AMA! We're Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman of Stacking the Bricks, 30x500, and more.

The best, quickest way to make more money when you're already making money is to maximize the way you're already making money.

I 100% agree with Amy. Don't get fancy.

I'll also add that there's a "quick buck" and then there's "the quickest buck that pays the most dividends."

There's nothing wrong with a quick buck, mind you. But I am always looking for the quickest buck that will also give me leverage the next time I want to make money.

We call this investment mindset: https://stackingthebricks.com/failure-the-hourly-mindset/

The best, quickest way to make more money when you're already making money is to maximize the way you're already making money. Same thing goes for products too! Figure out how to maximize your value delivery and raise your prices.

So, in short: Get a raise. If that takes learning a new skill, do that. If you already have skills which are undervalued or not clearly valued by your boss, tell your boss EXACTLY how you can apply it to make their business better. This applies to freelancing as well.

Get better at delivering and communicating value then raise your rates.

Yes! And thank you - hearing that you love the podcast really means a lot. Any favorite episodes, or styles of episode?

The show is something I'm very excited to get back to soon now that we've built some internal systems to free up more time/energy to work on things like the podcast. Podcasts take SO MUCH TIME to do well 😅

I also have some ideas for new formats, so stay tuned!

Definitely no qualms talking about money!

First thing first: the vast majority of the people who generate "insignificant" revenue do absolutely nothing. They make excuses, ignore lessons, or just dabble inconsistently.

Now, patterns:

• The people who make money show up and do the work every day. They treat it like a job, even if it's a side job, not a "side project." They follow the process.

• We always recommend a tiny product first: https://stackingthebricks.com/why-you-should-do-a-tiny-product-first/ This means something that's self contained, doesn't require complicated or custom delivery tools/platforms, and that you can create using skills and tools you already have.

• The format itself matters a whole lot less. E.g. instead of a whole piece of software, a plugin or snippet or kit could deliver a ton of value and be much easier to create and sell.

• Selling subscriptions are also MUCH harder than selling one-off sales, even when you know what you're doing: https://twitter.com/brennandunn/status/982326554414985216

• Most of our students start with zero or near-zero audience. People who follow our ebomb process consistently find themselves with 500-1,000 subscribers within 3-6 months. And that's not just a list of emails, that's a list of people whose trust they've already earned.

Conversion rates to lists built using ebombs regularly convert at 4-5% or more (without any fancy techniques), so 1000 subs converting at 4% is an easy 40 sales. If you sell a $100 product, that's $4k...and something you can do repeatably.

• The FASTEST we've ever seen a student go from enrolling in 30x500 to "significant revenue" is ~3 months to a $10k launch. https://stackingthebricks.com/what-if-your-product-launch-fails-this-interview-will-give-you-10k-reasons-to-do-it-anyway/

• More commonly, people find themselves building an audience of 1000+ subscribers within 3-6 months of starting, and launching their first product to that list within a year or so. Some go faster. Others slower.

• Consistency is the most common pattern in successful students. We have WAY more students who quietly do the work and make money than ones who are noisy about their progress publicly.

So when I did a talk at LessConf several years ago, I had quizzed a bunch of our SaaS friends to ask how long it took to get to $100k in annual run rate (not hard cash earned thus far). The answers were from 6-18 months. That's pretty typical. There's a selection bias here, of course — my SaaS friends are people who stick to what they start (OR they conscientiously shut it down). They're not dilettantes who dip in and out and dabble here and there and complain about a lack of results.

The fastest route to real revenue is consulting packages. It's easier to sell a tailored service than literally anything else.

Second fastest route is courses, I think, because they have a high value proposition.

Third would be pure infoproducts without any kind of live or interactive component.

Fourth, or possibly tied with third depending on your audience and connections and credibility, would be software accessories like plugins, tooling, etc.

Last would be SaaS. People are naturally resistant to the commitment it takes to switch to a SaaS and the ongoing cost. Using a SaaS is far more work than integrating a plugin, too. SaaS demands more of the customer to get the value (they think) and so it will always be slower growth.

