698: (Solo) She Worked 7 Hours a Day & Made Zero Sales - This Was The Fix

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1:03Welcome back to another Solo to Solo, Founder to Founder podcast. I want to talk about this one because I was on a call recently in the founder community. Member had an incredible brand, like amazing product, clear gap in the market, great problems she was solving, really strong, unique differentiator, solo branding. all tick in the boxes, right? But she had no sales.

1:25Nathan Chan:Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan.

1:39So I asked her, walk me through what you're doing every day. What does it look like? What have you tried? And she said, Nathan, I'm doing seven hour days. I'm posting on TikTok. I'm posting on Instagram. I tried Facebook ads. I'm doing all these different things, but nothing is sticking. And I said, that's your problem right there. You're doing way too much. So I want to make the case for doing less. And I know that I've probably talked about this before because I'm so guilty of it where you need to do way less. The number one reason new brands fail isn't a bad product necessarily when it comes to marketing, it's scattered focus.

2:11So I went deep on this. I pulled up her competitors. I looked at the data and what I found was there are massive brands in her exact category. We're talking a hundred million dollar year brands selling very, very, very similar products to the same customer so it wasn't a market problem right we know that there's demand it's clearly a marketing problem people want this product but she wasn't getting close enough to the customer and the reason that she wasn't getting close was she was spreading herself across seven different channels and i see this pattern constantly a new founder comes to me and says nathan nothing's working and nine times out of ten that's literally the problem if they've got the product right and you're trying to do everything, but it's just not working.

2:52And that is the problem because every guru on the internet is telling you to be everywhere. Everyone's saying post on TikTok. Everyone's saying do influencer marketing. Everyone's saying do Facebook ads. Everyone's saying post founder-led content on Instagram. And everyone's saying, you know, you can do retail. Retail's better. And what happens when you try and do 101 things? You become mediocre at everything and all of these channels work right all of these channels work but I'm a big fan and this is what I told her one product one channel one marketing message to one customer avatar that's it take all of that energy and focus it on one person with one message on one page with one good ad and one good product that's it get it really really really tight and I promise you it will work so i want to break down what i meant by one product i'm not saying you only ever sell one thing for the rest of your life but i'm saying you need one really good hero product like my friend rob ward who sold his business i'm gonna interview him again actually i interviewed him a long time ago and he sold his business to a big company called tool and he sold it for half a billion dollars and he's a big fan we've talked about this at length where like you can make like millions of dollars off just one hero product and that's where I believe you need to go like one really solid hero product that you're obsessed with getting right and that means nailing the marketing message the hook the angle the value prop the pricing the creative the landing page every single element of how that product gets from you to the customer dialed in so I'll give you an example when I started healthish it's a time marked water bottle right super simple There's a water bottle with time markers on two sides telling you when to drink throughout the day.

4:39Retailed at$25,$30. We didn't launch with 10 SKUs. We didn't have a massive product line. We had one product and that was a million dollar a year business for a very, very long time. And we got obsessed with making that one product sell. Now, here's where it gets interesting. Once that one product is working, then you want to have supplementary products to increase your AOV, right? Once you've got one funnel dialed in, the ads are profitable, organic is converting, all that good stuff, then you get to the bundling phase, right? You look at IM8 when I interviewed Danny Young. They had their Hero product and then they launched their Longevity product, right?

5:15They had the Essentials, then they launched their Longevity. Now they've boosted them both, right? Increased AOV. So as time went on for us, we had the water bottle leads to the cleaning brush. The cleaning brush leads to the ice cube. real quick before we jump in i want to shout out one of our sponsors zero i've used zero from day one of founder 13 years now and it's still how we run the business today it's cloud accounting software built for founders exactly like us and it automates all the admin that i used to do when i first started founder invoicing chasing payments expenses all the accounting it really helps me get paid faster and keep an eye on cash flow to founder listeners get a crazy 95 % off for the first six months.

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6:12Trays, ice cube trays lead to the sticker set and then we were going to do vitamin powders. I should have done that, never did, but you see where I'm going with this, right? So one product and then we get to the one channel. Same principle applies to distribution. One channel. When I told this founder, just pick one channel, master content creation, Instagram, founderland content, whatever it is. And she pushed back and she said, but Nathan, what if I picked the wrong one? And here's the answer. There is no wrong one. They all work. There are massive$100 million a year brands built on one platform.

