I just took on a brand new client, where I was told I would be selling a company’s flagship product.  When I left for the first day on the project, I got into the office, and asked to see the device.  There was an awkward silence…

It turns out, the product I was hired to sell didn’t exist.  This was my introduction into the startup world, and it seemed like an unmitigated disaster.

I wound up working with this client for several years, and learned a lot along the way.  It turns out that selling vaporware - that is, products that don’t exist at all – has some pretty nasty pitfalls, but also some amazing benefits.

If you’re thinking of launching a product, but aren’t quite ready to commit the resources to developing the product, then selling a non-existent product may be very appealing.  Having a product fail is incredibly expensive, isn’t it? That’s a lot of wasted effort and money.

There are many reasons to sell vaporware, but in startups, the main reason is product validation.  Incumbent companies have been known to use vaporware to stifle competition, but for the little guy its all about rapid learning.

Selling vaporware is a dangerous path to tread.  When you do it properly, a lot of knowledge and experience can be gained in a short period of time…but losing (or never having) focus can create catastrophic effects that ripple through the whole organization.

Fortunately, many of my early experiences selling vaporware went poorly.  I say this was fortunate, because I learned a lot hard lessons very early.

Lesson 1: Co-creating is better than pretending

When I started working with my first vaporware peddling client, I didn’t realize that the product didn’t exist.   The company had told collaborators and internal staff that the product existed, as well as customers and investors.

Looking back as my more experienced self, I probably should have ran for the hills, but I stuck through it and continued working to sell the product.

The motivation behind pretending a product exists is the misguided belief that customers avoid vaporware.  You may feel that the customer won’t buy something that can’t actually be delivered.  As a result, you put up a good front to pull the wool over the eyes of the buyer.

It’s true that people won’t write a check for $100,000 for a product that can’t be shipped, but they will write that check to co-create the product with you.  The catch is that it needs to solve a problem for them that they desperately need solving, that only you are committed to solving.  This is exactly what consultants do every day.

For example, in the preliminary stages of creating their vaporware, my client had over two decades of domain knowledge and conducted several key interviews with high value leads (buyers who could easily clear purchases for $200K-$300K).  They were able to put together a feature set that made these buyers hand over huge purchase orders, with gaped-mouth expressions, just waiting for delivery.

The product’s selling points were so strong that scores of potential customers were begging to give them money, submitting purchase orders and awaiting demonstrations.

But. because the product was never produced, sales staff would purposefully delay client meetings and sales calls because the client would expect demonstrations of the phantom product.  The sales process was delayed substantially, meaning that customer feedback and development was also hindered.  Customers couldn’t wrap their heads around the fact that a company would delay taking money for so long.

The main problem is that leads believed these products already existed.  Internal staff were informed that the estimated turnaround time for a new order was on the order of weeks.  Many orders were unfulfilled even after years of waiting.

So, how does the sales team stall a client for three years?  (Let me tell you, the excuse, “It’s still in manufacturing” loses its effect after a few months.)  Biding for time, they promise additional features to customers who still had not received their initial orders.  This kept the customers happy for a short while but it just compounded the problem.

Not only did these customers fail to get what they paid for, but even when the original delivery was ready, the feature set was falling short of new promises.  This caused even more of an R&D scramble (i.e. 100 hour weeks for the development team over several months) and customers were still unhappy because deliveries kept falling short of expectations.

Even with 100 hour work weeks, when the product finally existed the deliveries fell short of expectations because of the rushed nature, and constant game of catchup.

Needless to say, falling into this pitfall had severe negative consequences.  Simple questions between customers and staff become strained; customers relationships became incredibly difficult to maintain.

The solution here is dead simple – stop selling the product, and co-create it.  

As soon as the sales team stopped telling customers that the product existed, much more valuable feedback was generated.  New customer relationships were much less strained, and the dev team felt less pressure to release half-baked features.

Potential customers were now able to experience product demonstrations, except they were being called prototype demonstrations.  Feedback was flowing freely, because potential customers saw that they were encouraged to provide input.  The sales and engineering teams felt that a weight was lifted off of their shoulders because deadlines were no longer seen as a matter of life and death.

Customers love to create a product with you, but they hate to feel like they are being misled.  Telling a client that your product will be shipped next week, and not delivering it for three years will create irreparable trust issues.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, telling them that they are working with you to create a new product that may not be shipped for three years will put them in your corner, urging you along.

In most cases, co-creation also helps you minimize feature sets.  The small set of customers who are willing to spend a premium on co-creating will need only very specific features. This is a win/win, because it reduces the time to initial delivery (from years to months) and lets you expand your customer base more rapidly.

Lesson 2: Paying Customers Are Surprisingly Resilient

In the world of Amazon service and 2 day shipping, waiting weeks for your delivery probably sounds insane, let alone years.

Vaporware customers, however, are extremely resilient.  Counter-intuitively, the people who have already paid you for something are incredibly hard to disappoint.  The people who have paid you the most money are shockingly devout.

If you have told your vaporware customers they are co-creating the product, then they understand that there is a lot of idle time waiting for development. You can easily suppress status updates with the generic response, “We hit a snag in the development and are working through it”.  They will understand, so long as progress is being made over time and you keep them in the loop.

