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One of the best parts of this forum, and pretty much the backbone of what makes The Millionaire Fastlane so powerful, is the fact that you get people speaking from their experience.
Some of the threads on here from guys like @MJ DeMarco, @biophase , @JackEdwards , @AllenCrawley , @SteveO , and so many others can change the trajectory of your life – all from sharing the things they have done and learned along the way.
So, today I wanted to take a crack at this myself and outline the process I used to create a physical product and launch my own small business – and hopefully give some value back to the community here.
I will be totally upfront here – I am pretty green as an entrepreneur. In fact, I had gone all the way through the process I am about to give you before reading TMF . I made a lot of mistakes. So what follows is about 80% what I did and 20% what I would do differently.
Also, this is fairly “stream of consciousness” – so if anything doesn’t make sense hit me up in the questions.
Anyways, let’s do this thing.
How to start a product-based business
A little background
If you are like almost every other person on earth, you use products. You use something to wash your face. You use something to moisturize your skin. Maybe you are a grizzled blue-collar man with hands that have skin that cracks from the intense work you do. Any given person uses a lot of “generic” products every day, from soap to toothpaste to lotion.
The process of creating a product based business begins here – with the products people use. There are probably products you yourself use right now that you don’t even really like – but they are just “what you use”. This is where your opportunity is.
The most important thing to understand from the beginning here is that your product, while essential to the process, is not the most important piece. This whole process hinges on your brand. The only way to create and sell a product is to create and sell the brand.
My experience so far has been in personal care products, so I will frame everything in that context, but this process will apply to any product you want to create yourself. To make this whole process easier to understand, I am going to use a hypothetical product to illustrate some of the points.
I have always thought pomade would be a good one, so let’s go with pomade.
Phase 1 – Creating the product
While branding is key, you do need a product first. This part is very simple, but takes a little time as it is more of an R&D stage than anything else.
So, you get on google, and type in “make your own pomade”. Spend a few hours going over at least 10-15 different recipes. You will most likely notice right off that, regardless of your actual product, the majority of the recipes will be very similar. This is what you use to start creating your own recipe for your product. Pinterest is also great for this step.
Focus on natural products only. This is generally what people expect from a higher-end, handmade product. If you can, go for organic ingredients. You can find pretty much every kind of natural ingredient for these type of products at natural food stores. Plan on spending between $50 - $100 for a good round of ingredients to get you started. The best way to figure out what you need is to look at your recipes, and check out comments if it is on a blog – almost all will be a blog post with comments. Check out what people are saying about the recipe, and what they say about possible variations that would work well. Also, hit up amazon and check out comparable products. Read reviews and find out what people like and don’t like about the different products.
This would also be a good point to start cataloging some competitor analysis as well. While there is pretty much room in ANY product category for another option, you want to be the best option. The only way to be that option is to be the best relative to the other options – to differentiate your brand. A big part of a product based business like this exactly what MJ lines out in the TMF when it comes to low barriers of entry – you have to be exceptional at something. Check out Etsy for your product and take a look at how many people are doing very similar things – this will help.
Anyways, if you do the due diligence here you should see a shopping list taking shape pretty quickly. You’ll probably notice several base ingredients that are common to all of the recipes. Spend some time researching what the ingredients do, and understand why they are in the recipe. It is pretty easy to become a product expert quickly with something like this.
Go down and buy the stuff immediately. Don’t wait. Once you have the stuff sitting there, you will feel like an idiot if you don’t do anything with it.
I would suggest making at least 5 different recipes, so for us this is 5 batches of pomade. Try to make batches that you can use for at least one week. You should use your product every day, and document everything. Take notes. What do you notice? How long does it last? Is it comfortable? There is an infinite amount of qualities for any product, and the more you pay attention to, the better your product will be.
Once you go through this round of batches, you will most likely already have an idea for some type of hybrid batch. This is the point where your own product begins to form. You’ll want to work the best qualities of all of the batches into one single product. This will be a process of trial and error.
Keep making small batches, and don’t be afraid to share them with friends and family in exchange for feedback. Just try to avoid talking about this being part of a business idea – trust me.
Phase 2 – Creating Your Brand
In all honesty, “phase 2” is a little deceptive here because your brand has probably been taking shape in your mind during the product testing/creation phase.
Anyways, now that you are moving closer and closer to a perfected product with each mini-batch you create, you need to focus on creating a brand around the awesomeness of the product you are creating.
So let’s look at our pomade again. Perhaps what we didn’t like about the alternatives was the petroleum-base of most retail options. Perhaps we created a product that was less greasy because we wanted a more natural looking hold. Perhaps the product we created uses ingredient X to make the pomade easy to fix your hair over and over again because you are a hard-a$$ biker and get sick of your hair getting screwed up by your helmet and not being able to fix it. It is all based on the need, the micro-problem that your product solves.
