Intro: You are listening to the My Wife Quit her Job Podcast. And if you are new here, it’s a show where I bring in successful bootstrapped business owners to teach us what strategies are working and what strategies are not. Now I don’t bring on these famous entrepreneurs simply to celebrate their success, instead I have them take us back to the beginning, and delve deeply into the exact strategies they used early on to gain traction for their businesses.Now if you enjoy this podcast please leave me a review on iTunes, and if you want to learn how to start your own online business be sure to sign up for my free six-day mini course, where I show you how my wife and I managed to make over 100k in profit in our first year of business. Go to www.mywifequitherjob.com, sign up right there on the front page, and I’ll send you the mini course right away via email.

Now before we begin I’m happy to announce that I’m holding my own ecommerce conference on May 19th in Miami Florida this year called The Sellers Summit. And instead of the large crowded conferences that you are used to hearing about, mine will be small and intimate with a focus on learning. So picture small round table workshops instead of large auditoriums with a focus on actionable strategies that will grow your ecommerce business. For more information go to sellerssummit.com, and watch the video.

Now before we begin I also want to give a quick shout out to famebit.com for being a sponsor o the show. Famebit is the number one market place for influencer marketing with over 20,000 Youtubers, Instagramers, people on Twitter and vine looking to promote your company in any vertical, whether it would be beauty, tech, gaming, pets and more. Yes you can get famous Youtubers and Instagramers to promote your business for as low as 50 bucks.

The best part is that you don’t really need any money at all to post a campaign and receive free proposals from creators. Now if you’ve listened to my podcast before one of my guest Emanuel Eleyae used famebit.com to make over $65,000 in four months with YouTube influencer marketing. And the best part is if you use coupon code mywife@famebit.com you will automatically get $25 off. So go to famebit.com right now, and get famous Youtubers to promote your products, now onto the show.

Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host, Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. Today I’m honored to have the one and only Tony Horton on the show. Now, if you’ve never heard of Tony, he’s the creator of the incredibly popular P90X home exercise program. To be quite frank, the personal exercise industry is extremely competitive. And to give you an idea how big time his videos have become, they’ve ended up selling over 7 million copies which is ridiculous.

Since P90X, Tony has released P90X 2 and P90X 3 with awesome success as well. Not only does the guy look great, but he’s actually quite entertaining as well. With that, welcome to the show Tony. He’s actually flexing right now, you can’t see him.

Tony: Yeah, you can see me, but I can’t see you. I showered today, so I figured out why not do a video thing just for you.

Steve: I didn’t shower, so that’s why we are not doing a video today.

Tony: That’s right. It’s about the information man, it’s about the content. They don’t need to see you.

Steve: I noticed you are really pumped, so did you do pull ups before this interview, or is that just natural?

Tony: Actually my work out is tonight. I have a routine tonight where I do a lot of Plyo boxes and core and functional stuff on stability balls and med balls and BOSU balls. That’s tonight’s work out. I’m not– this is standard pomp, right there.

Steve: That is impressive.

Tony: No, no it’s okay. It’s okay.

Steve: So what I didn’t actually know about you before I started doing my research on you, is that you actually used to do standup comedy, you are an actor, you are a go-go dancer, you are Chippendale dancer which is pretty cool.

Tony: Dude, you went deep.

Steve: I did. I did. I want to hear all about that stuff in a little bit, but I also heard, and this is just a rumor that you were kind of a terrible athlete also?

Tony: That is the truth, the absolute truth. I was a wannabe athlete. My father was a phenomenal athlete. He was a three sport captain, football, basketball, baseball. But his job was such, when I was a kid and he was gone Monday through Friday, and so I didn’t have sort of a weekly father-son baseball, football, basketball games and instruction and mentorship. So I was kind of left learning on my own.

I played football in high school. Let me put it this way. I was in the football team [inaudible 00:04:57] it tackled on me Monday through Thursday, and then on the game on Friday nights I took stats. I didn’t even know what I was doing wearing pads and helmets. I had no use for them.

I was an okay tennis player. I was an okay basketball player. I was a middle of the road skier. I loved skiing, I loved hockey. I was this smaller kid, the weaker kid, the kid without endurance, the kid without the skill, but I wanted to do it. I loved watching sports. I was a big fan, but I was kind of a dork. I mean I’m much more athletic and stronger and fitter and more flexible and faster in athletic now than I have ever been at almost 60 years old.

Steve: I was really curios as I was like doing my research. How do you kind of go from standup comedy to go-go dancer to Chippendale dancer to fitness? Like what’s the path there?

Tony: That’s a security’s route, wouldn’t you say. It’s only a forty minute conversation; I don’t know whether or not to cover it all. Yeah, I mean the go-go dancing thing was fine. I used to love to dance; I used to love to watch. A lot of your listeners are probably younger, but there was a show called soul train. They had a lot of disco and funk. And they had this little soul train line. And I would just get up in family room looking at my victroller, my [inaudible 00:06:20] victroller, and I would try to pop and lock and do the robot and walk in place and Michael Jackson walk in the wind.

One thing that I was pretty good at that was physical was how to dance. I mean I could see a dance move and pick it up. Years later, moving out to California, I would go to clubs and I would just dance, every Friday and sometimes Sunday night. I just loved going to clubs and grabbing a girl and getting out there and just sweating and dancing. I was in a club one night at a dance contest, and I won the dance contest and the girl, another girl was there, was sent by her friends and she happened to work for Chippendales. She said, “We are looking for go-go dancers, do you want to audition?” And I did, and I got the gig.

Now I’m on a three by three box in a Para Dolphin show and [inaudible 00:07:07] and tiger socks doing the robot, making– and I was making like 32.50 an hour, which was…

Steve: That’s not bad.

Tony: As a young kid in his 20s that was a lot more money than I was making as a carpenter. I had all kinds of jobs. I was a handy man, a carpenter, a go-go dancer. I used to go down to the pier in UCLA and when I was completely out of money, I would put my hat down and I would do mime, so I could make like $25, so I could live on churros and yoghurt for three days. Those were tough times. I mean it was a big transition coming from New Ireland as a young kid to go out to California to make my way.

I wanted to be an actor, a movie star. Doing standup was another one of those things where people said, “Tony you are funny. You should get on stage and tell some jokes.” Storytelling and joke telling are not the same thing. There’s a formula to it like anything else. I had to learn that formula. You have to do your set up and your act up your punch line and your tag. Learning about a list of three, something called call back. These are all little tricks that comedians use. Just like a magician, or mime.

When I would go down the pier, I did mime for two years in college. It was all about survival. I’m in California, I’m not going back to the east coast, so I’m going to figure out how to survive. These are all the things. I was a statue during the academy awards. I put like gold lame spandex outfit on and stand …

Steve: I know what you’re talking about.

Tony: For an hour. I would just stand there motionless like a giant Oscar, so whatever it took baby.

Steve: The fact that you became a Chippendale dancer kind of applies that you had a good body before then, right? Did tennis come first or?

Tony: Well, you know the fitness came when I first came here to LA. I mean, east coast, fitness training was for athletes. Everybody else didn’t care. I mean there were people on the stands and people on the field are core. So you had two different groups, people watching, and people participating. The people who were watching were forced to do gym class. There wasn’t a fitness culture.

There wasn’t … You come out to LA, it’s 72.5 and sunny most of the time, that’s the reason we have a drought. When you came here, “Oh wow, there’s a body building gym and there’s an aerobics gym, what the heck is aerobics?” You know what I mean, like “Wow, let’s go to aerobics class because it’s all women, sign me up. Or yoga, more place for these all women. I don’t know why the dudes aren’t in here.”

I just really gravitated to the culture and partly because as a young actor at that point who was out of work my agent said, “Hey look here, you’re a little purgy around the waist; you’re a little scrawny shoulders and arms. If you want to get more work in this town, you might want to look a little better.” I had an agent, oh my god. I was like I’m going to watch Johnny Carson show and these big-time actors, they are talking about their agent, and I had one.

I just thought she was a goddess, so I just did what she said. I started changing physically and little did I know at the time that I was changing physically, I was also changing mentally and emotionally. I didn’t really realize then, there was a connection, a kind of a biochemical reaction inside of my brain as a result to working out four, five, six days a week. That’s how the fitness thing came in.

I was exercising and training, maybe three or four times a week. I wasn’t eating very well, but I was young so I had crazy metabolism. I was still eating hot dogs and pizzas and burgers and drinking beer three, four times a week. I had a good enough physique that I could get up on a box and dance.

Steve: So how does that kind of lead to exercise videos. I’m sure there is a long path. Whenever people think of people successful like yourself, they think of like overnight successes and that sort of thing. P90X wasn’t your first gig, right?

Tony: No, I mean…

Steve: If it was, I hate you.

Tony: What’s that?

Steve: No, P90X, if you scored a big hit on your first try, I hate you, but…

Tony: P90X is the one that people know about, but there were a few beforehand that did okay. They were like, they weren’t home runs, they were a good sell off the wall double that kind of thing. My on camera experience came as a result of having two careers. One career, when I was done being a Chippendale dancer, being a carpenter and a bar tender and being a statue during the academy awards, eventually I fell under training people. People saw how I changed physically, and so they would say, “Hey, can you do that for me?” I wasn’t certified. I didn’t know anything about training people. I knew how to talk to people and I knew how to show them to do what I was doing.

All of a sudden, I was — one of the last jobs I had before I was able to make a big switch was I was a production assistant over at 20th Century Fox. So I started training my boss, this guy Harlan Goodman was also in the music industry. Harlan made a tremendous physical change. He and I used to train, I didn’t have a gym. His apartment was pretty small. There was no place to train him.

My buddy had a converted garage, it was a gym, and we would just drive over to my friend’s house and start training Harlan in his backyard three days a week. One day he ran into Tom Petty, and then I got a call from Tom Petty and I hung up, because I thought why the hell is Tom Petty calling my house. Then he called back. “Hey, it’s Tom Petty. I think you hung up on me. My name is Tom Petty.” I mean, Tom Petty?

So I got Tom in great shape before a tour, and then my phone just running off the hook. Now I was officially a trainer, but at the same time I began to start my standard career then. I mean I had been a trained mime for years, so I knew how to perform. I knew how to– when you are performing to try to make money to feed yourself, you’ll push the envelope to get people to kind of people laugh and to participate in the whole process of street performance. On one side I was training Tom Petty, then Billy Idol, then Annie Lennox from the Eurythmics, and then Usher in the Ewan McGregor and then Sean Connery.

Steve: That’s crazy.

Tony: I had Bruce Springsteen. I had all these rockers and stuff, but then I was doing standup and I already had an agent that point. I was doing commercials. Now, I got a show called 360 which run on the playboy channel. It was like the Entertainment T4onight, but without the black line for women’s breast, I mean it was a little bit lustier. They were trying to break in to more legitimate TV with two co-hosts. I had a co-host, I was reading the teleprompter. I would start on camera one, I’d look at my co-host, I go to camera two and I go back to my– I mean learning these tremendous skills, how to do voice over for the first time. That was another great skill.

Steve: Can we take a step back. So you got Tom Petty. How did you get the other guys? Was it all word of mouth at that point?

Tony: When Tom Petty got ripped, no one ever saw Tom Petty rip before. That was a complete anomaly. He went on a huge summer tour, I think it started in late spring and went all the way through almost the end of the year. Tom Petty and Billy Idol had the same management company, East End management. They said, “Hey, you know, Billy is in from New York,” is when Billy moved from New York to LA. “Can you start working with Billy?” Then I got Billy ripped, you know what I mean.

