664: The $1 Product Challenge

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1:17What's up? What's up? Nick Oloper here. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show. Light on the theory, heavy on the tactics. It's an entrepreneurship podcast. You can actually apply. And you've been around online business for any length of time. I can almost guarantee you've heard the phrase, the money is in the list. And all the experts, myself included, extol the virtues of building your email list, right? It's the platform that you own and control. You're not at the whim of algorithm updates, social media changes. But the question is, are you building an email list of buyers? Subscribers are great, but you're not buying groceries on subscribers alone.

1:56My guest today has a unique list building and business building strategy that throws free lead magnets out the window in favor of low-priced products starting at just a dollar and has seen some exciting results, including that$4 ,000 in just 10 days. From growthmodels.co, Pete Boyle, welcome to the Side Hustle Show. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. You bet. I'm excited for this one. I got to know, what's the$1 product that you came up with? How did this work? Basically, I found myself in a position where I tried a bunch of things in business that didn't quite work out. As is always the case, you try some new things, it doesn't always work.

2:30And I was like, right, I need to get some good positive cash flow coming back in. Went back, tried the usual lead magnet, get people in, tried to nurture them towards buying from me somewhere down the line, a day or week, a month, whatever. It didn't work. And so I was like, right, I need to actually get some customers coming in. And so at that time, you know, chat GPT was doing huge numbers in terms of the actual, you know, daily usage and custom GPTs had just come out. But most people weren't really using custom GPTs. They didn't know how to do them. So I sat down over a weekend and I thought I'm going to figure out how I can create some custom GPTs.

3:07And much like the philosophy that's now in the$1 product challenge, one of the things I wanted to do was create something that was easy for the end user to use. not like a big load of information but a quick and easy solution and i created some custom gpts that were around content marketing because i spent a lot of my career doing content marketing for different brands and i said look these are four custom gpts that will help you identify a great topic create great headline do the brief that you need to send to a writer and even help you with the first draft four of them you can get all four for a dollar oh okay and then uh yeah it kind of spiraled from there because they were so easy to use and people could basically go in, answer a few questions and get the results that they needed.

3:49And I kind of daisy-chained them along so you could take the output from one into the next to get the next stage and so on and so on. Okay. So this is rather than starting from coming up with your own series of prompts to get the outcome that you want. It's kind of like a done-for-you type of pre-setup thing. yeah exactly so it's one of the issues i see now with a lot of the ai influencers for lack of a better term the lead magnets they're using is like here's a thousand ai prompts that you can use and i look at it and i think well that's great but i only need five sure that are really going to be useful for me so you've given me more work that i'm going to have to go through all 1000 to find the five that are useful for me yeah i'm sure these are all great right but what what's most relevant exactly and so i was just like what if i do that work for you and i say right answer these five questions about your audience what you want to create content about a couple of other sort of clarifying questions and this will just create the end thing like answers that everybody would have okay and that they would have to do anyway with a prompt but i'll take the prompting out of the equation and you can just take it from there and this was right when custom gpt's first came in so there was a lot of buzz around them and yeah i sold all four of those for a dollar Wow.

5:01Okay. So maybe some upfront work for a low ticket price, but then you don't have a, you have an email list, you have an audience to speak of at this point. Like how do you, how do you find buyers for this? So I did have an audience at that point and I had my email list and all of this, but I didn't use them to sell this to, I didn't sell this to them. Okay. They weren't really that interested in content marketing because I had an audience of freelancers who wanted to know how to attract clients. So there's a bit of an overlap there, but they weren't the exact ideal market. What I wanted was I wanted people who were running content for larger brands.

5:37So I had to go out and try and find them to get him to buy it. How did you find them? So I did something that I've now called in spear phishing was I found free communities of, you know, content marketers who, you know, they're all in there helping each other. You can't usually go into these places and promote because as soon as you go into a good free community, the moderators are going to be like no promotion. So I went in and I created just value-based posts. Like I said, you know, I've been doing this for quite a while. So creating these posts wasn't too hard. Eventually I created another custom GPT that helps me create the posts to take some of the work out of it.

