Page 97 - The $100 Startup_ Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love

up and running, and was rewarded with the sale.

MARKET BEFORE MANUFACTURING. It’s good to know if people want what you
have to offer before you put a lot of work into making it. One way you can do
this is through surveys, as we saw in the last chapter—but if you’re adventurous,
you can also just put something out there, see what the response is, and then
figure out how to make it.

A friend of mine did this with an information product aimed at the high-end
car industry. He offered a specialty guide that sold for $900 … except he didn’t
actually create it before he advertised it in a magazine. He knew it would be a lot
of work to put together the guide, so why do the work if no one wanted it?

Partly to his surprise, he received two orders. The cost of the ad was just $300,
so that represented a $1,500 profit if he could actually create the guide. He wrote
to the two buyers and said he was developing a new and improved “2.0 version”
of the guide and would love to send it to them at no additional charge as long as
they could wait thirty days for it to be finished.

Of course, he offered to refund their money if they didn’t want to wait, but
both buyers chose to wait for the 2.0 version. He then spent the next month
frantically writing the guide before sending it to the eagerly waiting customers.
Since he knew he had a success on his hands (and it helped that he actually had a
product now), he placed another ad and sold ten more over the next few months.

Maybe you won’t do it that way, but make sure there is sufficient demand for
your product or service before spending your whole life working on it. That’s
why it’s so important to get started as quickly as possible and why the first sale
can be so empowering.

RESPOND TO INITIAL RESULTS. After an initial success, regroup and decide what
needs to be done next. Jen and Omar responded to demand by adding more maps
and carefully creating new products. One year in, they made the decision to stop
doing their own fulfillment. “Going to the post office was fun when we were
first getting started,” Jen said. “But then we had to do it three to five times a
week, and it got old.” They decided to subcontract their shipping to a local
warehouse and ended up saving several hours a week.

Decisions like these may sound like a no-brainer (Why should two designers
spend their time making post office runs?), but implementing them can take a lot
of work. In Jen and Omar’s case, it wasn’t just a matter of hiring the local
warehouse to do their shipping; they also had to complete the daunting task of