Tom Petty introduced me to Anny Lennox. My day started out when I go to Tom Petty’s house, I drive around the corner and go to Annie Lennox house, and then from Annie Lennox I went to Stephen Stills from [inaudible 00:14:05]. I couldn’t do anything for him. And then I go– Tom, Anny, Steve and then Billy Idol and then some mornings I’d get Bruce Springsteen or Sean Connery in there or Sean McLain in the afternoons.

I go to Melbourne, I train [inaudible 00:14:20] in the little studio. That was kind of my routine. I would have regular doctors and lawyers and other folks too. I mean, I was getting up at the crack of dawn getting up at four, five am. My first client, it was still dark outside when we were finishing. Then I would go all day, and I would drive my old beat up mustang convertible and survive on power bulbs all day. I was making a few bucks and wearing down my old car, and thought I was on top of the world. Then I get a call from my agent, “We got a Lori Brown commercial. You got to an [inaudible 00:14:50] commercial, whatever. That was …

Steve: So you weren’t advertising. This is just all word of mouth.

Tony: All word of mouth. There was no advertising whatsoever, none whatsoever. I had business cards. I had business cards made up, and I’d hand them out and like maybe get a gig or two from that. But it was just that when you get a celebrity, a rock and roll person, super fit and no one’s ever seen them like that before, there is a lot of conversation that starts up within their community, it’s a very tight community.

And the reputation that I had back then was that I was good company, that people enjoyed and I mean obviously the workouts were hard, and I was giving them, great results, but I wasn’t the traditional drill surgeon guy. I didn’t treat the stuff really, it wasn’t dry, just like my workouts, if you get my workouts, I’m a bit of a clown.

Steve: Yeah, I love it.

Tony: So because this is the formula, it’s the formula giving people the variety. So when I had a client they would do yoga, they would do martial arts, they would do weight training, they would focal and functional stuff, they would do trimetrics. And a lot of the trainers that they had had in the past were just weight lifting or just all cardio. And they would get bored, they would get hurt, they would stop seeing results after a while. And with me they would continue to improve over time, and they actually enjoyed the process, and so that’s how my client list just grew as big as it did.

And the boomer was there is only so many hours in a day, and you have to drive your car from Venice to [inaudible 00:16:07] to Hollywood, to Kansas [ph] city. It’s just this; there is a lot of dead time in a day just getting from one or the other. But now with the job I have now I mean I can access millions of people.

Steve: Yes so was that the primary impetus for doing the exercise videos?

Tony: No, I mean it was pure serendipity that I actually ended up where I am. I mean I at that stage in my life having moved from Connecticut and Rhode Island and being a fairly depressed overwhelmed procrastinator, I kind of fell in into the very LA, California, personal development world.

A lot of Deepak Chopra, a lot of Don Miguel Ruiz, a lot of Tony Robins in his heyday, a lot of doctor Thierry Zukoff and Andrew Weil and all these and Wayne Dyer. I mean had them all, I had all the books and all the tapes. I listened to them, and I go okay, 80% of this is crap, but this 20% that I can use, you know what I mean? And I did that, I would go to these weekends down by the airport; down by LAX you know what I mean?

You would do all the S seminar and you do a terminal seminar. I had this change in my thinking patterns, because I wasn’t — I mean I had a high school and college education that were designed to help me get a job, so that I can make money, so that I could have a house or a car, and a wife and some kids, but I wanted more than that, I wanted to be able to inspire and motivate and educate people. But I needed the Intel and the information for myself first.

I needed to get it, I needed to apply it to my life and then I was able to disseminate it to other people. So I was in the middle of all of that when I was training these celebrities and these rockers, and they thought, this guy is not just a muscle head. He is somebody who is thoughtful and creative, and wants to have a life outside of just driving all the time and training people.

So the gig– so I had all this going on, and then a friend of mine in Minneapolis said, hey I got a job out in Minnesota with Nordic Track, you had some experience on camera, you are a fitness expert, you’re training celebrities, they want to audition you. After the first audition they said, great and so I went back and forth to Minneapolis and did some Nordic Track stuff, kind of their own camera guy, their infomercial guy.

Then I got the show on Playboys, I had that in on camera time. And then one day just a mutual friend introduced me to a guy named Carl Daikeler, who was this young entrepreneur out of Philadelphia, who had had two nickels throughout [inaudible 00:18:34]. He had all these great ideas, he was sort of a visionary, and so I get this idea for great body guarantee, this is little infomercial, a 15 minute workout. 99.9% of most people who know all of my stuff have never even heard of that workout program, but it did well, it made money.

So investors came around and said what’s the next thing? So I talked to Carl and I said how about a full 90 day program, we’ll call it Power 90? This is when everything was on a half inch tape, there were no DVDs yet, there were no cell phones, the internet was brand new. And we did this thing called Power 90 in six days, and we couldn’t eat right? Everybody in the industry said you are wasting your time, but that thing we sold about a million and half of them.

Steve: So how did you do that, can we walk through that first product, like how did you get the word out, how did you market it?

Tony: Well Carl worked for a company called Guthy-Renker, Guthy-Renker at that time was probably the biggest infomercial company in the world. Infomercials are for folks who don’t know how this works; there is a long form and short form. Long forms are the ones that are full half hour, short form are anywhere from 30 seconds to two minutes right? So the — I’m being told I have to sign something, hold on. This is the life of [inaudible 00:19:43] oh an agreement with China?

Steve: Oh that would be my agreement.

Tony: Yes, that’s cool okay, well maybe we could do that one, Steve you and I. So the way it works is like, anybody and I can’t tell you that if there is 100 people with an infomercial idea. Some kind of retractable cap or some kind of ad machine or workout program that I do, out of that 100 people that try probably two or three succeed, and because it’s one of the most difficult industries to get into.

But Carl had that background back in Philadelphia; he had a couple of little things out of Phili where he had some success that were not fitness products. But the one that he did get well before he came to California was eight minute ads, and that’s like eight minute ads, for a guy out of Phili who didn’t live in LA that was pretty impressive.

So they brought him up to LA, Guthy-Renker did. And he came to me and he said I want to do this thing; I had some great success with eight minutes ads. So you basically come up with what it is, like why is this thing unique, why does it stand out in the industry, what else — why isn’t this like everything else. We thought a little 15 minute workouts with another trainer named Debbie Siebers and I. And I had three of them and she had three of them, we packed them together. And then you have to cross, and then you have to go, make all your phone calls to find out who can make it the cheapest, who can press in, who can package them, then of course it’s all happening in China. You have deals with various media buy, it’s like different companies that buy media for local stations and also national.

You got ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX those are big national, then you got all the cable ones as well. We made these things, we manufactured these things, and then the marketing people started making phone calls. Hey, yeah, can I have a 3 AM slot on NBC for next Friday? Can I have — and they called the Miami affiliate, then we called the Buffalo New York affiliate. Because the New York City, LA and Chicago ones are too expensive, and you would spend like five grand you know what I mean? And you sit there and then you wait for the numbers to come in and the…

Steve: So you pay money to get on these infomercials, okay.

Tony: You pay to buy these minutes, two minutes, or full half hours. And it’s not — you buy in half an hour for an infomercial. That is not cheap. So you might get — this is, I’m talking about people who are first starting out, or new in the business, who don’t have deep pockets like Sony or other companies. So every time we would spend 5000 bucks, we make eight, we spend six we make 12, we would spend 10 we would make 20 and that’s how it went.

So investors saw that after great body guaranteed, and so we made Power 90. Power 90 was sort of like P90X junior. Power 90 did so well that I got to move out of my three bedroom apartment after 21 years to buy a beautiful home in Bradwood. So I had kind of a cartoon like upgrade from living at the poverty level to living in a pretty beautiful house.

Steve: And this is all through infomercials?

Tony: All through infomercials. I was still training people; I wasn’t training as many because I didn’t have to. But I mean I was getting these royalty checks every month, the kinds of money that I never made as a — I might make 20 or 30 grand as a actor in a beer commercial over the course of a year. I was getting checks like that per month, and then I was getting twice that and then three times, then four times, then five times. And then I mean I was getting checks — I don’t want to get to read the numbers, it feels sort of not…

Steve: No that’s cool, no numbers aren’t important, I was just curious though how does even one get on an infomercial, like let’s say I want to have my own infomercial, who do I call? I mean you had the contacts, right?

Tony: You can Google infomercial companies, and so Guthy-Renker would come up, Beach Party would come up. And they aren’t that many, there is probably about 10, and then you just have to — for me it was a different route. Mine was that I happened to know a guy who worked for one, and he liked my technique as far as exercise and fitness, and so I was just a paid gun. I mean I got paid $2000 for being in that very first product called great body guarantee. And to me at that time that was a big chunk of money to have to only workout three days.

But it sort of evolved over time, but the average person and the average person is like one of the philosophy is build it and they will come. So and for a lot of people who are entrepreneurs whatever their idea is, they have to have a ton of passion, they’ve got to probably trade market, they’ve probably got a patent because they don’t want people to steal it, right? Then you got through that process and that’s several thousand dollars just to do that.

And then you have a couple of prototypes made, and so one of my prototypes for me as an entrepreneur I had — every time I went to a gym, or every time I went to a retail store, I was trying to find some decent push up stance. But they were really rickety, and made of metal and handles were sort of narrow and they dug into my hand, and the platform wasn’t really good, and they didn’t use good rubber, the rubber would always peel away.

So I thought — I called a buddy who worked for a fitness company and this is sort of an example to help the average person who wants to do this. And he called a guy who manufactured ladders in downtown LA. And he said, hey, and so I made it dry and he made this thing and each one of these hands — push up stands weighed about 5 pounds each, nothing that you could ever ship, but they were functionally awesome.

And they had a round base and had a really wide handle, and the handle was declined from the back to put pressure off the wrists, this was just like sort of my idea. And then after I got the patent and trademark, I went over to Beach Party and I said, hey do you think you guys would be interested in what relatively would be– and since I did all the due diligence, since I did the manufacturing and the prototype and I had patent and trademark, they didn’t have to do it. I got a much bigger royalty than if they had done it from scratch and they just wanted me to wrap it or something. And still to this day I get royalties on my power, and so that was [inaudible 00:25:42] every month yeah.

Steve: I just want to take a moment to thank Bench Accounting for being a sponsor of the show. Now I love running all of my online businesses, but you know what I hate doing the most? Book keeping, seriously keeping track of receipts and expenses is easily the worst aspect of entrepreneurship hands down. And here is where Bench Accounting comes in.

Bench is an online book keeping service that pairs you with a team of dedicated bookkeepers who use simple and elegant software to handle everything for you. They’ll collect all of your financials and turn them into nice concise financial reports, so no more data entry, no more number crunching, and no more headaches. Plus it’s reasonably priced, and the best part is that you can get 20% off of your first six months if you go to bench.co/mywifequitherjob.

Once again that’s bench.co/mywifequitherjob to get 20% off of your first six months, now back to the show. So that was actually one of the other questions I wanted to ask you, so you had P90, and then P90X was the one that like get it out the park right?

Tony: Yeah and both Power 90 and P90X didn’t do very well at first, because they were so different. It would be like you walking up to your friends 15 years ago with a Smartphone. They would have said what, that isn’t a thing, that isn’t real. And that’s the reason why I think it did so well. I think the reason why — if you can find a niche that is — I mean I have like a list of 15 things that haven’t been invented yet, but eventually I hope to have invented.