If, however, you told them that the product already exists, and stacked the deck against yourself, this gets more difficult.  The customer gets more frustrated and the relationship gets strained.  Regardless, these customers probably won’t abandon you.  Because they have given you money, they have shown a deep level of commitment to your company, and their beliefs about your product.

I still struggle to wrap my head around this freakish concept.  I have seen this on several occasions. Customers who have paid the most and experienced the longest delays have given the highest recommendations to their colleagues.  Then, their colleagues (who, also, have not received their product), provide more glowing recommendations.

Inversely, people who have paid the least tend to complain the most, flood you with support queries and request refunds that drain your time and energy.

Despite their resilience, don’t push the limits; be reasonable.  Missing deadlines is never an alternative to shipping on time.  It’s easy to miss deadlines on vaporware, but it’s infinitely better to ship on time and establish a solid relationship.

Whenever I have doubts about getting paying customers before pursuing a product idea, I always force myself to remember the resilience of paying customers.  As a result, I will be closing sales for new products well before they are created whenever I can.

Lesson 3: Pricing based on value, not development

The knee-jerk reaction to vaporware pricing is always to willingly underprice.  The logic is that the product doesn’t exist, so early adopters should get a price break.

I strongly disagree with this.  Pricing should always focus on the value the product will provide.

If you approached the customer on a relationship of co-creation, then it is conceivable that you can actually charge them a premium.  When co-creating, the customer is getting a custom product tailored to their exact needs.  To get that level of service from the competitor is usually not possible, and to have a private engineering firm take on the task would certainly result in a heavy fee.

Also, the highest paying customers tend to provide the most benefits.  They buy higher margin items, increase revenues by the greatest amount, tend to be the happiest, will give glowing recommendations and don’t ask for much support.

Since higher paying customers are the most beneficial, charging a high fee to early adopters will weed out the customers that hinder revenues and progress.

This is very counter-intuitive and can be psychologically hard to implement.  When the conversation shifts towards vaporware pricing, the decision-makers always want to undercharge, as if they are doing their future customers a service.

Avoid the trap. Generate a good relationship with your customer and propose a price based on the value that the customer would experience from your product.

To give a practical example, I am in the process of selling a handstand training course that hasn’t been fully developed.  I have analyzed the market and seen that a personal trainer can vary from $25/hour to $50/hour, and very few personal trainers can provide handstand training.  Additionally, similar products that provide slightly more value are selling in the $50-$150 range, but don’t specifically discuss the handstand in the level of depth that I will provide.  Similarly, home training materials can vary in price from $150 (P90X) to $400 (personal treadmill).

The value of an at-home fitness product tends to be in the range of $50 to $400.  Yet, I have spoken with people who are creating their first niche eBooks that provide massive value, and they expect to charge $2.99.

When pricing my product, it would be silly to provide this value for $2.99 (or worse, free), when the value to the customer is somewhere between $50 and $400.  When the product can deliver on its promise the value will be real and valuable.

Lesson 4: Know When to Quit

The main benefit of selling vaporware is that you aren’t spending time and resources developing a product that may not sell.  It defeats the purpose, though, if you continue waste resources on the sales and marketing of a product that hasn’t proved it can generate revenue.

After all, selling vaporware isn’t free.  Even if you are a solo entrepreneur bootstrapping your first product, you run the risk of throwing your time (and limited funds) down the drain.  You want to stop selling a worthless product as soon as possible.  Fail fast and try again.

This is actually a very easy trap to fall into, because vaporware is perceived as effortless and costless.  What’s the cost of having something in the catalog that never sells?  The answer is: a lot of f*!&ing money.

I have worked with teams where some products in the catalog didn’t generate a single sale for over six years. The products had become so stale, that when a request for the product came through, the engineering team realized they didn’t even have the means to make the product anymore.

Think about that for a second.  That’s six years of sales copy, brochures, marketing material, website design, meetings, discussions and musings about a product that was only interesting to one of thousands of potential customers in their market.  I can’t even begin to enumerate the wasted resources, but I speculate that the costs total hundreds of thousands of dollars…and that’s just wasted employee time.

Before you set out on selling any vaporware, set a goal with a deadline: “By the end of the quarter, we should have gotten a commitment/sale/purchase order from 10 customers for this product. If not, we will reexamine if it needs to exist in our catalog.”

Now, that doesn’t mean that every product that underperforms needs to be scrapped, but it needs to be reevaluated.  Maybe you didn’t sell it properly, or the price that you decided on was not appropriate.  By setting up timelines, deadlines, and goals, you force reconsideration of the product.  This will force you to decide if the product was a failure or success (rather than getting stuck in limbo).

Vaporware Simplifies Product Launches

Virtually no one understands selling non-existent products on the first try.

It’s counter-intuitive, and very few of us have sold or purchased vaporware before, leaving us at a disadvantage in understanding the pitfalls.

If you are looking to create new products, you should strongly consider selling vaporware to minimize development costs.  My practical, concrete recommendations would be:

1. Co-create the product
2. Devise pricing according to the end-product’s value
3. Aggressively pursue sales
4. Set a goal to know when to quit

To read more about my case studies, recommendations and experiments, you probably want to be on my mailing list.  If my emails don’t appeal to your taste, feel free to unsubscribe (or tell me what you’d rather read) at any time.

