Business Is Easy After You Achieve Product Market Fit

This video is going to challenge you and you're going to have to keep an open mind because there is something that your customers want from you and there's what you want to deliver to your customers and those things are currently miles apart. And the reason you need to keep an open mind is because until we bring those closer together, you are always going to struggle in business. This is a problem called a lack of product market fit.

In today's video, I'm going to share with you my system, my framework for achieving product market fit. Now, this has led to seven businesses that achieved a million of revenue in their first 12 months. Before you do anything else, achieving product market fit is one of your top priorities.

It's way more important than systems and scalability and hiring and raising capital. Product market fit precedes all of that and allows all of that to happen later. Product market fit is the first thing that makes your business effortless.

Your favorite gurus, they're talking about scaling up. They're talking about exiting the business for life-changing amounts of money, but they're not talking about this important step. And everything hinges on this step.

Now to get started I want to talk about the entrepreneurial journey as a whole journey so that we can zoom in on product market fit and you know where that's going to sit in the whole journey. Okay so let's talk about entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is a predictable set of stages.

The first stage is the stage called founder opportunity fit. Normally something that you do by yourself. It's a oneperson thing.

You do the soulsearching. You figure out what is a good opportunity for you to bring into the world. The second stage is called minimum viable product testing.

This is where you come up with concepts and you come up with audiences and you see if the audience is interested in this concept enough to fill in a form or enough to answer a survey or to join a waiting list. The next step, this is product market fit. We're figuring out the perfect ideal customer persona and the offer that they respond to.

Inside that offer, we're going to figure out all of the things that they want and need in order to be completely excited about staying with you as a customer. After you've achieved product market fit, then you go to something called go to market. Go to market is cranking the handle and making lots of sales.

And then after you go to market, you want to think about how do you scale up. This is new products, new markets, and new territories that allow your business to explode in value. Once you have scaled up, you can then look at exiting the business.

And when you exit the business, that is where you sell the business for a life-changing amount of money. And then you have a little bit of time off before going back to founder opportunity fit. We want to zoom in on this phase here called the product market fit phase.

And we want to have a look at what exactly has to happen. Product market fit is when two things come together. The first thing is what we call the ideal customer persona.

The ideal customer persona is the perfect person who sees the most value in what you do. And the second thing is the intellectual property packaged up as an offer. This is where you take what you know and your stories, your examples, your process, and your principles and you packaged it all up in an offer that includes multiple ingredients in order to achieve a desirable outcome.

So, let's zoom into the fundamental problem with product market fit. The fundamental problem is that your customers want a lot. They have a movie in their head, and in their mind, they're going to have this incredible life.

Suddenly, their business is going to be the best it's ever been. Their relationship's going to be the best it's ever been. All of these things are going to be better and faster and cheaper with more emotional benefits than they've ever experienced before.

And that's all going to happen. And that's the movie they have in their mind about why they're buying something. Then there's you, the entrepreneur.

There's you, the business, and you have a movie in your mind. And the movie you have is of a scalable business that just runs on autopilot and is not stressful. And what you want to do is offer a simple product and service that ticks enough boxes that people can buy it.

You want to be able to sell to people anywhere in the world. You don't want to have to get involved in customers dramas. You don't want to have to overpromise the world to them.

You don't want to have to change their life. You just want to be able to do what you do and get on with your life. Now, if we're honest, there is a massive gap between what customers wish you could do and what most businesses are prepared to do.

And that gap is what creates a misalignment that leads to a lack of product market fit. We have to be able to bridge that gap. We've got to be able to get these two points closer and closer and closer.

And if they can touch, we've got something called product market fit. Now, at the point of product market fit, the customers super excited that they found you, and they would be disappointed if you went out of business. It would ruin their day if you suddenly didn't exist.

And at the point of product market fit, you're going to feel under enormous pressure that you have to deliver this thing and you're not sure how it's going to scale. Scalability will happen later, but at this particular moment in the journey, you should feel a little bit of weight on your shoulders where you've achieved product market fit, but oh my goodness, you start to realize how demanding customers are. And that's totally fine because scalability will come, but it'll come later.

Now, Brian Chesy, the founder of Airbnb, one of the most scalable businesses on the planet, in the early days, he discovered that he had to go around to people's houses and help them to take photos of their house in order to get onto Airbnb. and he actually says in the early days you got to figure out how to do things that don't scale and then figure out scalability later. So the feeling that we're going for is that the customer at this point feels elated that they've found you and they would be disappointed to lose you and you feel under enormous pressure and that you feel like this is never going to scale.

And that's totally fine at this point in the journey. Scalability comes later as I showed you before. There's no point worrying about scalability if you do not achieve product market fit.

