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• Prescriptions and Descriptions
• A lot of speakers start by talking about themselves
  • I’m going to talk about YOU
  • I sent out a survey to attendees
  • Got about 50 responses
  • Q: Monthly income from products
    • 20 @ $0
    • 13 @ $1-999
    • 3 @ $1k-3k
    • 5 @ $3-5k
    • 2 @ $5-7k
    • 4 @ 7k+
  • So half the people have started, half haven’t
  • Presents a challenge
    • Those halfs need different advice!
  • So this talk:
    • Just starting out? Prescriptive advice – you need to know what to do
    • Later stage? Descriptive advice – show you what’s worked for me for you to pick and choose
• How I started
  • Programmer 6 years ago. Was using vim
    • Made me more efficient
    • But it’s hard to learn
    • Really deep. You can keep learning more and more things about it
    • Became vim aficionado
    • Started helping my coworkers
      • Became “the vim guy”
      • I loved that – I love teaching
    • “How else can I teach this?”
    • Emailed the organizer of the Boston meetup group
      • “Can I give an 8 minute lightning talk teaching the basics of vim?”
      • Went well
    • Can I give a 40 minute conference talk about vim?
      • Applied, got accepted
      • People showed up!
    • People are willing to pay to hear me talk about vim online
    • Can I distill this into an online screencast?
      • Put it on Shopify, $9
      • Started to grow a following online – people wanted to learn vim
    • 2/1/10 – someone bought!
      • Exciting

• Get to that first purchase email

• • • It’s transformative
    • My mission: to give you that same experience
• Part 1, for people who haven’t started: How I’d Start Over
  • The process I took with vim was mostly right, but by accident
  • Phase 1: Teach
    • Some ways to pick a product
      • What is something that you from 6 months ago would’ve found valuable?
        • Especially if it’d save you time/money at work
      • What are people asking you about?
        • Indicates people see you as an authority
      • What are you passionate about that bores other people?
        • Speaking to someone last night: “I spend so much time on billing and expense reporting for my freelance stuff, because I love that stuff.” <- Dude, that should be your first product.
    • How do you teach it?
      • Small, in-person, free
      • Ask around. Offer a lightning talk / free lunch and learn about <topic>. People will take you up on it
    • Do this multiple times
    • Three wins in this phase
      • 1. You’re building an audience. Authority. People are starting to trust you. Get a way of staying in touch with them. Get their email
      • 1. You get practice at teaching
           • It’s a tough skill
           • You’ll improve it this way
      • 1. You can do crazy amounts of customer research
           • Ask them – who are they? What got you excited about this? What did you take away from it?
           • Crazy amount of valuable information. Take advantage of that
  • Phase 2
    • Goal: sell ONE copy to ONE stranger
      • Everything else comes later
    • Small is beautiful
    • A 198-page e-book is bad – people won’t read it all, may not open it
      • Start small
    • Example titles (using Docker)
      • “Docker crash course”
      • “Docker for beginners”
      • “Docker for non-programmers”
      • “What I wish I’d known about Docker when I started”
      • “Why Docker sucks and what you should use instead”
      • ALL great e-book titles
      • 40 pages – great.
    • Recommend: get an Airbnb
      • Not a hotel: because Airbnb has a kitchen
        • Buy enough food to last 4-5 days
        • You don’t need to leave to get meals. That interrupts your flow
      • Goal: really simple. Really focused.
        • Write one chapter of your e-book
          • Not the first / intro chapter
          • Pick a meaty middle chapter
        • Write the contents page
        • Make a way to accept money
          • Do not code your own checkout
          • Use Leanpub
    • Most people here said they wanted inspiration & motivation
      • But the people saying this were the ones who haven’t got started
• It’s natural to assume:
• You feel inspired
• You get started
• You have success
• But the reality is
• You get started
• You have success