Byline: Hi, I’m Chris Salvato. I wrote this article based on my experiences working with startups, and selling products that don’t exist. I also apply this knowledge for savvy clients who need consulting on their sales and marketing process. If you want to talk more about selling products, send me an email.

For the past few months I have been reading a lot about email marketing and mailing lists, and how I could start incorporating email marketing techniques with our blog.  Given that we hadn’t tried email marketing just yet, this was totally new territory, so I decided to experiment with a new process.

Because I often hear how difficult it is to generate a new audience, I wanted to try and run these experiments without overly leveraging the credibility we had with our existing audience. This was done partly to prove a point, but mostly because I wanted to generate a completely new audience.

The Goal

I set out on this experiment to refine down product ideas to be sold on our blog and website.  I wanted to get an initial following and use that to build another amazing product, without spending any money.

I didn’t feel like flailing around and building something, hoping people would buy it, so I figured getting 1000 subscribers interested in some product would be a good place to start.

I was successful, breaking 1000 subscribers after 14 days of the initial setup of the email list.  The list was established about 30 days after deciding to undertake the task, bringing the total time to 44 days. I am now actively developing my first product for this market.

What I Did

Below are the broad, generalized steps that I took to hit my goal and generate a new audience.

1. Appeal to a broad audience
2. Refine the Audience
3. Introduce Scarcity

Appeal to a Broad Audience

Past experience has shown me that its easiest to generate a new audience by identifying what I call a middle-niche.  A middle-nich is a subset of a huge community that is still quite broad.  For example, you may want to reach out to Consultants.  Instead, you might have better luck targeting Sales Consultants first as a middle-niche. (To take this one step further, if you reach out to Sales Consultants in Florida, that would be a fine-niche).

Since much of my expertise lies in the fitness community, I decided to approach a middle-niche fitness community – bodyweight fitness enthusiasts. I could have just as easily approached the engineering, medical device, programming or marketing community since I have expertise in these areas as well.  Approaching the basket weaving community or home security community, however, would have been worthless, since I have no experience in these areas.

It only makes sense to approach communities where you have deep expertise.  Readers are always looking for value, and if you don’t have deep expertise, then there is likely very little value that you can add for your readers.

I have a lot of experience in using bodyweight workouts while traveling, so I was playing to my strengths and not arbitrarily picking a topic that I thought was profitable.  I’m a firm believer that you should always play to your strengths.

Once I knew the community I was targeting, I wrote 4 different articles all along a similar theme – bodyweight fitness while traveling. Having a theme to the articles would give a sense of continuity. If it got a huge following, I would easily be able to expand into something long term.

The articles that I wrote appealed to different aspects of traveling workouts. The titles were as follows:

• The 1-Minute Handstand
• 23 Key Workouts for Strength Training While Traveling
• Getting Started with Your First Portable Bodyweight Routine
• 5 Techniques to Staying Motivated and Committed While Traveling

If you are going to put something out there, it needs to add value to the world and be respectable, or your effort is worthless.

After writing the articles, I set them up on the blog to be released one at a time, week after week, with a callout at the top explaining that people who liked this article could sign up for a newsletter to receive more information about this topic.

The signup callout used at the top of each article

As soon as the first article was launched, I made an announcement on various subreddits (upon which I never posted in the past), and answered questions in the comments.  All traffic to the articles was measured with Google Analytics.

Each article was analyzed for the first-weeks readership, and average readership over time.  At the time, I was only looking at 1-Week Pageviews because I wanted to move quick and didn’t want to wait for a month’s worth of statistics.  Before you gather the entire town to persecute me with torches and pitchforks, though, it turns out that 1-Week Pageviews can be a pretty good indicator of 28-Day behavior as shown in the chart below.  Whew!

Statistics for the first set of articles when generating my new audience.

After the fourth article was released, I looked back at the stats and the 1-Minute handstand was the clear winner in terms of these metrics.   Not surprisingly, it also happened to get the most upvotes and comments on various subreddits.  My email list was happily building; gathering the names of people interested in my middle-niche topic.

After four weekly articles, only announcing on Reddit, I had about 200 subscribers.  Even if you aren’t impressed by that, it was a solid start.

Bodyweight Fitness for Travelers subscriptions after 4 weeks.

Refine The Audience

Now that I knew which material was performing the best in my short test (The 1-Minute Handstand), I made sure it wasn’t a fluke and released a second article elaborating on the same topic, and using a similar subject line - The 10-Second Freestanding Handstand.

The 1-Week results were similar to the previous article in the series, so I decided to take it to the next level, and build on the handstand niche more thoroughly.

Statistics for the 10-Second Freestanding Handstand Article

(You are likely shouting at your computer screen now, cursing my previous assertion that 1-Week stats are indicative of 28-day performance.  Sometimes generalizations aren’t true, but the end result here was the same.)

If you’re the thinking-ahead type, you may have realized that my refining process means that I am creating a fine-niche from my middle-niche.  Since I identified a fine-niche (bodyweight fitness enthusiasts interested in learning the handstand), I created a second email list for the refined audience and created a 4-week Automated email campaign.  I called it a Handstand Course.

The four week email program would give people weekly instruction on where they should be in a 4-week program, and how to advance in their handstands.  The people who sign up now are seeing that they get immediate value from the list.  Rather than a nebulous claim that they will just “get alerts” or “more information”, they get something concrete – 4 weeks of material targeted towards a single goal.