And you can come up with a way to get it manufactured at a reasonable price and it’s like Henry Ford. They first said, why are you creating this thing, the horse and buggy are fine. People aren’t asking for this because they don’t know what to ask for, but I’m going to show them why they need it. It’s the same thing with Steve Jobs. It’s the same thing, he just said, yeah, people don’t know they know it yet, but I’m going to show them why, and of course now look all of us have phones and laptops and iPads now.

Steve: So P90X was primarily through infomercials that you got the word out, did you guys do any other sort of marketing or?

Tony: Very little social media stuff then, this is even way before Instagram and Twitter and Facebook, and stuff like that, it was all through infomercial. And the original Power 90, the original P90X didn’t do well. The original Power 90 we put it out there, we put out the offer, and it was crickets, you know what I mean?

Well then and everyone went, oh well I guess it failed like we all predicted in our CEO cross fit, no now all we have to do is just change the offer a little bit. Don’t make it three easy payments, make it four for less. But the beautiful thing that happened which no one else had done before prior was, the few people that bought Power 90 and P90X were submitting there and before after pictures, their day one and day 90 pictures.

And they were also submitting their own video, because now this was the early time when people could kind of – they didn’t need a big recording device on their shoulder, with tape anymore. They could record their process on their phone, and they were sending this stuff to us. And it was gold, we didn’t need to use fitness models anymore, we didn’t need to use people on test groups anymore. We were just using regular folks who were submitting their stuff.

And we just injected that into the infomercial and people saw that stuff and went, oh my God there is my uncle, there is my father, there is my brother, there is my aunt, there is my sister. There is people I can relate to, they seem like me, and Power 90 nothing and then the following year this crazy checks were coming through the mail. So now it was time– and I had a good three, four year run, and then Carl came to me and said what’s the next thing? And I said I don’t know, we both agreed on taking it to the next level.

So he gave me a year to research P90X and everybody said, okay, you got lucky with Power 90. I mean if you are going to go even more extreme, I mean forget it people aren’t professional athletes, you are going to kill them with that thing. Same thing, nothing at first and about a year later after all the before and afters guys like Jeremy York who had had 180 pounds to lose did it and lost 180 pounds, as well as Catherine MacDonald who I know tried everything.

And she told everybody her story, tried this, tried that, then I did this extreme program and I lost 150 pounds. Richard Neal, I mean he didn’t know he was going to be one of the greatest ways to advertise this product, losing 242 pounds doing extreme fitness program. On top of that, professional athletes, famous actors, Sheryl Crow goes on the red carpet at the Grammys and says, “Oh my God, you look amazing.” “I’ve been using P90X.” I mean that was happening with congressmen like Paul Ryan, who was vice presidential candidate.” It was just that regular folks and big influences were all using it.

Steve: But it took a year for it to catch on.

Tony: Yeah, it took a year before it really exploded.

Steve: So let me ask you this, as you were doing this, what was your time frame in which you would have declared it a failure?

Tony: Any other company other than Beach Body would have killed it after about anywhere from 5 weeks to 4 months. They would have killed it. But when you got something that is extraordinary that is helping maybe only a handful of people, because seeing these extraordinary results, sometimes you just have to kind of re-work the offer, and really begin to interject the people who are using it, and getting the great results.

I feel really fortunate, I mean the one lucky thing is the company that I work for really believes in what I do, and they bend over backwards to make sure that they find a way out to get it out to more people. Now the advent of on-demand, we’ve got Beach Body on Demand, now did a 30 day offer which is really great, so it’s another way to … You don’t have to make a phone call anymore.

You just go to Beach Body on Demand, you hit a couple of buttons and you have instant access on your phone, on your laptop, on your iPad, wherever you go, even on your TV now, without having to call, wait, the mailman delivers [inaudible 00:31:38] machine. That’s archaic compared to how it’s done now. But with people, that transition it’s like what happened to tapes and the DVDs, there was that…

Steve: yeah totally.

Tony: We had to go for a while and I don’t know how many other people have tape anymore. That’s kind of a transitional phase around it, but you want to make sure that people have access either way.

Steve: That’s one of the things that I was going to ask you. One, what are you working on now and how has the marketing changed? Are you still doing infomercials, or are you focusing on YouTube. I noticed your YouTube channel; you’ve got a lot of videos on there. How has your marketing evolved?

Tony: We’ve try to evolve with the rest of the planet. Not everybody is doing infomercials, people still try to get into that genre, but we’ve got that down. We’ve got tremendous relationships in the industry with all the networks and stuff. They know us, they like us. We’re very consistent with buying media with them. It’s funny week-to-week, it’s not like you pay, if it’s 3:00am on ABC week 1, it can change the following week depending on how many other people are buying media.

We’ve got that stuff all figured out, so we’re never going to lose that. That is a formulation that works. We’re doing more short-form stuff. We’re doing a more 30 second, a minute, two minute stuff and maybe not spending it all on full half hour. We’re using Instagram, and Twitter and Facebook and social media. We’re using YouTube. We’re using our website; we’re using my website Tony Horton Live as well.

The thing about social media, you’ve got to be careful because that’s usually typically for free content, and people don’t like to be advertised to. They like great advice, they like great content, but stop selling me stuff. It has to be done in a very subtle way, in a very respectful way, and we haven’t quite figured that formula out yet. There’s nothing worse than posting something about Shakeology and I see more unsubscribes than I see subscribes. That’s not my plan. I don’t want to piss off my fans.

At the same time if you really like something and you really [inaudible 00:33:38] I’m a huge believer in our performance online and our boost line. When we first started doing supplements and stuff, it wasn’t very good. We were not very good at that. We were good at infomercials and fitness products and diet programs, but we didn’t have our supplementation stuff down, so I didn’t promote them.

People say how come you don’t promote the bars? Because the bars suck, that’s why. Our bars are terrible, so I’m not going to talk about our bars. But shakeology itself, it’s a phenomenal product. It’s helping people, and I like talking about it, but at the same time you have to be careful.

We’re using every means possible to get the word out. For example yesterday in the Beach Body and I shot two Beach Body on Demand workouts, a brand new yoga routine and a [inaudible 00:34:20] sequence, which are really important. When it comes to people who are getting older, you need the tricks of the trade. If you know more you can last longer and be less vulnerable and more durable than if you were a tennis player, or a skier or whatever. This is for on-demand subscribers only; you can’t get it any other way. We’re just trying to build that kind of content.

But generally the company is about, we got a problem, and we’re not selling you some, excuse my French, bullshit diet program that works extraordinary, so you can look good and dress in front of your friends at your re-union. We’re trying to look at the big picture here. The big picture is obviously, anybody with a brain, exercising where you will enjoy doing and you can be consistent with, and by the way, eat more vegetables. We’re going to give you a recipe so vegetables don’t taste like wax, that you think they usually taste.

Steve: Let me ask you this Tony, if you were to start all over again from ground zero in today’s day and age, where would you focus your efforts?

Tony: I would focus my efforts on figuring out the latest ways to connect with as many people as possible. That is through a YouTube channel, what you are doing, what you and I are doing, this is a credible way to get information out. I think if you’re starting out right now infomercials are not the way to do it. There’re so many huge YouTube stars, it’s these kids that were working out in their apartment in the middle of …

Steve: They have billboards in LA for YouTube stars, right?

Tony: I know. The thing is you want to probably spend as much time as possible where everybody else is, mostly where people in their teens and 20s are spending their time. There are a lot of people who are just kind of stuck in the old school stuff, and it’s time to move on. At this stage in the game, I would have an electronic press kit, I would have a ripping website, I would have a great presence on all the social media platforms.

All I would do is just copy people who are killing it, like who has 5 million subscribers? Duplicate that, just go [inaudible 00:36:22]. Everything that I’ve done, every push-up, every pull up, every jump knee tuck, every cool and functional thing that I’ve done is a combination of some other version of it. The only reason why I’m successful is I can kind of give them goofy names and I can upgrade them.

Steve: I can tell you why you’re successful Tony. I watched a bunch of those videos prior to this interview, and if I might say, you’re kind of like a goofball in these videos, but it’s really entertaining at the same time. I just called Tony Horton a goofball.

Tony: I am! I did standup comedy and look, it’s about our attention span, it’s all about raising attention span. If your delivery is dry, and boring, I don’t care how informed you are, I don’t care if you had a 4.0 all the way from grad school. If you can’t figure out a way to communicate, then you’re not going to …

How do you think people are elected? Why is Donald Trump popular? Because he’s a freaking train wreck, and nobody can take their eyes off it, there is no opinion about his policies or anything there. It’s just that he’s extraordinarily entertaining, and that alone, is a reason for people to go, “Yeah.” If you look at Barack Obama, same thing, there was a certain style, a certain panache, a certain sort of charisma, regardless of whatever his policies are. It’s sad, but it’s true. It’s the delivery system. It’s an absolute delivery system.

That’s how people learn and that’s how people grow. That’s how people change. If you’re in the middle of an exercise routine, and it’s trimetrics or yoga, something you would rather eat [inaudible 00:37:52] than do one of those two things, there better be a delivery system that makes it so that you come back over and over again. That’s all I’ve ever done. I just said, exercise kind of sucks. We are going to have a couple of yucks along the way so that this thing is doable.

When you’re asking people to do something for 90 days, which is what most of my programs are. The brand new one ‘22 Minute Hard Corps’ is 8 weeks. It’s boot camp; it’s all boot camp training. But it’s still a long period of time and it’s every damn day, and if you don’t have variety, and if you don’t have modifications, and if you don’t have a decent delivery system, then you’re going to be like everybody else and you are going to have a much smaller audience.

If you want to build your audience … Like you, you have a tremendous audience. A lot of people like what you do, they like your guests, and the reason being is you figured out a phenomenal formula with a great delivery system. And that’s why you’re popular, and that’s why I am too.

Steve: Let’s talk a little about motivation. Just a brief background like I’d always wanted six pack abs, and then 2 years ago I decided to just do it. I ended up not just eating carbs, and I ended working out, and I cheated after 5 months, and then I felt so good that I decided to keep that diet up. It was a lifestyle change for me.

The problem is a bunch of people– I wrote a post about this and a bunch of people started asking me about it and how I did it. I told them how I did it and they were like, I can’t do that. There’s no way I can do that. So I’m just curious, what is your method of motivating people to follow through.

Tony: My reasons and it’s changing because I’ve been handling this now for a long time, I think more and more people begin to get it. My reasons for doing anything are much different than what most people’s are. Most people want to eat and exercise because they want some sort of aesthetic, hypothetical aesthetic change sometime into the future. What they do is they start doing something; let’s say it’s one of my programs.

They start on day one and all they’re thinking about is that photograph on day 90. They’re constantly on the scale, they’re constantly pulling out the tape measure, and they’re constantly taking pictures with the hope that they’re going to have some sort of aesthetic change that is really all ego. Like you wanted six pack abs?

Steve: It was ego, yeah.

Tony: It was ego. That’s all ego and that’s all, “Hey, look at me.” But in the end, you were able to sustain and maintain it because it wasn’t about ego anymore. It was more about lifestyle. I say to people, why don’t you start out with lifestyle, initially? There is going to be a greater propensity to be able to survive it, and hold on to it for the rest of your life.

You can train your ass off as much as you want, but there’s sort of that fear and anxiety and frustration that comes with the unknown, of not knowing, really truly, what you are going to look like in 90 days, unless you’ve got somebody standing over you looking at every morsel that goes into your mouth and making sure you’re pushing in the envelope with every one of your workouts.