I sure have, and I've done it. The whole origin of "Year of Hustle" was me focusing as hard as possible on one project: the Free Myself From Consulting Project. The trick is, of course, THAT project included multiple products as a way to deliver different streams of revenue.

I'm sure I could "grow faster" if I focused on only one product for years at a time, but I don't want to do it. That's not the life I want to live.

The true answer to a question like yours is, "What results do you want?" While I love money, obviously, the result I TRULY want my business to deliver for me is the freedom to do what I want, creatively, and the result I want to deliver for my customers is number of lives improved. I get bored easily doing the same thing over and over, and I relish the opportunity to use ALL my skills (design, writing, persuasion, sales, marketing, scriptwriting, programming, etc).

For the record: I tend to focus hard on one project a time for weeks or a month or two, not 50 things in a day. The key for me is to have projects that feed into each other, like Sweep and 30x500 do — less so with Freckle, which is why we're not spending the bulk of our time there right now. Whenever I focuse hard on any of the individual products, they have grown well, but growing in fits and starts is no better or worse to me than smooth growth.

I personally love working on different things each day. Being able to choose what I work on, who I work with, and how I work is a big part of how I've designed my professional life.

It's not always obvious, but my work on Indy Hall and the work I do with Amy are both geared towards helping independent creative people. The things I do in one, benefit the other.

With that said, the biggest mistakes I've made were choosing projects (or audiences) that don't overlap. E.g. I was briefly the CTO of a very successful t-shirt company. How cliche. It was doing well but it was SO out of whack with my other work that besides general interest, all it did was consume time from my other businesses. I overcommitted, and even had to step back from my work with Amy for a while.

For me, so long as I'm relatively consistent with my focus on who I'm helping, I can get my variety from the many ways of helping them.

This is what I call the PDF format — I didn't invent it, but formalized it from analyzing the best sales letters, ads, and commercials of all time. The formula is Pain-Dream-Fix. I've written about it here:

https://stackingthebricks.com/shut-up-and-take-my-money-or-how-to-pitch-so-people-will-listen/

https://stackingthebricks.com/how-i-increased-conversion-2-4x-with-better-copywriting/

https://stackingthebricks.com/is-bad-copy-killing-your-product/

Lessons about how to write PDF (even if you "suck at writing") are a core part of 30x500 :)

The reason it works so well is that you sell the reader on their own pain — not the product, not the feature, not you, but their own experience. Not only is that an easier sell, but it builds instant credibility because you prove that you get it. What people need and want above all else in this world is to be listened to and understood. Reflecting someone's very real experience back to them is powerful.

My best advice is:

You'll never hit it on your first try, so get out there and start making Tiny Products First.

It's tempting to sit in a room and think that if you just logic it out to the nth degree, you'll find the perfect answer. But no plan survives contact with the enemy (aka reality).

The thing you REALLY want to avoid is spending 6 months of your life building something, only to ship it and find out you hate it, you hate the customers, you don't want to run that kind of business, or it doesn't sell well. (Or worse: a year, or more. I've heard this story so many times.)

If you get out there and Safari your audience, and use that to build a small audience and ship a tiny product, you'll learn so much through experience what you do and don't like, what does and does not work.

Experience is the best teacher.

https://stackingthebricks.com/why-you-should-do-a-tiny-product-first/

I just want to reinforce Amy's point: your first product does NOT need to be your best product. It can't be, unless you decide that it is. This is super, super important.

I'm very proud of what Indy Hall is for thousands of people, and I'm very proud of the students whose lives Amy and I have changed. But if either of those two things are my "best product" what the fuck am I gonna do with the rest of my life 😉

Okay, so there's two things in here:

PART ONE - SERVING AN AUDIENCE YOU DON'T BELONG TO

One, you're trying to serve an audience that you don't belong to. This isn't impossible but it's about 1000x harder.

There's an old joke about two people camping in the woods. A bear shows up at their campsite and starts ripping things apart. Both start running for their lives, but the first guy stops to put on his running shoes first. The second guy says "what are you doing, those aren't going to help you outrun a bear!?" and the first guy says "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you."

