Startup Guide: How I wasted $150K, then for $0 launched my new profitable business
How I wasted 5 years on never-ending Lean Startup fail-fasts. → Then uncovered the “Startup No Fail” approach. → And in a week I had my profitable business. You can apply the approach today.
Suddenly my mind blew up.
It was something out of this world!
The approach described in the article was so simple and logical.
The results were awesome!
My jaw dropped to the floor, and my eyes popped out.
I shouted out loud: “Holy %@##!!! I wasted 5 years on these never-ending Lean Startup fail-fasts, when I could have been making profitable businesses right away without any tests and failures! AAAAAAAH!”
My 2-month-old daughter was sleeping in the next room.
I‘d forgotten that.
I shut up, but still I was shouting in my mind.
The first snow was falling behind the window.
My heart was beating faster than ever.
I couldn’t wait to apply the approach immediately.
Does this scenario sound familiar to you?
- An awesome idea for a new product comes into your head.
You‘re full of inspiration. Your eyes shine. Your motivation overflows.
2. For a month, or even a few years, you invest money, time, hope, faith and love to give life to your product. You fight with developers, marketers, co-founders, investors, etc.
3. And one day you launch it! Yehaaa! Let’s celebrate! You celebrate, and have fun, but …
4. … nothing happens after the launch. Nobody stands in line to buy your awesome product.
5. You start to hustle, hustle, hustle, promote, promote, promote. You try to hack growth — but nothing seems to move the needle.
6. The fear of running out of money draws closer and closer, gets bigger and bigger.
It paralyzes your happiness more and more.
You don’t sleep.
You work 24 hours a day.
Even when you sleep, you dream about working.
You become nervous.
The capillaries in your eyes can’t stand the pressure and burst more and more frequently, causing cutting pain.
You look in the mirror and see a kind of human, a sort of vampire or zombie staring back at you from your recent nightmare.
Your family forgets what the real you looks like.
Your relationships become worse and worse.
Quarrels explode from nothing.
7. After a while, the fear chases you, and you end up running out of money.
Failure knocks on your door and enters without your permission.
It captures you and kicks out the feet from under your dreams and hopes.
You hide from everybody, you cry, and try to overcome your shame and frustration.
So many people warned you that you‘d fail — and now you have to admit that they were right.
It‘s all so demeaning.
Eventually you recover from the failure, then a new awesome idea strikes you — and you repeat the whole process.
But this time you keep it top secret, so you won‘t be as demoralized when you fail again.
Sound familiar?
I was running in this never-ending loop like a squirrel on a wheel. Until I learned a new approach…
Going Global
March 2010. The snow had just started to melt, and the first brave birds had returned from the south to the homes they‘d left in October-November.
I lay on a sofa.
After autumn 2006, the 24-year-old version of me felt like he‘d retired.
Google Adsense checks came in every month.
My job was just to scan them, send to a bank and convert them into cash.
The rest worked automatically.
People posted ads on my bulletin boards, Google generated traffic, and Google Adsense transformed it into revenue.
Heaven on Earth! Birds sang in my head, life was full of happiness.
I was realizing my various talents, and was the envy of my friends, who had to go to work every day and #@%% their souls.
Meanwhile, Google was preparing a surprise for me.
The company decided to update its algorithm.
As a result, the traffic on one of my websites that was focused on SEO decreased by 4 times.
My revenue dropped by 4 times, too.
My carefree 4-year retirement was suddenly not so carefree.
$#@#! 4 times — that was too much to bear!
I loved my retirement!
I wanted it back!
The next minute I thought that if I continued to rely so heavily on Google, one day I might have nothing to eat. I‘d have to join my friends who were #@%%ing their souls doing work they hate.
For 3 months, I thought about what to do. Finally, I decided to launch my first global startup.
I thought everything would happen fast.
I just had to create the same website I had for my local market — but make it better, bigger, more convenient, with more features, and in English.
I sold the website and decided to invest the money into a new global one.
I knew the niche well. There was no risk.
Or so I thought.
The plan was to launch in 3 months and make money in six.
