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Work Less, Earn More is the podcast that explores how to get the most out of every hour you work. Gillian Perkins brings more than a decade of experience as an entrepreneur and educator to help you design a business that's not only flexible and fulfilling, but highly profitable. She shares strategies that are working in her own business to save time and maximize profits. She also features interviews with successful business owners on how they’re achieving big things in their businesses with crazy-little time investment. Share Work Less, Earn More with an overworked entrepreneur you know who could use a change of pace!
[0:00] We are going to be talking about how to find a profitable product idea. So this is obviously one of the very first steps that you need to take to be able to start a money making online business. You need to have something that your business sells, right? But even if you are past this very first stage of starting your business, this is something you're probably going to do time and time again, because most businesses don't just sell one thing for the life of the business. Most businesses are going to bring additional products out at least every few years. And I want to make sure that as you are doing that, that you find product ideas that are really good, really solid ideas that there is a demand for. So that's what we're going to be talking about today.
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We became entrepreneurs because more than anything, we want freedom. We want to be in control of our own schedule, income, and life. But unfortunately, that isn't always the reality of being a business owner. I'm Gillian Perkins, and I'm on a mission to take back entrepreneurship for what it's supposed to be.
In every episode, I'll share with you how to get the most out of every hour you work so that you can work less and earn more. Let's get to it.
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[1:16] You probably have a few ideas, right? If you are an entrepreneur, you're probably an idea person. You might have a list of ideas. You might just have ideas swimming around in your head. Or maybe you just have one that keeps coming up. Or maybe you know you need an idea and you kind of have some like swirling around, but you don't have anything specific. So whichever place you are at right now, we're going to work on this together. Now, most entrepreneurs start exactly where you are at right now. But the difference between those who succeed and those who stay stuck is not actually the quality of their initial idea, but it is knowing how to test whether that idea has a real profit potential. Okay, we've all got good ideas, and not so good ideas, maybe or ideas that don't have as much profitability potential. But I want to just help you to figure out whether your idea is the best idea
[2:07] you can come up with right now. So you know whether to move forward with it or not.
[2:11] So first of all, let's talk about how to generate ideas that actually sell. So this will be great for you if maybe you don't have as many ideas as you would like right now. So the first thing you can do is to mine your own frustrations. What problems do you solve in your daily life? What do you wish existed? Your personal pain points often signal broader market needs. Okay, so if you've ever said, I wish such and such existed, or you found yourself struggling with a problem or with an unanswered question, that can be the very first and oftentimes the most authentic place to create a product from. Also, you immediately have some validation, a very small amount of validation, but some validation that there is some demand for it because you want it, right? So somebody wants it. You're not just imagining maybe somebody else wants it, but you know that at least you want it. So what I would encourage you to do.
[3:03] Is to write down these ideas whenever they come to you, okay? Because it can be hard to brainstorm this sort of thing. You know, if you sit down, you're like, okay, what problems do I have in my life? What unanswered questions do I have? That can be pretty tough, right? To think of those things on the fly. But if you just get in the habit of writing down whenever you do face some sort of challenge, or you see kind of like a gap in the market, something that you wish existed, writing it down, you'll find that you will notice these things more and more.
[3:31] A second place that you can generate ideas from is listening to the conversations online. So whatever social media platform you like to use or however you like to consume content online, whether that is Reddit or Facebook or YouTube, be looking in the comments, looking for phrases and like, I wish someone would or why doesn't anyone make? And also frustrations that people have. Now, in different types of content, this will be more or less common. So for example you know on reddit there are all these different subreddits and some of them are talking about people doing things and they're using products and so there will be a lot of those sorts of words or people trying to do something and then others you know it might be like the jokes right you're probably not going to find a good product idea in the jokes right so i'm not saying that all online chatter is good for generating product ideas but whenever you are consuming i would say how to type of content or educational content aside from the thing people are learning to do, they're also going to be talking about the tools that they use to do it. So you will be able to get quite a variety there of different challenges that people are facing and desires that people have. All right. Number three is to study what's already selling. So you can take a look at different marketplaces like Amazon.
