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Wire-framing to plan the creation of sites or apps

This is an opportunity to guide people through the process of structuring the app so they can plan what should be on each page. It’s also a tool that can be used to illustrate funnels and landing pages.

Keep in mind that one who is more experienced, might simply want to code the app up sticking to something like Bootstraps fundamentals. Coding up could be quicker in the short term but I feel like there is some value to be had in mapping things out be fore you build things in code.

Here is a wireframe taken from Root. Root is a template I bought for Figma which allows me to create my wireframes in Figma now, rather than Balsamiq. In theory, Figma should be more robust, but it’s a very young app. To be honest Balsmiq has been one of the buggiest apps I have ever used, pretty consistently too.

Ways to make money from home

My aim is to produce products that can be totally automated that help a new class of digitally savvy business owners who are not technical to get their business to their first 100k. There are hundreds of types of markets and personas that might fit into this broad category, but I think it’s an exciting space, that’s why I am choosing to focus on it. That being said, I want to be more pragmatic about how I select a specific niche and a problem to work on.

A quick brainstorm has produced the following list of ways that people can make money from home / online.

  • Matched betting
  • Selling information products (live classes, on demand courses & ebooks)
  • Consulting
  • Done for you services (marketing, accounting, copy writing, remote assistant, coding, sales development)
  • Content Creator (Blogger, YouTuber, Social media influencer)
  • Selling templates (WordPress, PowerPoints, Bootstrap, Calculators / Spreadsheets)
  • Lending money (Lending circle, Zopa)
  • eCommerce Arbitrage (eBay, Shopify, Dropshipping)
  • Micro SaaS
  • Affiliate Marketing
  • Renting (Spare room, valuable goods)
  • Selling your own / branded products
  • Rent to Rent
  • Mailing List (Jacks Flight Club, “Things to do in London”)
  • Online Gambling
  • Selling gaming assets (Hard to get; resources, skills or characters)
  • Tutoring
  • Camming
  • Content Curator (aggregating different content from different places, forums)
  • Pateron
  • Selling subscriptions to premium content or access
  • Audience builder(?)

 

I am thinking about these markets in different ways;

  1. What are the barriers to entry and how easy are they to access?
  2. How accessible are the people who are in this market?
  3. Are these markets big and growing?
  4. Do these markets have participants with a significant amount of capital?
  5. What phase do I want to interrupt? (It’s often much easier to convert a sale if there is a grounding of the need in a transition – getting married, switching from validating to growth stage, starting a business from home)
  6. Is there a cheap way to get to the first batch of customers?

A Warning

Being a hustler is not for everybody. It has some highs and incredible lows.

I once read a tweet or blog post where the writer said every entrprenue they have met has physcological issues. I have to say in my experience this is true. There seems to be something about the torture of running a business, the stress, the inability to accurately estimate risk and even worse – ignoring risk completely for the sake of their world view being correct – lying to themesleves or others.

To give you a few examples of just a few of the people I have met along the way who have stuck to running a business and met dark times…

Sleeping problems

Most of the people I have met who own or run businesses do not sleep well. In some cases it will come up as a passing comment or they will say something stupid like “I am a workaholic”, this is celebrating something that is known to be a form of torture and is linked to mental health issues like depression.

Sickness from stress

I know of one guy who was so sick with stress that his body started to break down and ended up suffering from Diarrhea. Which was a shock because he’s known for living a healthy lifestyle.

Incredibly bad decisions

I know another guy who I haven’t seen for years. In the process of making millions of pounds he broke the law and is now on the run from the FBI and others. I mean literally.

Are you stong enough to look a room full of employees in the eye, knowing you can’t pay them at the end of the month and their rent/ mortgages are at risk?

Fuck your good idea

You do not need a “good idea” and, “follow your passion” is terrible advice.

Your aim is to match a product or service with an audience who want it. This might seem like an obvious thing to say and you might know it already, but when you step back and think about what I am going to tell you in the rest of this book, it should become clearer as to what I am saying.

To illustrate why I want this at the front of your mind – when most people meet someone who they hear is a business person, they ask – what is the person selling? How did they make their money?

What they really should be asking is: “what audience did they match to a specific product and how did they reach them cost effectivly”.

The thing is, even if you are taking the “good idea approach”, you still need to find the customers at some point, and you will have to pay to get in front of them, one way or another.

If you can simply get a list of products that are already for sale with the process of attracting the audience clearly visible, this will tell you a huge amount of what you will have to work out at some point. Jumping straight to it will save you a huge amount of time and effort.

For example, you might sit at home trying to come up with a new concept for working out, this means you will then have to find out who wants to try your concept, you will have to educate them to the value of your concept and you will have to try and convince them to test your concept now.