But 12 months later, I didn’t even have a completed product.
I had to turn on super-lean mode.
Two teams of developers had wasted 9 months of my life.
First, they created what I had not asked them to create.
The second team created nothing at all.
The hope was that the third team would complete the product before I ran out of money.
But I had to sell my old car…
and my second business to cover my expenses.
Cold February 2012
It was a super-cold February 2012: -20 Celsius (-4 Fahrenheit) outside.
February is the coldest month in Ukraine. (Its name in Ukrainian translates as “Severe”.)
I stepped into the deep snow, heading toward my next job interview, …
because I‘d sold all my businesses and wasted all the money on a new global business that didn’t fly.
A crazy freezing wind scorched my face.
My soul was flooded with sadness and indignation.
I was going to work for somebody else!
Five days a week, eight hours a day!
Like a slave!
What the #@%$! — my eyes were shouting!
I hated it!
I had to escape from this nightmare!
The HR managers who talked to me saw that inner dialog in my eyes.
I couldn’t hide it.
My wife says it’s easy to see what’s in my soul by looking into my eyes.
Everything looked like the end of the world.
Welcome to my period of broken dreams and collapsed hopes.
Magic
Somehow, in the middle of this mental apocalypse, an investor magically appeared.
The dark clouds vanished, and the sun began to shine in my eyes again.
But I was afraid of running out of money again.
This time I took everything more seriously than ever.
I was not in a hurry to launch a new product.
I thought I was being much smarter.
I got to know the Lean Startup methodology.
First I created a landing page with a description of a future service: an independent music radio station that plays music according to your taste.
I bought some ads for $50.
It resulted in over 300 shares.
I thought this was an awesome result — enough proof to merit investing in creating the product.
Two months later, I launched the first version.
When we participated in a startup trade show with the radio product, our booth was one of the most visited.
It generated a lot of “Wow”s.
And it was the only one that played music that you could manage.
But there was one problem…
We were about to run out of our investor’s money.
The product had zero viable monetization ideas.
And a lousy retention rate.
Meanwhile, $30K of investments and 11 months had vanished
$30K?
In 11 months!?!?!
$#@%!
Where did you spend that?
Time and money flew away seamlessly.
We were so involved into building our baby… full of hopes, ideas, hustling…
fighting with the “monsters” and “zombies” that appeared on the way to our huge success.
But one day — BOOM!
We realized that another year had passed, along with our funding.
I began to worry, couldn‘t sleep, increased my work day from 10 hours a day to 15–20.
I forgot I had a family.
At times like this, the uncertainty captures your essence.
You‘re one step away from the gulf of running out of money.
Again.
Startup contest
Suddenly, a startup competition I took part in won a $10K grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce.
And I was also accepted into a Ukrainian-American business accelerator.
The sun was shining in my eyes and smile.
Again.
My soul was jumping out of my body.
It was so unexpected, and at the perfect time.
Ah, the roller-coaster of the entrepreneurial life…
Though that happiness evaporated quickly…
It was February 10th, 2013.
I was listening to my radio, coding, uploading files to the server.
Suddenly, folders began to disappear from the server.
In a matter of 30 seconds, all the music on my service was removed.
I was looking at it happening, but I couldn’t do anything about it.
Somebody had hacked the service.
My heart ached. I didn’t have any backups.
My ex-co-founder, who had joined me 2.5 months ago, was an outstanding hacker.
He received a salary from my pocket, but he didn’t want to work.
I tried to motivate him for 2 months, but eventually we broke it off.
He wasn’t agreeable and decided to pay me back by hacking and killing the product.
The $30K that had been invested into collecting and tagging the music for 8 months disappeared, literally in a twinkling of an eye.
Radio without music is not radio. My startup was dead.
3.5 months left
I didn’t have a startup, didn’t have a co-founder…
And there were only 3.5 months left before my participation in the business accelerator was to start.
I had a distinct feeling that I was always at the epicentre of uncertainty.
And I got used to it.
My worries almost vanished.
So many times magic had happened when I thought it was the end.
I started to think it was a constant.
There was never an end. Somehow the dots would connect.