[4:46] Etsy and Kickstarter, and you can notice the different products that are more popular. And it's pretty easy to see on these platforms because you can just look at the number of reviews the different products have or the number of comments that something has gotten or the number of the interaction around it. And you can also look at like bestseller rankings on Amazon.
[5:05] So I would recommend that you start with one of the first two. And I'm really like this is kind of a hierarchy here. Like the best place to start with an idea is that first thing, your own frustrations. Second best place is what you hear other people saying they want. Third best place, although still a very valid place, is to go and look at what is already selling.
[5:24] And then a fourth and final place is to look actually in the reviews of products on these different marketplaces, especially Amazon, and to specifically look at the three star reviews of popular
[5:37] products to see what people say is missing. Now, it might be that you're looking at, you know, the review for, for example, these pens that I was talking about earlier, and you notice people are saying these are pretty good, but, you know, they don't erase as well as they should or something like that, or I wish they came in more colors. And you think, oh, I could create a better version of this thing. But you also might find where people are talking about a problem that they still have. And it might give you an idea for a different type of product or even an educational product. So keep that in mind as well. You know, there's that famous quote that goes something like Henry Ford said, you know, if we'd asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. They didn't know they wanted the automobile, right? But it turns out they did. They didn't know what they wanted. So when you see people's complaints, don't always just take it for what it is. You know, if they say they want faster horses, that doesn't mean you need to go out there and invent faster horses. Maybe you need to come up with a different way for them to get to the destination that they really want.
[6:38] So now let's talk about once you have an idea, how you can test it, okay? How you can figure out if it is a good idea. So there are three basic things we want to do here. The first one is to assess the general demand, okay? Are people already searching for this thing? So you can look at data like Amazon bestseller ranks, Google Trends. If you just search for trends on Google, you'll go to the Google Trends dashboard and you can search on Google Trends and see what people are searching for and how their interests are changing over time. You can look at YouTube search volumes and the number of views on YouTube videos relating to certain topics. You can look at the Etsy sales numbers. If people are actively looking for solutions like yours, then you will know that demand exists, that there is interest in that topic, that there is interest in that tool, right? So that's what we wanna do first, okay? You just kind of get the general lay of the land.
[7:32] Second thing is to assess the size of the market. You are going to need thousands of potential customers, not just dozens, okay? You might be able to build your business with only dozens of customers. But to get dozens of customers, there needs to be thousands of potential customers. So you want to look here for communities, okay? We're talking like Facebook groups, popular subreddits, and consistent search traffic, okay? If you're looking on like an SEO tool, and you can see the Google search traffic for different terms, you want your niche to be specific, but not tiny. Okay, this is something I think people get wrong a lot of the time because they hear the riches are in the niches or something like that. And they think, okay, so that means I need to niche down. I really need to focus. I need to focus on a tiny group of people. No, okay. Actually, you want to focus on a very, very specific problem, a very, very specific product. But you still want the group of people who you are helping to be as big as possible.
[8:31] Now, that doesn't mean you should try to be all things to all people, right? We will do better when we have a specific message when it is for a specific type of person. But again, the larger that group of people is, the more potential customers there are. So don't conflate specific with small.
[8:50] Now, the third thing that you'll want to look at as you are assessing the profitability of your idea is people's willingness to pay, okay? So they might be interested, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are interested in paying for help with this challenge that they have or this topic that they're interested in. So you want to make sure that you check if your competitors are selling successfully, and then follow this up by pre-launching your product to validate your idea before you invest the time to create it. This is really important. So I first encountered this idea when I read The 4-Hour Workweek, probably about over 10 years ago. Now I read The 4-Hour Workweek. And in it, Tim Ferriss talks about how he validated one of his business ideas. And he specifically talks about having this idea for selling a certain style of shirt. And that he tested it by running Facebook ads to a landing page where people could ostensibly purchase the shirt. Although they couldn't actually purchase the shirt. Okay, I'm glad. To be totally frank, I don't think that this is the best way to do this. But it was, like I said, just the first time I heard of this idea. And it planted the seed. And it's such an important principle.