6:14But essentially I go in and I'd say, look, these are the big problems that I see with content marketing. This is the solution. I've actually created some custom GPTs to help me do this. No promo. It was like a value-based post. here's the problem, here's the solution, I've been working on this thing. Just a little tease of what the offer is. Then anybody who liked, commented, I'd follow up with in direct messages. So it wasn't a cold DM then, it wasn't like a complete stranger saying, hey, how's it going? I could go in and I could say, you enjoyed the post, thanks so much for engaging. Yeah, there was some level of interaction.

6:48Exactly, exactly. So it was not cold DMs, warm dms i guess um and it was thanks so much really enjoyed it any questions and then if they were receptive i would then segue that into a you know i put some of those custom dpt's together i can give you access for a dollar and that was how i started to get the initial sales coming through it's not a very scalable system because it still requires you to go in and talk to you know in these groups right but um it can still work quite well and as long as you focus on value the moderators so far have most of the time like 80 of the time not had an issue with it yeah and if you're listening in you may already be a part of some of these communities so it's not you coming in completely completely cold you kind of know the you know the culture of these different forums and communities where you know what kind of content is going to fly or what kind of posts are going to fly in there and if you can lead with this value first the spear phishing is kind of interesting like i don't need everybody in here but you know a handful of people who are interested and it's going to help me validate whether or not there's any legs to this idea yeah and that was the whole thing is you know as you say you're looking for those people who are basically giving you a digital hand raise of saying yeah that's cool i like this you know comment or likes and then you can follow it with those and then you know that just made it so much easier when following up with those people and just getting some kind of a result okay so now technically are they sending you venmo are they sending you paypal is there like a stripe uh landing page or like how are you if you're figuring out like yeah okay i give you access to these for a dollar okay next next step to collect and deliver yeah so it's it's one of those things i think a lot of people really overanalyze what they should be doing with this and it's like oh how do i deliver this so it feels like a premium package and all of this sort of stuff for years now i've had a thrive cart subscription and if you i don't know if you're familiar with Thrivecart, but it's a checkout software.

8:42And so you pay once for lifetime and I think it's like$500. So no monthly fees, nothing like this. And then it integrates with Stripe or PayPal, but you can set up a nice looking cart checkout. Quite simple. And so I set it up there and basically then I said, anybody who buys this, send them to this thank you page, which then has the links to the get them here. Very, very simple, very low tech. You could do the same with a Stripe checkout, I think, or even a PayPal page. Once you have payment, you just send them the links to the to the custom gpt's okay got it thanks for thanks for sharing that how many people bought the uh the one dollar thing i think it was 26 okay and so the manual in these different communities groups right so the people who might be interested in this thing leads to the direct message outreach to the digital hand raisers the people who engaged with that content yeah and then a percentage of those people click through to buy the thing so now you got a grand total of 26 dollars minus processing fees exactly yeah so that's still not going to make much of a business out of this you know what happens next it's kind of the how do you lead people up the value chain to buying more from you or doing more business with you this is where thrive cart kind of helped out and there's plenty of other tools that you can do this with as well a lot of them are termed as like funnel building tools but also any of the good cart checkouts if you look to see if they allow you to create a bump offer and upsell offers one click upsells because that massively reduces the friction.

10:03And basically what this allows you to do is add other products onto the checkout so that somebody then has the option to go, oh, you know, I also want this. I'll take that as well. And I basically built a couple of extra products that I added onto the$1 product on the front. The way that I always view this is the$1 product or the front end, the first thing that they buy is there to help them achieve a quick solution. Don't give them this massive big thing of information that they're going to have to sort through and figure out how to use. Give them something that they can take and just put into their business or take and use and get a very quick result because that's much easier to sell.

10:39Use this. It takes five minutes. You get this result. Very easy to sell compared to some of the other things out there. The bump offer, when they go to the checkout, there'll be a little checkbox that says, do you also want this? And that bump offer should be there to add extra value to the initial offer. And I like to think that it's going to help people achieve the result faster, easier, cheaper, or more profitably. So it's going to make getting the result from what you're just selling them for$1 faster, easier, cheaper, or it's going to help them get a bigger result. Okay. The, the extra value of the bump offer.