By serving an audience you don't belong to, you're basically trying to "outrun a bear" while also learning everything about an audience you don't belong to. Compare that to the advantages you already have in any professional audience you DO belong to. The intimate knowledge of how they talk, where they hang out, etc. You have the tools to earn trust, and help them using skills you already have.

Use your advantages. Business doesn't reward you extra points for picking a "harder" audience.

Your odds of success (with speed and consistency) go WAY up with an audience you already belong to. And when you're making enough money to live comfortably from those products...you can go back and take all the time in the world to learn about the real estate industry.

PART TWO - ASKING CUSTOMERS HOW TO RUN YOUR BUSINESS

I'm going to excerpt this longer article about why this is basically always going to backfire:

" You rely on your interviewees being experts at research & development — you trust them to identify their own pains with unflinching honesty and accuracy. To remember, in essence, exactly what they do, all day, every day.

And to be willing to tell you about it.

And to be able to imagine a world unlike the world they inhabit, with a different workflow, different tools, different outlook, different life.

You rely on them to accurately identify the causes of the pains they do identify.

You rely on them to be wholly rational.

They must not care about your feelings at all — to not be, in fact, the kindly people they must be to accept your interview request — because they will be too friendly, too supportive, too optimistic, too nice…which of course results in worthless data.

You need them to be people who always do exactly what they say they will.”

---

Rather than asking people what they want, find ways to spend time watching your audience. What do they visibly struggle with? How do those problems cost them time and money? What other things to they buy, how do they buy, where do they buy, WHY do they buy?

That's the crux of Sales Safari, and why it's so much more powerful than idea-first validation.

Alex hit all the points I'd normally hit ;) but I'd also like to add… it's good to want things, but your wanting things won't make the market want them.

Sure!

The best thing any engineer can do to stand out is to help others. Lots of folks say, "Contribute to open source!" but that's only one way to do it.

Back when I was more active in programming, everybody in my language communities knew who I was — I became a go-to person — and yet I never contributed to OSS. People trusted my programming ability because of the things I wrote about programming. My cheat sheets built my credibility. Only a person who understands can teach others… but, in a glorious flip side, teaching others builds understanding. Speaking about programming or relevant professional topics, recording screencasts, sharing code snippets, designing cheat sheets, writing blog posts, all of these things will build reputation and communication skills and demonstrate that you are a well-rounded individual and not just a keyboard jockey.

Another thing is to have some kind of cross-over skill, whether it's ethics, philosophy, business, accessibility, design, sales, public speaking, security, the front-end guy who knows databases, the back-end girl who knows CSS, etc.

Lastly, even if you never do any of the above, learn how to listen, elicit requirements, and understand business goals. If you can go to an interviewer and explain how you and your skills will help the business as a whole and not just "Solve Interesting Problems," you'll be ahead of the pack. Most employees never look up.

I'm in the middle of hiring at Indy Hall right now - granted, not for engineers but the "how do you stand out" thing is big on my mind from the other side of the table.

The one thing that almost no candidates do is research the company, so I all but forced our applicants to by asking the question: "In your own words, what is Indy Hall?"

This wasn't a trick question, or even a right/wrong question. It was there to show me who was taking the time to understand what business we are in, why we're successful, and in the savviest of replies, they aligned the rest of their answers with showing me how they could help us succeed.

Through this lens, 6-7 quickly people stood out from a list of nearly 80 applicants without me even looking at their CV, and 2-3 really stood out from them. Many of those people made it into our first round of 10 people to interview.

We also asked a question of "what questions do you have for us?" and once again, many people used this question to ask us about the role (themselves) instead of the business and organization. The most stand-out questions were people who asked about our short and long term goals as an organization, and about our priorities/values.

Applying for jobs is sales, too. But unlike the kinds of biz's people talk about on this forum, you have an audience of one (relatively speaking - there may be a few decision makers to convince) that you're trying to persuade to buy YOU.

