The End Hype Podcast

If I had to start from scratch right now, what would I do?
The world is filled with opportunities. We have a million ideas and dreams.
What business would I create to achieve my goals if I was starting today?

Entrepreneurs pour themselves into building products but fail to build demand. The product launches and no one buys.

The Baseline

Here are five growth hacks to power product launch marketing. Now, you can use these strategies to grow your business, grow your sales, or you can line these strategies up ahead of launch time, similar to the traction products that we're always talking about, to get yourself that foundation of audience of interest. You can put the product into your community and see those immediate sales.

There's this fallacy that you have to create the product, and then once it fully exists, you can start to market. This becomes really difficult because there's a lag. There's a time for some of these things to work. More old school digital marketing like SEO, which you absolutely have to do, might take three months, six months, 12 months before you get results. It's not helpful to do these strategies after the product exists. We want to think about things that we can do...

Everyone wants to be a youtuber or another flavor of social media influencer. The attention from moderate fame or the connection to so many people or the opportunity to make money might excite people. Creating content to engage and grow an audience requires a level of consistent effort and dedication most people just don’t have.

What happens when the audience or platform shifts?

What happens after de-monitization?

What happens after the notoriety?

I see brands building sizable businesses on the audiences of influencers. Vloggers, artists, musicians, and fitness people are making pennies on the dollar. I understand these brands pay well for the sales but they walk away with a business. Eventually, with growth, these brands might not even need influencers.

Solid companies, like MVMT, GymShark, Countless supplement brands, have launched product businesses using influencers for affiliate marketing. There is absolutely nothing inherently wrong with the situation. The strategy...

 Here is a little piece from the Innovate program.
Something we talk about a lot.
Something that goes into that killer pitch.

We are talking about a team. It's everybody's favorite thing. I know, in high school, middle school, college, whatever, everyone loved group projects. They were fantastic. Everybody helped out each other and you got an A. You loved it. You had a great time. … OK, probably not. Most people hate group projects because they're really difficult.

Here is the difference about your real life, about your business life, about pursuing your passion, that's completely different from high school. Maybe in high school or college, you were lucky enough to have friends in the class and you did your group project together. You probably goofed around a lot and didn't really get it done together. More likely, your team was chosen for you. You were smashed together. You didn’t pick the roles. You didn't get to figure out … this person's good at this or...

We're seeing this more and more right now (maybe because of the condition of the market) ...

Companies that we thought were amazing, that we thought were incredible because they had amazing revenue, are crumbling.

Of course, in the Instagram influencer market, everybody is making a billion dollars. It is tough to see and tough to really know. We are living in a time exposing the fake entrepreneurs.

The amount of videos on fake gurus on YouTube has recently exploded. I love the content on both sides. The expose videos help steer hopeful people away from the scams. The fake guru content provides insight as well.

If you ever wanna know how to market something, you can look at how these people do it and then just don't use those tactics. You might learn how to get in front of people but scamming practices kill you in the long term. Don't do fake webinars. Don't do tricks like sneakily billing people every month, pretending famous people will speak at your...

Come up with an idea, prototype it, make a million units, sell like crazy, and get that bread. Right?

Not accurate. Sorry.

Get comfortable with prototyping if you want to save serious money on development, manufacturing, and overall margin. Prototyping is not a process of making the best product we can and iterating until it is perfect. Prototypes are experiments we use in an overall strategic product development process to answer questions, validate assumptions, and explore opportunities.

Yeah, I get it. Making stuff sounds way more fun. The boring parts of business, like constructing and executing a good prototyping plan, is where success is hidden.

In this episode, I discuss some of the milestones and hack that comprise a better approach to prototyping.

Why spend time and time building a presence on social media?

Why not just keep working in secret?

Many types of businesses can succeed without social media as a sales channel. Traditional industries and hardcore B2B companies can grow (believe it or not) while still barely having a website. Why can’t you do that as well?

Creating content enables communication and allows feedback to start refining your message.

Like many things in business, we need to go beyond linear (transactional) thinking and move into network (relational) thinking.

If you think you are not cool enough or “ready” ...

It's not about the flex. 

It's about the come up story.

People miss the entire point.

Stage 0

Be known. If I don't know you, I can't do business with you.

Stage One

Define and refine your message, story, and brand.

Stage Two

Find, build an audience that relates to your story.

Stage Three

Attract team members and partners

Stage Four

Build community

Deploy traction...

I am unbelievably excited to bring Dawn onto the podcast. I will be doing more Founder Talks like this in the immediate future. We can learn so much from the experience of others.

Dawn fills us in on the progress and growth since graduating the RBC Mindhive incubator (now called Innovate) last year. She has won pitch events, built a team, developed a product, received investment, and planned a go-to-market strategy. Seeing the tactics and strategies put into action is so gratifying.

Listen in because this episode is filled with absolute gold.

We hear little sayings like, “the riches are in the niches”.

Why are niches good?

How do you find profitable niches for products?

And perhaps most importantly ...

What the hell is a niche?

When thought leaders say find your niche they usually mean a niche market. 

They mean find the place where your product fits. 

Niche means products, services, or interests that appeal to a small, specialized section of the population.

Here is a more human approach to understanding the power of niche markets.

In the past, even the recent past, groups of people were lumped geographically and could be sectioned with demographics such as age or gender. Groups of people were more homogeneous. Groups of people were reasonably the same. 

People had limited access to outside information and products. A town might have had a couple of stores. People’s interest and desires were very localized. Word of mouth was manual but generally how trends moved. Changes happened but...

Transform your product idea into a business reality.
This is End Hype

Here is the top conceptual mistake new entrepreneurs make about competition:

If someone exists in the market ...
If that idea is out there selling ...
They have to give up.
They have to come up with a different idea.

People believe this with such intensity that doing product validation and research causes anxiety. Stop letting bad programming guarantee you failure.

Here is the secret. Competition makes the market.

Being first to market in a new space is hard. Sure, there are possible massive upsides but educating the customer becomes your focus instead of product, growth, culture, etc.

Competition means customers. If I research a problem area and find businesses, courses, products trying to solve that problem, I know opportunity exists. I can quickly figure out what customer segment has the problem from website messaging, email newsletters, and social posts. I can model what is effective.

Even better when I find out...