeed Indeed the better it gets and listeners of this show will get a 75 sponsored job credit. To get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com Strategy Hour, just go to Indeed.com Strategy Hour right now and support our show by seeing you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com strategy hour terms and conditions apply. Need to hire. You need Indeed. If you sit there and you're still talking 20 minutes later, it's too complicated. One sentence, one sentence. This is your opportunity to pitch to someone completely outside of your industry and see if someone understands what you're trying to do and accomplish. Now, the first time you sell an offer, your sales page is going to be simple. You don't have a bucket of testimonials. You're just putting this out for the first time and that's okay. Being clear and concise, no frills. It is going to make people say I need this. Now. People are not worried about this beautifully branded fancy website. In fact, I have seen some of the ugliest digital products do the best because it wasn't about how they appeared, it was about the contents when you're writing the copy, which we'll talk more about messaging in a minute. But when you're writing the copy. I really need you to be focused on benefits, not features. It's not that you're going to get this other aspect of support or this other download or this other thing. I mean, yes, those deliverables are important and those deliverables help you identify. Have you delivered what they said they were buying? That's the checklist to say you gave it to them. But when we're talking about the actual sales process, we have to be focused on what it's going to do for them, not what it is. I don't care if it's three hours of video content, a hundred pages of copy, a PDF or da da da da da, it doesn't matter. I mean, again, not that you don't list those things out. You still have to share those features once in a very, very simple format. You don't have to say how long something is though, that I am a stern, stern believer on, but you need to get clear on what it's going to do for them. Having that one sentence that you were doing before is going to make this a whole heck of a lot easier. Then I want you to set a goal. Honestly, think about it as a threshold. If I sell this much, then I'm going to build the thing. If I sell less than this, I'm going to refund people or I'm going to try something else, or I'm going to swap it out for something else. Know what that is for you? I think it's best to aim for a number that feels reasonable for you. I would say no less than 5. I think 10 is a great number. To know that, like this is really sticky even with a small audience. Like you could have an audience of 50 and still sell 10 if that audience is warm and ready and this is truly serving a need for them. Once you've sold the product, then you can work on creating it. I recommend going through your full launch before you even start creating it and then give yourself a week to 10 days to deliver so you can pre sell bigger courses down the line, more signature offers down the line. That's a little bit different because you're going to be communicating in a different way. But for something like this, a digital product, you want to deliver it quickly. If you can't deliver it within a few days of the sale ending, then you've made the product too complicated or you're not selling it at a price high enough. Like this needs to be quick, it needs to be simple, it needs to be something you can get out into the world. Now, it's not quick because you're doing it a disservice. It's quick because you're not trying to change their whole life. You're trying to fix one thing. Now, earlier, when I said that it needs to make someone make sense to someone outside of your industry, I think a lot of people are like, but my audience isn't dumb. You're right, they're not. I am not suggesting that they couldn't understand your grand idea. The thing that you're so passionate about and so excited about. It's not to say that they won't get it, but they're distracted. They have a thousand things going on. They have notifications and their phone dings and people around them need things from them. And when you have clarity, it cuts through the noise. When they can just essentially glance at something and know they need it, then it's not something that they have to sit and question. If you're going to have to really get them on board, like, is this even a digital product? You shouldn't have to sell a digital product. A digital product should sell itself because all you're doing is simply sharing that you can help them with a problem. Then they're like, oh yeah, I need this. I think using something like ChatGPT can be such a huge game changer here. Now, I'm not saying ChatGPT is making your product. In fact, I don't love that. And not that you can't use it for part of it or to create a bonus or something like that do, but I think your genius is inside of you and you can use something like AI to pull it out of you. But I don't think AI should be creating it for you. Story for another day. But I do think if you write a sales page and you put the time and effort into that before you go posting it, go into something like ChatGPT and say you're an expert copywriter. You have X number of years of experience in this specific industry. You are well versed in my ideal client who is da da da da da da da. These are the kinds of problems they've been facing lately. This is the kind of solution I want to create. Here's a draft of my sales page. Quote, copy, paste it. Can you provide edits that would improve clarity and you know, ultimately allow my ideal client to better understand if this is a good fit for them. I promise you the insights you're going to get from a prompt like that will blow your mind. Like absolutely blow your mind. You can send it a single paragraph and ask AI to help make the copy more interesting to read, more