Boom, what's going on everyone? It is Steve Larsen and you're listening to Sales Funnel Radio.
Today I'm gonna talk to you guys about product evolution.
I've spent the last four years learning from the most brilliant marketers today. And now I've left my nine to five to take the plunge and build my million dollar business.
The real question is how will I do it without V.C. funding or debt, completely from scratch. This podcast is here to give you the answer.
Join me and follow along as I learn, apply, and share marketing strategies to grow my online business using only today's best internet sales funnels.
My name is Steve Larsen and welcome to Sales Funnel Radio.
What's up, guys?
Hey, I'm excited for today, got the whiteboard with me if you guys are watching on YouTube. If you're out listening on iTunes or some other place, welcome. I'm so excited about this.
This episode specifically has been a long time in the making. I'm very excited about it. I have gone through and I have I spent the last hour and a half just thinking through it alone. Let alone the months prior.
I've been trying to figure out how to describe this very critical lesson. And I don't know another way to be able to describe this except for like two or three stories. So I gotta tell 'em here really quick…
What I'm trying to do is…
I first want you guys to know right, this episode specifically is all about how I create good products. I'm not talking about offers, I'm talking about products. Products and offers are totally different. And I'm here to talk about product creation.
Now I had the good pleasure in one of my semesters in college... I'll never bag on college. I think it's good. It's not how you make money though, but it does open up the noggin a bit, right?
So anyway, one of my semesters in college was kind of cool 'cause the professors walked up and they said, "Hey, check it out. You have no classes this entire semester. Your only task is to make as much money as you physically can." That's what the whole semester was…
They assigned us a random industry. And I got stuck in the food industry. If you guys know me personally, you know I am not a good cook. I was like “Crap, I don't wanna be in food, put me in the knick-knack. Put me in you know, the e-com space. I was like food, seriously?”
But it ended up being the best education I got the entire time I was in college. And it was fascinating.
At the beginning what they did was they put us into groups of like 15. So we're in these small groups, and we went on this retreat. They brought us up and super high mountain place for like three days and, we just did a whole bunch of like team building stuff.
I always made fun of that stuff, but if you guys ever heard of the terms Form, Storm, Norm, Perform? Meaning you're gonna get with a group of people, people are gonna unofficially be assigned roles.
You're gonna fight with each other and then finally the team can actually start producing, right. Well, we did that in that three day period. And that was one of the reasons they did it so fast with us.
Anyway, so we go in, #1: we start brainstorming cool product ideas.
We went through and we started writing out ideas for the name of the business, for what the product is gonna be, what the price point should be.
We were all over the place just coming out with this crazy deep dive of what we think would be best to sell.
Well, when we came back out of our high mountain escapade, it wasn't challenging or anything, it was a lot of fun though. When we came back they said, "Hey, you know what's helpful is to start asking your customers about what is it they wanna buy." And they started teaching us about design thinking.
Design thinking, meaning: here's how to actually think in order to design cool stuff. And they started teaching us these really cool processes. It was really really fascinating, it was a ton of fun.
And among those techniques were different brainstorming methods - different ways to go through and create products with customers. Which is where a lot of what I know comes from. It's really really cool.
Well, I remember there was this really fascinating point where they started telling us we had to keep a journal of what we were learning each day. And I found the journal, and I just read it for the last little while … and this thing is full full full full full, okay. And super awesome.
I started reading the journal entries and what I was writing, and I'm so glad I took it seriously 'cause like there's some good crap in here. It's fascinating to see what they were teaching us.
It was a combination of how to be creative, mixed with what they call data-driven decisions.
And I'm not the first person to ever say that at all. But that was when I was like, “Oh yeah, that makes total sense. Why would I not make decisions based on data? That makes sense. There's security in that…”
Remember, I'm specifically talking about product creation here.
So I'm gonna go through 3 separate things on how to actually create products.
Some of these stories, some of you guys may have heard in the past, but I don't think I've ever done an episode where it’s kind of laced altogether.
So first of all, remember I'm not talking about offers. I'm not talking about offers at all. I'm talking about product creation and how to make sweet products that make people be like, "Oh my gosh, that's so freaking cool."
The first time I ever learned about this was data-driven decisions, right. Meaning I can go out, I can see what other competitors are doing - essentially funnel hacking, right?
I can start asking and see what other markets are doing; what other products are doing, how they're making money? Very very data-driven - obviously data-driven decisions.
What was interesting is like as we started pushing forward and as we started learning these cool techniques and methods, I started having these really massive “aha's” on what actually created good products.
I've told this story in the past, but … so the guy, the professor that was assigned to our group, was not allowed to intervene with us at all. Only when we asked specific questions. So it was very much like, “Let's throw you off a cliff and see what you do in free fall.” And the whole semester was like that. It was a bunch of fun.
Anyway, so I was voted to be the CEO at the beginning, and what was cool is I got a lot of really cool interactions with him. He kind of became one of my first unofficial mentors, and I spent a lot of one on one time with him.
He was fantastic. He was the CEO of Denny's and of Pizza Hut. The guy invented stuffed crust pizza,... ahhhhhh! He was the man. He was super c...