11:13So the, you know, would you like fries with that kind of thing except in a business? Similar to, yeah. I like to think of it as like a catalyst to help them get better results. And so in that case, I then recorded a couple of videos of myself building custom GPTs. And I put a basic template of how I did the description into the custom GPT because you give it a custom description that it follows that process. So I gave them that template and a couple of videos around it. And I said, you know, for an extra, I think$47 is what I usually go for for a bump. You can also get the whole system that I've built on how to do these so that you can create not just leads for content marketing, but for any repetitive task in your business, you can teach an AI agent how to handle it for you.

11:54And you just follow this. Okay. So like the how-to tutorials, the instruction manual, plus, hey, if you ever want to do this on your own, here's how I set this up. Exactly. Yeah. That is like the first page that they'll see when they go to buy. They'll be filling out their payment details for the$1 product. And then just before they can click go through, it'll be like, do you also want this? It'll teach you how to do this. And it's like, oh, great. And then essentially when you've sold them that initial product, you've solved a problem in their life and you've given them this solution and you've moved them from where they are today to that transformation of where they want to be after that product.

12:28That new area, that new sort of reality that they have, they now have a new problem. And so I then offer them an upsell, which helps them solve the new problem. So it's a solution to that new problem that they experience. And so in this case, we're talking that they have custom gpt that will help them create content and then we got something that will help them create their own custom gpts but they have a new problem now that they're going to have this content is it optimized how do they promote it you know how do they actually get sales from that so then the upsell was more information on how they can turn one piece of content into like a sales machine so that people who read that piece of content will actually buy rather than just producing content and seeing no tangible results from it okay so So that's no shortage of content or digital clutter on the internet, but how do you actually get results from that?

13:20So that's the upsell offer. Do you remember what that was priced at? I want to say it was$97 or$1.97. And I only had maybe a handful of people take that. It wasn't like a huge number of people, but I was$97 or$1.97 because usually the numbers that I'll go for is the initial product will be anything from, I always start these at $1 because it's a very low barrier to entry. And just beginning thinking on a transactional relationship with the person changes the rest of your relationship with them. It's buyers versus freebie seekers. But it's usually$1, then$47 for the bump, then$97 to$197 for the upsell is what I tend to go for.

14:00And that gives you potentially$250. In all digital, no direct time required on your part to deliver this good. It's not like people are signing up for coaching or consulting yet not yet no so this was all just something that i've created and it was loom videos so pretty low tech in terms of you know there was no lots of editing and like flashy things it was me sat in this very chair doing a screen share it's like go here this is how i do it these are the templates this is why it works very very low tech sort of approach it took me maybe an hour to create the bump and the upsell together and then once i created them i could sell them dozens of times okay interesting this is like i'm starting to piece together you almost have to start with what you know i don't know what would you recommend people start to like start peeling out different segments of their knowledge and expertise or like what you know how to think about these different tiers as different offers like it's really interesting i would always start with the the end customer like who is it that you're trying to sell to and figure out what are their problems that you can solve.

15:07So they have various, everybody has problems in their life. What are the problems for your ideal customer that you can solve? That's where I'd start. And usually if we're talking about sort of business offers, whether it's services, coaching courses, there'll be one primary offer that will take somebody from where they are today to that end transformation of where they want to be. And that might be earning a set amount of money, having X percent freedom or whatever it might be. The$1 product needs to eventually lead into that big thing because if there's no direct line between the first purchase and the big purchase, you're not going to...

15:43I see what a lot of people do with their low ticket offers is they sell the equivalent of like, oh look, here's some stuff for blue shoes. And then their primary offer is yellow t-shirts. And it's like the person who wants blue shoes doesn't care about yellow t-shirts. So there has to be like a direct line. More with Pete in just a moment, including the small percentage of customers that make up the majority of your income and why you want to validate your funnel sequence with free traffic before you try ads right after this. A lot of side hustlers suffer from what if-itis. What if it doesn't work?

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18:11Limited time new customer offer for first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. In my case, what I could help people with was content marketing. And I had a course at the time, which was the content marketing model. And that's how I did like built whole content marketing systems. And so that was the going to be the end thing for this. And so I had to go back. What would be the very first thing that I could do that would be very small and help somebody solve the initial problem that's stopping them getting from where they are to that big transformation of where they want to be.

