#234: How to Test your Product Idea Fast
Today, I’m talking about how to test your product idea fast. And I’ve got a story to tell you about this.
But before I launch into the episode, I have to say that we’ve been told the best way to grow our businesses is to give away our best content for free.
But what if there was an easy way to monetize what you know by setting up a paid workshop?
And what if I could show you how to start selling it in 15 minutes?
Come to my live training on July 21st at 12:00pm CT…
Table of Contents
“The Paid Workshop Launch Plan!”
Here’s what one attendee wrote after my last paid workshop training:
“Thank you Jillian, for the amazing info on how to set up a paid workshop. I am so excited to offer this to my audience and to start connecting with them.” —Carrie
My goal is to save you time, money, and energy, with simple set up and no complicated tech.
And by hosting a paid workshop, you get to build a stronger relationship with your audience.
If you are an artist, chef, coach, crafter, marketer, whatever your skill…
How is that not something you want?
At the end of the one-hour live Zoom training, you will know:
- Exactly WHAT TO TEACH and how to leave your audience wanting more!
- How to SET UP YOUR FREE SALES PAGE for maximum impact!
- How to MARKET, CREATE, and HOST your workshop effortlessly!
You will also leave with this added toolkit…
- Our FREE 14-Day Launch Calendar to give you daily tasks and all the templates you need to launch your workshop
- A FREE Canva presentation template to use for your workshop
- A FREE 1:1 strategy call with me to get direct feedback on your workshop!
(While we’d love you to show up live, if you can’t make it, no prob. I’ll be sending a link the live video afterwards.)
Isn’t it time you started building a new, powerful income stream on your terms?
And why am I charging $10?
Because you will show up differently if you pay. It will motivate you to move and create and grow! ?
Can’t wait to see you live on the 21st at noon CT! ❤️
If you sign up now, I’ve got a SPECIAL BONUS for you! It’ll be in your welcome email after purchase.
Show Notes:
- The Paid Workshop Live Training July 21st at 12:00pm CT
- MiloTreeCart
- Paid Workshop Idea Worksheet
- Join The Blogger Genius Newsletter
- MiloTree Pop-Up App
- Become a Blogger Genius Facebook Group
- All Blogger Genius Podcast Episodes
- MiloTree on TikTok
Subscribe to the Blogger Genius Podcast:
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to The Blogger Genius Podcast. I am your host, Jillian Leslie. And I’m a serial entrepreneur. I like to build businesses with my husband. And what I love is being a lifelong learner.
So I get to learn from my guests on my podcast. And as we build products, I’m learning constantly, and I’m trying to metabolize what I learned so that I can share it with you.
So right now, David, my husband and I have rolled out our new product that I’m super excited about called MiloTreeCart, it is a payment solution for selling digital products to your audience. So think of it as an easier to use and understand SamCart, ThriveCart, it’s much more cost effective.
Because we don’t charge a monthly fee, we only charge a small transaction fee, and we offer free hosted sales pages. So honestly, I think creators are going to be able to tap into new revenue streams easily with it. People asked me “Well, what exactly is a digital product?”
How to Test your Product Idea Fast
So if you’re wondering that here are some examples. A digital product is a paid workshop, a membership, courses, coaching, a paid newsletter, ebooks, digital art, templates, printables. All of those are digital products.
Now, as I am talking to creators, helping them one on one setup, digital products to sell, I am learning so much. So today, I wanted to share a story of one call that I had this week, that I thought was really interesting.
Why You Want to Do B- Level Work
But before I launch into the story, I want to give it some business context, one of the things that I talk about a lot is doing B- work, which is not A level work. It is it is good enough work. But it’s not just phoning it in, because B- is above average.
However it is work that gets stuff done. So I talk about this all the time. And I will say I get the most feedback on the concept of B- work seems to resonate with people, especially people like me who struggle with perfection.
Constantly Talk to Your Audience and Customers
And the other thing that I am constantly talking about is talking to your audience, like I’m going to share this conversation that I had because you gain insights. You hear where people are, and it gets you out of yourself, to empathize with somebody else to hear their own struggles.
And that way you can see where somebody is where they’re stuck, what transformation they’re looking for. And then you can put yourself in there in a way of saying I can help you with your own transformation. So that’s why getting on these calls has been so helpful.
And by the way, as a plug, if you want to work with me for free to set up a paid workshop, just reach out to me at jillian@milotree.com. And we’ll get on a call because this has been so enlightening, hopefully for the people I’m talking to and definitely for me.
You Need to Be Looking for Product-Market Fit
And then the third thing that I talk about a lot, is this idea that you need to come up with a hypothesis. But to be humble about that hypothesis, because you might be right, you might know exactly what your audience wants. And you also might be wrong.