6:44It's kind of crazy, but there are some brands that do over$100 million a year just on paid advertising, right? Now, all of them have produced enormous businesses, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Google, like whatever it is, right? You can build a million dollar a year brand, one channel, one product, one marketing message, one customer avatar, one page. So just choose the one where your audience already lives. Pick the one that you're most naturally strong at when it comes to creating content, what you naturally lean towards and just go all in mastering it. Learn the top performers, the who's who in the zoo, model, proximity is power, find people are doing it.

7:26Once you've cracked it, you've built a repeatable system for generating customers. You've got your selling machine working and only then do you ever add a second one. So how did I do this, right? I'll tell you, like I made this mistake with founder in the early days. I built the whole business on the app store through organic search and I did keyword stuffing, gaming the search results so when people search for Forbes or Entrepreneur Inc. magazine found it would shop and it worked subscribers were pouring in but then Apple changed the rules they limited the keywords and overnight our daily subscribers halved and because I built on one channel which was the right move but I hadn't used that time to build a foundation underneath it and I chose a channel that was on somebody else's land it got risky right so the sequence matters pick one channel, master it, build the foundation, then start to add another one.

8:18Okay. Now I want to talk about something else that I think doesn't get enough attention when it comes to growing your brand and selling one product is the difference you can make to your bottom line by finding that right pricing sweet spot. That's the difference between being able to scale a campaign and not being able to scale at all. Pricing is such a really powerful lever. You know, these guys that like McKinsey or Bain, these consultants, they play a lot around with pricing. They're very, very smart people. And the reason they play around with pricing is there is some cases where you could drastically increase the price of your product and increase conversion rate.

9:03Kind of crazy, right? And most new founders we find underprice their product. They think if I'm cheaper, more people will buy. And that is not how it works. And like even experienced founders, they grow pricing against the wall and just kind of guess it. And pricing can be such a powerful lever to grow your business. But, you know, if your price is too low, your margin too thin, you can't afford to acquire customers through paid ads. You can't afford to grow all that stuff, right? If you want paid ads to work, if you're listening to this right now, make sure your AOV is above $60 USD. It's criminal that all these agencies, they take people's money and, you know, all these brands and all these people say, yeah, this is how you scale your ads, right?

9:42And they don't even look at the key economics. You cannot scale your brand unless you've got volume, right? There's this caveat. Unless you've got extreme volume, there's a caveat to the rule around volume. But for the most part, you need an AOV of at least$60 USD. And we found this out at large with all of our founder operators members who we help scale up their ads and scale their brand through ads, right? So I always say this, the company that can spend the most to acquire a customer wins. I'm going to say that again, the company that can spend the most to acquire a customer wins. So if your competitor can afford to spend 20, 30, 40, 50 more dollars than you to get a customer and you're bidding in this auction, they're going to beat you.

10:23They will grow faster. They will dominate the market. Even if your product is better, even if your brand is stronger, they win because they can outspend you. You can't beat that. And so the lever that fixes that is pricing, average order value, lifetime value, get those numbers right, one product, and suddenly the entire game changes. That's why I like the Hero product. You can't optimize pricing and margins when you spread across 10 SKUs, but one product, it's just simple, right? And then over time, you can bundle or you can bundle with your existing, like it doesn't matter. Anyways, this is your homework.

10:52If you are running a brand right now or think you're starting one, I want you to do four things. Choose your Hero product, focus on that, not a whole product line, one product you're going to get obsessed with selling that one thing and choose your hero channel that one platform that you are going to absolutely master three get the unit economics right pricing margins average order value customer acquisition costs all that good stuff make sure the math is mapping and then four don't add a second product or second channel unless the first one is absolutely printing like my friend rob from quadlock says you shouldn't start another product until you're doing at least a million dollars.

11:28He says that minimum, which is crazy. Anyways, I promise you the brands that win are the ones that are not doing the most. They keep it simple. One product, one channel, one page, one message, one avatar. That's it. All right, I hope you guys enjoyed this. As always, if you haven't yet, please leave us a review. Please, please, please. It helps us more than you can imagine. And share this show with some other friends that you have in your network that are founders that you think will get value. it would mean the world to us we work overtime to make an incredible show for you all right that's it for me guys i'll see you in another one