• You feel inspired

• • “Do you write on a schedule? Or only when you’re inspired?” - “I only write when I’m inspired. Fortunately, I get inspired every morning at 9am”
    • Book recommendation: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
• Part 2, for people who HAVE started: My Ten Best Tactics
  • A grab-bag of tactics
  • 1. Create a recurring reminder to run a pricing test every 6 months
       • Jordan Gal said this morning – he tripled his prices, and signups stayed constant
       • Your first test: hide your cheapest plan / tier
       • If you have only one price point: double it
       • I did this recently
         • Someone recently signed up to my product with an @uber.com address
           • That company is happily losing $3B a year
           • I’m charging them $29/mo
           • Hid the $29/mo plan. So cheapest was $59.
             • Just commented out the HTML!
           • Zero change to trial signups at first
             • After a while it did go down slightly, but trial to paid was way up
  • 1. Create an email course
       • I run an educational site. Helping people with Rails jobs
       • Made a free email course – “land your dream Rails job”
         • Took a while. It’s a solid course. Took some work
         • But it started converting 10% of the people who went through it
         • Totally automated
           • It’s like marketing automation is a thing and you should use it 😉
  • 1. Integrate and partner
       • Slept on this for a while. Dismissed it for a while
       • Turns out it’s awesome
       • Look for win/wins
       • We had a Zapier integration
       • Zapier wrote about it on our blog
         • That drives a lot of customers, for free
         • Win/win: Zapier wins, and we win
           • Another example: that Ruby education product
       • Went to someone else with a Ruby education site
       • Suggested a combined course. My best content, his best content. Cross-promote it
         • Made $100k combined in like 4 months
  • 1. Sell annual plans
       • Talk about it in two places:
       • your pricing page
       • An email that goes out on day 86. Do you want to switch to annual billing? Your next bill is in 4 days time, so let me know and I can switch you before that.
         • Also at the end of the year. If you have a bunch of money in your budget you need to spend – we’ll take it!
           • All that cash upfront is wonderful
  • 1. Put faces near things you want clicked
       • Humans have evolved for millions of years to be interested in faces
       • We can’t help it - Increases conversions
  • 1. Try a diving save
       • People sign up, but don’t have time
       • About a day after they cancel we email them
       • Saw you cancelled. That’s cool. People often cancel because they don’t have time. How about we get you set up on an annual plan, for a discount, so you have plenty of time to get set up
         • People take us up on this
         • From $0 churned customer → annual plan
  • 1. Start a podcast
       • Podcast Motor. You basically show up, do the speaking, you’re done
       • Great ROI
       • People tend to say yes to podcast interview requests
       • Can get big names in your industry on your podcast
       • And get them to tweet about the podcast
  • 1. Manually onboard customers
       • Highly recommend
       • Watch someone sign up for your product live
       • Get THEM to share THEIR screen, and talk out loud as they do it
       • You’ll learn A LOT
       • You think things are intuitive. They’re not. - Worth doing periodically. Especially worth doing in the beginning - “Enter your email here, and one of the founders will get you onboarded”
       • Email them, non-automated email, let’s get a time in Calendly - Great way to test onboarding. Show them the new price page and say ‘how does this pricing look to you?’
  • 1. Double down on things that work
       • It’s easy to get excited by the new and shiny
       • But you can get great results from doubling down on what’s working now
       • Snapper:
       • Had a popular blog post about the 30 best stock photo sites
         • Great, but it was sending people to 30 other sites
         • So he made his own stock photo site, and pointed people there at the top of the blog post
         • High conversions… and eventually led people back to Snapper
  • 1. Ask for help
       • You can ask me for help, whenever
       • @r00k
       • ben@benorenstein.com - Other people are happy to help here. Talk to people. The speakers here – reach out. You’ll be shocked how friendly people are. People are happy to help
• Q&A:
  • “When you get rid of your lowest pricing tier, do you add one at the other end?”
    • Good question. Haven’t tried it.
    • Running one now – what if we put an SLA in the top tier?
    • Should try – “Enterprise - Contact us for pricing”
  • “Rationale of starting with non-SaaS?”
    • It’s harder
    • You can sell a lot of an infoproduct pretty fast and pretty early on
      • Getting that first $ matters more than anything
      • Start your scrappy little business as quickly as possible. Don’t worry about replacing revenue. Just get the first $ as quickly as possible

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