Unscripted: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship pdfdrive com

1. Checklist Your Channel:
Are you sure you’re leveraging the right channel with the right targeting
measures? Or is there a better medium to reach your audience? If you’re
advertising a facial cream on a Mustang forum, it's the wrong channel. If you’re
Facebook ads target “all adults over twenty-one”, you’re targeting the wrong
audience. Before concluding a product failure, checklist your channel. You must
constantly test varied channels and targeting options by acting, assessing, and
adjusting. Your product might not suck, but your channel and your audience
targeting do.
2. Checklist Your Reach:
The other failure of nothingness is a lack of reach. You might have selected
the right channel and the right targeting, but you haven’t reached enough of
them. If your ad had only one hundred impressions or thirty-two clicks, you are
drawing conclusions from an inadequate sample size. No matter what the

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industry, conversions need large samples. I don’t care what the product is, zero
response from thirty-two clicks isn’t unusual, no matter what the offer! Just
because you burned through one hundred dollars at Amazon and nothing
happened, it doesn’t mean failure. You might have failed reach. Check the
sample size and ensure it’s large enough to warrant conclusions about its data.
I’d recommend at least 10,000 impressions and/or 1,000 clicks.
3. Checklist Your Message:
Probably the most common false flag is your message. Your offer is weak.
Your copy sucks. Your call to action doesn’t exist. Your design and UI look like
they were done with GoDaddy’s web tool.
Remember the cancer corollary: the greatest product in the world goes
unsold if you cannot persuade the marketmind of its value. Kickstarter is a
fantastic avenue for hard proof, but the fact is many great products die there
because of flawed offers and poor presentations. In the end, you could hit the
right medium and saturate the right reach—but a poorly constructed offer will
kill success. 
I’d estimate most launch failures are from failed offers, not from failed
products!
Put these three multivariate unknowns together—the wrong medium, the
wrong reach, and the wrong offer—and do you see why failure is often
interpreted when seeking hard proof?
The entire evaluative process of channel, reach, and message is likened to
striking a piñata. Too many entrepreneurs poke and prod the piñata, only
forcing a sway, giving up none of its goodness. To bust it open and get the
bounty inside, you have to hit hard and multiple times. 
Only act, assess, and
adjust (followed by these three checkpoints) can flag a failure worthy of, “OK, this
didn’t work…next idea.”
The Marketmind “Yes”: Victory
Pushing proof’s third outcome is the desired: a sale! Congratulations. Light a
cigar and toast the champagne, you’ve just proven the viability and value of your
offer. Someone wants your product and is paying for it. You’ve just
accomplished more than most entrepreneurs ever dream of.
Once the celebration is over, get dirty, and again, act, assess, and adjust. Is
your marketing message as effective as it can be? Based on the sales, what is your
customer acquisition cost and how does it relate to your cost structure? Did it
cost you fifty dollars in advertising to generate twenty-five dollars in profit?

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Assuming a positive margin, your first sale segues into the next phase of kinetic
execution: a productocracy.
PRODUCTOCRACY: USE, ENGAGEMENT, AND DISCIPLESHIP
A sale proves you have effectively communicated perceived value. Your
marketing works. However, have you delivered actual value? Only your customer
knows. This unknown establishes the contrast between a productocracy and a
BRO-marketing scheme.
Some years ago, I befriended a respected “entrepreneur” I met on an exotic
car forum. We shared a love for Lamborghinis. As I got to know this guy, I
discovered that his business model was based entirely upon marketing and
planned user forgetfulness. He was a value-cheater who dealt in perceived value,
not actual value. His products merely surrogated the scheme. Ultimately, I
learned that he was a slime bucket who deployed all the effective persuasion
tools: powerful copy, fake testimonials, insinuated celebrity endorsements, and
anything else that persuaded the customer to buy. After buying, the customer
didn’t know that their purchase included a continuity enrollment, of course
nicely disclosed in a large block of text that no one reads.
If you’re not familiar with continuity programs, that’s when your credit card
is automatically dinged every month for product refills or membership renewals.
And yes, they’re gold mines for entrepreneurs. But like anything pertaining to
gold, they can be abused. Most people don’t pay attention to their credit card
statements, and when the client discovers the charges (and that the product
sucks), several beefy monthly payments have already occurred. Worse, his refund
and cancellation policy was like trying to navigate the IRS tax code.
Let me be clear: If you have an entire department dedicated to chargebacks,
you have a product problem—and probably a sleeping problem as well. Yet
based upon his fleet of exotic cars, my guess is that he was making a fortune but
certainly wouldn’t win any awards for ethics.
Within the customer life cycle, 
the productocracy stage covers use,
engagement, and discipleship
. Your objective in the productocracy stage is to
confirm gravitons—investigating if actual value is delivered (worthy of
discipleship) over perceived value (worthy of nothing). If your customers aren’t
loving your product, the objective becomes to skew value until they do,
establishing a productocracy. You can only do this by listening, observing, and
engaging your customers. Are they complaining or not using your product as
intended? Are they reordering, or is it one and done? Do they comment on your

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email blasts? Are they recommending your products on social media? The
answers to these questions determine your potential product power in terms of
transforming customers into loyal disciples.
Once again, act, assess, adjust comes into play. When I owned my Internet
company, I made a mandated effort to reengineer the entire site every eighteen
months. Why? I was proactively adding value to my service by adopting features
uncovered by pattern echoes.
Quite possibly the most famous “pattern echo” comes from Instagram’s
meteoric growth. When Instagram was first started (back then it was called
Burbn), founder Kevin Systrom and his programmer, Mike Krieger, noticed that
no one was really using the “check-in” feature while everyone was engaging the
photo-sharing feature. They acted, assessed, and adjusted, and bam—Burbn was
dumped and simplified, and Instagram was born.
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Anytime you prod the marketmind, rise to full attention and see what’s
bouncing back to you. These three gravitons could be a sign of a productocracy:
1.
Reorders or renewals: both say,
“Yes, you’ve delivered on your promise.”
2.
Private emails: Written accolades or testimonials signify success.
3.
Public reviews or praises from strangers: a positive blurb (blogs/social
media) from strangers hints of a productocracy.
How I Found A Million Bucks Hiding in my Forum
I launched my entrepreneur forum in the summer of 2007. As mentioned
earlier, I started it because another forum I frequented was littered with
schemers, self-promoters, and spammers. In need language, “I was tired” of the
BS. My intent was not to make money (I was driven by the need as community
building is incredibly difficult) but to provide a refuge for legitimate
entrepreneurs.
Over the next few years, the forum grew to where it became beneficial to
monetize the traffic with advertising. Most users didn’t care. But others did. One
publicly posted a thread and complained about the ads. A few others followed,
voicing the same opinion. However, embedded in their complaints was an
opportunity. The complainants said that they’d be happy to pay for an ad-free
forum.
I thought the suggestion was ridiculous. Why? My personal bias interjected.
It scoffed, “I’d never pay to view a forum ad-free, so why bother?” Despite my
sentiment, I listened to my users and offered an ad-free version of the forum for

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a mere $7.99 a month. I spent about one hour implementing the plan and named
the ad-free option “
Fastlane
Insiders.”
On top of ad-free viewing, I also added several other benefits, including what
many saw as most important: privacy and less dreampreneur noise. This one
decision—merely acting, assessing, and adjusting to users—helped me find a
fortune hiding underneath my forum pages. Over the life of my ownership, this
simple decision should net out to over a million bucks. Additionally, the business
move also increases the valuation of my property, should I sell it. Pummel
piñatas; don’t poke—watch how the beast sways as it reveals important clues into
how your next swing should strike.

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