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A pre-sell to 7,000 subscribers got zero sales. The failure forced a free-plus-upgrade model that broke a three-year income drought and became Trends.vc. The target I missed was smaller than what the miss handed me.
Show Notes
A pre-sell to 7,000 subscribers got zero sales. The failure forced a free-plus-upgrade model that broke a three-year income drought and became Trends.vc. The target I missed was smaller than what the miss handed me.
Featuring: Dwight D. Eisenhower
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One mental model each day in a few minutes. Habits, business, building products and thinking clearly. From Dru Riley, founder of Trends.vc.
"Plans are worthless, but planning is everything."
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The first time I tried to make money from Trends.vc, I pre-sold the next report. Seven thousand people on the list. I figured some slice would pay up front. Zero of them did.
Ash, from my mastermind, cut in before I could spend a week regrouping. He asked why I was waiting to try again. "It didn't work. You already have your information." Then he pushed past my comfort: tell people it flopped. Be vulnerable about it.
That wasn't how I operated. I did it anyway. I scrapped the report, picked a new topic and wrote a post about the pre-sell falling flat. The model changed with it. The report goes out free. You see half. The full version sits behind an upgrade.
People bought. They replied. They empathized.
I made my first hundred dollars in two hours. I went three years without a dollar from my own work. That two hours ended the streak. Within weeks the income was steady enough that going back to a job left the table.
I went in chasing one number: pre-sell revenue. I missed it. What I walked away with was the model that became the business. The target I aimed at was smaller than the thing the miss handed me.
Readers wanted more than the next report. They wanted a new one each week. So I put the reports on a subscription. The pre-sell I chased would have paid once. The subscription kept paying.
The plan failed. Running it was critical.
You aim at a target and miss. The miss drops you somewhere you couldn't see from the start.
Your best outcome may be one you can't name yet. You find it by running the thing that might miss.
What would you try if a miss could hand you something better?
Dwight D. Eisenhower: "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything." (Remarks, National Defense Executive Reserve Conference, 14 Nov 1957. Attribution: high.) The plan (the pre-sell) was worthless. The planning (running the experiment at all) is what surfaced the better model.