Take every bit of (real) sales advice you can, and don't be afraid to sell yourself into the job you want.

Their Nachos Grande (no olives, add chicken) is simultaneously an appetizer, a meal, and a mountain.

Popcorn chicken 4 LYFE!

You're right that we've been sporadic. Stacking the Bricks (previously UnicornFree) aren't either of our only or primary business. Yes, our launches tend to ramp up content release schedule, by nature of how launches work. Amy's health is also an important variable in our production schedule for products and content.

We're both examples of how you don't have to do everything perfect to be quite successful, so long as you get the right stuff right. If you really understand your audience and what they need in a way that makes people go "yo, are you reading my diary!?," you gain enough points to make up for an inconsistent production schedule.

But being consistent would be better.

So if you're on our list, you might have noticed that we've sent an email consistently every single week since the start of 2018. :)

What you might NOT see is that I've been working behind the scenes to edit our hundreds of posts (mostly written by Amy) into evergreen pieces that can be sent anytime, and building what our student Brennan Dunn coined as a "shadow newsletter." Essentially, even if we create zero new content for the next year, our subscribers will get brand new stuff every single week.

Ultimately, this frees us up to work on creating NEW things - podcast episodes, new products, fixes and improvements for our existing products, etc - with consistency, rather than constantly running (or in our case, falling off of) the content hamster wheel.

The biggest limiter in our business is DEFINITELY my health, which is super shitty. I've been limited since 2009 and learned how to get lots of shit done with reduced energy and hours, but the last couple years have been just one long brutal string of infections (intestinal, flu, pneumonia, bronchitis, flu AGAIN, endless sinus issues, viruses…)

This does mean that I'm finally getting treatment for a previously undiagnosed autoimmune disorder, but that brings its own side effects. (And the treatment is a massive time sink.)

Business issues are nothing — and I mean NOTHING — by comparison.

I've been dealing pretty well with the underlying condition for years, but the constant infections on top of everything else has burnt me the fuck out!

Today I'm feeling pretty good (latest virus is on its way out) but who knows what I'll be like tomorrow.

Everybody else (Alex, Thomas and Cannon) has had to take up the reins which has been rough in some ways, but good for the long run.

Also, Alex is working to automate much more of our shared business together, and that is a huge help as well.

Sometimes even I have to wait for a Fuck This! moment.

1. Are prosumer audiences bad or worse than professional ones? (Is there even a distinction?)

Yes, they are worse. By definition they don't make money doing it.

2. What are the alum trends with picking professional or hobby level audiences to safari?

We strictly discourage hobbyist and consumer audiences, and as far as I know nobody who has ignored that advice has succeeded in making much money at all (it's our advice based on observation, not bias).

3. How would you expect teaching styles to need to differ between technical and non-technical audiences?

This sounds like you need to read some books on teaching!

4. Is starting with multiple audiences and focusing on one later a bad idea?

Yep.

You sound like you want personal coaching, and that's outside the scope of this Q&A, but my answers above should tell you everything you really need to know to take your next step!

Heh, whoops. I fixed the copyright date when I saw this question come in, thanks for the bug report.

YES we are still teaching 30x500. In 2015 we shifted from a live (but online) 2-day bootcamp format to a new format that allows students to work at their own pace. We expanded the lessons and exercises by 20x, added more systems and self-evaluation tools.

We open enrollment for that class approx 4 times a year (we'll be opening up for our waiting list in early May). If you're not on the list you can sign up here: http://30x500.com/academy/

Ok let's break this down!

First, let's define the following terms:

Chain letter: a scam letter than aims at getting sent to as many people as possible, saying that if you don't "forward to 7 friends" or whatever, you'll be stricken with the Hacker Pox or some such stupid thing. There's almost never any financial component, just trying to force virality.

MLM: Multi-Level Marketing, a business where people allegedly sell products but what they really sell is the business opportunity itself — e.g., you pay to join MLM Makeup, and you may sell some makeup, but what you really want is to convince more suckers to sign up to sell MLM Makeup (and they have to pay money to do it). When they make sales or get more people in their "downline," you make a share of their money. Affiliates all the way down.