After creating the necessary written materials, I set my blog to release one new installment per week.  Each installment was announced on Reddit and through email campaigns. This is where I realized one key aspect of reddit marketing that will likely shock you: upvotes don’t matter.

My posts announcing the email list were #1 on various subreddits, presumably because of their high traffic, but they were getting mixed reviews. The image below was taken from my reddit post on /r/fitness.

Notice the low amount of up votes, and comparably high down votes.  The thread only had two comments.  Yet, this post was where a majority of the signup traffic originated.

I was even getting complaints from some people (“Why do you need my email address?!”), but you have to realize that there are a lot of squeaky wheels on Reddit, and most of them don’t matter.  One lesson I learned the hard way is to just ignore negative comments all together, since no good can come of them.

In the end, I stuck by the metric I originally identified (email signups), rather than focusing on positive comments and upvotes.

It just drives the point home on the necessity for pre-meditated goals based on performance metrics. You don’t want to get caught up in negativity or hype.  I assure you, negative people and comments are worthless to you.  They will never buy your product, nor be interested in your material.  The people who do matter don’t usually comment if there are negative comments around, probably because they don’t want to be seen as an outcast.

Within two weeks of announcing the course, I had 450 subscribers to my fine-niche list.  Now we’re getting somewhere.

NB: Aside from the announcements, I also put callouts on top of the The 1-Minute Handstand and The 10-Second Freestanding Handstand linking to the course signup form on MailChimp.  I also set up auto responders on MailChimp to send out the weekly articles once per week to all new subscribers on a pre-set schedule.

Callout used on articles promoting the Handstand Course.

Screenshot showing 447 newsletter subscribers that signed up within the first 2 weeks.

To recap, up until now, my experiment has shown me that I have a topic people want to hear more about. They are actively reading the articles and are signing up to get more information.

While 450 people exceeded my goal, I wanted to see if we can get to 1000.  With a conversion rate of 2%, I should be able to convert 20 of those people to paying customers.  A 2% conversion rate is the low end of the internet marketing average in the fitness industry, and 20 people as paying customers is a good start for any product.

Since I want to revamp the materials anyway, I decided to do test the waters by introducing scarcity.  It would be interesting to see how many more subscriptions I would get if I were to remove the materials from the web entirely.  I was excited to see the results of a practical application of loss-aversion and scarcity mentality.

Introduce Scarcity (or, How I Increased My Email Subscribers by 100% Overnight)

On January 14, I announced the course.  On January 28, I announced that the course would no longer exist.  To refresh your memory, in the first 14 days of announcing the course, because of my previous legwork, I had 450 subscribers.

By simply making an announcement on Reddit that the material would no longer exist, I increased the count by 100% in 24 hours.  I exactly doubled my numbers.

Another shot of the newsletter signups, but this time within 24 hours after introducing scarcity.

NB: MailChimp has a somewhat funny way of generating these segments.  This shows all people who signed up between 1/28/2013 and 1/29/2013.  This is slightly longer than 24 hours, because I announced the removal of the material in the middle of the day on 1/28/2013.

In the weeks that followed, with no additional promotion, people have continued to sign up for the email list.  The current subscriber count is steadily increasing.

Getting into the heads of my subscribers

The whole point of this was to get an audience to design and launch a product.  To do that, I probed for more information, identifying what this audience will buy from me.  You need to get into the head of your audience and find what brings value to their lives.

Based on the popularity of the articles and the course, I am operating on the conclusion that people want access to handstand learning materials that will teach them how to safely and effectively work towards their first handstand hold.

Knowing that the people on my list want to learn handstands, I set out to figure out who they are and why they want to learn handstands.  This step helps you to formulate sales copy for landing pages, content marketing (blog posts) and email newsletters.  By understanding the audience and demographic, you can write specifically for them in all of your content.

I launched a free survey using Survey Monkey and sent it out to everyone on the email list, appealing for their help, using an A/B Split Campaign on MailChimp.  By keeping my survey simple and to the point, I got over 150 replies (or 15% of my list at the time, which is a great response rate for a free fitness email list).

From these surveys, I found out that over 80% of my users are between 18-35 and Male.  That’s valuable! I can probably reference video games and drop F-bombs in my blog posts from time-to-time, and talk about Spartans, Ninjas and Star Wars.

In the survey, I also asked the question “Why do you want to learn handstands?” and left this as an open ended question.  Open ended questions are fantastic when you are looking to identify the key words, phrases and themes that regularly go through your audience’s daily thought process.  Granted, you will want to encourage respondents to keep it simple.  People hate thinking too much on forms, and knowing that they don’t need to think too hard can be a great comfort.

Without going into gory details, I saw a lot of people mention that handstands “look cool” and that they are an “awesome thing” that would be “impressive”.  I also saw quite a few people who wanted to “get stronger”, so my product needs to cater to those visceral desires.  You always need to know the customer’s desires so that you can appeal to them.

Leveraging My Audience

Once I had an idea of my audience and their deepest desire for handstands. I used all of this information to create a first pass at a short eBook on the topic of learning to handstand and leveraged my mailing list again.  I reached out to about a dozen of the most engaged people on the email list and sent them a copy of the new handstand eBook I created, and gathered feedback.  They all seemed incredibly exited about the new material.  One happened to be an english teacher, and edited all of grammar and spelling (something that is desperately needed in all of my writing.)