18:44I just want to help them take that first step. Got it. That's what the initial$1 product should be. Then the bump offer is the catalyst to help them achieve that faster, easier, cheaper. The upsell is the next problem that they have. And then that all qualifies them for whatever the bigger pieces that you're going to sell them down the line. What was that in your case? Because it doesn't stop. It didn't even stop with the upsell. It's like there's still more. It harkens back to the 80-20 sales and marketing for everybody who buys this thing, a percentage would buy something 10 times more expensive.

19:18And then a percentage of those people would buy something 10 times more expensive. So what was it in your case? Yeah. I email my email list every single day and I'm always keeping in touch with them. And this was going to be, and the way that I build things now is there'd be an automated thing on the backend where it then drip feeds them information for whatever the big offer was. And as I said, I was going to push them towards, it was a thousand dollar course, which was the content marketing model at the time i thought that things wouldn't take off so quickly i didn't think that i'd see sales initially i was just testing things so i didn't have everything ready for that and so i started emailing people and i was like if you'd like some help let me know and uh essentially somebody reached out and they were like it seems like you know what you're doing can you help us and uh closed i think it was like a three grand short-term consulting gig with this brand.

20:06They just reached out and said, when can you start? And I said, yeah, I can come in. And it was very low effort for me because it was more like a coaching rather than me doing the work. So I would come in, help their team. But that was what it became in that short term. And that's why in those 10 days, they went from buying a$1 product to hiring me for$3 ,000. Isn't that crazy? That's just like such an interesting sequence of events or a sales funnel, so to speak, from strangers to building up trust and authority and credibility to get somebody to pay you three grand. Yeah. I think it's that difference between starting off on a transactional versus a non-transactional relationship.

20:43The way I look at it is if somebody is willing to pay even a dollar, they have a pain that they're actively trying to solve. And I always term it as in, it's the difference between people who think information and the solution is nice to have. And what they do is they collect it. They put it in like a Google Drive folder and they're like, I'll come back to that in a week. And people who think that the information and the solution that you have is something they need to have, if they're willing to pay even a dollar, they need the solution, which means they're going to be more receptive to more help to help them get that solution and the transformation faster.

21:13Yeah. We've heard this phrased in a few different ways. People who pay, pay attention. And in a lot of ways, it's easier to take somebody when this was the example of Fiverr, you know, his line was it's easier to take somebody from$5 to$10 ,000 than it is to take somebody from zero to five. It's like that initial transaction hurdle, like, I had to bring in my credit card, I got to pay for something. It's a much bigger burden of proof to get somebody to pay you even a dollar than it is to sell them more stuff once you have built that trust. Yeah, 100%. The way that I view it is the$1 product is little more than a filter for those who are serious.

21:50Because everybody's collecting these big email lists. And I've worked with people who have got tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, but they're not making the revenue that they should from that audience. Because there are those people, like you said, who want to go from$5 to$10 ,000 and spend. But when you've got so many people who just want free stuff, it's very hard to identify who they are. And that whole argument of signals versus noise, it's very difficult to find when you've just attracted the freebie seekers. So I just view the$1 products as a filter for those who are serious and then I can continue to serve and help those people achieve their goals.

22:23Yeah. And in your mind, the days of the ebook or the, you know, the five day email course or challenge, like that stuff is kind of, that's just like more information versus, you know, if I'm charging for a thing, it's almost got to be like you said, this custom GPT, like something that people can implement right away. I'm curious your, your structure or like What might make sense for that intro offer? I think any format can work. And it's really depending on who it is that you're working or targeting to work with and how you're trying to bring them in. But I know guys who are using this with e-books and they're charging for the e-books, so not the free e-books.

23:03It still works. I know people who are running little challenges. The difficulty that you have with both e-books and challenges and courses is consumption. because it's great having somebody pay a dollar, but you need them to actually go and consume it and use the thing. Right. To then make the high ticket stuff really viable when you're talking about nurturing them post-purchase. But I don't think there's any one thing that is like doesn't work. I think the difference is whether or not you're giving it away for free or charging for it because that payment is what filters the serious people. Is there any thought to what competitors are doing or do you find that people are like shopping around, so to speak, for this like a dollar thing where it's like, well, other people are offering this for free.