Ponzi scheme: An investment con where the early investors see massive returns that are actually paid for from the investments of later investors, and not any kind of innate value; the investment scheme can never pay off for everyone because, of course, the human population is limited.

Your questions have nothing to do with any of these types of cons.

"Does anybody REALLY need this product?" is not what determines a chain letter, MLM or Ponzi scheme… only the innate facts of the item determine what it is.

You're assuming that if YOU don't want XYZ product or can't imagine a use case for it, it has no value, and is therefore a "scam." But a product that isn't all that useful isn't a scam, it's just a poor product.

You think ebooks are scammy. There's no basis for that, because an ebook like a book is simply a delivery mechanism for content.

In short, you're suspicious of economic and sales activity in general, and relate every product to your own potential use case.

Now, you said: "This has echoes for me of a glorified chain letter for an mlm scheme - especially if someone was to make an info product doling out the same kind of advice they learned from you."

Well, I've already proven that the 'echoes' part makes no sense, since even if a student was foolish enough to repackage my content, it wouldn't make it a chain letter, MLM or Ponzi scheme.

But "Me Too" products are a problem — for other people — and it makes me mad as well, because some other, shitty "business" courses don't actually teach their students how to identify a market they belong to, figure out what they need, and deliver things that the audience will buy.

Which is exactly why WE DO.

Which is why you'll rarely if ever find a 30x500 copycat product from one of our alums… it goes against literally everything we teach.

And we have never offered a referral fee or affiliate program for 30x500.

Good use of "effective" — I'm gonna break that down, because it's the crux of the question.

If you grow your list faster and bigger, but it's not as responsive, was the method "effective"? No, obviously not.

There are ways to build lists bigger and faster than ebombs… like giving away free stuff in a contest, or posting a link-baity industry survey (if you play your cards right.) But those people will have shown up for a different reason than valuing your free content and they will have different goals than someone who is raising their hand and saying, "Yes, I want to invest more time in learning and doing things."

Ebombs build responsive lists. A list of 500 responsive people is worth more than 5,000 randos.

Now, you described ebomb as a "crisp bit of useful info." That implies small and insanely targeted. That doesn't have to be the case. A 12-part email course is an ebomb. A screencast is an ebomb. A free Q&A is an ebomb. A webinar is an ebomb (if you actually endeavor to help people and not just act super vague so people sign up for more).

This is one of my most successful ebombs and it's epic: http://yearofhustle.com

Brennan built an empire on a rate calculator that led to a customized email course.

Egghead offers free courses that are always free, and then they do promotions where new courses are free for only a certain period of time… those are ebombs.

Free white papers? Excellent, high value ebomb.

Optimizing for the highest # of signups is often counterproductive. Crazy nagging CTAs etc, will get people to sign up just to get away from them. Deep discounts will get people who always look for the lowest price, even if they don't want/need the thing.

Bait the hook to suit the fish… if you want high-quality, meaty fish, you need high-quality, meaty content.

Nope, I don't have any advice for you. I don't give advice for situations outside my experience. If that's working for you, great!

You're living the problem of starting with an idea first and audience last: https://stackingthebricks.com/video-failure-vs-creating-a-product-people-want-to-buy/

This article MIGHT help you, but the best thing to do is to focus on your audience's pain points first: https://stackingthebricks.com/cant-find-audience/

Props for referencing that you've listened to our advice before! :D Great question.

So… a good audience:

• is easily found online

• shares with each other (products, recommendations, growth opportunities, etc)

• pays for things, they buy for value

• is growth mindset-y… they look for ways to improve their business/professional lives, skills, income, etc.

• is nice to their service providers

• has a sufficient level of savvy that you're not answering "HOW DOES THE INTERNET WORK" type questions in support

If they're not those things, they're a bad audience.

Is it ok to give your product away for free to validate

People using something for free is not an indicator in ANY way that they will pay for it. You're just wasting time, afraid to charge for it, or both.