While the product isn’t released yet, I am confident about it’s success.  One of the readers of the pre-release eBook had the following comment for me:

Keep working at it, you have a good thing going.  Looking forward to seeing what comes of it.

While that comment is a great indicator that I am on the right track, successful product launches don’t come from encouraging words. My audience has been growing quickly and steadily.  That is likely be a better indicator of success.

Next Steps and Summing Up

The next step is to introduce my product to my audience.  If I hit my sales goal, then I can reinvest the funds into the product to make it even better (adding video/audio, releasing a more extensive book, etc.).  If I don’t hit my sales goal, I haven’t hit on the right pain point for this audience, and its back to the drawing board.

If you are looking for rock solid recommendations on generating an audience for a new product, or having your business reach out to a new audience, I would start with a middle-niche, and put out feelers for topics of interest.  You may just be surprised with what you find.  I didn’t think there was room in the market for handstand teaching material, but the data supports otherwise.  We’ll see how it goes!

To read more about my case studies, recommendations and experiments, you probably want to be on my mailing list.  If my emails don’t appeal to your taste, feel free to unsubscribe (or tell me what you’d rather read) at any time.

Byline: Hi, I’m Chris Salvato. I wrote this article based on my experiences at Eat. Move. Improve. creating audiences for bodyweight fitness products, and helping people online. I also apply this knowledge for savvy clients who need consulting on their sales and marketing process. If you want to talk more about selling products, send me an email.

“Think hard about what you do. Look closely at everything you do. There are probably by-product opportunities everywhere.” -Jason Fried, 37 Signals

Hi, I’m Chris Salvato and this is the story of how my partner and I generated a significant sum of money from our side business, starting in 2011.  This article is quite long (4000+ words), and filled with practical advice and our first hand experiences in the trenches.  From these experiences, I created a simple formula that I am now reusing for my next product with confidence, and I want to share that process with you.

If you are entrepreneur looking to create a new product, then this article is for you, particularly if you are interested in creating info products.  There are also some great practical tips if you are interested in starting a company, looking to generate your first evangelists in your market, and to be considered an expert in your field.

A lot of this writing comes from my frustration in reading about Customer Development and how to generate the initial sales of new products.  Despite my experience selling non-existent and new products for the better half of a decade, the advice still wasn’t clicking.  I felt like there was some code to unlock that I was missing.  Everything I read felt nebulous and difficult to understand.

How do you know what products are worth selling, for example?

Even with years of sales experience, I felt like I had a huge checklist, with no strategies.

The funny thing is, I took a look back at the accomplishments of my small blog, Eat. Move. Improve., and realized I already had a very successful stint through the customer development cycle — without even trying.

If you are interested in how two guys and a $60/year hosting plan turned into $200K and want practical advice on reaching that point, then read on. I did my best to analyze our experiences and break it down our formula for success.

Some Backstory

Our biggest accomplishment is Overcoming Gravity, a bodyweight fitness book published on Amazon’s self-publishing service, CreateSpace.

We started our website a few years back. Originally we planned to generate revenue through advertising.  After several months, we saw that we were maxing out at $50/month of AdSense revenue – and the advertisements were embarrassing (“Lose 10 Pounds in 2 Days!”).  We experimented using Amazon Affiliations, which were a bit better, but still only generated about $200/month.  Taking home $100 (before taxes) was a nice side-income, but not really interesting.

Then we released a book, and revenues skyrocketed.

We never set out to release a book or any product at all.  Over time, however, it become an almost obvious step to take.

We launched the book in November 2011, and have cultivated sales into thousands of units sold.

The Formula

I examined what we did systematically, and was able to break it down into 4 key actions that enabled us to release a well respected book, with impressive revenue.  Here is the formula that I derived from our experience.

1. Answer Questions
2. Identify a Profitable Topic
3. Create a Top Notch Product
4. Increase Profits

 1. Answer Questions

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” - Benjamin Franklin

In 2009, my partner and I were posting on a lot of the same internet forums, which is how we met and forged a relationship. (Interestingly, to this date, our relationship is conducted almost entirely online.  We only met in person twice.)

We were answering hard questions for people in fitness forums (our area of expertise).  We helped them improve their health and wellness by hitting impressive fitness goals (like a one-armed chin-up, and their first 300-400+ lbs. squat).

We loved doing it – and still do.  If you go this route, you should love the information you are providing, too.

Do you love providing advice that can be generalized to help many people?

We saw some inefficiency in answering the same questions all of the time.  It didn’t take long for us to see patterns.  Certain questions (“How do I start eating right?” and “How can I hit my first muscle up?”) cropped up all the time, and we made copy/paste answers for these posts.

We didn’t realize it, but we had an audience and we were getting deep into their heads.

We decided to streamline this advice-giving process a bit.  Our plan wasn’t well defined, but it was just a side hobby, anyway.

This is where we created our blog, Eat. Move. Improve.  We wrote articles that directly answered the questions we saw repeatedly on the forums.

Are you answering the same questions over and over again?  Are you willing to turn these questions into a blog?

Sidenote: If you are trying to recreate our success, then you should also consider setting up an email newsletter when you set up your web site.  It is incredibly effective at keeping people informed of new articles and product releases.  We never did this, and I regret it.