I liked this feeling. A peaceful mind, confidence in the middle of uncertainty.
Though I couldn’t afford just to meditate on this feeling.
I had to hustle — and then hustle harder and harder.
And again.
Without a technical co-founder and enough money for developers, I had to force myself to code.
I‘ve been able to code since 1998.
But I was never a fan of this activity.
But I had no choice.
Within 2 weeks, I had a new startup: NextMusic, a YouTube music stream tailored according to your taste. This was an upgraded version of my previous startup.
By May 2013, a new technical co-founder had joined.
Everything looked good — except for one thing.
In 2 months, I would run out of money unless some new magic happened (the business accelerator didn’t provide funding).
Pitching
Every Friday at the accelerator, we refined our pitches.
From time to time we had different guests (investors, experts) listening to us.
In June 2013, Semyon Dukach — the #1 angel investor in Boston — listened to our pitches.
An average Friday.
Suddenly, after my presentation, he got interested and decided to invest $15K right away.
That gave us the chance to operate for another 5–6 months.
I was at the apex of the roller-coaster.
But this time I wasn’t jumping-around happy.
Yeah, I was happy, but not as much as I used to be.
I predicted another fall.
It looked like a pattern.
Acceleration
It was 7 am.
Summer.
Birds are singing, but I don’t hear them, because our startup area is located in a basement.
No windows, no feeling of time — similar to a casino.
I haven’t slept for 36 hours.
I‘ve been working all night long.
Hard Death Metal is bombing my ears.
It‘s the only thing that keeps my eyes open.
In the morning we listen to seminars by clever guys from Silicon Valley.
Then I do my homework and refine my pitch.
And then I help my co-founder code, so that we can overcome our weak retention rate.
I see my wife only on Sunday.
But it only looks like I‘ve come home.
In fact, only my body comes home — and immediately falls dead onto the sofa.
This self-destroying, on-the-edge schedule lasts for 2 months.
The only thing I can dream about is getting some rest.
And my dream comes true…
The team goes to get some rest on the Black Sea.
… and we keep working at the same time.
Everything looks awesome in the picture.
But there‘s one problem.
Our retention rate is so bad that our new investors don’t want to fund our team, even after the demo day.
We have 4 months left before we run out of money…
Pivot
Someone is on the phone.
“Hi, I’m from Forbes. Semyon Dukach told me about you. We want to film a short video about your startup and show it to our readers.”
Wow!
Free press!
Forbes!
I spontaneously stand up and do a happy dance.
But then I sit down.
My next thought is that any promotion would be useless if we maintained our awful retention rate.
People visited our music service, and sent us awesome feedback, but the very next day they‘d forget about it.
Our service was about entertainment.
People would come hungry for new music, find a ton of new music, but then continue to listen somewhere else that they were used to.
This made our retention almost 0
A couple of days before the call from Forbes, a new idea hit my head.
What if we didn‘t give away all the new music at once?
Instead, we’d give people only one new song a day, and we‘d send it to their email.
Sounded like a good solution for our problem.
When the journalist from Forbes called me, I understood that the only way to get benefits from the promotion was to turn this idea into a reality.
We recorded a video about a new product that didn’t exist.
And I had only 10 days to create and launch it before it would be promoted in Forbes.
But there was one problem.
My technical co-founder didn’t believe in this idea, and refused to code it.
I had no choice but to code it by myself.
Forbes
I turned on my 24/7 eat-sleep-code mode…
The day before publishing, my half-sleeping eyes and shaking, exhausted hands uploaded the last file to the server.
My new startup was released.
Here’s what happened next:
Our retention became much better.
Though something inside me felt that it wouldn‘t last forever.
But while we had traction, we had a chance to get funded.
A #1 super-angel fund in the former USSR region decided to invest $50K.
Right before this, I started to see what I‘d feared.
The open rates of our emails started to drop
People were getting overwhelmed with daily new tracks after only a few months.
Also, my technical co-founder left the startup ship.
I was alone, with $50K and declining traction…
Bad and good feelings mixed together.
I had to overcome the retention problem and make money.