Everybody is different; everybody has different levels of pain threshold and work stress and lack of sleep and lack of access to really healthy, tasty foods, because of cost or whatever. It really does require … When you see how many people are successful, who lose their weight, who change their lifestyle even though they start out with ego first, it’s incredible.

What I would say, and I say to people, like you train today you’re better today. You might not change aesthetically, but you’ve taken care of business. You’ve pumped the oxygen and the blood into your brain. You’ve released [inaudible 00:41:17], all these things that change your outlook about your life. It’s your life. It’s your joy. It’s your happiness. It’s your connection with people. It’s your sense of adventure. It’s your level of energy. All that stuff gives you the day that you want to have and it comes from exercise first, and also making it happen with decent food choices.

If you make horrible food choices and you decide not to move, then life is a struggle. Fitness and eating is the foundation, is the platform to have all the other things that you want. There’s a pyramid, at the bottom is, number one, if I exercise today and eat right today I change my brain chemistry. When my brain chemistry changes, it’s like John Ratey talks about in his book ‘Spark,’ then you have a greater potential to have a better day and then you just repeat, repeat, repeat.

After 30 days and 60 and 90 and you repeat it for the first year, the second year, the third year, all of a sudden you’re one of those people who go to dance class at 95, still skiing at 82, and taking gymnastics for the first time in your 50s, and then you’re a person who looks back at your life and goes, that’s the story. Because the story is not, oh I had another bottle, I banged through a bottle of vodka this week while watching re-runs of ‘I Love Lucy’ and [inaudible 00:42:30] Island. That’s not a life. That’s not a story. If you’re not exercising and eating, then you’re just … and by the way time keeps on ticking. It keeps moving on, moving forward. Your body is aging, your brain is aging. The only way to slow that down is to move and to eat things that fuel you properly.

And of course there’s supplements as well. If you’re working out really hard, and you’re not getting the perfect amount of sleep and you still have a certain amount of stress because of work and stress and family and traffic and everything else, it’s going to be really hard for your body to recover. You’ve got to do the multi-vitamins, you’ve got to do the creatine, you’ve got to do the CoQ10, you’ve got to do the [inaudible 00:43:03], you’ve got to these different things.

“Oh, supplements don’t work.” You don’t need them if you don’t do anything. If you show me one collegiate or professional athlete, or Olympic athlete who doesn’t supplement just right to be able to perform at their highest level, because they’re training 2 hour days, or 3 hour days, they’re genetically gifted. It’s a formula, and when you learn the formula– in my book, ‘The Big Picture,’ it’s in there. It’s not so much a fitness and diet book as it is a lifestyle book to show you what to do so that … I mean, I’m 57.

Steve: You look great.

Tony: Thank you. I did shower. And I still [inaudible 00:43:40]

Steve: Although there is a reading glass you got on.

Tony: They are. I’m lifting them up and my screen is a [inaudible 00:43:46].

Steve: Here’s the thing. I think motivation and business are all intertwined. Once I started getting in shape, I found myself having a lot more energy to actually work more on my businesses and that sort of thing. I almost think that getting into shape is fundamental to anything else in life that you want to do, I don’t know.

Tony: The bottom-line is healthy in-shape people eat right, have bigger lives than people who don’t. There are people who have a lot more money, maybe a lot more stuff, maybe they don’t exercise or eat well at all, and they are successful because they are very smart and they inherited a business or they are just sort of super ambitious or very smart. Let’s say, you didn’t have all of those things. Maybe you don’t have a college education. Maybe you don’t have that sort of family help, or you are not part of an industry where you can make some decent money and have a great life.

If you exercise, start to exercise and start to eat right, the two things you can control, those are the only two by the way. Most people don’t realize that. I’m going to exercise today, I’m going to eat right today. Traffic, I don’t have control of that, family I wish, work I don’t– my boss got me cohunes, weather, none of it, none of it. All that stuff that kind of creates all these conflicts in our lives are more easily dealt with if you make a dietary shift, and you begin to exercise, everything kind of falls into place. You have more patience. You sleep better. Your sex drive improves; your memory in cognition improves. There are so many things that are more mind and emotion about exercising and eating right than even the physical.

Too many of us are exercising because we want to look better, and none of us are exercising because we understand it completely alters our mental and emotional state. The second the workout is over, I don’t know of anybody who finishes a work out and says, “Oh my god, that was a horrible idea.” They just– but it’s making the decision to do it. The worst part of the exercise is the ten to five minutes before, and the first five to ten minutes at the beginning of it. It’s like, “Oh I don’t want to be here. I’m tired. It’s early. I’d rather be sitting down with a cup of coffee and a dash.”

But when you fall into the pattern, I gave up sugar four weeks ago. Now I was eating healthy breakfast, healthy lunch, healthy dinner, working out five or six days a week, but I still had my little sugar addiction. But I noticed that I was moodier. I thought, am I just a moody guy, am I just moody. Is it genetics? I mean, my whole family is moody because everybody eats sugar, everybody eats fried foods, everybody eats soda pop. I was cutting out everything except for the key lime pie, and a chocolate, eat cookies and the chocolate mousse, chocolate mousse.

Steve: I love chocolates mousse.

Tony: I just thought, you know what I’m going to experiment for 30 days. It was the most brutal 30 days. I felt like, I would stand in front of a pantry for ten minutes at a time just looking at the things that I couldn’t eat. But man I won’t eat a cookie or a donut or a brownie or a pie, and it was hard. It was like getting off a crack. I mean– and that’s what happens inside the temple low. The dopamine, it is that huge flash of dopamine which makes you feel good in the minute, but in the end if you look at the sugar that you eat, you will also—it’s like you’ll make a graph of the sugar, oh I had sugar at this hour, and then my mood went down. Like your mood and sugar and process curves go hand in hand.

I’m a pretty upbeat positive guy anyway, because I have a pretty awesome life and I have a job that I love and I’m married to the woman of my dreams. So even with the sugar, I was a pretty happy guy. Now that I’m without it, I just feel like I have a little bit more energy. I sleep a little bit better. I have a little bit more patience, all these little things that have been altered as a result of getting off. Same thing with alcohol, I haven’t had alcohol in years, so I wouldn’t even know.

Steve: Interesting. Yeah, I’ve been off sugar for two years also. It’s been great.

Tony: Yeah, it’s fantastic. And so when it comes to how does it all relate to business, you want to build a foundation. You want to make some basic changes on behavior. When your behavior changes, so does your productivity and energy and that goes up and as that goes up, so sort of that helps your business grow. Why not have that advantage if you can have it? Ultimately it’s about longevity and quality of life too. I mean these are things that everybody wants.

If you’ve got hypertension and diabetes and the potential for stroke and high blood pressure, all these things, and you are working your ass off, and you have all these physical mental and emotional problems, is it worth if you can’t enjoy it. You know what I mean. So you clean up the diet and you start to move. It doesn’t have to be one of my program, I mean heck I love … So I can buy a new couch. But it’s not really about– it’s really about, decide, “Hey I’m a Pilates guy. I’m a yoga person. I love body building.” Figure it out, but add some variety too, because you don’t want to get bored on a plateau, you want to make sure you have variety. When you do that, life is but a dream.

Steve: That’s a great philosophy. Hey, Tony, you rattled off a whole bunch of your products. I just want to give you some time to talk about all the things that you are working on, and where people can find you online.

Tony: Thank you. If you just want my stuff, you know my general stuff, and you are still using kind of old school DVDs and stuff like that, you want to go to beachbody.com. If you want a particular product, it’s pretty basic. You can go to P90X.com or P90X2.com or P90X3.com that’s where you get the products that create beach body which is great. But if you want to learn more about me and the things that I’m doing outside of that, like events, I’m going to be at the Omega Institute, and I do a lot of travelling in Europe. I go to Hawaii and do events. I go to the Orient, and do a lot of stuff in South Korea and Japan.

If you want to know where I’m going and what I’m doing and you want my free newsletter, then you go Tonyhortonlife.com. That’s my website, it’s brand new, and we’re always sprucing it up. The weekly newsletter kind of gives you a lot of the things that you don’t get from the book, because I’m always learning, I’m always growing, I’m always stealing other people’s really good ideas and making them my own. And where I learn something I think, “Oh my God, this is making my life better. It’s making it less complicated.” Here’s the thing, you have to– just like your phone, everyone gets a new phone every once in a while, you have to update your own personal Intel, and I’ve learned that.

This comes from somebody; I used to hold on to stuff for so long. I used to put on the blinders, I used to hope for the best and hope it’s all going to turn out okay. I’m not doing that anymore. I’m still– I’m always learning and growing. When I find something that really, really matters to me, then I make sure that I put it up for everybody once a week. It’s all about motivation, it’s all about diet, it’s all about learning how to do a particular exercise or how to exercise on the road. It’s part of the same basic things that come up all the time that people struggle on. I’m always looking on new angles on which to kind of help people get better.

Also, you can get the book. You can go to Amazon, the big picture. It’s my most recent book. Then of course, my original, my first book Bring It, my second book which is a little audio video book, called Crush It which is a lot of fun. There’s a lot of humor there, and of course the YouTube channel.

Steve: Yes, I was going to say, you are missing the YouTube channel which is my favorite part.

Tony: I was going to get there Steve. Tony Horton fitness and we’ve been kind of stagnant for a little bit on that. Those of you who are listening saying, hey I haven’t seen new content in a while, that’s going to change pretty quickly, because we had this switch over to the on demand stuff. For those of you obviously that just want convenience and access to my entire library, all of my stuff, go to beachbodyondemand.com, which is Beach Body on Demand or BOD.com it will take you there.

The first 30 days are free, free, free, and so that way you can work out ten times a day, it doesn’t cost you a penny. At that point, the cool thing about that is that you can kind of look all the content and go, “Oh, all right.” Then once you sign on, I think it’s $38 a month which is crazy, I mean you have access to all my stuff, Shanty stuff, Chalene stuff. I mean there are hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of workouts, and the beautiful thing is you don’t have to buy the entire program; you can just buy– for 38 bucks you can do whatever workout you want. It’s just– I mean it’s the future. That’s where most people are. It gives you tons of access and tons of variety. So you can avoid the boredom and the injuries, and I can tell you will see results even as you get older.

Steve: I’m going to link all that stuff up so you guys don’t have to remember everything that Tony just said.

Tony: People are jotting it down. What was that Tony Horton fitness, oh crap. Thank you for that, thank you Steve for hosting me.

Steve: No problem. Hey, I really appreciate your time Tony. Thanks a lot. This is a great interview. It’s great to hear your philosophies on life and on business. I think these are going to be really valuable to my listeners.

Tony: Steve thank you for having me on. I’m a big fan of yours. I love the work you are doing and I’m very honored to be here today. Hopefully we will change a few minds on how to behave, and how to eat so that the people can become more productive and build their businesses the way they want as healthy happy human beings, not stressed out and people sick and depressed human beings.

Steve: Yeah, it’s all that eating right.

Tony: Exactly right. Thanks man.

Steve: All right, take care Tony.

Tony: Thanks Steve.

Steve: There you have it, Tony Horton of the legendary P90X fitness program. How awesome is that? And what’s even cooler is that Tony is totally down to earth and really entertaining as well, and I hope you enjoyed his story. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode104. And I want to thank fame bit for sponsoring this episode. As I mentioned earlier fame bit is the best place to find YouTubers, instagrammers and other influencers to promote your products online and it works.

One of my podcast guests Emanuel Eli used famebit.com to make over $65,000 in four months with YouTube influencer marketing. It costs as low as 50 bucks to start. The best part is if you use coupon code “my wife” at famebit.com, you will automatically get $25 off your first campaign. So go to famebit.com right now and get famous YouTubers to promote your products with $25 off using coupon code “my wife.”