23:47So why should I pay you? So I've not had any sort of pushbacks with anything like this. And yeah, I've not seen it. I guess there is a thing where when you're trying to sell something, you do probably have to put a little bit more effort into the marketing to make it feel a bit more premium. One thing that I'm always very confident in is that anything that I sell, I'd know that the quality of the information and the solution inside is good. It works. It's always tested. So I'm not worried about somebody not getting their money back. What I always try and do is make sure that they get at least two times value of what they've paid because then nobody can ever come back and be like, oh, that wasn't worth the money.

24:24With a$1 product, you're looking more at like 100 times the value because nobody wants to pay you. Yeah, yeah. It's hard to imagine to be like, can I get a refund on this? This was not worth it all. Exactly, yeah. One of the things I realized when I did the custom GPTs is you needed a chat GPT pro account to actually be able to use them. And I put that on the sales page. One person didn't notice it. They emailed me like, I can't use these. And I was like, I'm happy to give you a refund. They were like, that's fine. But yeah, no one's going to ask for a refund for a dollar, even if it's terrible.

24:57But last week or the week before I actually bought somebody who's doing a similar thing with$3 as a product. And the quality of the information inside was really quite lackluster. And as a result, when they then started to put me into their email sequences to pitch me the higher ticket things, I had no trust in them. So when I'm doing the$1 products, I like to offer at least like$100 worth of value for the$1 because this is the first touch point of this relationship. If I start off on a bad foot, if I charge them a dollar and it's terrible, i'm not going to be able to charge them a hundred dollars a thousand dollars down the line it still has to be of a high quality yeah i'm i'm with you it's like the first it's like that free sample it's got to be good where the one dollar sample like it's got to be enticing enough to build that trust and say yeah this guy is worth doing business exactly and my thought is if you can give me a dollar and i give you a hundred dollars worth of value back when i turn around and i say this thing's like a hundred dollars you're going to say how good is this thing going to be it's going to be amazing.

25:58Right, right. This is helpful. If I'm pausing, it's because I'm trying to map out like what, you know, what the sequence might look like. Are you still selling this sequence or still selling this product? Are you kind of migrated to something else? Are you still going active in these communities? Or is there, at a certain point, we've heard of people doing like a self liquidating offer, like trying to drive advertising traffic through Facebook or Instagram or whatever, like to the$1 thing and then, you know, at least pay for the ad costs. You do anything like that? A hundred percent. Yeah. So the, the initial offer I'm not running anymore because it's, it's, it's obsolete now.

26:35AI has got a much better point than it was that you don't really need the custom GPTs for what I was doing it for. And, you know, it's gone through several iterations since I was selling this and really, I don't think there's much value in the custom GPTs that I had built for those things. I still use a lot of custom GPTs in my community with people based around templates that we know that works, but yeah, not using that offer, still using very low ticket offers. And I still begin them all at$1 and I still go out and I start spear phishing in communities where there are people who are interested in this just to try and get a feel.

27:10Because I think the problem that a lot of people have and the mistake that they make is they think ads are a cure-all. It's like a silver bullet. If you just run ads, you'll make sales. Ads, in my opinion and experience, are a catalyst. Again, they're fuel to the fire. You need to be able to sell one of something, then you should be able to sell 10 of it. If you can sell 10 to 100 of that thing, ads will then help you sell 100 to 1 ,000. Most people don't have the money to throw at ads to them to find out if something works to lose thousands of dollars. So I want to go out and I want to see if this will sell without having to put money behind it, and then I'll put money behind it.

27:47So yeah, still running$1 products. And then what happens is once you start running ads, you're going to have to play with the prices a bit to try and get sure to make sure that the average order value beats the cost per acquisition on ads. So I'm running my own ads now for the$1 product challenge. Oh, okay. It's very meta. Yeah, exactly. It's all very dependent upon making sure that when they come through that initial funnel, they at least break even with the acquisition cost. So, yeah, you do have to play around with it. but it's just the easiest way to scale because doing the spear phishing is great, but it's difficult to scale after a certain point.