Otherwise my risky journey will end up in another collapse.
I wouldn‘t give away pieces of the company infinitely.
Revenue
I read an awesome case study about a startup.
The founder wanted to test whether it was worth investing in an e-shop that sold shoes.
He created a landing page with pictures of different shoes, as if the shop was real.
He also placed “Buy” buttons.
But when a visitor clicked those “Buy” buttons, he was redirected to a page saying:
“The shoe e-shop has not launched yet, but we can notify you via email when it starts to work.”
He calculated the number of clicks on the “Buy” buttons and the number of emails collected.
The data showed that it was worth investing in.
This story inspired me to do the same with my music startup.
I created a landing page describing different nonexistent services, and added prices and “Buy” buttons.
This is what I got:
Based on these statistics, for every $1 I invested in ads, I generated $92!
I got 92x ROI!
Wow!
Yehaaa!
At last I‘d discovered how to make money on independent musicians.
It was the best news of all time!
Butterflies were flying with me in 7th heaven!
Small unicorns were playing with me on the rainbow!
In my dreams, I was swimming in a ton of money, like Scrooge McDuck.
I needed to build these services as soon as possible.
I needed them now!
But there was a problem.
All these services heavily depended on how many people listened to my email music discovery service.
I needed millions of listeners.
Alarm
A brainstorm started whirling in my head.
What if I didn‘t create a new habit, but piggybacked on an existing one?
Where do people listen to and discover music right now, on a daily basis?
Where would my discovery service become an additional awesome feature?
Alarms!
People use alarms every day.
Alarms wake them up with boring sounds.
If I created a mobile app for Android and iOS that would wake a person up with a new track, selected according to his taste, I would have an awesome solution.
I put my head down into developing it!
Within five months — in May 2014 — we launched the AlarmNewTrack app for Android and iOS.
And we didn’t forget to celebrate it!
We were proud of ourselves.
And ready to welcome millions of listeners — and tons of money in our bank account.
…
After Google and Apple approved our app, the first thousands of users downloaded it. A month passed, and we could see…
OMG!
Our retention was 100 times worse…
than our existing email music discovery service had been.
Huge bummer!
And there was another problem.
In 30 days we would have $0 in our account.
Hold on, you say!
Five months ago, you had $50K!
Yup.
Those dollars were all eaten by the app and the billing system for musicians, for whom we couldn’t sell anything, as we didn’t have millions of listeners.
20 days before running out of money
Fever. Hot June. Sweat is pouring down my face.
My eyes and thoughts are moving fast, unnaturally.
My stomach hurts.
It reflects my feelings and makes them even worse.
I’m sending emails to all the investors I know.
Three employees on our awesome team need to feed their families.
They have obligations.
We had become friends.
And my investors are also my friends.
They had supported me for so long.
All of this made the process even more electric with fear.
I felt a sense of duty, shame, frustration, worry, hope and faith…
I had two days before I would run out of money… my deadline was June 28th.
One of investors wanted to talk
In the lobby of a hotel.
I arrived a bit earlier than 10 am.
I wear a white t-shirt and shorts.
Perfect clothes for the hot and sweaty weather outside.
The investor came in with his tech friend.
We talk about this about that, about life, the tech industry.
In the end, when it was time to go home, the investor pulled out $20K in cash from his bag and tells me, “Take it. I want to invest. Do you have anywhere to put it?”
I had only big pockets in my shorts.
It looked like this:
Two hundred 100-dollar bills has somehow landed in my pockets.
You know this feeling when you prepare yourself to jump from a cliff onto concrete?
You close your eyes, take a step and… out of the blue, someone‘s hand stops you and a voice says: “Hold on.”
I felt something like that.
Semyon Dukach had said previously that he’d invest an additional $10K if another investor went first.
We now had $30K in our account
And I still didn‘t know how to make money!
It was July 2014.
I felt like I was hitting my head against the same wall over and over again.
But my inner blind optimist hoped that I had learned lessons and wouldn‘t repeat the same mistakes.
Though my results showed the opposite…
Money, money, money
I was too optimistic about how easy it would be to attract 1M listeners.