2. Identify a Profitable Topic

“Creating demand is hard. Filling demand is easier. Don’t create a product, then seek someone to sell it to. Find a market – define your customers – then find or develop a product for them.” - Timothy Ferris, Author of The 4-Hour Workweek

Some articles were getting a disproportionate amount of traffic.  No surprise here if you have read the 80/20 Principle by Robert Koch, but we realized this almost accidentally.

It turns out that most readers prefer longer and more detailed posts.  This is corroborated by Neil Patel, who recently stated in a webcast that 2000+ words is the target length for a useful blog post.

If you don’t believe me (or Neil), Google any interesting topic and look at the top hit. Chances are, the first page is filled with 2000+ word articles.   Look at the post you are reading right now.  I am presuming you’re intrigued and engaged if you read this far through.  This post is huge.

Are your blog posts long enough to be noteworthy?

We continued using our posts to answer questions on the forums where we had become so valuable.  For example, a typical exchange may look something like this:

Q: “Can you critique my workout routine?”
A: “<provide critique> … but you may also want to read this article for more info <URL here>”

Our posts weren’t deleted or moderated because we were actually answering questions and providing value – not just spamming our latest articles.

Once we knew what people enjoyed, traffic had taken off in positive a feedback loop.  We looked over the most popular posts on our site.  One post in particular attracted nearly 80% of our readers and time-on-site: The Fundamentals of Bodyweight Strength Training.  

Are you actively promoting your most popular material? 

We continued launching other articles, but very few of them took off in the same way as The Fundamentals of Bodyweight Strength Training.  

Sustained traffic is a serious indicator of an engaged and profitable audience.  Another good indicator is getting to page 1 on Google for a generally vague term like, “Bodyweight Strength”, “1-Minute Handstand” or “Tendonitis”, (of which we are #1 for each without any attention to SEO).

We satisfied both of these criteria.  Now we had a profitable topic.

But what about the competition?  And why should people trust us, anyway?

To put it bluntly, the competition doesn’t matter.

We took into account that the other materials that were out there on the same topic were horribly made, but, again, it didn’t really matter.  We had our own audience, who respect what we have to say.  We were answering questions for years, so we already had their trust.  People wanted to hear the opinions in our book.  Chances are, they would be reading the competitions’ books, anyway.

In a nutshell, people liked what they were reading and wanted more information…from us.

This is the same strategy applied by Alan Weiss, the Million Dollar Consultant, and how he turns general advice into high priced courses and info products.  Alan charges $495 just to join his forum!  People will pay once you have their respect – and usually pay a premium.

Is there any information that you are giving away for free that can be turned into a book?  Do your readers love and trust you?  If not, answer their questions better. Get them results.

3. Create a Top Notch Product

“Don’t worry about being a star, worry about doing good work, and all that will come to you. ” – Ice Cube

The Fundamentals of Bodyweight Strength Training article was originally launched in March 2010, and the book, Overcoming Gravity, took 18+ months to create.  Looking back, 18+ months was probably too long, but it shipped.  And shipping is always better than not shipping.

The Two Parts of Making a Top Notch Product

From this experience, and a metric ton of reading material, I postulate that there are only two main components of creating a Top Notch product:

1. Solve a problem
2. Validate that people will pay for your solution

A. Solve a problem

This is what some people call the value proposition.  My partner was always incredibly passionate about releasing the book with as high of a quality as possible.

This is the only part that truly matters.

I would say that the book was done at about the 6 month mark, though we waited a total of 18 months before the product was released.  There was a lot of “clean up” that wound up not being worth the time invested.  After the “clean up” period (where friends read through the book for editing mistakes), we still had a pretty badly edited book – and it was a success anyway.

So, how could we have been just as successful releasing a book riddled with errors and editing mistakes that is still considered a Top Notch product?

That’s because, generally speaking, your customers won’t give a crap about editing mistakes.

Let me repeat that: Your customers won’t give a crap about mistakes.

This is the same if you are releasing a software product.  If there are bugs or bad design, people just don’t care so long as you solve their problem.

Some people will complain, but people are more concerned that you are solving their problem, and answering their questions.  Customers are extremely tolerant of bad spelling and grammar because you are actively solving their problem.  (I suppose you are tolerating my bad spelling and grammar, as well?)

If you sell software, you have probably been shocked at the amount of bugs a user will tolerate so long as it is solving their problem.

Are you focusing too much on the details?  Or are you simply solving their problem?

Top Notch doesn’t mean well designed, well edited or pretty.  It means that you solve their problem when no-one else could, you get them on the right track, they love you for helping them and they respect you.

Your value proposition is hard for them to ignore.  In our case, the value proposition is that we will make you an expert on training bodyweight strength skills.  If people didn’t like this value prop, they wouldn’t have purchased at all to see all of the editing mistakes.

B. Validate that people will pay for your solution

The simplest way to validate your product is to release it, and see if people buy it.  Asking people if they will buy something is generally pretty useless, so to put this to the test.  Release, announce and check for a sale.

In retrospect, we should have set a clear goal for initial sales. I think we thought it would fail, so we didn’t plan too far ahead. But, it was hard to ignore hundreds of sales within the first 6 weeks.  In the future, on new products, we will always have a goal.