[10:04] How Tim Ferriss had it set up initially, you know, and I don't think he knew what he was doing at the time either. You know, I'm sure he's come a long way too. But he had it so people could like basically start purchasing the shirt, try to purchase the shirt. But then before they would check out, it basically say that the shirt wasn't in stock or something like that. So they couldn't complete their purchase. But he had already, you know, collected their name and email. So he could count, you know, how many people had actually, you know, pushed the buy now button, and then it failed. Now, like I said, I would recommend not doing it quite like that. But you still can test your productivity in so many ways by doing a pre-sale or a beta launch. And we'll talk more about that later on.
[10:44] So here's an example of how you might do this. Let's say you wanted to create a course about how to care for a house plants. So again, we've got these three things we want to do. So first we want to test the demand. So we could look at monthly search data using a keyword research tool to find out that how to care for house plants gets 900,000 monthly searches on Google. And that there are many plant care tutorials on YouTube that have over 200,000 views. So that gives us an idea that this is a popular topic. Now we want to know how many people are in this market, though. Okay, we might do a little bit of research and find that there are some groups on Facebook for houseplant care that have combined over 200 million members. And we could look at the hashtags on Instagram and notice that the hashtag plant parent hashtag has over 15 million posts. Okay, so clearly there are a lot of people who are using these terms.
[11:42] Now we need to do the willingness to pay test though. Okay, so first let's see like how much money are people selling these for? We could go on Udemy, which is an online course platform, and notice that there are houseplant courses selling for between $30 and $80, and that there are several courses with hundreds of reviews. Okay, that's important. And then finally, the most important, and yes, the most challenging part of this process, but the most important is to do a weekend beta launch and see how many sales we can get. And you do that, you get six pre-sales out of the 30 people you reach out to.
[12:15] Now, I know that six sales might not seem like a lot, but when you've only reached out to about 30 people, which is what a lot of people do for these beta launches, six sales is huge, okay? That is a 20% conversion rate effectively. Now, you can't necessarily expect to continue to get that because right now you might be reaching out to really warm leads, you know, people who know, like, and trust you, and you are reaching out to them one-to-one, but it shows that there is interest and people are actually willing to pay for this idea. So this idea, past all three tests, there's proven demand, there is a substantial
[12:50] audience, and there is a demonstrated willingness to pay. So this would give you the green light to move forward with this idea.
[12:57] We just put the finishing touches on a free business course for all those of you who are listening right now because you're just getting your business started. I know that when you are in those beginning stages, there are so many unknowns and it can to be hard to grasp the big picture of where you're really taking your business and what you need to do to grow your business and reach your goals for it. I know that because that was exactly how I felt for the first few years when I was getting started. And it took me quite a while to understand that big picture. But once I did, I got so much clarity about exactly what I needed to do. So that's why I decided to create this free small business 101 course that gives you that big picture perspective. It teaches you the basics of what you need to do to get your business started, as well as helps you to understand actually how your business is going to make money and how you can set up a sales funnel to drive sales into your business, how you can start working with those customers sooner rather than later. So if this sounds like it would be helpful to you and you want to get your hands on a free copy of this course, then just head to gillianperkins.com slash 101. Of course, we'll put a link in the episode show notes as well. But again, that URL is just gillianperkins.com slash 101.
[14:14] So now let's talk about how we do this in our program Validate. So you can see kind of how all the steps end up lining up. So first of all, we start by brainstorming product ideas. A lot of people come in to validate already with a product idea they know they want to test, but some people aren't quite there yet. So we work with them to brainstorm and choose one idea to test. Now, something that's really important to keep in mind is you don't have to choose the perfect idea. The whole point of this process is to figure out if your idea is in fact a good one. So it's okay if you're just choosing the idea that you like the best. Step number two that we have to validate students do is to talk to real potential customers to find out what those potential customers want, need, and are struggling with. Okay, we want to make sure that we're making a product that will suit what they want and need. And we also want to know the language that they use to describe what they want and need and are struggling with so that our marketing messages can be really effective.