This time I had to be more realistic.
All the team had one job — to invite musicians who were also friends to our co-working space.
We talked a bit, and I asked them the same question:
“What pain is so big for you that you‘re ready to pay for the solution?”
Musicians are happy to talk about their problems.
They saw we were carefully listening and wanted to help them…
There were smiles, hugs, handshakes, tea, cookies, open hearts and souls.
After 2 weeks of investigations, we figured out the main problem.
Artists wanted to know where they could play gigs and make money.
We could do it.
All we needed was to persuade music venues to publish their open performance slots on our platform.
Ha! That would be easy!
Let’s do it!
The team was inspired.
We smelled money, and start running towards it.
But there was one problem.
Venues don’t want to fill out any forms.
And there was no sense in trying to educate booking managers, as they rotate almost every month.
Bummer…
We didn‘t give up.
Nevertheless, this was the only thing that musicians wanted to pay for.
We had to figure out how to help them.
We dug deeper and deeper, and uncovered more new obstacles.
We solved them, and stumbled across new ones.
Meanwhile, 10 months slipped away. Now it was May 2015.
We had 30 days before we‘d run out of money
2…
1…
0…
This time, the magic didn’t happen.
Dramatic music did not play in a background, like in an epic movie.
Everything was quiet, calm and sad…
There was no money in my account.
Nobody wanted to invest in this dead body.
I was like a soulless stone. No feelings, no emotions, eyes staring into the blue…
Now it’s June 2015.
Five years passed since I decided to create my global product easily.
I don’t have any businesses that generate passive income for me.
I‘ve wasted all my investors’ money.
I haven’t built my super-awesome profitable global business.
I have nothing.
…
No. The magic still doesn’t happen.
I have to yank out the narcotic needle of investments out of my vein and somehow make money to pay my bills.
Meanwhile, my wife is 6 months pregnant…
Growth Hacking
In May, I started to dive into the topic I felt passionate about: growth-hacking.
I bought many books, subscribed to different blogs, and started to read them one by one.
My mind exploded.
I gained so many insights from this magical knowledge.
Wows flew out of my mouth every time I stumbled upon a tasty new insight.
I started to collect them into a private document.
Frameworks excited me the most.
I put them together, one by one.
While looking through job offers, I found that my startup fellows were looking for marketing help.
I offered my services to a few of my entrepreneur friends and started to make money by helping them create growth hacking plans for their startups.
Growth-hacking was like rocket science for 99% of them.
It was magical knowledge on how to become a unicorn by investing close to zero dollars on acquisition, activation, retention, revenue and referrals.
Life started to seem brighter.
We were able to pay for the hospital, doctors, cloths, and other stuff for our upcoming baby.
The GrowthHackingIdea newsletter
When my wife was in a sanatorium, seven months pregnant, I was at home. And God sent me a crazy idea: “Share your collected growth-hacking tips via email.”
What?
Share them?
They‘re golden!
They had helped me to create growth-hacking plans for startups and pay my bills.
“Just share!
It will help you to keep motivated on a daily basis to look for new growth hacks.”
That made sense.
Why not create a newsletter?
I did it easily.
After eight hours of coding, I shared a link to my GrowthHackingIdea newsletter among my friends.
Happy?
OK.
Now calm down, I said to my inner rebel, and don’t bug me with your next crazy idea.
I relaxed for a while, and forgot about it for a couple of days.
Then I noticed that 44 subscribers had actually signed up for my newsletter
Interesting!
I edited my referral system and posted a link to a startup group on Facebook.
Soon, 30 subscribers had joined and invited 10 of their friends.
Interesting!
What if I posted the link to more groups?
Within 24 hours, GrowthHackingIdea had gained over 300 email subscribers, who in turn invited over 100 of their friends.
Very interesting!
The acquisition and referral parts of the system seemed to work well.
But they would be worth nothing if the retention rate was poor.
I had suffered from bad retention for years and didn’t want to invest any time into a new failure.
So I decided to step back and look at retention.
Two weeks later, my retention still looked pretty inspiring.