For what it’s worth, it was only recently that I read an article about book sales, where it was stated that 7500 to 8500 units sold was considered a successful niche book. If an info product is your goal, I would suggest a sales target of 50-500 sales within the first six weeks, depending on the unit price.

If you hit on the right topic, pain point and quality level, you will see at least some sales within the first 6 weeks. If not, you’re doing something wrong.

As a small side note, if you don’t have the drive to figure out what you have done wrong, then that product is not for you or your company. I know, that sounds obvious, but if you or your salespeople don’t have the passion to fix the problem with poor sales, then just forget the product all together.

I have worked for a few companies as a salesperson and helped dozens of others and that is the first sign that a product is not a good fit for you – when you just have no desire to sell it.

Are you passionate enough about the product you are creating to figure out why sales are abysmal if things don’t go according to plan?

4. Increase Profits

“What matters is having forward momentum and a tight fact-based data/metrics feedback loop …” - Steve Blank, Author of 4 Steps to the Epiphany

After the product starts bringing in some cash its gets a lot more fun for business-minded people like me.  If you’re the kind of person who just likes to solve the problem, and not care about sales, this can turn into a major roadblock/headache.

The headache is caused because the focus shifts to sales, not solving the original problems you love.  This can make identifying the next steps difficult, and sales may stagnate.

But, there are really only two ways you can go from here: (1) increase sales and (2) decrease cost per sale.

Increase Sales

You shouldn’t even think about increasing sales until you are generating sales.  Your value proposition – the problem you are solving – should speak for itself and generating respectable revenues on its own.

Once you are generating sales, though, you can aggressively tackle optimizing your sales process.

Make Sure You’re Ready for Sales Optimization (aka A/B Testing isn’t for everybody)

For small companies, sales optimization may not even be necessary.  In our case, we haven’t yet optimized our sales, though I have prepared myself for this undertaking once we are ready to take on the challenge.

To reiterate, you shouldn’t even think about optimizing your sales until your product is already valuable and interesting. Some misguided souls jump right into optimizing sales head first. Contrary to popular opinion, where everyone seems gaga for metrics funnels and A/B testing, optimizing sales is NOT the biggest priority until you are already generating sales.

If you A/B test too soon because you read that A/B tests can increase conversions by 5%, then you will be working to increase a small number by 5%, which is just another small number. You will likely be spending more on your analytics tools than you are generating in sales.

Instead, focus on getting your first ten 5-star reviews/testimonials; reviews and testimonials are great indicator that people find your work valuable.  You should only look to increase significant sales numbers, generated by an awesome value proposition.

Be honest, have you recently thought about A/B testing something before you even know what you were selling?

I know this sounds self-evident, but I fell into this trap myself.

I recently released a product called Search Word Creator, when I fell into the A/B Testing and metrics analysis hype.  It’s remarkably similar to another successful product, Bingo Card Creator, where I originally got the idea.

Even with 160K+ Google searches for “Search Word Creator”, and an awesome funnel tracking setup, I was already thinking about my tenth A/B test.  Then I realized, even when I was buying my traffic, I was only getting about 70 hits a day, and my users weren’t coming back.

My value proposition wasn’t very good, and I was still wasting a ton of time thinking about the best way to implement A/B tests.

Advanced metrics, funnels, A/B tests and SEO are just not necessary for new products.  Get interest and sales first, then worry about your A/B testing and metrics analysis.

Are you still wasting your time thinking about how to A/B test a product that people don’t even care about?

Setting up your first sales process

Since I have done this a few times now, I could write a whole volume on setting up an initial sales process, but I won’t delve into that here.  At this stage, its not really relevant, since you likely still need to find the product that is validated.

Simply put, you cannot formally focus on increasing sales without having a well defined sales process.  You can perform sales-related tasks like social media marketing, material promotion and even call people directly.  Sure, these activities may increase sales…but they may not.  To get a big win, you need to set goals and take measurements – you need a process.

Low Touch Sales Process

For most info-products that are under $1000 (or $1000/year), you can focus entirely on what’s called a low-touch sales process.  This means that you don’t interact with the customer very heavily.  Rather, you passively analyze how they are interacting with your site/promotional material, and make sure that you are properly setting the stage for them to give you their money with very little interaction.

To keep it short and sweet (the juicy details are outside of the scope of this article), a low-touch sales process involves identifying a consumer’s current state of mind and catering to that state of mind with the right information and calls to action.  You want to set up a series of small “yesses”, “sounds goods” and “that’s interestings”.  You do that by setting goals and systematically achieving them one by one.

For example, if you want more new eyes on the product, you can first set up what is called an Acquisition Funnel, where you look at all new/unique visitors and see how your landing pages and websites ultimately result in more reading and repeat visits.  You may set a goal to increase unique visitors by 10% when compared to the baseline through increased SEO efforts, social media and advertising campaigns.

To track and optimize these funnels with minimal effort and maximal results, you will need to invest in some tools.  If you are already generating sales, these services will easily pay for themselves as they drive up the total number of units sold. They include:

• Metrics/Funnel Tracking - use KISSMetrics or Mixpanel
• A/B Testing - Visual Website Optimizer or Optimizely
• Content Consumption Heat Maps - CrazyEgg

Are you considering A/B testing, advertising, metrics analysis and SEO at this stage, just in time, and not too early?