Once again I also want to remind you that I’m starting my own Ecommerce conference this year called the Sellers Summit, which is going to be held in May 19th in Miami Florida. So if you’re interested in learning about Ecommerce or taking your existing Ecommerce business to the next level, then you must attend. Go to sellerssummit.com for more information.

Finally if you’re interested in starting you own online business, be sure to sign up for my free six day mini course where I show you how my wife and I manage to make over 100K in profit in our first year of business. Go to mywifequitherjob.com for more information, sign up right there on the front page, and I will send you the course right away via email. Thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to The My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com.

Intro: You are listening to the My Wife Quit her Job Podcast. And if you are new here, it’s a show where I bring in successful bootstrapped business owners to teach us what strategies are working and what strategies are not. Now I don’t bring on these famous entrepreneurs simply to celebrate their success, instead I have them take us back to the beginning and delve deeply into the exact strategies they used early on to gain traction for their businesses.Now if you enjoy this podcast please leave me a review on iTunes and if you want to learn how to start your own online business be sure to sign up for my free six-day mini course, where I show you how my wife and I managed to make over 100k in profit in our first year of business. Go to www.mywifequitherjob.com, sign up right there on the front page, and I’ll send you the mini course right away via email.

Now if you enjoy this podcast please leave me a review on iTunes, and if you want to learn how to start your own online business be sure to sign up for my free six-day mini course, where I show you how my wife and I managed to make over 100k in profit in our first year of business. Go to www.mywifequitherjob.com, sign up right there on the front page, and I’ll send you the mini course right away via email.

Now before I begin, I just want to give a quick shout out to famebit.com for being a sponsor of the show. Famebit is the number one market place for influencer marketing, with over 20,000 Youtubers, Instagramers, people on Twitter and via LinkedIn to promote your company in any vertical, whether it would be beauty, tech, gaming, pets and more.

Yes, you can get famous Youtubers and Instagramers to promote your business for as a low as $50. And the best part is that you don’t really need any money at all to post a campaign and receive free proposals from creators. Now if you’ve listened to my podcast before one of my guests Emmanuel Elayae used famebit.com to make over $65,000 in four months with YouTube influencer marketing. And the best part is if you use coupon code mywife@famebit.com, you will automatically get $25 off your first campaign. So go to famebit.com right now, and get famous you tubers to promote your products, now onto the show.

Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host, Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have my buddy Pat Flynn back on the show. Now I’ve had Pat on the show once before on episode 41 where we talked about how to make money with every online business model out there. And in fact Pat was gracious enough to come dressed for the occasion as he wore at Stanford cardinal red [inaudible 00:02:31] during the interview. I mean how cool is that to be able to forsake his own college for a superior school is just a testimony to his awesomeness. Anyway, Pat runs the very popular blog, Smart Passive Income.com, and what’s cool about Pat is there’s always something new going on with his businesses.

So last month he brought in almost $108,000 from various sources such as affiliate marketing, iPhone apps, eBook sales, you name it, and this time around he’s actually releasing a brand new book about a very important topic related to business. And with that welcome back to the show Pat. How are you doing today man?

Pat: I’m doing well and you know I got handed to the cardinal for beating [inaudible 00:03:11] this year during the big game. I want to thank you for wearing your golden blue for the interview when you are on my show. So I appreciate that with little phone finger, that was great.

Steve: The phone finger was classic.

Pat: We have like a Photoshop for it going on. But I do it in my own Photoshop skills I must say.

Steve: I know a lot of people on the audience probably know who you are already, but if you won’t mind telling us kind of what you’ve been up to lately, that would be awesome.

Pat: Yeah totally. So I’ve been up to a lot of things. Moving into 2016 I wanted to think of what I could do differently than what I’ve done before. To help me figure out what to do, I’ve looked at my audience to see what it is I can improve, and what is necessary to better provide value to them, all those sort of things. So I looked in a couple of sports to help me figure that out.

The first one is really cool because I have another podcast called the Ask Pat show or Ask Pat and askPat.com. And on that show, I answer voicemail questions from my audience five days a week. As a cool by product of this I get these questions coming in from my audience all the time and they are voicemails. So I get to hear their voice and hear their struggles and all the stuff. I hand select a few for the show, but I get dozens every day.

By far the number one question that I had over the past two years of doing that show is, how do I know if what I’m working on is going to work? And that was a really difficult question for me to answer on a fifteen minute podcast. So I actually tried to do that, and I figured out this is a huge topic. I need to see how else I can do this. So I thought about turning that in to a blog post or an eBook or something and then, I did a survey also.

This is the second part of it that I was looking into my audience to figure what to do. And I just confirmed that this was like a huge topic that people needed to know more information about, “How do I know if this idea I’m working on or this idea I have is actually worth pursuing. How do I know it’s not going to fail or it’s the one that going to work in the market.”

And so I decided to write a book about it and it was a fun interesting topic to write about because actually I’m not the first person to talk about this. I don’t know if you remember in The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss, he has a chapter called testing the news where he just, in one chapter, it’s a very small thing. But he talked about how for instance he paid Google for Google ad words to get cold traffic to a website where he was selling something. I think it was French Sherwood shirt or something, and he was validating that business idea.

One of this see if people were interested in it first before building it out. And so he actually kept track of how many people clicked on the buy now button. And that was how he could tell whether or not this is something people wanted because that was a sign that yes, they were actually going to pay money for it. And that chapter was so short, but so many people talked about that and have used that to help them validate business ideas. And there’s a lot of other ways to do it that have popped up since 2007, and I wanted to explore that.

I wanted to put it out there and share that with everybody in a nice step by step kind of manner. I think I talked about it very well. I’m very excited to share this book with people which is called Will It Fly: How to test your next business idea so you don’t waste your time and money, because really that’s what it’s all about. It’s about wasting time. You don’t want to waste time. A lot of us who are entrepreneurs and even us who are going to be entrepreneurs, we know that time is our number one asset. We do want to just focus on the things that we know that are going to work out in the end.

And I kind of broke this book up into two major parts in terms of validation. There’s the obvious one which is how do you know if this thing that you are working on is going to be well received in the market? How does it compete versus everybody else who’s already out there, all those sort of things. But the second part and the most important part, which is why I start with this, which is how do you know if that idea is actually going to fit with the you. Like, how does that validate your strengths? How does it actually complement where you are going and where you want to be? A lot of times– I know you and I we both go to conferences and at the end of the day, usually after the conferences is over, we are sitting in a bar somewhere, and we have these chats and we get pretty deep with what we talk about.

A lot of times these conversations are about like, how is life and stuff. And I know through just personal conversations with people, that a lot of successful entrepreneurs are unhappy. And they are unhappy because they are at the top of the ladder, but it’s not the ladder they want to be on top of, the business that they chose is not complementing their life. They go out into entrepreneurship to have control and they’ve lost control. Or they are doing something that they don’t feel fulfilled about. So I want to catch people early in this book. I’m really excited with what’s it’s become, because it’s going to help a ton of people.

And the cool thing about this is you know, I don’t know if you coach people Steve, but I coach a few people and my students are like, a lot of times, they just simply need permission. They need– it’s like that’s great. Go do it, really? Okay. Okay. Somebody gave me permission to do it, so I’m going to do it. I want this book to be sort of that permission giver for people like yeah that idea is great, like it’s checked out. It’s gone through all these litmus tests. It’s kind of like taking these experiments and actually then going full scale after you’ve started with small scale experiments. It’s either that or people go through the book and they are like, wow this was actually a really bad idea. I’m so glad I didn’t waste two years of my life and money on it, and I figured this out now instead of later.

That’s what kind of what the book is about. That’s really been my one thing over the last year. You know, I do have other things I’ve been trying to make the systems and the stuff within my business better, the teams. I’ve been expanding my team. I hired a content manager which has been completely helpful for helping me plan into the future in terms of content and helping me figure out what to write, when and how to incorporate it into the different launches and things I’ve been coming out with. Even down to, I know…

Steve: You have someone handling your email now, I know right?

Pat: Yeah, Jessica. I feature her in episode 155 of my podcast. I interviewed her because she was such a huge weight off my shoulders. Like she, oh my gosh, I had nearly 10,000 unread emails when I hired her.

Steve: I got 24,000 right now actually. I need her. I need a Jessica.

Pat: Are you serious? Oh my gosh.

Steve: In fact how much are you paying her? May be I’ll have to make an offer.

Pat: Yeah, I can make that connection for you, she’s like amazing. She was able to help me create a system where now I go into my email and I don’t even look at my inbox, I go into my “urgent box” and that’s what I need to see and only the things that I need to see. You know, she goes in there and reads most of my emails beforehand unless they kind of bypass the inbox and go directly into my urgent box based on who I’m getting emails from. But there’s a lot of systems in place, and you can listen into that in episode 115. But I’ve had her, I have Jenner who is my content manager. And really just focusing on the systems moving forward to make sure that my time is spent exactly where it needs to be spent which is kind of so much of the theme for this book.

Steve: So on the topic of validation; it’s actually where I find most people screw up at least in the world of ecommerce. Not validating your product kind of usually leads to like a garage full of products that don’t sell. I had this one reader who actually recently brought in really nice lady. She had been running her jewelry business for six years. She has her stuff listed on Etsy, Amazon, eBay, but she’s actually only had a couple of sales in six years. Now, six years is a long time, right? What do you think Pat. Do you think it’s fair to say that her business isn’t working?

Pat: Her business isn’t working, but there’s a reason that she’s been doing this for so long and I would say there’s a little bit of passion behind which she is doing, she sees it more than just a business. That totally can be great, but it also if you are trying to run a business that can earn profit, passion can also screw you up. There has to be some sort of business aspect on the other end of it which means you have to be making money one way or the other. So you know, I’m curious to see how her garage looks like, and how much inventory is there. Did she need all that in the beginning, or did she need to just start with a few prototypes and other things at first just to make sure that this is something that people would want to buy.

Steve: Yeah, here’s actually another question that a reader sent in, actually specifically for you because I kind of told people that you were coming on. So if you wouldn’t mind yeah, so Steve and Pat big fun of your show. I’ve been rooting for the same football team for six years now, but they keep losing the big game to the Stanford Cardinal year after year. Should I just give up all together and wear the Stanford colors with pride. I mean six years is a long time, right?

Pat: Well, let’s talk about this a little bit. No, because– no never, never go.

Steve: Six years without a win. It’s time you get. You didn’t answer the first question correctly either by the way. You were supposed to tell the lady to give up.

Pat: No, it’s not about giving up; it’s about reassessing where you are at, and what it is that people want. Really, that’s where it all starts. It starts with the market researching and understanding what people want and actually using transactions to validate, because maybe she did try validating. And this is what a lot of people do. They go to their friends. They go to their families and say, “Is this something you would be interested in?” And they say, “Yeah totally, I’d buy that.” But when it comes down to actually putting money on the table, they don’t. And that’s also where a lot of people screw up.

So I don’t know how she went into this, but she’s done traditionally what a lot of people do which is they built something, maybe they heard it was a good idea. Maybe somebody said it would be, and they go to rooftops and they scream like “buy my products.” And then nobody buys it and they wonder why. The validation process is an iterative process where along the way you can see where the points of failure are, and you can figure out where to fix it from there, or if you should continue moving or not and then no on that Stanford thing, ever.