I hadn‘t seen such good numbers in my life…
It looked like people really needed and liked what I was sharing.
I discovered a couple of interesting hacks, implemented them into my referral system.
I asked myself:
What if I share my invitation link to the same groups?
Boom!
Within 24 hours, over 1000 new subscribers had joined and invited over 600 of their friends.
Holy cow!
I continued to update my email referral system, and added multiple referral layers and a bunch of other hacks.
By August 3, 2015, I had 2,595 subscribers in my email community.
I was getting used to these mouth-watering numbers.
The next day, GrowthHackingIdea was featured on Product Hunt.
Boom!
+1,595 subscribers in one day!
And they invited over 600 of their friends.
@#$%!
It worked like magic!
Could I sleep?
Pinch me, somebody!
Daily growth hacks
There was one big benefit I found when I read a ton of articles and looked for new growth hacks.
Some of them were so awesome, so inspiring, that I couldn’t stop myself from implementing them on my email referral system.
I felt like the Wright Brothers, who did what they loved.
Then, unexpectedly, their plane took off for a while.
It inspired them so much that they were living and breathing for that machine, fixing it, testing new ideas on the fly, staying at the highest level of excitement and inspiration, 24/7.
Time stopped.
Nothing existed but this pure, inspirational process…
My email referral system was working better and better.
Viral growth
August 2015. Summer heat has cooled.
The birds were unafraid to get burned while singing under the sun, and produced melodies all day long.
The smell of delicious watermelons, melons, apples, grapes and other yummy fruit suffused the atmosphere.
I was looking at my stats on GrowthHackingIdea — and couldn‘t believe it had happened to me.
My current subscribers were inviting their friends like crazy — more and more and more!
The viral coefficient of the referral system jumped over 1
The community was growing on its own!
Never in my life had I seen such easy growth.
On August 6, I had 5,048 email subscribers.
On August 14: 6,068.
On August 18: 7,007.
On August 29: 10,311.
On September 1: 12,306.
On September 9: 15,209.
On September 17, my daughter was born.
For 2 weeks, I dropped the business.
I was not a big fan of children, but my daughter Emily changed that.
Completely.
I couldn’t expect such deep, pure love from myself, or from her.
One glance from those innocent eyes, and I was utterly disarmed.
One smile, and all her cries were forgotten, covered by a big warm layer of healing love.
Hugs and kisses, kisses and hugs… i couldn‘t stop myself.
Was this really me?
Back to work
After a while, I tried to get back to work.
But my schedule would never be the same again.
For years, I worked at home, from 8–10 pm, when my wife goes to sleep, until 7–8am, when she wakes up.
The city is sleeping.
The spiritual energy is clean.
Freedom!
I loved it.
But when Emily was born, I couldn’t continue this schedule.
It was no longer possible to sleep from 8 am till 4 pm, like I used to.
My 10–12-hour working day turned into 2–4-hour kind of working day.
But I had to make money somehow.
Make money
At approximately the same time, I started to get regular offers from my email subscribers to buy ads on GrowthHackingIdea.
These offers soon generated $350-$700 per month.
Not bad, compared to nothing — but not enough to make GrowthHackingIdea my main source of income.
The approach
It was November 2015.
I was looking for a new growth hack, reading an article.
The author (Bryan Harris) told his story, and it was similar to mine: struggles and losses while launching new products, failures, the same emotions.
But his story had a happy ending.
One day, he got to know about a new approach.
Unlike his never-ending loop of tests and fails using the “Lean Startup Methodology”, this approach was something radically different.
It made failure impossible.
The author applied it and made $10K in 10 days.
Then he improved his sales funnel — and generated $220K in 10 days.
$220K! In 10 days!
My mind was blown.
The approach was so simple and logical.
The results were so awesome and tasty.
My jaw dropped to the floor. My eyes popped out.
I shouted out loud: “Holly %@##!!! I wasted 5 years on these never-ending Lean Startup fail-fasts, when I could have made profitable businesses right out of the gate, without any tests and failures! AAAAH!”
My other thought was more pleasant:
“Wow!