vivid, more colorful, more playful. Change the tone. You can use AI as a tool to improve what you're already doing. Fantastic. But you don't need to use it as a crutch now. I've done quite a few backwards launches in my day. I have sold a lot of products before. I have built them and I love it. It's so, so, so, so much fun. Probably my favorite one in the last year or so was this time last year I had an idea to teach people how to do this. I wanted to teach people how to build a digital product. A no brainer offer that would allow them to use it as an entry point into the world so they could get paid to bring in leads. And I was like, this is going to be a game changer because ultimately this is the work I've been doing for a decade. I have 40,000 students, I have 368 digital products. Like I have sold millions in revenue. But I didn't make the offer, didn't build it until I sold it. And it wasn't because I didn't have a clear idea on what I wanted to create. I absolutely did. There are things I knew I wanted to include and was excited about including, but I wanted to get the right people in the door so I could tailor it even more to their specific needs. And digital product Jumpstart has been hugely successful, absolutely one of my top selling products in the last year. You can find out more about it@bossproject.com jumpstart if you're interested in me walking you through the process of building your first or next digital product, I would love to help. It was such a game changer and I can't tell you how much enthusiasm I had going into this because I was just like so excited, so excited to build it that when I was selling it I was sharing that excitement of putting the product together versus being in the weeds building the thing. It was just so fantastic. We had a very good launch and it absolutely changed the trajectory of the whole year. But I have taught a heck of a lot of people how to pre sell. In fact, I blocked over 8,000 people through how to pre sale inside of my one day launch challenge. So if you have not gone through that or if you recently participated, fantastic. But if you haven't gone through it, you can find out more@bossproject.com launch but I have walked people through what goes into a pre sale and one of my clients. Now this was a one on one client at the time but she pre sold her offer during her busy season. So she's actually an accountant. She does bookkeeping and taxes every year for her clients. So January, February, busiest time of her whole year because she's preparing tax records. But because she's so busy during that season it can be much harder for her to onboard new clients. And so she wanted to build a financial buffer and so she sold a product during her busy season that she knew that she could deliver immediately following her busy season and her buyers would be happy with that timeline. She would be happy with that timeline but it gave her the financial cushion. Now she did over ten grand on that launch. Anna man, she had her first hundred thousand dollar month going through my launch process and then had another hundred thousand dollar month a couple months later which is wild. So if you want to be able to like copy paste my launch process, the strategy, but also the scripts for various types of emails and social posts I do. You can find out more@bossproject.com box now I do want to call out the elephant in the room. What do you do if no one buys? What are you going to do? I want you to know that that's feedback all on its own and it's better that you know now than to find out after you've spent hours and hours or weeks or months creating something that no one wants. I know it'll burn, but I would much, much, much, much rather you have spent some time working through the idea, building a sales page and marketing it for it to not work than for you to go through the whole thing, build the whole product and then feel totally deflated on the back end. I hope you're feeling just about just as jazzed up as I am about launching backwards, because selling first is going to help reduce that risk. It's going to help you build clarity and ensure that the product you're offering solves a real problem. Plus, if you know it's going to pass the grandma test, it's going to help you refine your messaging even more so you can be crystal clear on communicating the kind of problem you are solving. If you've been hesitating to launch or if you've been putting off creating a digital product, use this strategy to validate your idea and gain confidence. I know, I know it's going to make such a massive difference. Now I want to know what's one idea that you could pre sell this week? DM me over at Abigail says, I would love to hear from you. My link is in my profile if you go to Boss Project on Instagram @Abigail says this link there and if you want a step by step guide to pre selling your digital product, I'm giving you my whole launch in a box. You can head to bossproject.com box to find out more. Next week I'm going to be diving into is it really possible to do this without a huge following? So make sure you're subscribed and come back next time. Hey, a few quick favors before you leave. I'd love if you'd share today's episode, send it to a friend who needs to hear it and post on social. You can show us where you're listening from, your favorite takeaway or why someone else should listen. Be sure to tag me, Abigail says and bossproject so we can share it. Okay. Second favor to get podcast updates and all the behind the scenes news from Boss Project, I'd love if you'd join my VIP list. Just head to bossproject.com signup to make sure I have all your contact details. Really love this show. It would mean so much to me if you'd leave a rating and review. It not only helps more listeners find the show, but allows us to bring on quality sponsors so we can keep bringing you this valuable content for free. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time.