How we created our first paid product

Hey, Andrew here this week.

The other day, a reader hit us with some tough love:

“Your life experience is becoming unrelatable.”

Ouch! But point taken.

So today, I’m taking it back to basics. I’ll share how we at Bootstrap Giants created our first product, from scratch.

From identifying demand to interviewing users and closing customers, you’ll get all the frameworks you need to launch your products. I'll share real numbers along the way.

When I partnered with Jesse on Bootstrapped Giants he asked me, “What’s your DFS?” Desired Future State.

I said, “Part of it is having the majority of our revenue to come from selling our own products. The best way to know that what we’re creating is valuable is to have people pay for it.”

His response was, “Ok, let’s start. Let’s make things and sell them.”

That made me feel uncomfortable.

Jesse and I have a different approach to starting businesses. I love to do a lot of customer discovery. Talking to potential customers about their companies’ challenges, understanding what they wish existed to overcome them, and creating their ideal solutions — that’s my happy place.

Jesse operates differently. He just starts companies and launches products. He knows his customer well enough to get started and adjusts as he builds.

On Thursday, we had a deep conversation about how his “shoot from the hip” approach both helped and hurt his past companies, but I’ll leave that to him to write in a future newsletter.

Today, I want to show you how we launched our first product by doing a lot of customer discovery.

In one of my first emails to you, I said I was moving this newsletter to beehiiv*.

I told you it’s because I’m obsessed with learning about customers. And beehiiv was the only email platform that allowed us to properly learn about our audience.

One of its advantages is that whenever someone subscribes to our newsletter, we can use beehiiv’s Survey tool to know them better.

*beehiiv is our sponsor. If you want to use a growth-focused newsletter platform, use my partner link to get a 20% discount for a 3-month subscription.

When new subscribers joined, we asked them:

a) Which customers are you serving?

B2B was the clear winner.

b) Which industry are you serving?

Consulting and SaaS were the top choices.

c) What do you need the most help with?

Sales and Marketing were the recurring themes.

In fact, if you take a closer look, you'll see that marketing is such a pressing issue for some readers that they’re not even sure which channel to focus on.

So our first product needed to be something that helped our readers with either marketing or sales.

But how do we choose what to offer?

We hired Nathan May of Feed Media. His company does subscriber growth, sponsorships, product launches - everything end-to-end to help entrepreneurs grow their business via newsletters. He previously worked with Jesse on another project, so I trusted him.

Nathan shares my belief that you can’t build in private. You need to constantly interact with customers.

He led product creation by interviewing Jesse and the leaders of Gateway X companies about the sales and marketing they do to grow.

Nathan found that even though Jesse has 170K+ followers on social and is an expert in scaling paid ads (he did that for Uber, Dollar Shave Club, and other unicorns), he always started his sales with direct calls. This was the foundation of scaling his 3 companies to 8-figures in revenue.

(Bootstrapped Giants isn’t nearly at 8-figures yet, but I’m working like crazy to set up the foundations to get us there. I’ll use emails like this to update you on our progress.)

So we had the perfect combo of a killer product: Strong user demand + Personal expertise.

We chose to help readers get better at sales.

Jesse emailed ~300 of this newsletter’s subscribers:

"Hey, if you're running a B2B business, we're creating a product to help you get better sales. Would you be interested in using it?"

The goal was to reconfirm that readers had a sales problem and that our product was the solution. We didn't want to create a product no one wanted --- the #2 reason startups fail.

Out of the 300 people, 50-60 of them replied "Yes."

We sent the product to those people. They went through the content and provided feedback. Nathan’s team at The Feed Media compiled the feedback and tweaked the product. And resent it to them.

They, again, suggested changes. After a few iterations, we and the early users were satisfied with the product.

We called it the B2B Blueprint. It documented how Jesse’s companies sell, complete with recordings of sales meetings that used this process, scripts, and everything else we’d give someone on our team if they needed to sell.

Based on the early user's feedback, we created the landing page for the paid product.

When we asked early users what they’d pay for it, they said, “$500.”