[15:07] The third thing we do is we build a test offer. Okay, so we create the smallest possible version of this product, the smallest, simplest one. We call it a minimum viable product because we would want to be able to test the market without over-investing our time. Too often, people spend months, sometimes even years creating a product and launching it only to find out that it is a dud, that there's not demand for it actually. And we wanna make sure that we do not make that mistake. So we create just that smallest, simplest version of the product so we can do our weekend beta launch. Now, we don't do it like Tim Ferriss did back in the day, you know, and kind of do a bait and switch where we offer a product and then it's not available. But instead, we make sure that people can actually complete their purchase, either buying a small, simple version of it or buying something that is coming very soon, like a class that we're going to be running live or a coaching offer. Now, fifth, okay, we are going to collect feedback from people. So we want to make sure that we gather real data from actual customers and refine it based on what we learn.
[16:11] And then finally, is where we launch with confidence. So we run that weekend beta launch to confirm that there is real interest before building the entire system. I know you might hear me talk about those six-figure sales funnels, and I love them. But don't try to build one until you have a proven product, please. Because there's such a good chance that it might be a waste of your time. And I really don't want you to waste your time because your time is so precious. You know, we talked about that earlier, that work less, earn more value that I have. I really don't want you to waste your time not earning much of anything at all or maybe earning nothing at all. Because I want you to be using your time to build a successful business and to spend time with your loved ones.
[16:54] Now, validate. It's not about perfection. It is about turning your uncertainty, turning your lack of clarity and turning your lack of confidence in your product into, as it says here on the slide, actionable insights so that you can move forward with a product that you have a lot of confidence in because you will be able to much more effectively sell a product that you have confidence is what people want and your time will be very well spent.
[17:21] So that brings us just about to the end of this short class today. The action step that I want to leave you with is kind of a two-parter. I want you to start with a brainstorming session. Brainstorm some ideas that you are interested in. It could be based on struggles that you have, challenges that you're facing, questions you have, or things that you see people are struggling with online. And I just want you to choose one idea to try out, even if your idea feels imperfect, even if you do not know if it is going to be successful. Now, you don't need to get into the weekend beta launch and all that yet, but just run it through the first part of the three-part profitability test. Check the demand for it on Google Trends or Amazon reviews. Verify your market size by finding some active communities online, looking at the hashtag data, that sort of thing, maybe doing some keyword research, and then confirm willingness to pay by researching competitors at least.
[18:16] And if you get a green flag from all three of those tests, then you can consider moving forward with creating that minimum viable version of your product and doing a weekend beta launch with it.
[18:27] Remember, you don't need a perfect idea to start. You just need one that is good enough to test. Small steps forward beat perfect plans that never launch, right? The plan B that you carry through is going to add so much more to your life, to your business than the perfect plan A that you never do. Okay, so make sure that you start taking action today or this week, at least that you learn from the data and that you adjust as you go. That is how real businesses are built.
[18:59] Now, if you want to take the next steps with this, I've got two suggested resources for you. The first one is Startup Society, which I know many of you are going to be joining us inside when you get your scale pass. You're going to have at least a free month inside Startup Society to check it out. If you do that, or if you just join Startup Society itself, which you can do at StartupSociety.com, I want to just give you the heads up about this action plan right here. Okay, it's one of the courses inside Startup Society. It's called Decide What Business to Start. So if you are at the very beginning stages of this process, and you're just trying to figure out what your product options are, what sort of business maybe you want to start, what sort of niche you want to focus on, that course is going to be very helpful for you. It's going to walk you through the complete decision-making framework in five lessons and help you choose your ideas with the highest profit potential and the ones that you will actually enjoy running the most.
[19:53] Now, if you are just a little bit further along with this, and you have an idea in mind, you're ready to charge forward with it, then you might want to check out Validate. So Validate is an eight-week accelerator program that we normally run two times per year. And it guides you step-by-step from idea to actually validating your product. So basically, we coach the students through the process of doing the market research, creating really compelling marketing messages to sell their product, and then doing that weekend beta launch process. So we work with them one-on-one and in group coaching settings. There's an amazing community and lots of accountability so that you can make
[20:30] sure you get through this entire process in just eight weeks. Like I said, we only do this program twice per year. But if you are interested in joining the next cohort of the program, you can go to gillianperkins.com slash validate to get your name on the wait list.