This is the same problem your customers want solved.
This part will be individual to every product, but fundamentally it is the same with every product. You need to understand the actual value of your product, understand who else values that, and build a brand around that person.
So, building on the example above, you made your biker pomade. Your single job is to be THE pomade for bikers, because your pomade is the solution to EXACTLY what bothers them. You are the reason that they buy and are disappointed with alternatives. Your product becomes the definition of what they want.
The nuts and bolts of the branding in short is as follows:
If you really want an in-depth look at this, check out THIS POST from Richard at A Better Lemonade Stand. Incredibly good stuff.
Now that you have defined your brand, that message has to crystalize into every aspect of your product. The product itself is already an embodiment of the brand, but the packaging, tagline, graphic materials, and everything else needs to be a symbol of this same message.
I personally love doing this part myself, but it would be very easy to take your branding materials and go to 99designs, elance, or even fiver and have a cohesive creative brief created for you. A lot of it will depend on your budget, but the richer of a brand experience you can create for your customer, the more they will connect with your brand. Again, you have to stand out.
This is a huge subject – more than I can cover here in this already obscenely long post.
Phase 3 – taking it out to the world
OK, at this point you have:
Now the operational components of this project come into play.
At this point, it really becomes a matter of buttoning up a bunch of details, like:
I’m just gonna leave this one wide open for now. All of the things listed above are really going to vary between products and brands. Again, if you have a specific question don’t be afraid to ask.
What I did here was just list out each piece and knock it off the list. The best thing you can do is create a simple word document and just spend time everyday blowing it out in every direction possible. This document becomes a dynamic worksheet for building your business, and never leaves you wondering what you should do next.
It really is this simple to get up and running. I can already hear the comments about this not being fastlane – a product at this point really is not. The point is that you could build it from here into a fastlane business, and this whole process for me in my own business cost me a total of about $500, which I have made back within a month or two in a more crowded niche than I would go into if I did this again.
Hope this helps!
Some of the threads on here from guys like @MJ DeMarco, @biophase , @JackEdwards , @AllenCrawley , @SteveO , and so many others can change the trajectory of your life – all from sharing the things they have done and learned along the way.
So, today I wanted to take a crack at this myself and outline the process I used to create a physical product and launch my own small business – and hopefully give some value back to the community here.
I will be totally upfront here – I am pretty green as an entrepreneur. In fact, I had gone all the way through the process I am about to give you before reading TMF . I made a lot of mistakes. So what follows is about 80% what I did and 20% what I would do differently.
Also, this is fairly “stream of consciousness” – so if anything doesn’t make sense hit me up in the questions.
Anyways, let’s do this thing.
How to start a product-based business
A little background
If you are like almost every other person on earth, you use products. You use something to wash your face. You use something to moisturize your skin. Maybe you are a grizzled blue-collar man with hands that have skin that cracks from the intense work you do. Any given person uses a lot of “generic” products every day, from soap to toothpaste to lotion.
The process of creating a product based business begins here – with the products people use. There are probably products you yourself use right now that you don’t even really like – but they are just “what you use”. This is where your opportunity is.
The most important thing to understand from the beginning here is that your product, while essential to the process, is not the most important piece. This whole process hinges on your brand. The only way to create and sell a product is to create and sell the brand.
My experience so far has been in personal care products, so I will frame everything in that context, but this process will apply to any product you want to create yourself. To make this whole process easier to understand, I am going to use a hypothetical product to illustrate some of the points.
I have always thought pomade would be a good one, so let’s go with pomade.
Phase 1 – Creating the product
While branding is key, you do need a product first. This part is very simple, but takes a little time as it is more of an R&D stage than anything else.
So, you get on google, and type in “make your own pomade”. Spend a few hours going over at least 10-15 different recipes. You will most likely notice right off that, regardless of your actual product, the majority of the recipes will be very similar. This is what you use to start creating your own recipe for your product. Pinterest is also great for this step.
Focus on natural products only. This is generally what people expect from a higher-end, handmade product. If you can, go for organic ingredients. You can find pretty much every kind of natural ingredient for these type of products at natural food stores. Plan on spending between $50 - $100 for a good round of ingredients to get you started. The best way to figure out what you need is to look at your recipes, and check out comments if it is on a blog – almost all will be a blog post with comments. Check out what people are saying about the recipe, and what they say about possible variations that would work well. Also, hit up amazon and check out comparable products. Read reviews and find out what people like and don’t like about the different products.