Still, we priced it at $47 because:

a) I think free testers will always be more positive about pricing since they don’t have to pay it.

b) We wanted to provide 10X value. If buyers feel it should cost $500 when they were charged $47, they’ll trust us. Long-term relationships are worth more than maximizing revenue from this first launch.

Then we emailed all subscribers (minus the early users) announcing our paid product. BUT we didn’t open it for sale yet!

Remember, I like getting feedback from customers. Frankly, sometimes I feel that my love of feedback drives Jesse crazy. “You know everything you need to know already,” he tells me. But customer interaction is what I live for.

So instead of selling, we emailed this newsletter’s readers and asked, "We’re creating a product to help you close more sales faster. If you're interested in buying it, get on the waitlist and you'll get to buy it before anyone else."

600 people got on the waitlist.

We emailed only people on this waitlist and offered our $47 product.

Luckily, beehiiv makes this kind of segmentation easy. As soon as someone clicked the waitlist link, they were automatically added to the waitlist segment. Then, we could send our early sales emails just to them.

Of those 600 people, ~160 bought the product.

Why email only this small subset? Like I said, I love feedback. I wanted to see if anything was confusing or broken.

Side note: I was one of the first startup interview podcasters. Before they were famous, the founders of Airbnb, Y Combinator, Reddit, and others were fans and guests of my podcast. #humblebrag

When I tried selling a “How to Interview” guide, only a few of my listeners bought it. Luckily, I only tried selling it to a small subset of my email readers. So I asked them why they didn’t buy. They replied, “I’m not doing any job interviews at the moment.”

I forgot that there were two kinds of interviews. The kind Joe Rogan does and the kind an HR department does.

So before emailing my full list, I changed my guide’s name to “Interview Your Heroes” and wrote copy that talked up how interviewing was big in podcasts, YouTube and blogs. Suddenly I had a hit product.

We spent a week gathering feedback from early buyers of the Blueprint to identify areas for improvement. Nathan’s company analyzed the data, adjusted the sales copy to clear up any confusion, and updated the B2B Blueprint.

Surprisingly, there weren’t many major changes needed. The biggest issue? We accidentally revealed too much information in the sales call recordings included in the Blueprint. While we aimed for transparency, we may have overshared. After making a few small edits, we officially launched the Blueprint to our list.

376 customers bought our $47 product = $17,672 total revenue.

Yes, it’s not huge.

But we only sold it for 4 days. Plus, selling a $47 product was never our goal. It was a test to see if readers would buy our product and to establish trust with buyers.

Now that we had real customers, I could talk to them about what their bigger needs are. And understand how we can help them.

So I started getting into online meetings with buyers of the Blueprint. I asked them about their businesses, their problems, and how we could help.

These were just opportunities for me to learn. But as I started to ask “what if we create” questions, I started hearing hearing phrases like, “If you create that, I’ll pay you for it right now.”

To see if they were serious, I said, “Ok. Can I charge your card using our Stripe account on this call?” And they said yes.

So now we have over $80k in pre-purchases for our next product. We’re launching it on Wednesday.

It starts with the sales process that we packaged into the Blueprint and levels it up into a deeper experience. Many B2B leaders told me that their B2B sales motion isn’t systemized, so their revenue goes up and down from month to month. They’d like to fix it, but their attention is pulled in lots of different directions.

What they wanted was someone to work with them on it and hold them accountable to stay focused until they have a playbook that works for their companies.

So, Jesse agreed to personally work with a few members to grow their companies’ sales and help them implement a customized playbook in their companies. We’re calling it the B2B Sales Accelerator.

I’ll tell you more about that in next month’s update. Let me know what details you want us to share.

But if you’re curious, you can see us launch it live on Wednesday, here in a teaching workshop.

We’re just getting started. Thanks for following along.

-Andrew

PS: I can’t thank beehiiv enough for enabling this. I couldn’t have understood our audience as well or segmented them properly without beehiiv’s tools. If you’re starting a newsletter or looking to grow one you’re already publishing, use my partner link to try it free and to get 20% off for a 3-month subscription.