What are some strategies to reach decision makers

If you don't already have access to a decision maker (aka a person with credit card) you're already choosing one of the hardest versions of starting a business that you can.

I said this in another comment: unlike a video game, business doesn't reward you extra points for playing on "difficult" mode.

That's not to say that you can'd do direct sales (Nathan Barry's post on how it helped grow ConvertKit is very good: http://nathanbarry.com/sales/) but it depends on the product solving a painful and expensive problem that the customer KNOWS they have.

So unless you know for certain that companies will spend $xx,000+ on your product, the time and energy invested in enterprise-style sales (cutting through gatekeepers, red tape, etc) is generally not worth the effort.

There are much easier ways to start, and (as long as it's honest) there's absolutely zero shame in choosing easy mode.

FWIW, essentially everyone I've ever personally met in business underpriced themselves at the beginning. This is true in jobs, freelancing/consulting, and product businesses.

I don't really have a price framework, I just pick numbers that sound good and then I go higher. For newbies, I recommend thinking about how many hours a product will save the customer / or hourly rates it will earn them, and use a fraction of that.

Sure, if your price is too high you'll make fewer sales. (Which is actually a blessing, because then you'll start off with the most motivated and value-minded customers.) And then when you carefully determine your price is too high — after optimizing everything else — you can lower it, and your optimizations will result in more sales.

But, typically speaking, the price is usually the least objectionable part of a sale… whenever I hear price objections, I hear them as "You made a shitty case for your product and if I don't REALLY believe it will work, I will only pay $fraction."

And A/B testing your pricing is a terrible idea and in some places, probably illegal.

People are scared of pricing their products because they know they are shitty salespeople. The key isn't to underprice the product, but to. become better at sales.

Glad you're enjoying the site/podcast :)

1 - We don't keep a directory of tools we use/recommend because the specific tools you use generally don't matter to the customer.

We see our students spend hours, days, sometimes weeks debating between two options for blog engine or email provider...time they could have used actually helping their audience.

Don't waste time on picking tools. Period.

The other reason we don't generally recommend tools is because there are very few tools we like enough to recommend as "the best" and several that we use that we downright can't stand but there aren't really options. ¯\(ツ)/¯

2 - I've been adding more case studies here: https://stackingthebricks.com/success-stories/ many more on the way!

As the resident designer tho I will say that I have been working to develop a more consistent brand and you'll see more of that coming up. We're going to be renaming 30x500, and using the same name "structure" (if you will) and typeface across all our products/endeavors in the future. Plus, of course, similar color palette.

That said, also as the designer, I can tell you that branding — as a design exercise — is not nearly as important as people think it is. Whatever brand you pick, exposure is going to be the thing that makes it A Brand You Trust, as Alex said.

We've gotten branding "wrong" in so many ways....and yet it's never stopped us!

• Don't name your product or business a math equation like 30x500. It's confusing, hard to remember (so many people remember it as 50x500, 20x300, etc) and it's IMPOSSIBLE to say out loud ugh.

• Amy came up with the name UnicornFree.com long before "unicorns" were a popular term in the startup world, but nobody ever seemed to understand the intended reference before or after.

• We definitely get flack for the swearing in the title of JFS.

You'd almost think we were trying to confuse our audience. 😂

Turns out, the other side of "branding" isn't names and domains and color schemes and logos.

It's reputation. We've always focused more on helping our readers and students than the brand itself. The brand (whatever it is) gets associated with the trust that is earned by helping people and businesses. That's basically the heart of everything we do, and teach. Get that right, and our mess of domains & names matters a whole lot less.

"Stacking the Bricks" has always been a core concept in our teaching, and a somewhat natural fit for the first episodes of the podcast since the plan was to show examples of our students stacking their own bricks.

Bit by bit, we're moving towards everything being unified on the Stacking the Bricks name/domain. More about that here: https://stackingthebricks.com/unicornfree-is-dead/

If nothing else, we're living proof of exactly what you can do imperfectly and still do pretty well for yourself.

Work in progress. Always a work in progress.