So at this point in the journey, you go allin on product market fit at the expense of scalability. Let's talk about a process so that you can get to this product market fit. Now if you're an entrepreneur, if you're a business owner, even if you're experienced, this is going to be gold.

This is going to be the thing that really lights a fire under your business. Getting product market fit is an essential step for making a lot of money. Step one, I want you to get inside the mind of your ideal customer persona and I want you to do a series of surveys and data gathering activities.

Survey number one is called a waiting list campaign and it works like this. You tell a group of customers that we're going to be launching a new approach to achieving X, Y, and Zed. And if you're interested in understanding the new approach, please join the waiting list.

I'm going to give you all the information when it's ready. So that could look like a landing page that says, "In the year ahead, we're launching a new approach to weight loss. If you've ever been interested in rapidly losing weight with the latest thinking, the latest support and tools, the latest medications, the latest supplementation, join the waiting list because this will be a new approach that is specifically relevant to people like entrepreneurs and executives to lose weight and get into the best shape of their life.

Now, the trick is that when you launch the waiting list, you're going to ask people not just for their name and email address. You're going to ask them five questions that helps you to understand their world. You're going to ask them which best describes your current situation.

And you'll list out a menu of things that they would relate to and empathize with. Then you'll ask them which best describes the desired outcome you're looking for in the next 90 days. And give them a menu list of outcomes that they're trying to achieve.

Then ask them which best describes the frustration or the obstacle that stands in your way. And once again, you'll give them four or five things they can choose from. And finally, you'll ask them which best describes your budget or which best describes the type of solution that you think you'd be most inclined to engage with.

The final question is, is there anything else you want us to know? And this is an open box question that people can put anything else that they think is relevant. Now, that is going to give you the data that will tell you the prices people are willing to pay, the biggest frustrations they're trying to solve, who they are, where they're trying to get to.

All of that is covered in those five questions. that will give you enough to crunch the data and really get inside the mind of different ideal customer personas that you can talk to. In a perfect world, you'll identify some real people who are very interested in what you have to offer and you'll actually get on Zoom calls with them and start having conversations with them so you can better understand their world.

So approach number one is to launch a waiting list. Approach number two is called a product market fit survey. And the product market fit survey is perfect if you already have customers.

So let's say you already have 150 customers. You're going to send them out a survey. on the product market fit survey.

Question number one is the most important question and you would say, "How would you feel if you no longer had access to our monthly video production services? " Or if you've got a software company, how would you feel if we switched off your access to XY Z software that you currently subscribe to? Now, the answers to this question can be very disappointed, somewhat disappointed.

I would be okay with it. Now, the most important group is the group that said very disappointed. We want to know exactly who that group of people are.

What makes them tick? What is it that they're using this product or service to achieve? Why do they rely on this so heavily?

Why are they so excited? Why would they be so disappointed if this disappeared? And what are the key things that they rely upon most?

So, as soon as they answer that question, we want to follow up with four or five questions to really understand exactly who they are because that's going to be our ICP that we can expand upon with our product market fit. Now, for the group that said somewhat disappointed, we want to ask the question, who are you and what kind of features or additional services would you like us to incorporate in order for you to become more excited about our product? Which things do you want us to develop?

It's really important that we're figuring out exactly what type of person they are and what it is that would tip them over the edge so that they'd be more enthusiastic about the product. For people who said, "I'd be totally okay," we can ignore those. We can ask some questions to find out who they are.

So, if we can figure out a bit of a theme of the types of people who don't really rely upon this product, it's unlikely that we're going to hit product and market fit with that group of people. Okay. The third survey that I could get you to run, especially if you're a service providing business, is called an experience score.

So, the experience score is just purely and simply you ask the question, how would you rate your experience with us today? And regardless of what they say, you ask the question, which best describes you? Which best describes the outcome you're looking for?

Which best describes something that you perceive as a frustration or an obstacle? And what could we do to improve that experience score by at least one point? Now, if you ask those questions, you will get all sorts of information, all sorts of answers as to how you can improve and achieve product market fit.

The first step to achieving product market fit is to get inside the mind of your ideal customer persona. Over the last 5 years, we've done this with scoreapp. com.

We've constantly gone and spoken to the people who subscribed and figured out exactly who they are and exactly what they want from Score app in order to get that product market fit. We now have several ideal customer personas and we know exactly what makes each one tick. And I can tell you the clearer we get about that, the easier it is to scale.

Step two is we're going to radically improve your offer. And what we're going to do is we're going to work backwards from some of the information that we got from this survey and we're going to create something called a gold, silver, and bronze version of what you do. And we're going to construct an offer.

What we're going to do is put together a slide deck, a brochure, or a landing page that explains who you are, what you do, and who you serve, and going to give people an opportunity to subscribe to either a gold, silver, or bronze version of what you do. Now, in the gold version, we're going to go over the top. We're going to tell people that we can do five to 10 different things for them.

