Stacking the Bricks: Creators and Entrepreneurs You Can Relate To

This week I'm stopping by The Cognitive Bias Podcast with David Dylan Thomas to riff on a topic we're both very passionate about: the intersection of ethics and capitalism.

Dave is one of the best people I can think of to talk to about this because as a designer and a strategist, He spent a lot of his career thinking about the implications of bias on our work as creators.

And one of the things I've heard Dave talk about over and over and over is how so many of the ethical problems we face in business today might actually be designed problems that we can better solve. And in some cases only solve. If we first understand to the cognitive biases that those problems are rooted in.

Dave has spent so much time thinking about bias that he literally wrote a book about it called Design for Cognitive Bias, about how to understand the impact of biases on our customers, our teams, even ourselves.

The book is amazing. Everyone who makes things should absolutely read it.

Back to ethics and capitalism. Seemingly opposing forces. Right?

Well, in this episode, we're going to be talking about:

• the impact of survivorship bias on the kinds of businesses that people start and grow
• the relationships that exist between money and power
• and a very unexpected segue into an episode of the nineties TV show dinosaurs that I promise is more relevant than you could possibly imagine.

If you enjoy this conversation, I highly recommend going and checking out. Dave's aptly named Cognitive Bias Podcast for other similar in-depth discussions with industry experts, and then go back and check out these super bingeable back catalog of his 5 to 10 minute episodes where he explores one bias in each one. It's truly a treasure trove of how our we're human brains work.

But now, and here, I hope you enjoy this wide ranging discussion about the get rich quick scheme that we call America with David Dylan Thomas. Here we go.

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30x500 Alumni Pat Maddox joins Alex Hillman. They talk about how Pat used the 30x500 process of Sales Safari and dropping ebombs.

Then Pat shares how he ruthlessly followed just three steps every day for 10 days to get from from barely making rent to having over $3000 in MRR from paying customers and over 1000 subscribers on his mailing list.

Tune in and learn from Pat. Check out his blog at patmaddox.com.

This recording originally appeared on UnicornFree.com in an article titled "From zero to $3k MRR in 10 days, the story of RubySteps": https://unicornfree.com/2014/from-zero-to-3k-mrr-in-10-days-the-story-of-rubysteps

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"The idea that, oh well, I shouldn't charge money for this because... some reason.

Justin spent years noodling on side projects. He made every excuse in the book for not charging for them, including some we haven't often heard:

At the time, it seemed like, 'Why should I charge money for this? This is a passion project of mine.' So I should just release it for free."

But last year, he decided to make a change.

Justin took 30x500. In the first 3 weeks of droppin' ebombs on his blog, he added his first 50 mailing list subscribers. (ebomb, n: our special brand of educational content marketing.)

He kept at it, just an hour or two a few times a week. He researched his audience using Sales Safari; he wrote ebombs; he came up with a simple formula, really, to make writing those ebombs dead simple.

He started a book on the wrong foot; threw it away. Twice. Then he went back to basics and wrote, launched, and presold a beta book. He revised and shipped a finished book. He's made nearly $20k in sales so far. He didn't get on Hacker News or Product Hunt, just built his blog, built his list, and sold from there.

All on an hour or two a few times a week, in the morning, on the side

Justin also has a job and a little kid.

If my prose seems rote and workmanlike, it's because that's exactly what Justin did: He used 30x500 to take something people angst about, that they treat like their BIGGEST EMOTIONAL STRUGGLE EVER, and turned it into something he could simply do, the same way, over & over until he had created a wonderful result.

It's not that his book itself is formulaic, but the process to create it could be a formula. And maybe his ebombs have a distinct pattern to them, but they help people, and people share them, and nobody's complaining.

The process isn't exciting. The results are.

If I could snap my fingers and teach the entire world something, that would be it: The drama of "creative work" rarely helps, and often hurts. It's energy and value just... burning off.

If you're in the place now where the "fun" and "excitement" has worn off and you want to get real and make a product that helps people, and one that earns you money... well, you definitely want to listen to Alex's interview with Justin today!

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Here is the double-edged sword of the software business:

• All the “features” in the world will not matter if you don’t have the customer pipeline.
• It is better to lose many customers over a missing feature than spend a month on a feature that people say will make them sign up.
• Yet there really are features you’ll require in order to get and retain your best customers.

OK, so maybe it’s a triple edged sword. Or maybe a citrus reamer. Shut up.

I understood this in an intellectual sense, and I tightly managed our list of features for a long time. But we still built stuff that didn’t matter, while at the same time not building fast enough some of the things that really did.

But we did not at any point do enough marketing. Never. Not once. Not even now. (It’s #1 on my agenda for this year.)

So we will have these new features that our best customers really, truly need — features that will remove objections, and help us land some big fish, and retain them, too.

But it’s not like overcoming an objection will magically draw new eyeballs in. New features do not fill your marketing pipeline. The value is in the features only once your customer owns the product. After they learn your name, read your sales page, sign up for your free guide, open a trial account...

If there’s nobody to object, does a missing feature make a noise? No.

In this episode we talk about the marketing vs product conundrum, the third of five things I wish I’d known when I started Freckle, things that would have made my life so much more profitable and pleasurable.

• Missed Part 1? Listen here.
• Missed Part 2? Listen here.

Subscribe here or at http://unicornfree.com for new episodes of Stacking the Bricks every Friday!

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Jim Gay is a busy dad. A REALLY busy dad, with 4 kids.

He really wanted a product business so he could spend more time with his family instead of working endless stressful hours to pay the bills.

But this episode isn't actually about making time at all...it's about clearing a path for success.

Do you remember the approach to tidying we talked about in episode 6 and 7? We learned that the path to a tidy home is deceptively simple...and part of the process involves letting go of things that are holding you back.

In this episode, 30x500 alum Jim Gay talks about going through exactly that process, and how hard but important it was to start his product business with a clear perspective.

You'll learn how he rebooted his approach, immersing himself in the community to learn what they care about most.

Jim did so many smart, strategic things to build his audience: from turning his most popular ebombs as talks for conferences, to being really intentional about the KINDS of blog posts he wrote in the first place. And he's done very well for himself - his launch weekend topped $10k and he's earned over $60,000 from his first product since the first beta release.

But Jim made some mistakes, too. One mistake in particular had big emotional costs in additional to delaying his financial success for over 2 years.

It's a mistake that Amy and I have seen countless people make, and we've even made ourselves. You're going to have to listen to see what that mistake was, and how he recovered from it, and how selling products is helping him achieve his goal...having more time to spend with his family.

Links mentioned in this episode

• http://clean-ruby.com
• http://twitter.com/saturnflyer
• http://sivers.org/obvious
• http://baconbizconf.com

Interested in being part of our 30x500 Pioneers program? Sign up here and we'll send you details about the launch next week: http://30x500.com/pioneers

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