Alternatively, if you can see the guy on the beach selling ice cream from a truck with a huge queue lining up to buy the ice cream, you will have found demand, product and a solution for getting it to them.

This doesn’t mean you are out of the woods, I have seen many business running but actually losing money on a daily basis, either savings or venture capital.

The Customer Education Problem

From a Funnel Persective

With customer education and outreach

  • Cold email or ads
  • educational content
  • get them to come back
  • they research multiple options
  • they decide on the option (might not be you)
  • Then they buy

Problem already being searched for with intent based keywords

  • They google search
  • Your add is at the top
  • they sign up

The theree most important fundamentals for building a business

Clear product market fit

Customer CAC v LTV

  • This is simply a game of CAC/ LTV – simplify everything down to this.
  • Getting this right allows you to flip
  • Look at Uber, here in the UK the referral fee would be: £10 credit for new user, £10 for the affiliate who referred them
  • If they used Google ads, it wouldn’t have been as trusted as a referral from a friend
  • If you end up making 3 rides and they are more than £10, then assuming they make 30%, then they will get that back in 3 trips
  • They don’t make 30% – Sales tax, driver fee…
  • So ideally, you want to pay to get a customer once and keep making revenue from them, because it’s normally cheaper than buying new customers
  • This is why when there is a new customer acquisition channel, while it’s cheap all of the savvy marketers work as hard as they can to milk it while it’s cheap to get people onto mailing lists and keep them engaged
  • Sending out an email on a mailing service like mailChimp is like £1 / 10,000 emails
  • When you look at a social media influencer, who has 10,000s followers, they are doing the same as people with a mailing list.

Flipping

  • buy for £1 and sell for £3
  • This allows you to buy 3, then make £9
  • Then you buy 9 and make 27
  • Which is not totally true, you need to set some money aside for marketing, this means you might only be taking £1 out of the deal
  • Obviously, you want to be doing this with £100s
  • So lets compare this with an eBook at £7, you might have a budget of £6 for buying customers
  • £30 a month, £360 a year, leaving £359 for customer acquisition
  • If you have a SaaS platform for £300 a month, then that’s £3,600 a year so to put a £1 in your pocket, you can spend £3,599 on customer acquisition
    • Imagine how shit you can be at marketing, how much room there is for trial and error

My Validation Checklist

I’ve decided to share this tool early on in this journey because it’s a crucial step in venturing out on a new project as a bootstrapper / Indie Hacker. It’s probably the most important step in building your business.

By leveraging a Validation Checklist in line with your goals, you’ll save weeks, months or maybe even years of wasted time. It also helps you prioritise between all of the ideas you might have.

In the video below, I take you through all of the questions I ask myself before kicking off a project AND I share why they are important. Watching it will help you understand:

  • Why some projects do better than others
  • What you should build next
  • Is your idea any good?
  • Will people care about your idea

Obviously, you’ll want to customise this for your own use, but copy and pasting most of the points I have and understanding the implications of them will be a game changer for you.

If you have a project already, this could help you answer questions like:

  • Why haven’t you made any sales?
  • Where can you find customers?
  • Is there a market for your product?
  • Do people care about your product?

Detailed walkthrough the checklist

Investing this time up front, could save you months of frustration and get you on track for building your ideal business, so I highly recommend that you digest my list and build your won as soon as possible.

During the video above, I mentioned one of my ‘tricks’ for finding your target market online, if you’re interested, you can watch that video here. For more content like this, make sure you subscribe via email on the right, checkout my YouTube channel and follow me on twitter.

 

Download My Current Validation Checklist

You can download the latest version of my checklist here – remember that you’ll need to customise it for your goals and objectives.

 

Download Validation Checklist

Selecting a growth channel for your startup

  • Where to focus for your growth strategy

This post is for entrepreneurs or marketers who are trying to work out where to get started when trying to decided the right marketing channel with limited resources.

This is really important as most founders are limited by both time and money so not getting this allocation right can be the difference between life and death for many startups. Select the wrong channel and your company will run out of money before you start driving sales. Selecting the right channels can bring in much needed cash-flow and provide a sustainable and scaleable source of growth.

In this post I am going to break down how I select what channels to pursue for each project when putting together a growth plan. I will show you the calculator I use which makes comparing channels both quick, simple and as objective as possible. By the end of this post you will be able to work on what you should focus on to drive the growth of your startup.

Skip to video button

What we are trying to achieve

Our aim here is to identify multiple channels we should be focusing on if we are going to be building sustainable growth going into the future by taking into account both the opportunity a particular channel provides and the risk associated with it for your business.

To do this, we need to make a clear assessment of what the options are and which ones are worth dedicating our time to.