If you're a fitness trainer, the gold version is going to include meal preparation in their home with a chef. It's going to include a photo shoot after they've done their 12week body transformation. It's going to include GP1s.

It's going to include supplementation. Everything that you can think of that you could package up, it's included in here. And what you'll do is you'll price it up.

Then you'll add a profit margin and you'll put it in there as the gold package. The bronze version is going to be more of the basics. It's going to be four or five of the key things that people need in order to achieve the outcome that they're looking for.

It's going to be at a lower cost, but it's still going to have a healthy margin. And silver is going to be somewhere in the middle. It's going to have a few of the basics plus a few of the frills in order for people to feel like that they're going to get the outcome that they want as fast as possible.

You're going to have three price points. All of them are going to be profitable price points. And I don't want you to feel intimidated about the way you price this because if you achieve product market fit, the price objections melt away.

Now, one of the fun things that you can do at the moment is you can use AI to help with all of this. As soon as you've collected all of this data, you can actually put this data into AI and say that based on the data, you want to create gold, silver, and bronze offers for this group of people. I want you to take that to a graphic designer who can produce a brochure, a landing page, and a slide deck.

Now, remember this. 50% of people's brains is dedicated to visual processing. If people can't see it, they can't experience it.

They can't get excited about it unless they can see what it is that you're offering. Consider this. People will buy a multi-million dollar property off the plan, provided that there's a brochure and a little model that they could see, and then they'll happily sign a contract that commits them to millions of dollars worth of investment.

But people must be able to see it in order to believe it. The final step, how do you really connect the dots and make sure that you hit product market fit? What I want you to do is go back to at least 30 customers and I want you to have 30 one-to-one sales meetings.

And during those 30 one-to-one sales meetings, you're going to present them with the slide deck and the brochure that you've got. And what you're going to do is walk them through and show them this new product and service offering that you've got on the gold, silver, and bronze versions. And you're going to ask them which one they're most excited about committing to or if they're still unwilling to commit.

Now, what we're looking for is that at the end of 31:1 sales meetings, we've got at least three people who have committed to silver or gold. Now, the final test is where we lock this all in. We've signed up three people to the new silver or gold package.

We're going to fast forward 90 days, and then we're going to ask them this simple question. Now that you've experienced our new offering, would you be disappointed if we took it away? And what we're looking for is that those three people say absolutely yes.

They do not want to lose access to this product or service. We want to see that the experience score is through the roof. These people, they rated a 9 or a 10.

We want to see that they have a fear of losing this product or service. They'd be very disappointed if this went away. And ideally, we want to see that they would enthusiastically recommend this product or service to someone who's in their shoes.

And if we pass all of those tests, congratulations. we've achieved product market fit. As soon as you've achieved this product market fit, you can move on with your entrepreneurial journey knowing that you are going to go to market, make lots of sales.

You're going to have a new set of problems, but they're going to be good problems to have. You are one step closer to that big scaleup journey. You're one step closer to a massive profit.

You're one step closer to a life-changing exit. And you're one step closer to having raving fans who would be completely devastated if your business ceased to exist. So, the big issue that gets in people's way is the emotional barrier that they have to asking these questions.

People feel embarrassed sending out a survey. They feel embarrassed asking people for feedback and advice. They somehow think that they should just know what's going on in customers minds.

And they think that great entrepreneurs just somehow automatically know who's the perfect ideal customer persona. In reality, for most entrepreneurs, this can take 5 to 10 years to accidentally stumble upon the perfect ideal customer persona and the perfect thing that you want to offer them. The great entrepreneurs who scale up way faster, they just simply ask the question.

They run the survey, they create the new brochure, they put it in front of 30 people, and they get the customers to decide. This isn't about being an amateur. It's about being a professional.

See, the great irony is that people think that it's amateur-ish to ask the customers what they want. And actually, it's the most professional move you could make. And the real truth is that customers love being asked what they want and they love being shown new products and services.

See, if your business was terrible and if people just completely hated what you do, it would be very easy to go back to these steps. But the truth is, for many businesses, they have a business that's good but not great. Their customers are lukewarm.

Their customers continue to buy. Their customers are signing up. They're not disappearing, but they're not raving fans.

The biggest thing that gets in the way of having product market fit is almost having product market fit. You can kind of just bridge the gap with sales and marketing heroics. But the goal is that it doesn't require heroics to sign people up because you're so damn good at achieving product market fit.

Once you've achieved product market fit, the next step will be go to market. That's all about cranking the handle, making lots of sales. And I just did a video about that.

It's 34 minutes and it's all about how to generate leads, appointments, to present your value to people, and to make more sales. It's very much a goto market video. So, if you've achieved product market fit and you're ready to go to market, that's the video to watch next.

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