Episode #042: How to Validate Your Idea With Paying Customers
How to Validate Your Idea With Paying Customers
Want to know how to get PAID to have amazing ideas?
In this episode I break down my process for coming up with amazing ideas, and then validating them through paying customers so you never create or build something before you get paid to KNOW that people want it!
When you tune in you'll learn:
My 7 step process for creating an IDEA that gets you paid
The importance of testing the waters before you do anything to sell a product
The simplicity of a presale page and how easy it can be to get paid
Tune into this weeks episode to learn more!
Links Mentioned on the Show From Zach:
Not Your Average Membership Use code PODCAST to get 30 Days for $30
Full Transcript:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast episode number 42. And in this episode, we're talking about how to validate an idea with paying customers before you put too much time and energy into creating something that won't sell. If you got the idea for a course, a program, a workshop, or anything you want to charge for, but you're nervous people won't pay, this episode is for you. So stay tuned.
Hey, hey, hey, not so average marketer. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. Now, I'm excited for this week's episode, because we're going to take you behind the scenes of an idea that we had for a training and kind of show you how we've been able to get some really awesome results just getting started with this idea and validate that people would actually buy it before we put too much time and effort into it. I think it's really important to understand that you can take the time to build out an offer. You can build your course, build your workshop, write your presentation. But if you don't make sure that people are willing to pay, what you're ultimately going to be doing is building something that may not land.
And that for me is something that I really want to be aware of. I really want to make sure that when I launch something, I know that it's going to get paying customers. Just to kind of set the stage, I am really excited partially because we're going to share with you something that we're in the process of doing, and that is launching a paid workshop. Just to set the stage, we have a paid workshop coming up that I'm calling The Leveraged Podcast Live, and The Leveraged Podcast Live is a two to two and a half hour workshop that I'm going to be hosting where I'm going to take you behind the scenes of how we've been able to take our podcast to over 400,000 downloads, leverage it into paying customers, and ultimately just see some really great results with our podcast.
I'm super stoked for this workshop because we've actually validated this idea. At the time that I'm recording this, about three or four days ago, we kind of floated this idea to our audience. Within the first three days of actually opening up the cart for sales, we've generated $500. We've got 20 people signed up for the workshop, $500. Our goal is a hundred to 150, and it looks like we're going to be pacing to do that. I'm very excited about this offer. The question becomes, how did we actually put this offer into the world, right? First things first, I always start a new idea with research. Okay? I have a customer's only Facebook group, and I have to give a shout out to Elizabeth Goddard, who has really been instrumental in helping us kind of think differently about a customer only Facebook group.
We've been doing more and more with it. But the customer only Facebook group is for people who have bought anything from me, whether it's a low ticket product, a high ticket product, it doesn't matter. If you've bought a product from me, you get to be in our customer only Facebook group. And that includes the class that we're launching right now. If you buy The Leveraged Podcast Live, you get to join our customer only Facebook group. We've got about 1,100 people in there. I always start when I want to come up with a new idea with a research phase, and I think this is a really overlooked part of the process. You don't need a massive audience to do this. You can have a small following on your Facebook profile or your Facebook page or your Instagram or in a group.
But I always start by asking, what are you working on right now? What are you struggling with? What do you need more support with? Every time that I do that, what I find is that my audience tells me what they're looking for. This is the key. We posted inside of our customer only Facebook group and essentially said, "Hey, if I could create an amazing resource for you, what is something that you would be interested in?" We had a couple people say like, "Hey, I'm working on a podcast. I would love to get some insight on how to grow a podcast." I said, "Oh my gosh, I love this idea." I am not the authority on podcast, but we've gotten over 400,000 downloads. I feel pretty confident that we could create a nice training about how we leverage our podcast into sales and growth in our business.
And so I put something together. And that moves us into the second phase, which is what I call ideation. Ideation is about taking what you've done with your research and just kind of coming up with your idea and start formulating how you want to present it. We kind of said like, how do we want to test this thing out? How do we want to put the idea of creating something around podcasting out into the world? What we came up with is that we want to do a live workshop. We kind of want to do a workshop. It's $25. I've got all the details now live. We'll talk about how I brought those details live, but we really just said like, "Let's do a live workshop and let's see if people like this." If people are interested and people want more, we can always make an offer on the back end of the workshop, right?
We can always share more opportunities to work with us or hire us or buy a course. But to get started, I love affordable, accessible live workshops. Now, the reason I like these is because it's very easy to get someone to commit 15, 20, 25, 30, $35 to come join me live and learn a topic that I've already researched my audience is interested in. One thing that I want to say is that you don't need thousands of people saying, "I want this thing," in your audience, right? Generally, the voice of one person represents the voice of dozens of people who aren't seeing your post or commenting on your post or engaging with your post.