The overnight success of a random hack are great but, the reality is the hockey stick growth that you are looking for actually comes from mastering several channels which are sustainable. A hack might get you a quick win, but the odds are, it won’t last for long so by having multiple channels that have been selected carefully, you will not only be creating good foundations for growth by maintaining focus and building deep domain expertise, you will also be hedging for risks that come with jumping on random “hacks” you come across.

I have decided to talk about this early on because as I get asked about “where to start?” on a regular basis but, as I get into talking about optimising funnels I want to be sure that people are working on the right opportunities for them, rather than simply following what is cool, right now.

I came up with this process as a result living off of one source of traffic but also to help in minimising the time needed to get up and running. It also helps when explaining a decision making process to a client.

What this is good for

This process is really powerful if you have no idea where to get started and want to be planning for the longer term growth for your business. It can also be useful when you have very little experience of a particular market and need a framework for comparing opportunities.

While this process will simplify things in terms of decision making, like any calculator it’s only as good as the data that you feed it in the beginning. So if you are filling in the cells with random guesses, you might not come be presented with the best conclusions. Having said that, this can’t be an exact science so you will need to go with your gut if you can’t rely on a trusted source of information.

What it does

Like any actionable process, you need to have a list of the options and a clear way to identify which tasks are the priority so you know which ones to action first.

The challenge here is, when analysing different customer acquisition channels, there are lots of options (which seem to be growing daily). In addition to the number of options, we also have to consider that you can compare them against each other in multiple dimensions.

For example; do you want a channel that is quick to setup but can be expensive in the long term like PPC? Or, do you want something that is “free”, but leaves you exposed to the whims of something external like optimising your website to rank higher in Google?

…this is a tricky decision to make when comparing the two but when you have more than 20 channels to explore all of which will need building and optimising over time, you want to be sure that you are making the right decision.

To overcome this challenge when working on new projects of my own or for clients I decided to create a tool that would simplify the process which I refer to as “The channel analysis tab”. I promise you it’s more interesting than it sounds…

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/099fdcce-fa18-4f2d-a5c8-02b89a171038/Screen_Shot_2017-10-15_at_15.22.26.png

This calculator can be used to compare channels and strategies as it boils them down to a few key elements that make them easy to understand at a glance. You are instantly able to see what the potential Return On your Investment might be and it also applies a “Risk Score” to the opportunity.

Estimating the ROI

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/566347f6-35b5-4260-af9f-06f2cdc53cec/Screen_Shot_2017-10-15_at_15.22.26_2.png

While there are many reasons to run marketing campaigns from driving brand awareness to repairing a reputation, I am going to assume you are hear for getting a Return On your Investment. So the ability to get a rough idea of how much you could potentially make back is important.

Estimating the Return On Investment is obviously a tricky process when you are starting out. This is why we are not trying to focus on fixed amounts delivered by a particular campaign but but to see how it might compare to another in both a “best” and “worst” case scenario.

To work out the potential ROI we take an educated guess at a few key numbers…

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/39a8a3f5-d92a-4d2c-aa66-57d79978da1f/Screen_Shot_2017-10-15_at_15.38.30.png

Estimating risk

As difficult as it is to estimate what your ROI might be is being able to understand how risky a particular option might be. Again, this is not an exact science, we are simply trying to clear up a decision making process to compare how one thing might stack up against another.

To get a lear understanding of how the tool works, please watch the video below:

Video Embed: 

When to use this calculator

Most people’s instincts will be to use this is soon as possible. This is not always the best thing to do. Ideally you want to use this calculator once you have already created your customer profiles/ Personas. Creating the persona’s first is an important step because you want to ensure that you are looking at channels that are relevant to your ideal customer.

 

Images here: https://www.notion.so/Selecting-Customer-Acquisition-Channels-3c00ca27cbaf4595928a72c9410c67be

Using landing page inspiration sites to identify demand

One of the best ways to source ideas for products you might want to build is to look at website insporation sites. When you think about it, these are catalogs of apps that are already out there in the wild. While you can’t get indicators of how much revenue the products are making there are some tell tail signs to look for, but for now here are some sites you can use to look for ideas for products you might want to build…

  • https://saaspages.xyz/
  • https://www.landingfolio.com/
  • https://www.lapa.ninja/
  • https://onepagelove.com/

Leveraging review websites to identify demand

Review websites are great because they show you want people find useful and what improvements might help to separate you from your competitors in the market…

The process has the advantage of proving that people have typically used the product before reviewing it.

SaaS Products

  • https://alternativeto.net/

If you are thinking about doing an information product, book stores can be great…

  • https://www.amazon.co.uk/