And you know this because that weird kind of out of focus pin on Pinterest happens to be your number one pin, and you have no idea why. And that post on Instagram that you thought would blow up gets like crickets. So there’s this element of surprise.
When you’re an entrepreneur, you think you know, and chances are most of the time you might be right. But you will not know for sure. And this is why I talk about testing your ideas, testing your ideas.
But like how do you test your ideas? And how do you test your ideas fast? You know, the saying fail fast fail often? Well, it is really true. But it’s harder to do in real life than it sounds.
One of the reasons it’s difficult is because logistically, how are you putting these ideas out there? How are you going in front of your audience and selling them?
And then there’s also a personal part that’s hard. You put out something? And let’s say you’ve created a course and you put it out in front of your audience and it doesn’t sell that can feel incredibly demoralizing. So how do you deal with that failure?
I interviewed a CEO of a company founder of a company and he said for his company, if we are not failing a lot, we’re not pushing hard enough. We’re not trying things that are like pie in the sky, but could succeed. And I always think about that, like, that’s really brave.
But I don’t think I’m that brave, I think I would feel to devastated, demoralized rejected. So anyway, here’s my story.
A Story About Testing Your Product Idea
I was talking to this friend, and he is a blogger. And what’s interesting is he really is more, he’s in a variety of niches. They’re kind of related, but also they’re very separate. So I got on a call with him to help him set up his workshop.
And what he liked was using MiloTreeCart, it was really easy. We have sales page templates. And quickly, we were able to come up with an idea for him to sell and put together a sales page. And he was pretty impressed with how quickly this came together.
And he said, What was great about going through this exercise was it got me out of my thinking brain, and we were just able to go and put it up. Anyway, he goes out to his audience.
So we gave you a 14 Day Launch Calendar, where you can just follow this follow along, and we give you templates for email sales emails to send to your list and templates for social media posts. And literally, you can just go day by day. And he said that he went through this and it was super helpful.
But he got to the end, and he only had one sale.
When You Don’t Find Product-Market Fit
And I said, “Wow, how was that for you?”
And he said, at first it was a little painful. But because he hadn’t invested much he ended up reaching out to the woman and doing like a small consulting call. He was able to recognize that maybe this wasn’t what his audience wanted from him.
And he said that transition for him was the because he didn’t invest so much in his idea or building it out, it was easier to let go and easier to say, maybe this isn’t me. Maybe I’m just not connecting a solution to what my audience is looking for. And I thought that was really interesting. It is like to what he was able to do was take the personal out, this wasn’t a statement about his personhood.
This was a statement about not having it connect, the market is the ultimate arbiter. The market will tell you if you’re onto something. And guess what the market told him, this wasn’t the right idea. And I could hear this change in his voice when he started talking about it like that.
It was like he was able to kind of walk it off in a way that he hadn’t previously. Because then he shared that he had built out two courses that didn’t sell.
And that was demoralizing that somebody had said, Oh, I’d really like to learn this from you. And he went off. And he built a course. And I don’t know how long it took him. And then when he went back to the person or people to say, hey, here’s my course, nobody purchased it.
Warning: Do Not Create a Course!
And I say this all the time, please do not create courses, like unless you can pre sell them unless you can make them quickly. I will say I think it is. If it works, you are very, very lucky. But I have seen it fail too many times.
And if somebody finishes your course, like that is really shockingly rare. I think it’s like five to 15% of people ever will finish your course, which leaves a lot of disgruntled people, if you think about it.
In fact, I was on a call today with a woman and we were talking about the courses that we’ve purchased, where we didn’t complete them. And I bought a course for I was sharing this for like $37 I can email course. And I still have not completed it.
And my hunch is I won’t and I still feel unsettled about it. And it was $37 It makes me feel bad about myself, and I don’t want to purchase from this person again. And I kinda don’t want to follow this person anymore. Just because when I think about her, there’s nothing wrong with her. It wasn’t like I didn’t get duped but it leaves bad feeling.
So I just want you to know that courses seem like these awesome ideas, but they don’t sell themselves. They’re hard to make, and and they might leave a bad taste in somebody’s mouth, which is why again, I think this idea of a workshop is so much more potent and doable and possible.
Coming Up With Most Ideas to Test
So what happened was, he said, he said, you know, this was kind of freeing, because I usually teach in one of these three buckets. And maybe my audience just doesn’t want bucket number one. And maybe I need to be focusing on bucket number two, and bucket number three.
And now I can come up with an idea. And I can test those two. And I could feel this sense of lightness, because it wasn’t personal anymore. It was testing like two puzzle pieces to see if they fit together. And this is called in the business world, “product-market fit.”
And startups that raised lots of money, spend a ton of time trial and money trying to figure out how their product fits with what their audience might be looking for. And because we all don’t have those resources, we’ve got to be scrappier.