Remember, the whole point of using these tools and creating these processes is so that you can optimally turn interest into sales.  Interest should already be generated and validated (i.e. generating significant sales) before you even start thinking about sales optimization strategies.

High Touch Sales Process

If your product costs over $1000 (or $1000/year), you may need to consider a high-touch sales approach.  High-touch is also sometimes called “Direct Sales” where you interact regularly with the customer (and potential leads).  This normally entails generating a relationship, phone contacts, and answering unique questions.

Most info-products don’t fall into this sort of sales process, so the details here fall slightly outside of the scope of this article.

Decrease Cost Per Sale

To decrease the cost per sale, you must reduce the amount of money you lose from every sale.  For example, we used Amazon exclusively for the first 18 months of sales.  Because of the nature of Amazon and CreateSpace, we took home only a fraction of gross revenue for each sale.

As such, launching on Amazon, as opposed to launching a PDF meant that we had a very high cost per sale.  Despite these costs, using Amazon is a great way to validate your first info product.  You can always maximize profits later, once you know that the product is a hit, and that your value proposition is valid and worthwhile.

To be more specific, Amazon presents some distinct advantages…

Easy to Create Print-Only Books

Launching a print-only book on Amazon makes it unavailable to any sort of digital format.  In our case, Overcoming Gravity is over 500 pages long did not lend itself to piracy.  We enjoyed a pirate-free launch for well over a year before a master copy of the files were somehow illegally obtained from CreateSpace.

Piracy is inevitable in a wildly successful info product.  Be warned.  To avoid piracy, you need to either plan to stay very small or take strong pro-active steps to avoid it, like flooding torrent sites and FilesTube with fake uploads to deter users, but that is a topic for a different post all together.

Is your product at risk for fast piracy?

Instant Credibility

Amazon gives you instant credibility, which may or may not apply to your market.  For a fitness product, credibility is crucial.

For many people, when they see you on Amazon, they just get the feeling that this is a real product that was made by a team of professionals, even though many products on Amazon are far from it.

Because of our self-promotion, we were able to stay at the top of the list for best-selling Gymnastics books on Amazon, which means that we potentially increased sales organically by being exposed to consumers interested in gymnastics books.

My partner personally advised several of our customers after their purchases, which helped to seed the pot with dozens of 5-star reviews, bolstering our credibility.  People really trust Amazon reviews – much more than testimonials you plaster all over your own self-serving sales pages.

Does your audience love and trust you unconditionally? 

Awesome Distribution

Amazon takes care of a lot of the distribution for you.  You just sit back and let sales roll in, and not worry about setting up shipping/fulfillment systems or processing orders yourself.

Don’t underestimate how awesome it is not to worry about distribution at all for a product that is undergoing validation.  You don’t want to be thinking about distribution, order processing, optimizing sales pages, fulfillment and shipping (if applicable), when you are just getting the feelers out on if a product is even viable.

Do you have the patience/time to figure out how to set up distribution and fulfillment of print or digital books? 

Risk Free

Fourthly, there was literally no risk.  You write the book and upload it to Amazon.  If it sells one copy, you are immediately profitable, even if your margin is sub-optimal.

If the book doesn’t sell, you aren’t in debt since you didn’t invest any money into an online store.  Don’t forget, an online store can cost hundreds to thousands depending on your initial conditions and expectations.  Working with Amazon eliminates the pressure of feeling like you need a sale just to keep afloat.

If you enjoy many sales over time, you can always sell the book outside of Amazon later, or remove it totally.  The low risk makes it ideal for product and market validation.

Are you on a real shoestring budget?  Are you willing to risk cash if your product idea is a complete flop?

Moving Away from Amazon

Once the product is validated, its a perfectly viable option to move away from Amazon if you want to increase margins.  After nearly 1.5 years selling exclusively through Amazon, we recently decided to experiment with decreasing the cost per sale by selling a digital copy of the book through our Shopify store, which doubled our margins overnight for all sales made through our online store.

Selling outside of Amazon also opens up the option for metrics tracking, and A/B testing, which is just not possible when you use Amazon’s store.

Are you able to decrease cost per sale by making one small change, like opening an online store or removing failing ads?

Summing Up

All we did was sell something we enjoyed doing every day, regardless of whether or not we were paid to do it.

If this inspires you, then take action on my choice of the best product development platform - reddit.  Find a subreddit that has a growing community.  There is one for every crazy thing you can imagine.  I have had the best luck with subreddits where the community has 0-250K subscribers. There is /r/fitness, /r/travel, /r/selfhelp, /r/personalfinance, /r/pens and thousands more.

Find one relates to your area of expertise and start answering questions. Turn the questions into a blog, the blog into products, and the products into freedom.

You can find myself and my partner on /r/bodyweightfitness, helping people and letting them know that our awesome products already solve their problems.

If this analysis of the success of Overcoming Gravity has helped or will help you in launching your first/next info product, reach out to me.  I would love to hear your story.

I sure wish I had been able to read something like this in 2009.

Byline: Hi, I’m Chris Salvato.  I wrote this article based on my experiences at Eat. Move. Improve. selling bodyweight fitness products, and helping people online.  I also apply this knowledge for savvy clients who need consulting on their sales process.  If you want to talk more about selling products, send me an email.