Steve: So I would say that the people– so I ran a class that teaches ecommerce and I would say that the people who kind of run into problems fall in to two camps. Those that rush in without research, kind of wasting money on stuff that doesn’t sell, they get discouraged and then they quit. And on the other side of the spectrum, there’s people that never start because they don’t want to choose the wrong idea, they don’t want to fail. They are kind of scared about the competition. They don’t have the money or resources and generally they are just kind of scared to start.

Pat: I mean that’s most entrepreneurs. I mean, you think about people out there who are scared to start and all the amazing things that they can do, it almost makes me sad. I mean, what if there’s a person out there who has the cure for cancer, but they are just too scared of the publicity that would come with it or the failure. But you have the cure for cancer. I’m not saying that ecommerce is essentially the same as a cure for cancer, but it might be. I mean you are solving a person’s pain or problem with the product that you are promoting and putting out there and creating. So you are actually doing your potential customer a disservice hopefully because you aren’t creating something that is actually helpful.

When it comes to competition, the fact that you are coming in later than everybody else is actually a huge advantage. I talk about this in the book, because you get a bird’s eye perspective. You get to do some more research where you get to see, what I like to call your market map, your three Ps. You discover all the places where people are at and you target on each. You discover all the people who are starting out already, and also all the products they are buying already. When you create this map, you get a bird’s eye perspective of everything that’s going on, and you actually begin to start to know about that market better than the people who are already there. You can see what the problems are. You can see where the issues are, where the holes are. It’s very easy for you to see what’s missing.

And then you go in and you talk to some customers and you talk to people in that potential market and you see exactly and you hear from their own voice what it is that they need. That way when you go into the space, you are not just guessing, you are not just creating something based on a win. You are going there knowing that this is something that people want. And that’s really what validation is all about. It’s taking that guessing game out.

I mean, I want people to go out into this book with an idea in mind and go through the litmus test where the people who go read this book and get new ideas along the way. But what happens and every time I’ve ran people through this process, when I’ve validated this book and the principles in it, their idea mops. And it mops because it stops being our idea and becomes an idea for our audience, and it turns into something that will work for them if you actually execute. That’s another big thing; the idea is just part of it.

Steve: I was hoping actually we could just kind of go through step by step through your framework. I know you’ve released a product of your own in the past, the podcast player. And you followed the same principles that you talk in the book.

Pat: Yes. The other thing on that specific example though is because, and why that one is really important, is because I made a huge mistake back in 2010 with software. That was my first foray into software and I rushed into it. I didn’t do validation. Two of my friends released WordPress plug-ins all within about a couple of miles from each other and each of them were making six figures a month from those releases, and that’s why I got into it because I was like, wow, this is an incredible opportunity. This is working for you guys.

I am going to come up with some plug-in ideas and sell it, because I have this platform at smartpassiveincome.com. It’s going to go really well, right? And so the first thing I do is come up with ideas really first, and then I kept them secret. That’s the first mistake that people make. It’s like, they keep it a secret. And I wanted to keep it a secret because A) I was too afraid of telling other people about my great ideas and having them steal it which will never happen, and B) I wanted it to be like this huge reveal on my day one, you know from launch. “Oh my god, look at Pat’s amazing plug-in. Let’s all buy it.” That obviously never happened because I didn’t release it.

I spent $15,000 trying to develop two at the same time. That was how greedy I was. That goes back to the purpose of creating in the first place. It wasn’t to help people. It was actually to just try and make money. And every time I chase the money, I’ve always failed. Every time I’ve put my clients first it’s always been a win. So that was a huge lesson there. But also because I rushed into it, because I didn’t validate it, and because I didn’t go through some of the steps in the book which is like, what is this idea actually mean.

You know, we have these ideas in our brains. Our brain does a really good job of getting inspired and coming up with things, but it doesn’t do a very good job of ordering them. We think these things all over the place. And I tried to portray that in an email to these developers and because of that they just didn’t understand exactly what I wanted. I didn’t even understand what I wanted. And when they came with something, it was not what I had envisioned. And there was no way to match my vision, because I didn’t really have one. I just like, hey make this for me. And it just didn’t work out, but again, because I didn’t validate in the beginning.

Steve: You didn’t try to sell it at all though, right?

Pat: No, no, it was just terrible. I mean, I literally shared it after it was built. And people were like, “Yeah, that’s okay.” And that was, oh man, this is not going to go so well. I should have done that first. I should have just had the idea, shared it with a few people on my audience, share it with a few of my friends and colleagues to see if this was actually something that they would want. And when you speak about your idea with other people, they start to pull calls on it. They start to tell you what could be better; they start to tell you what’s not so good about it. That’s what we did with the smart podcast later.

You know, I actually built this thing for myself and then I actually wanted to share it with others, because they all said that they wanted in, but then when I came down to it I wanted to see whether they would pay for it and that’s where the beta group came in. Then we released as a WordPress plug-in. But I released it in a sort of an MVP model which is a minimal viable product. All these ideas I had in my head in terms of what I wanted to include in it, they wouldn’t validate it. I went to that beta group to see what it is that they would want and actually it turned out to be completely different. So I was so glad that they were there at the beginning. I guess I can just walk you through the process.

Steve: Yes, let’s take a step back. So step one, I know the first chapter in your book is called mission design. What do you mean by that?

Pat: So mission design is kind of stepping away from this idea. Like, yes, it’s about validating your idea, but it’s about looking inward and seeing where you want to go, and does this idea then actually complement that. Does it fit into that trajectory that you want to go on? Does it fit into your five year plan? The mission design is really all about these, there’s three thought experiments within mission design that are really important for you to think about so that you know where you are going.

It’s like, the analogy I use in the book and you know, there’s a few flight analogies in the Will It Fly writing. It’s because we’re always in the launch stuff, but launching is just the start of it. How do you know if it’s going to take off and fly, that’s why it’s called Will It Fly. This is really like how do you know if this is going to fly for you? And so the first test is really important, because it helps you determine like what would be perfect, what would be a perfect flight in five years.

So the thought experiment is like Steve, let’s say you and I for whatever reason we’ve lost our connection. We don’t talk for however many years, and then all of a sudden we find each other, crossing each other at an airport. It’s five years, I’m like “Dude, Steve, like how’s everything? So good to see you, how is life?” And you say, “Life is amazing. It’s everything I ever wanted to be right now.” And I go, “That’s awesome. Tell me why? Like what’s happening in your life right now?”

If you think about that, what would you say? I mean, the way that you break this down is you fold a piece of paper into four sections so you have four portions. And you right down your top four categories of your life that are most important to you. So for me it’s family, professional, finances and health, and then under each of those categories, you literally write down, what would make you say that life is awesome and perfect five years from now. This is not like a wish list or anything. It’s like you are literally thinking what would be perfect right now for five years from now.

And this sheet that you create becomes the basis for all the decisions that you make. It has been so helpful for me, because actually for me I get all these new opportunities coming my way, and a lot of times we get like googly [ph] eye with certain opportunities, but then I look at my sheet and I see, well, that actually won’t be a good fit for me. Like for instance I have this opportunity to create a hosting company right now for podcasts, which makes complete sense for me and who I am in my business in terms of where I’m at in podcasting world and all that stuff. It could potentially make millions of dollars and I have it on air space already, I mean every customer at [inaudible 00:20:07] podcast can become one of these people.

But it just doesn’t make sense for me right now with my family and my health, because all the things that I listed it would take me away from that. I would need to put a lot more time and effort into the professional and finance part, but it would take away from my health and family part.

Steve: So is the framework that you are talking about more for a kind of higher level goals, like we are just talking about the podcast player. Obviously these things are just too deep for a product focus idea, right?

Pat: Yes, but the product then becomes one component of you leading up to that. So that’s the first thing. And then there other things, for example, like– so that experiment kind of you looking into the future. The other one, you look into the past and you look at all the different jobs that you’ve had and different vocations and careers and maybe volunteer work and teams that you’ve joined, and you think about what you liked and dislike about those things, because a lot of times we move through life without really thinking about what we like.

We just do that whatever it is we are doing right now, but when you look in the past, you kind of get this parameter of the things that you like and the things that you dislike. And you can make sure that the things that you continue to do from that point forward match up in line with the things that you like and not with things you dislike. And for instance, I’ve run through this experiment for a lot of people who love to be sort of behind the scenes.

They love making things work, but they are not really into putting themselves out there in front of the world, so they are more likely to be happy with building a business on the back end, something a little bit more on sort of the ecommerce side where they are not necessarily the face or brand of their business, but they are on the back side creating things and putting things out there into the world. Whereas me for example, I love being in front of people, I love talking and being the personality, so that’s why, Smart Passive Income, even though that’s what it’s called, everybody knows that that’s Pat Flynn site, because I put myself out there.
4
So there’s a few other exercises and mission designs that are never really important. But I think what most people might be interested in are how to take this idea and actually develop it and get into a place where you can then validate it and actually having people pay for it before you actually build it. And so to start with that, it really starts in what I like to call the development lab. So it’s creating this idea, but then actually mind mapping out and then figuring out what its purpose is.

And there’s a really cool exercise where if you have this idea, I want you to write a whole page worth of, what is this that this thing is? What is it that it does, who is it for? What are the benefits, what are the features? And then take that one page and try to squeeze it down into one paragraph. Can you get all those essentials out of that page into one paragraph? And then one more time, turning it into one sentence that becomes the thing that you are doing and why you are doing what you are doing now, and who is it for.

And that’s a really good exercise to help shape your mind around why is it what you are doing, and what is this that you are creating? And then from there, that’s what you take and then talk about with other people. And through those conversations, you can really have people like I said help poke holes in that thing. So if you have an ecommerce idea for a product for example, just talk about it with people. And say, see what– like literally go to Starbucks and be like, “Hey, can I buy you coffee?” “What’s the catch?” “I have this idea for a product; I just want to get your honest opinion about.”

That is a golden opportunity for you. And the cool thing is it’s a stranger. You won’t ever see them again. You won’t really know– you won’t really care what they have to say, but it’s going to be so important for you and what you move forward with. And even though they might poke holes in it, that’s good information for you that you can use moving forward.

Steve: So you don’t advice going to people that you know or your friends for opinions?

Pat: I think it’s still helpful, but your target customer or just random strangers is where you can get the unbiased kind of information from. If you go to your friends and family, they are going to want to tell you what you want to hear, but not necessarily what you need to hear.

Steve: What about finding people that are in your target market right? If you go to Starbucks or something, that person might not be your ideal customer, right?

Pat: No, but they can still give you some good advice, but you are right. I think the best place to go to is to find people in your target audience. And so there’s actually an exercise in the book, I actually talked about earlier which is your market mapping. There’s specific steps on finding places online and offline to find where those people are.

Forums are great, forums I think are the most underutilized tool on the web, because there is just a plethora of information on a specific niche, people who are pouring their hearts out telling stories, asking questions. It’s like going through their problems and people who are all in that space talking about it. Because a lot of people don’t realize how important forums are because it’s where you connect with other people like you.

And if you can go into those forums and use the search functions, there’s some really cool search functions you can use in Google to scope out some really cool things. So for example, if you want to find out problems that your target audience is having, you can look up certain phrases in those forums using Google. And Google will spit out every thread in that forum where those certain phrases were used. So I can say for example, let’s use, I don’t know, just any forum. Let’s use the fire fishing forum for example. If I want to look at a certain phrase– sorry I just heard my daughter crying.

Steve: Yeah, I hear that.

Pat: She’s like don’t give away this tip, Still the trick Google is, you know how when you put quotations around a word Google spits out the top search results for that exact phrase. Well you can do the same thing, but look through a specific website for that exact phrase, sorry.