Go sign up for a MiloTreeCart account and start putting up sales pages. Get my 14 Day Launch Calendar. Start sending emails, and start seeing what connects with your audience. Because what you’re looking for is somebody to take out their credit card and pay. That’s it. That’s the market.
Examples of paid workshops people have had success with setting up with MiloTreeCart:
- How to make money working with brands
- How to jumpstart your native plant garden
- How to bake French baguettes if you’re a beginner
- How to give up sugar without feeling deprived
- How to use Instagram Reels for your busines
Now, what I wanted to also share is this idea when you are ideating. On what to teach, say, for paid workshop, which is where I recommend you start think about that we are humans. And we’re all kind of similar and motivated by very similar things.
Six Questions to Ask Yourself When Coming Up with a Digital Product Idea
Does your product make somebody money? We like money, we like making money. And I will spend to make money. So that’s the first one.
Does your product, save people money? Because I like to save money. And so if you can give me some solution that will save me money, especially to make up for whatever the cost is of your product, I will purchase it.
The third one is does your product save time make something easier? Something complicated, but you know, this is the hack or the trick or something like that?
Okay, the fourth question is, does your product move someone away from pain? Like think about it, you’ve got a painful shoulder. How much would you pay for somebody to fix that? Probably a lot of money. But it can be emotional pain, it can be I don’t know a messy desk that causes pain, whatever that that thing is, if you can solve that problem, a pain point for me, I will pay for it.
Does your product move you toward love? Like it will improve my relationship with my husband or my daughter? Or make it easier at work? For me? Who knows, but something where I will gain more love in my life? I will pay for that.
And then the last one is, does your product raise someone’s social status? So do you promise somebody more TikTok followers, we are these kind of hierarchical creatures. So is there a way that your product makes somebody look good in other people’s eyes.
So as you’re thinking about your solutions, if you can slot them into one of these six buckets, you’re onto something. However, I cannot promise you that it will sell, but I can promise you a free sales page, a free “Buy It Now” link, and email templates to go test it.
So that’s what I wanted to share with you guys today. Testing stuff in front of the market, which is your audience, is not personal. And the more times you can do it, the less personal it feels. So just to wrap up.
One B- work, really push yourself to press publish and on your blog post or post that TikTok, or send that email. Or come up with that product idea and put it out there.
Talk to your audience. Get them to talk to you. Again, even if it’s buying them a Starbucks gift card or something, just hear how they talk about, their struggles, because you want to listen, and you want to use their language, in anything you are writing in your copy. Feed it back to them.
It speaks to this idea of take yourself out of the picture, it is all about your audience, your customer, and helping them with their own transformation. So you paint the picture of what their life will look like, at the end of it after the transformation.
Give Your Audience a Tangible Win in Your Paid Workshop
So like in a paid workshop, one thing that I teach is, make sure to give your audience a tangible win. At the end of the paid workshop, it can be a small win, but it’s not that the workshop just stays abstract. It’s something that you can help them with so that when they leave, they feel like they have made progress.
And then the third thing I talk about, and I want to share, is this idea of testing. And if you cannot take it personally, when you test, you’re golden. Really, because you can then test idea after idea after idea to look for those puzzle pieces to fit together.
And my next tip is do not make a course it’s just too hard. It will take too long, it will make you think you’re working on your business. And at the end of it, you’ve got a course and now you’ve got to go sell it because it doesn’t sell itself.
Only five to 15% of your people are ever going to complete it. And that leaves a lot of people who will feel bad about themselves. And chances are won’t want to buy from you again. So really think about what is a better solution.
And this leaves me with my final tip, my hope for you is to make money and build the career and the business and life that you want that you’re hoping for. In fact, notice I am painting the picture of the transformation, see that?
Why You Want to Sell Digital Products Vs. Physical Products
So please start thinking about digital products. They are much easier to sell than physical products. If you know something, if you are an expert with a small “e,” you’ve got a digital product in you chances are you’ve got blog posts that already could be turned into workshops, or ebooks or anything like that.
Think about those six questions that I asked you to kind of filter your thoughts and ideas through. And then please head to milotreecart.com and sign up for your account and start putting your products up there.
And I’m very excited to announce that on July 21st at noon Central Time, I will be hosting a paid workshop called the Paid Workshop Launch Plan. I will be going through how easy it is to set up your own paid workshop and the cost is $10.
I welcome you all to come, and one of the bonuses for coming to the workshop, you get to book a free one-on-one strategy session with me, just to make sure you are on the right path. To sign up, head to launchplan.milotreecart.com. That’s launchplan.milotreecart.com.
I would love to see you there, put it in your calendar July 21 at noon, central time and I will see you here again next week.