There's just so much benefit to doing that research and ideation. Now, once I've kind of researched and ideated what I want to create, how I want to put it out into the world, then I do what I call testing the waters. What I do is I post on my Facebook and in my private Facebook community and I just tell them honestly what I'm thinking about doing. I'm going to read you the exact post that I posted. I said, "Our podcast has officially been downloaded over 400,000 times. It's not millions, but it's helped me make millions. If I did a podcast live training for under $30 on how we started, scaled, and managed to grow and leverage the podcast, would you want to attend? PS: This is merely an idea at this point to gauge out interest." And then I added a photo of the total number of downloads that we've generated with our podcast, right?
I just took a screenshot from our podcast host and I included how many downloads we've been able to generate. What happened was we got 20-ish comments in both places. We actually probably had closer to 30 comments, and I'm just kind of gauging out the interest. I'm watching to see, are people even interested? Are people considering this? Do people want to check this out, right? I'm doing that because I want to make sure that before I even put the work into create a slide deck or build a simple sales page, have I made sure that people are interested? I think the real key thing about testing the waters is that I notate that it's going to have a cost associated with it, right? In this case, I wasn't super decided on the price.
I knew I wanted it to be under 30 bucks, so I just said, "It'll be under $30. Are you interested?" We landed on 25. I like that number. I think it's accessible. It's simple. It works. But we landed on $25. Now, the second thing that I do... I shouldn't say second, because it's actually the fourth thing I do, right? The fourth thing that I do is I create a simple sales page. Now, I love ThriveCart for creating simple sales pages. I think it's really powerful what you can create in ThriveCart. We've got really good results using ThriveCart. What I love about ThriveCart is that you can actually build a page that has the checkout right on it, but is a miniature sales page. If you're interested, you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com/leveraged, and you can see the sales page that we created.
That's leveraged, L-E-V-E-R-A-G-E-D, so heartsoulhustle.com/leveraged, and you can see how we've created a really simple sales page for this. On that sales page, I just want to note a couple of things. First things first, I always talk about what my research has uncovered. My research uncovered that people are in one of two places. They're either looking to start their podcast, or they're looking to learn how to grow their podcast. For me, there's kind of in my mind a very healthy overlap here. Because if you're looking to grow your podcast or start your podcast, you still need to grow your audience, right? I said, "The Leveraged Podcast workshop is how we've generated 419,917 total podcast downloads and leveraged it into coaching clients, course sales, and more."
And then I just made a note, "That's the number of downloads we have as of August 22nd, 2022." Now, one thing that I've found in my research and my time online is that really specific headlines like that, where it's like how I generated 419,917 downloads, really, really work. People really connect with exactness. I created a headline that was really powerful, but then I also on this sales page did a couple of key things that I want you to know. It's not a really long sales page, but I did three really important things. Number one, I provided proof. We've never, to be completely candid, done a podcast training, right? I don't have social proof. I don't have testimonials that's like, "Zach helped me launch and grow my podcast."
I don't have that. However, what I do have is screenshots of my total downloads. I took my total downloads from my podcast host and I put a picture saying like, "These are the exact downloads that we have," right? The second thing I did is I talked about what's going to be in the workshop. I got really specific. I like to talk about five to six talking points on my sales page. I do six because I can do it in two rows of three, and I think it looks really visually appealing, but I talked about how to launch or relaunch your podcast, how to create great audio, how to grow your audience and show, how to come up with content ideas, how to generate revenue, and my favorite tools and software for recording.
The reason that I got specific with what I'm covering, again, I uncovered what people are looking for in my research, but I also made sure that they understand exactly what they're getting. Then I talk about FAQs, and I think that this is a very overlooked section of sales pages is FAQs. You should absolutely have FAQs. You don't have to call them FAQs, but you can just say, "Do you have other questions?" I do things like, when is the class? What's included? Will it be recorded? Is there a refund policy? How long is it? Is it right for me? How big should my list be? I just make sure that the things that I know people are going to ask me are answered.
Now, it doesn't mean that people won't still message me and say, "Hey, is it recorded," which is totally fine, but I always make sure to answer those questions that I know are going to come up, right? That's kind of what I do. I build out my presale page. Then what I do is I start my sales process. The easiest way to start your sales process before I email my list, before I do like a big grand announcement, I go back to those testing the water posts and I respond to every single comment individually. I don't just drop a link. I actually take the time to leave like a two, three, four word comment, right? I know it sounds silly. I'm not saying that you have to like write this dissertation to every person who commented, but I like to write a slightly different comment.