Steve: Pat is still recovering from the cold by the way, just so you guys know.

Pat: I am, but that’s okay. So you put a certain phrase in quotations, space site colon, and then whatever URL, so firefishing.com. And that will then spit out every inference of that phrase in that forum on Google.

Steve: I used to do this all the time for the wedding forums to figure out what brides were looking for actually.

Pat: You are familiar with this. So it’s…

Steve: I was Christine [inaudible 00:25:56] on the forums. I never went [inaudible 00:26:00] but yeah.

Pat: You don’t even need to be a part of the forums to find that information although you could go in. But those forums are really helpful, because then you can go in there, you can talk to people, you can build authority. Actually there was a forum in the Lead Exam space that I became an authority in, and that really helped to launch the Lead Exam website that I had. And I didn’t go in there and I didn’t start promoting right away.

I went in there, I built friendships, I added value, I answered people’s questions, I became a resource for people and then all over a sudden people got interested on what I had to say and what I offered, and that’s when my business started to grow from there. But that’s where you can find people. Plus there’s also websites and you can look through iTunes, there’s a search engine. Amazon is a search engine; you can find a lot of authority figures there who you can then look at who their followers are, Facebook graphs, which is a fantastic resource to find people too.

And then again it’s just about putting yourself out there, making cold calls is actually one of the best strategies you can use too and that’s a tough thing to do. But I know some of you who are listening to my show might remember Dane Maxwell’s episode in episode 46 where he used to cold call small businesses and just ask them, “What are your biggest struggles? What is something you do every day that you hate? What’s a software that you use to help you, and what do you wish was done better with?” Those are all idea extractions and questions that tell him what needs to be done, and he can go in there and build that software for them.

Steve: You know it’s funny. Cold calling is actually quite difficult, because a lot of times they don’t want to talk to you, and you end up dealing with a lot of objections. We do that for our business too. We cold call event planners, and kind of ask them if they need any of our services. It is tough.

Pat: It is tough and that’s why I feel like now you can utilize social media to actually initiate those conversations, or emails to just establish a relationship first before you call them out of nowhere. If you can provide value in the same way, or at the same time, then you they are going to be more likely to reciprocate at least by just having a small conversation with you and then you can go from there.

Steve: So one of the biggest mistakes for the students in my class at least is that they go in with a product that they are interested in and it has a market for, but there’s nothing unique about their product, it kind of just blends in with the rest. So what are some of your frameworks for figuring out what’s going to make your thing special?

Pat: So the market plan will help you because you get to see all the products that are out there. But one of my favorite things to do is go on Amazon, I know a lot of you use Amazon as your foot billing platform. Look at the competitors products and look at the three star reviews for all those products. The five star reviews are okay and you know a lot of times it’s just like super fans, and you get some good information three too. And the one star review maybe had a bad experience or whatever.

The three star reviews is where you can get the most honest information. You know because it’s a three star review. There is going to be things they like about it and things they dislike about it. A lot of times you come across these reviews that literally say, here are the pros of this and here’s are the cons of this.

I also like to, if I were in the ecommerce space, which I might get into in the future, I would literally buy those products and use them and see what they are like, and see what I can do to make them even better and then talk to people about what those ideas are. Say, “What if you had this but it also included that, how much would that affect your love for this product, or how much do you feel that would change your thoughts about what this actually can do for you? Again those conversations are so important to have.

And then also then taking a little bit of initiative and making a prototype of what that next thing might be and see if it’s actually something that people would– gauge their reactions. That’s the most important thing and why I love the one on one in person reactions or conversations, because you can literally see in a split second what their thoughts are and gauge their body language on what a new feature might do to your product. Those conversations are really important.

Steve: So in the context of your podcast player, did you go through and test a whole bunch of different players and then asked people what they liked and disliked about the existing ones?

Pat: Well, the interesting thing about that one was all the players out there were just simply a play button and a stop button. So it was easy for me to determine what other features could be included to differentiate it, but then it was a lot about which ones are most important. Then we actually went in and actually surveyed a bunch of people and said okay out of these lists or out of this list of features that can be included in this product which ones are most important to you.

Steve: Okay.

Pat: Then we got the top ones there, people added their own and some of them were kind of outlandish and some of them were right on the money. Again I wouldn’t have known that if it wasn’t for those conversations, and those conversations can be hard to deal, I mean I had one on one conversations through Skype, but also we ran a survey with some of our beta group, we tried to figure that information out. Those in person conversations which are the most helpful they can be very– you can get very nervous leading up to that.

I think even that goes along with what you said earlier, some people are just sacred and it’s really scary, but that’s part of the process of becoming an entrepreneur. It’s not going to just land in your lap, you have to do the work, and you have to go out there and get uncomfortable because that’s where all the awesome stuff happens is when you get uncomfortable. If you are comfortable the entire time, it probably means you aren’t doing what you needed to do.

Steve: The process that you went through, it sounds like you sent out a list, created a beta group of people who were interested, and then you proposed to a much smaller group a list of features that you had them evaluate essentially right?

Pat: Here’s the validation process, so this is part four which is called the flight simulator where you’re actually doing a small scale experiment with this idea that you have that you’ve kind of flushed out already. You’ve determined based on conversations, based on research, based on what this would be. This is kind of like where your myth is and myth busters right? What you want to put to the test.

The first step is you get in front of an audience. If you have an audience already great, if you have existing customers perfect, that’s where you start. If you don’t I should give you eight different ways, actually nine different ways that you can get in front of an audience even if it’s not yours. I think this is where a lot of other instructions on validation falls short is they often assume that you have an audience already. There’s a lot of different strategies from paid advertising to getting on other people’s shows to kick starter and suing platforms like that to get in front of an audience and validate your product too.

That’s a first step, and then from there if you get in front of your audience or you have an audience already for example, then it’s about hyper targeting. What I mean by that is you have this audience already, but your solution is going to be only for a certain people with a certain problem, and you have to have people in that audience to essentially raise your hand and say yeah I have that problem or I could use something like that. Again you’re hyper targeting because those are the people you want to actually test and have conversations with when you propose your idea which is the next step.

You want to share the solution with them and then come back to them a little bit later and say, okay well I’ve had a few people that were interested in this. If there were indeed people who were interested, and then you say okay, well I need to know for sure that this is actually something that you are interested in. If you are I am trying to get 20 people to actually preorder this, which will give me notification like yes this is something to build, and if I don’t get that I’m am not going to build it.

I mean again you’re being very honest about this, this is kind of what’s different than the ten fairest model, which is like you have a buy now button which looks real, but you’re just gauging that quick note. This way you’re actually having conversations with people and you’re saying this is what I propose, this is what you all said you’re interested in. If you are preorder it here or PayPal me this money here which is what some people do actually. If I get 20 people, then I am going to build it, if not I will just simply refund your money.

Steve: Incidentally that’s actually how I launched my class. I got on like a webinar and I said I am going to build this course, prepay me and I’ll develop it, and 35 people signed up right away, and then I was like crap I guess I have to build this now.

Pat: Yeah, but that’s is good you know it’s going to work instead of where a lot of people do is they would build that course first, and then say hey guys I’ve got this new course, are you interested? And then maybe they’re not. In that way you knew because there were 35 people that were interested, so you did have validation to move forward there. I liked how you said you used the webinar because that’s another strategy to get in front of an audience whether you have your own.

You get them on a webinar, or you paid to have cold traffic get in to this webinar and they get to see you and of course on that webinar I’m sure you provided a ton of value. Then you had your pitch at the end, and then people were interested and that’s actually, I have several examples of people who have done this in all different kinds of ways in the book. A couple of people have used the webinar strategy very well. Some people just went out and hustled and talked to a bunch of people in person. I know that Kagan actually I don’t know if you know this, but he validated a beef jerky subscription company called Sumo Jerky.

Steve: Yes.

Pat: He validated that as a challenge and that was done in 24 hours. He earned a thousand dollars profit. That was his challenge to see if he could earn a thousand dollars profit in 24 hours for an idea that his audience gave him. That idea was a jerky service company, and he went out there and now that company he actually handed out that company off to somebody named Ryan to become a CEO, who’s now a chief jerk in that company as Noah says, and that company earns five figures a month now and…

Steve: That’s crazy.

Pat: If he didn’t validate it wouldn’t have been built, but he validated it, and that told him to put more resources into it and build it out full scale.

Steve: Let me ask you this, so let’s say you had zero audience and you wanted to market your podcast player, what method would you personally have used to get feedback about your player?

Pat: Well I would start with building a list of who the podcasters are out there, and then also who the podcasters are out there who have influence to other podcasters, because that would be really important to know. I would get in front of those people, talk to them maybe even get in person with them at a conference or so and take them out to dinner, and then tell them about what this idea is, and actually give them a copy to use and actually set it up completely for them maybe, even on a sand box site to show them what it looked like so they can see if it’s actually that’s my prototype for them, and they can get a fill for what it’s like.

Then I can say hey if this is something you’re interested in, I’d love to give it to you for half off. If I collect 20 people or however many people depending on how many people you reach out to. Essentially you want to get eight to 12% say yes and actually pay you based off the amount of people you ask. That’s sort of like in alignment with the earlier doctor graph.

Steve: It’s funny that you mention going to conferences, because it is kind of hard as a nobody to just randomly reach out to people and have them respond to you right?

Pat: It is but it’s not possible right.

Steve: Right.

Pat: But when you’re there in person its like people are going to be rude and say…

Steve: Yeah exactly.

Pat: No, I’m not going to talk to you right now, but they will shake your hand and even if that’s not where you have this conversation, you at least made a point of contact. Then when you follow up with them later, even if you call them it’s no longer a cold call anymore. That’s why conferences are a great place to go, but even if it’s not a conference establishing that relationship on social media, sending an email out or starting as a person who runs a guest post or maybe you talk about and reveal all this incredible information.

Again asking for nothing in return, but then you later then talk about this opportunity. That’s how a lot of people have gotten in front of me is we build a relationship together, and then I later find out that I have this really cool thing that’s is going on, and I ended up buying it or using it, and then of course later promoting it to my audience.

Steve: We’ve kind of covered steps one and two. Three is kind of market conditions right, which is determining the level of competition and what’s out there?

Pat: Yes.

Steve: We’ve kind of it seems like we’ve kind of mixed all the different steps together.

Pat: Yeah, we kind of did.

Steve: Is there anything that we missed in that spot and kind of just gauging the competition and what the market is like?

Pat: Yeah I mean one of my favorite things to do is come up with your customer plan P-L-A-N. This is something I came up with which is sort of an alternative to your customer avatar. Obviously knowing your avatar is important, and avatar is sort of a made up person that you create who is your ideal customer who you can know about them. A lot of people will give this person a name, and a life and what their problems are.

That’s key I think it’s important to know who your audience is, but every time I’ve tried to create my own customer avatar, it’s felt a little weird to me. I don’t know if you feel the same way, but it’s like I know that person is fake right? Like it’s a made up person and I never truly feel connected to that person. Which is why I feel like it’s important to go out there and actually get to know a few people who are who have those struggles, so you…

Steve: My avatar has always been wrong.

Pat: Has it always been wrong just because you make it up and it’s not…

Steve: We make it up, and then it turns out not to be the right market, and then we just switch on the fly after we have a couple of customers. I don’t know if that’s how your experience?

Pat: No it is.

Steve: Okay.