This would also be a good point to start cataloging some competitor analysis as well. While there is pretty much room in ANY product category for another option, you want to be the best option. The only way to be that option is to be the best relative to the other options – to differentiate your brand. A big part of a product based business like this exactly what MJ lines out in the TMF when it comes to low barriers of entry – you have to be exceptional at something. Check out Etsy for your product and take a look at how many people are doing very similar things – this will help.
Anyways, if you do the due diligence here you should see a shopping list taking shape pretty quickly. You’ll probably notice several base ingredients that are common to all of the recipes. Spend some time researching what the ingredients do, and understand why they are in the recipe. It is pretty easy to become a product expert quickly with something like this.
Go down and buy the stuff immediately. Don’t wait. Once you have the stuff sitting there, you will feel like an idiot if you don’t do anything with it.
I would suggest making at least 5 different recipes, so for us this is 5 batches of pomade. Try to make batches that you can use for at least one week. You should use your product every day, and document everything. Take notes. What do you notice? How long does it last? Is it comfortable? There is an infinite amount of qualities for any product, and the more you pay attention to, the better your product will be.
Once you go through this round of batches, you will most likely already have an idea for some type of hybrid batch. This is the point where your own product begins to form. You’ll want to work the best qualities of all of the batches into one single product. This will be a process of trial and error.
Keep making small batches, and don’t be afraid to share them with friends and family in exchange for feedback. Just try to avoid talking about this being part of a business idea – trust me.
Phase 2 – Creating Your Brand
In all honesty, “phase 2” is a little deceptive here because your brand has probably been taking shape in your mind during the product testing/creation phase.
Anyways, now that you are moving closer and closer to a perfected product with each mini-batch you create, you need to focus on creating a brand around the awesomeness of the product you are creating.
So let’s look at our pomade again. Perhaps what we didn’t like about the alternatives was the petroleum-base of most retail options. Perhaps we created a product that was less greasy because we wanted a more natural looking hold. Perhaps the product we created uses ingredient X to make the pomade easy to fix your hair over and over again because you are a hard-a$$ biker and get sick of your hair getting screwed up by your helmet and not being able to fix it. It is all based on the need, the micro-problem that your product solves.
This is the same problem your customers want solved.
This part will be individual to every product, but fundamentally it is the same with every product. You need to understand the actual value of your product, understand who else values that, and build a brand around that person.
So, building on the example above, you made your biker pomade. Your single job is to be THE pomade for bikers, because your pomade is the solution to EXACTLY what bothers them. You are the reason that they buy and are disappointed with alternatives. Your product becomes the definition of what they want.
The nuts and bolts of the branding in short is as follows:
- List all the words that describe the entity that is your brand (exclusive, sassy, nerdy, colorful, natural, manly, etc.) and group these words by theme. This will help you narrow your “Pillars” down to 4 words that are the core message of your brand.
- From these core words, define in one sentence your Brand Essence – the sentence that says exactly who you are.
- From this, you understand your Brand Promise, which is where your brand essence meets your product benefit.
If you really want an in-depth look at this, check out THIS POST from Richard at A Better Lemonade Stand. Incredibly good stuff.
Now that you have defined your brand, that message has to crystalize into every aspect of your product. The product itself is already an embodiment of the brand, but the packaging, tagline, graphic materials, and everything else needs to be a symbol of this same message.
I personally love doing this part myself, but it would be very easy to take your branding materials and go to 99designs, elance, or even fiver and have a cohesive creative brief created for you. A lot of it will depend on your budget, but the richer of a brand experience you can create for your customer, the more they will connect with your brand. Again, you have to stand out.
This is a huge subject – more than I can cover here in this already obscenely long post.
Phase 3 – taking it out to the world
OK, at this point you have:
- A product that is awesome, that you make yourself.
- A brand that symbolizes your awesome product relative to your ideal customer
Now the operational components of this project come into play.
At this point, it really becomes a matter of buttoning up a bunch of details, like:
- Containers
- Labels
- Shipping/ fulfillment
- Costs/pricing
- Social Media
- A website
I’m just gonna leave this one wide open for now. All of the things listed above are really going to vary between products and brands. Again, if you have a specific question don’t be afraid to ask.
What I did here was just list out each piece and knock it off the list. The best thing you can do is create a simple word document and just spend time everyday blowing it out in every direction possible. This document becomes a dynamic worksheet for building your business, and never leaves you wondering what you should do next.
It really is this simple to get up and running. I can already hear the comments about this not being fastlane – a product at this point really is not. The point is that you could build it from here into a fastlane business, and this whole process for me in my own business cost me a total of about $500, which I have made back within a month or two in a more crowded niche than I would go into if I did this again.
Hope this helps!
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