[20:45] So that brings me to the end of this. Gabe, were there any questions that you saw in the chat that we should cover before we wrap this up for the session? Yeah. So I saw one question from Amusu. Hopefully I'm saying that right. But Amusu is wondering, what do we use to do all these market research interviews and tests? So what are maybe some tools or some tips for doing the market research? Yeah. So there are lots of great SEO tools out there. And that might not seem like exactly what you want. But you can use something like Keywords Everywhere, or Google Trends, or you can use Moz, or there are so many of them. Keyword Research, we decided on Ubersuggest.
[21:33] Ubersuggest? Okay, awesome. So that's a great one. And what I like about Ubersuggest is they do have a free version where you can do your first several searches for free. and then it also is just significantly cheaper than a lot of the other options that are out there. So those are a few good tools that you can use for that. Was there something else you were thinking of that you want to share, Gabe? I was wondering, like as far as tools with the market research, maybe even breaking it down like Zoom, like usually we just go on to record it and then like get the transcript, that kind of a thing.
[22:01] Yeah, for sure. So yeah, if you're going to be talking to people, we highly recommend that you do it via video. Okay, that you're not just doing it, certainly not via text. Audio is okay, like on the phone, but video is generally best because generally people are the most open and you can kind of like see, you know, their facial expressions and where they're coming from and whatnot. Lot. And it's easy to record. So even if it's someone you know in real life, I would recommend doing it on Zoom, recording it. And then what's so like, AI does make this process so much easier now, because afterwards, you can take your recording, you can run it through a tool to get the transcript. Now you can use a tool like otter.ai to get the transcript, or you can put it into Descript, which is an amazing tool that we do really like, get the transcript from that. And then you can just pop that transcript into ChatGBT and you can ask it questions about it. So you can ask it to give you the keywords that the person mentioned for the problem that they're facing and what different terms did they use for the outcome that they're looking for and like that. Okay. And you'll want to do that for each of the different interviews that you do so that you can create a little library of terms for yourself that your target customers are using to describe this product that they want, okay? And they're not really going to be talking about the product itself. They're going to be talking about their own desires and their motivations, why they want it and the obstacles that they're facing.
[23:24] Awesome. I see Maddie put Notta, is that how you say it? Is an awesome transcription tool. N-O-T-T-A. Great. JB says, I use 10 or fewer questions from free SurveyMonkey surveys for my ideal clients. I post it where my ICs go and you can get 40 answers for free. That's enough for me to make decisions. Love that.
[23:44] Yeah. So I know using surveys can be great and it can definitely give us some insights, but I do highly encourage everyone to actually have conversations with people because you'll find that a lot of time their answers are a lot more nuanced than what you'll get from a survey. People tend to be a lot more verbose when they're speaking than when they are typing. And you can also ask follow-up questions. You can ask them, what do you mean by that? Why does that matter to you? Oh, you're struggling with this, you know, like what have you tried to solve the problem? So I know it can be easier to do a survey for sure and certainly a little bit more comfortable sometimes.
[24:17] But I think you will, I know you will learn more if you talk to some real people face-to-face. Yeah, love it. If you do have any questions along the way, just email contact at gillianperkins.com and we will help you out. Perfect. Amazing.
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Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Work Less, Earn More. Now, here's what I want you to do next. Take a screenshot of this episode you're listening to right now and share it out on your Instagram stories. And when you do, make sure you tag me @gillianzperkins so I can see you're listening. Sharing on stories is going to help more people find this podcast so they too can learn how to build their business in a way that allows them to work less and earn more. And if you really love the show, head over to Apple Podcasts right now and leave Work Less Earn More a review to give it a boost and help even more people find it. Okay, let's wrap this up. I'm Gillian Perkins, and until next week, stay focused and take action.
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