I'll be like, "Sweet! I'll see you there. So excited you're interested. Link. The training is now ready. Come check it out." I'm not necessarily like writing these long, drawn out sentences about why I'm so excited they're interested. But I think it adds just a human element to actually respond personally to each person. It takes a few extra minutes, but I just think if you're like, "Here's the link, here's the link. Here's the link. Here's the link," it's robotic and it's not personalized. As you know, this podcast is called the Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, and we want to do things that are not so average. We want to do things that other people aren't willing to do. You really want to make sure that you're creating an atmosphere where people are interested, right?
I create my presale. I build my interest, and now what I'm doing is I'm going to build interest within my audience outside of those posts. Now I start posting on my social media. For example, for The Leveraged Podcast, I posted on my Instagram Stories. I posted on my members only Facebook group with a direct call to action to join the group. I'm also going to make an event inside my members, only Facebook group for The Leveraged Podcast. I'm going to do all of these things just to continue to build that interest and get people signed up. Now, the reality is I've chosen a relatively niche topic, podcasting, so we may not get as many people signed up. It might take a little more energy and effort to promote it. But I know that this is something that would benefit my audience and I know it's something that's wanted.
We've gotten about, like I said, about 20 sales, $500 so far, with one email, the Facebook validation posts, my Instagram Stories, and the post inside my members only Facebook group. There's really only been four touchpoints of promotion and we've already generated 20 sales. The other thing is that at the time I'm recording this or the time you're listening, it's only August 24th, 25th, and our class isn't until September 8th. We have all the time in the world to kind of promote this, a couple weeks. Some people won't join because it's too far out. Some people will join because they're excited about getting in early. There's just so much we can do with this over the next couple weeks that I don't see any reason we couldn't hit a hundred to 150 people on the class.
Now, I kind of want to talk about what you do with your validated idea and kind of how to move people in. I've talked really about how to research, ideate, test the waters, create your presale, start generating interest. But then the last two things that I want to talk about are testing it and productizing it. Just to be really candid, this is where I fall a little bit short. I get excited and I move on to a new idea. But what you want to be thinking about is, how do I turn this into something that I can continue to sell? For me, the easiest way that I do this, and I have done this and we have sold, we've done this before with a membership workshop, we take the live class and we sell the recording. We'll sell the recording of the class.
We have that now as a permanent product that we can use in our business, right? It's really, really straightforward. It's really, really simple, but it's really, really powerful to be able to have something that you put the work in, you've grown, and now it's a product. The other thing that I want to say is if you are doing like a live workshop or a live training, you can also put an offer on the back end, right? Like with our podcast class, we will, full transparency, have an offer on the back end. We'll say like, "Hey, if you want to go deeper into podcasting, here's how you can do that." We're still, to be completely honest, formulating exactly what we want that offer to look like, because, just to reiterate what we talked about earlier, I'm not building out a full training or course until I knew that The Leveraged Podcast Live class had legs.
I'm always being mindful of where am I investing my time? Where am I investing my energy? Am I putting that into things that I know are going to lead to sales and growth of my business, right? I'm always starting by testing everything live. I do live workshops. I do live trainings. I do live boot camps, and then I productize them. What you'll notice if you were to look at our business from a really high level is that we have like our Facebook Ads Five Day Bootcamp, which we did live and is now productized in one of our funnels. We have our membership workshop. We did that live, and now it's productized in one of our promotions. We are now doing The Leveraged Podcast Live, and then afterwards, we'll productize it and put it on our website.
There's so much that you can do with your business and with your growth and with your audience if you just continue this process. The last little note that I want to leave you is that if you're thinking about doing this, realize that it's a replicatable, repeatable process. We've done this multiple times. We've researched our audience, come up with ideas, thrown the idea out to our social media. Once it's confirmed, we then start by creating the presale. We build interest within our audience, then we test it live and productize. This is a simple process that you can repeat over and over and over again. The good news is, we didn't really talk about this, but I want to throw it in here, is that if you test the waters and no one bites, it's not a big deal.
Because now you know I didn't have to go through all the steps of creating the presale, generating interest, doing it live, and productizing it to not get sales, right? You can start where you are and set yourself up for long-term success. That's what we do. That's what we're doing. I hope you got massive value from this episode. We are going to link everything that we talked about up in the show notes. You can check those out over at heartsoulhustle.com/nyap042. Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/nyap042 for Not Your Average Podcast episode 42.
I'll leave you with this. If you're thinking about launching something, try it out. See if it works. Test the waters. There's no harm in posting on social media and going, "Eh, that didn't land. I'm going to try something else." It works. It's incredible. You'll get great results if you follow this process in my experience. I hope you have an incredible rest of your week. And until next time, stay not so average.