Pat: I like how you say that it was after when you got customers, after you got people who actually are in your target audience, and you’ve gotten to know them or at least get an understanding of their buying habits and what not. The customer plan the P-L-A-N is not going to– the P is the problems. You’ve got to know what the problems are. Every business is just a solution to a person’s problem, and the better you understand those problems the more likely it is you’re going to succeed right? Then it’s the language, that’s the L and that’s really important, because the language is what your use to connect with that person on your sales page and conversations and tweets.

You’ve got to know how they describe those problems or what they say. You’ve got to understand the language of your audience, and that’s really important especially if you’re going into a space that you know nothing about, because then if you start talking about this solution that you have, even if though it’s a great solution if you don’t know the way that that audience talks, you’re just going to seem like you don’t belong there. You need to know the language.

Steve: On that language point before you go on. Yeah so incidentally I use that technique when people start asking me questions I would use their language and put that on my sales page, and that actually ended up helping improve conversations on myself.

Pat: Like to really copy paste it, right?

Steve: Almost copy paste.

Pat: Yeah, you can do that. I mean the survey that I ran in July I literally copy pasted parts and put them in my email sequence, like for subject lines and bullet points and the response rate has been huge. I jumped from a 35% open rate to about a 75% open rate on sending those emails which is crazy. The language is super-super important. Then the A is one of my favorites which is the anecdotes or the stories, and this is where you can start to get like really into the feelings and really into the head of who are your target about customers. It’s actually like pin pointing a few people in your target audience and getting just to know them and what their story is.

Some of the best questions you could ask in those conversations, I got this from [inaudible 00:40:05] from you know MPR and startup because he was talking about– he’s a great interviewer right, and one of his favorite questions to ask is tell me about a story when blank. That’s one of the most powerful questions because then your option is going to get, “Oh well I did this and this.” It’s like oh well, it was Saturday morning, it was kind of– you get this whole spectrum of really the whole setting of everything.

That’s really important to know when you are looking to get into the heads of your customer and then the N is the need. Based on the problems and the language and the stories you can really come up with what truly that need is that you’re trying to solve, and again when you get to know that part of your audience the plan it does become your plan. You get to create that thing to really help them, and then other part of the market map going back to the three Ps that I talked about earlier.

You’ve got the places the people and the products. If you were to just simply do that, like if you were do that right now and list just the top 20 places your audience is at, the top 20 people the other influencers in the space, and the top 20 products that they use better on a Amazon or elsewhere. I mean that is such an incredible tool that you can use because okay you’ve got the list of places. Those are places you can advertise, those are places you could guest post on. Those are places that you could do retargeting on, or any of that stuff. The people, those are people who you can JV with, you could have as a guest on your show or be a guest on their show.

You could connect with on Twitter and follow up and build that relationship. You could scope them out on at conferences, and the products those are potentially products that yes your competitors, but you can also be an affiliate with them or work out deals with them, or at least get an understanding of what the top products are that people are buying, and what’s wrong with them so you can come out and them build something that’s even better.

Steve: I was curious on you anecdotes, can you give me an example of someone you would target for example maybe in the context of your podcast player an anecdote example.

Pat: Yeah so you know to discover the anecdotes for that one it’s a little bit tougher, because nobody really even thinks about the podcast player, but the story is about the podcast and how they’re trying to grow it and how they’re trying to make the experience better for their audience, and how they’re struggling. I have these conversations all the time with people about their podcasts. It might be– I can’t pin point a person specifically right now, but there are people out there who are coming up with brand new podcasts, they have a new show, they have a new noteworthy and they just want as many people to listen to their show as possible.

Digging deeper into that, part of the information that I’m giving to people that people might not know which is what you’re doing when you come out with a product a lot of times is for this one is specifically is that a lot of people didn’t know that a lot of people listen to your show on your website as opposed to on iTunes or in Stinchar.

Steve: Right.

Pat: Even though we want them to listen to there, I have dated a backup to the fact that people are listening on your website, and so what is that experience like for people who are listening, who is listening on your website. Well it’s a play button and a stop button and a volume button and that’s it. Well what if there is was an opportunity there in that call to action that moment that usually it’s a first impression that people have to make that experience even better.

The conversation or the story might not be the podcast star, maybe it’s about the podcast listener who is listening on the website. Yeah press play button and I read this show notes and that was it. Well that is a boring experience like how can we enhance to make that story even better?

Steve: Yeah the reason why I asked that question is because in the context of my email autoresponder I had started telling stories about my life related to business. Once I started doing that I found that people started buying my stuff after reading these anecdotes. For example I told a story about how I almost didn’t ask my out my wife and take that chance, and it’s kind of related to business right talking that leap.

Pat: Totally.

Steve: I had other stories about when I first had my kid, I did all this book reading and I thought that I knew how to take care of my child and then the kid came out, and then I didn’t know what I was doing and it all helped. For some, I think those stories actually had an effect on my conversion rate, but I couldn’t really exactly measure it, I don’t know is that kind of what the A stands for in you plan or…

Pat: Yeah totally.

Steve: Okay.

Pat: It’s just getting to– because like you said when you started sharing your stories your audience got to know you better and trust you better. When you learn about the stories of your target audience, or the people who are going to be using the product you get to understand them better. You get to really feel for them and trust them and what they’re saying because it gets placed in this context. Also in just as a side note like using your own stories in your marketing is great, I mean Will It Fly is full of stories, I am pretty sure you’ve…

Steve: It starts with a story right?

Pat: Yeah it starts with a story about my son who on his third birthday I taught him how to fold the paper aero plane, which was like the coolest thing for me when I was a child, so I wanted to pass sit on to him. I folded just a plain dark design, I flew it across the room, and he was just like, Oh my God amazed. Like any three year old boy who saw his dad do something cool, he wants to do the same thing, so he like immediately grabbed a piece of paper, and even before I could give him instructions he kind of like started folding, like going through the emotions, but obviously it just ended up becoming this, it looked like a boat really more than a plane.

He threw it and it didn’t fly anywhere of course, and he flew it again and he ended up saying I hate paper aero planes. I was like no like you’ve got to, you need somebody to teach you these things and these principles first. It needs wings and all these things. I think that’s how a lot of people build their businesses, it’s like they see other people doing something and its cool, and they try to emulate it, and then the first moment it goes bad or doesn’t work they just give up.

Steve: Yeah totally.

Pat: You have to get that instruction, you have to go through a process of folding one, and then folding the other an then actually having that plane before you can fly and make it work. Now you know ever since I taught [inaudible 00:45:40] how to do it properly, he’s has been coming up with all these new designs and trying things out. He understands now that failure is a part of the process, and that’s what entrepreneurship is, but also getting advice and learning from somebody who’s done it before is also really important too.

Steve: At this point we’ve talked about validating the idea, the value preposition, the mission design. What is the next step after we validate it?

Pat: Well if you validate it, well then it’s like…

Steve: Just start selling.

Pat: All the systems go. I mean not just start selling, but then you building it out and actually work with those people to turn it into something that they would use and your other targeted customers would use. I mean a lot of people get the validation part right, but then they just build and then they start putting in their own things into it and no. You have this amazing resource from your existing customers who have paid you money already, talk to them.

They’re going to want to know and keep up with what you’re up to, so keep in constant contact with them, creating a small private facebook group for those people so they can stay connected to you and what you’re up to, providing news updates. It’s just like on kickstarter right? It’s the exact same thing as kickstarter and actually kickstarter is a great platform for validating although it comes with these all other things like fulfillment of pledge things, and actually going too big at first which is why I don’t recommend it. Like kickstarter, after the– I don’t know if you’ve ever backed anything on kick starter Steve?

Steve: I have yeah.

Pat: You’re paying for something essential that isn’t built yet, and over the course of the period when the contest ends and you get that item, they are giving you updates on the manufacturing process, they’re giving you insights, and at the same time they’re also building that relationship with you in addition to just keeping you filled in on when that thing is going to come and arrive at your doorstep.

You can do the same thing with your audience too, and by the time you get to that point you’ve build up this thing, you know the systems, you’ve created it in a way that your target audience wants, and it just becomes this thing that you can scale. Scaling is different for all types of businesses obviously, from consultation work and private stuff to just digital mass production, but that’s where you go from there.

Steve: It seems like all these principles that you’ve talked about apply to pretty much anything regardless of what type of product, whether it’s a service or product or a physical product, right yeah.

Pat: Totally, like if you’re doing a service you would actually be doing that service for somebody and seeing if A) they would want it. If they don’t want it, then you don’t have to worry about everything else, but if they do then you go and you do it and you work with them to see if it was done well and what could be done better. Again you’re doing it with just a few people before you do it with masses.

Steve: Yeah that’s great Pat. We’ve been chatting for quite a while already, surprising actually.

Pat: Yeah, I can’t believe it.

Steve: Yeah, so when does the book come out, where can you get it, and if anyone has any questions for you where can they reach you?

Pat: Thanks Steve well the book comes out February 1st, which I am like super stoked about it and very nervous. This book was really hard for me to do actually, because I’ve been blogging for almost seven years now, and I can write a 5000 word blog post in half a day or a day, easy, but this book was just a challenge for me. I think it was a challenge because I wanted it to be great.

I am very happy with what I’ve come up with what I came up with, and so willitflybook.com, you can check out the book. It comes out February 1st. You can preorder it before then, or order it of course afterwards. Willitflybook.com, and you can connect with me on Twitter @patflynn if you have any quick questions about it, and I’d love to answer and I am here for you guys.

Steve: Yeah and I am giving away recaps to Stanford fans only, so if you’re a [inaudible 00:49:08] unfortunately the offer doesn’t apply.

Pat: I don’t, oh man.

Steve: I just came up with that by the way.

Pat: That good, oh man that’s funny.

Steve: I’m just curious before we go why a book, because it’s a tremendous amount of work. Why a book and not a series of YouTube videos or something like that?

Pat: Totally great thought. The book I feel a lot of people read books right, and a lot of people feel like the book is the start of a lot of things for them, and this book I wanted it to be different than other books. It does have a lot of actionable information; it does have a lot of exercises. One of my pet uses of books are books that tell you why and what, but not necessarily how.

This book does tell you how and I feel like it’s a low easy non threatening sort of a starting point for people. That’s why I wanted it to be a book, and there is of course other things coming and courses and other things coming out later, but the book I felt like was a low buried entry into entrepreneurship, and if I could be there to help hold people’s hands along the way, then it’s going to maximize my impact and maximize the amount of people who actually follow through.

Steve: Cool, sounds like a good reason, well hey thanks Pat for coming on the show, really appreciate you coming on.

Pat: Thanks for having me.

Steve: All right, take care.

Well there you have it, and I hope you got a lot out of this episode. Most of the people who fail at their business neglect to validate their niches before investing significant time and money into a venture. By experimenting and selling early and often, you will eventually find out what works, so pick up Pat’s book which will be available next week.

For more information about this episode go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode101. And once again I want to thank Famebit for sponsoring this episode. As I mentioned earlier Famebit is the best place to find Youtubers, Instagramers and other influencers to promote your products online, and it works. One of my podcast guests Emanuel Elayae used famebit.com to make over $65,000 in four months with YouTube influencer marketing, and it costs as low as 50 bucks. And the best part is if you use coupon code mywife@famebit.com you will automatically get $25 off. So go to famebit.com right now and get famous Youtubers to promote your products.

And finally if you are interested in starting your own online business, be sure to sign up for my free six day mini course, where I show you how my wife and I managed to make over 100K in profit in our first year of business. Go to mywifequitherjob.com, sign up right there on the front page, and I’ll send you the mini course right away. Thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast, where we’re giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com.