I actually never start with Dear XYZ unless it's a sly kind of joke (which might not always come across) ;)

I only did the LETTER style of the Direct Mail Sales Letter(tm) for Sweep, recently, because I thought it would be a fun (tongue-in-cheek) way to raise an incredibly painful and ultimately boring daily problem — the calendar alert death spiral. That was just my first pass of a sales page, and later copy will probably ditch the actual "personal letter" format.

The long copy, CTA near the end, etc., stuff all DOES convert better — I've tested, other folks have tested it. Not in every case.

But in most cases, long copy works because (as I wrote above)…

You sell the reader on their own pain — not the product, not the feature, not you, but their own experience.
Not only is that an easier sell, but it builds instant credibility because you prove that you get it.
What people need and want above all else in this world is to be listened to and understood. Reflecting someone's very real experience back to them is powerful.
You can paint a picture of THEIR WORLD, IMPROVED… rather than talking about features and benefits and hoping they make the cognitive effort to imagine how it will apply to them specifically.
Once you've got them hooked, you can counter their objections before they even realize they have them.

Finally, there's an element of commitment. When someone commits to reading the whole thing (and you'd be surprised how many people do!), they've committed a lot of energy to considering the product.

The standard behavior for most people on a landing page is Glance, Don't Find Anything Compelling, Back Button.

If your product REALLY DOES solve a problem, and you've persuaded them to really think about it, the chances are massively higher than they'll try it.

Now, long copy isn't ALWAYS the best choice. Our friends at Beanstalk find that it converts worse, because people come to their page already knowing EXACTLY what the product is and are already decided to sign up. They tested it. That's why testing is valuable.

Amy and I both started selling things before we were 10 years old. We have time on our side. We recorded a bunch of fun stories from our early days here, and more importantly, how those early experiences informed our later "real business" approach and experience: https://stackingthebricks.com/podcast/ep17-kids-incorporated/

The best way to get a grasp of business is to do it. It's like riding a bike or playing the piano. You can read about how it works in a book or watch a video but until you actually DO it, you can't really learn it. See also: tacit knowledge.

Worst of all, most business books are nothing but regurgitated trash, with vague advice at best or BAD advice at worst.

Pick a way to start selling. Start small. Try selling stuff on ebay, or start freelancing. You'll learn more in 6 months of actually trying than if you spent 5 years reading business books.

I'm the wrong person to ask… I hate being a boss! We have one great employee. When hiring technical people, I have always paid them to work on a freelance project first. That tells you a lot. That's about it for my advice.

That's a lot for a single comment haha.

It's something we've talked about a lot in the podcast but Alex and I were just discussing this morning, we need a Sales Safari landing page that collects everything.

Here's a good place to start: https://stackingthebricks.com/vintage-sales-safari-in-action/

Nope. Many have tried, or at least talked about it. Nobody's done it and I recommend strongly against it. And next to business, my other main area of expertise is building communities online and offline. :)

It's an insane amount of work and even more to do it well. @csallen and @channingallen will agree :)

Building your own online community just so you can study it is like building your own beach so you can look at the ocean.

I don't actually understand what you're asking, and it appears you've answered your own question?

Hey Mark!

Glancing quickly at the https://www.recapped.io website, the first thing that stands out to me is I'm not sure who this is for. It could be literally any kind of business.

If you give your audience a moment to wonder, "Is this for me?" they've closed the tab and forgotten about you.

More here: https://stackingthebricks.com/how-do-you-market-a-product-thats-for-everyone/

Do your 10 customers have something in common in terms of the kind of business they are? Or the majority of them? Or even half?

I'd figure out what that common theme is and call it out BY NAME on the landing page.

Once you've got that, the question is how you get more of those people. Where do those people gather? Where do they share information with each other? Are you already involved in any of those communities?

Don't show up in those communities and pitch....show up and help. Earn the trust of your potential customers. Offer them something that helps them with smaller problems, so that when they see your product they can think "oh, that person really understands my problems AND has helped me before."

Thanks for the heads up but I can't reproduce this error, is it possible you have a content blocker or something like that?