I already have my email community!
I can test this approach immediately!”
My 2-month-old daughter was sleeping in the next room.
But I seemed to forget this.
I shut up, but I was still shouting in my mind.
Outside, the first snow was falling.
My heart was beating faster than ever.
I couldn’t wait to apply the approach — right here, right now.
Here‘s this 8-step “No Fail” approach:
1. First, you need to gather an email community around a certain topic.
2. Then you need to share valuable content on a weekly basis.
3. The regular value you provide generates something super important: rapport.
People start to trust you.
You‘re no longer a random dude from nowhere.
You turn into a friend who regularly offers something valuable.
People look forward to new emails from you.
4. Once you gain trust, you ask people about their biggest problems, struggles (regarding your topic).
5. Then you choose which of the most popular problems you can help them solve through a book, a course, software, hardware, etc.
6. Then you tell your audience that you can create this solution, but only if they prepay you for it.
Will people prepay you if they don’t trust you?
No.
This is why rapport is so important.
7. If not enough subscribers prepay, you refund those who did and don’t invest your time/money into a solution that people don’t care enough about.
8. If enough subscribers prepay, you‘re golden!
You have achieved Product/Market Fit, without writing a line of code.
Unlike me, who banged my head against the wall of product/market fit for 5 unsuccessful years!
So many success stories…
When I first read about the 8-step “No Fail” approach, I thought the author was the only guy on Earth who had uncovered this magical approach.
I was the second — and I had to test it immediately.
Later on, I found out how many people were already using this approach, had created their email communities and were living happy, wealthy lives, profitable businesses without having to rely on investors’ money.
Blow your mind with these success stories:
#1. Edgar passed $100,000 in monthly recurring revenue 11 months after his launch date. How did he do it? Before launching, he had an email community of 75,000 subscribers.
#2. Abby Grace grew her email community to 2,555 subscribers, then offered a course called “A Practical Wedding Workshop LIVE”. Result: $28,987 in sales.
#3. Mike Dillard had built his own distribution channel — email community of about 200,000 subscribers. Then he offered them his product and generated $419K in revenue within his first 7 days of business.
#4. Eric Barstow grew his email community to 13,774 subscribers. Then he offered to sell them his product, “Painting Business In A Box”. Result: $38,241 in sales.
#5. Michael Hyatt, speaking about his email community of 115,000 subscribers:
“I have literally built a multi-million dollar business on the strength of my email list. 90% of my income comes from it.”
#6. Matthew Allen has built an email community, but hasn’t created any services/products.
He’s making $2,700/month in affiliate commissions alone.
#7. Tom Bills grew his email community to 1,986 subscribers. Then he offered them his guitar-building course. It did $10,000 in sales.
#8. Justine Grey, a 25-year-old mother of 2 kids, launched her free weekly email blog. It generates $5,500 per month for her.
#9. Brad Hart grew his email community to 1,094 subscribers. Then he offered them a course and earned $9,865.
#10. Sue Anne grew her email community to 2,043 subscribers. Then she offered them her product: an ebook entitled “Earn Your First $1K Blogging”. Result: she earned $14,897 immediately after launch.
#11. Hernan Vazquez grew his small email community to 800 subscribers. Then he offered his course to them, and it generated $10,000 in one week.
#12. Nathan is a designer and author. He grew his email community to 800 subscribers. Then he wrote an ebook and put it up for sale. Within 24 hours, the “App Design Handbook” earned him $12,000.
#13. Shaunta Grimes grew her email community from 0 to 9,265 subscribers. Then she asked them to buy her course, “A Novel Idea”. It generated $48,750 in revenue.
#14. Marya Jan grew her email community to 3K subscribers, offered them a course — and earned over $5K in 4 days.
#15. Kathryn Meisner helps people find their ideal career. She grew her email community to 140 subscribers. Then she asked them to pre-pay for her course. She earned $5,900 within 11 days.
#16. Tyler Kling grew his email community to 3,464 subscribers. Then he offered them a course on investment management. Result: $3,000/month.
#17. Bree Noble grew her email community to 3,903 subscribers. Then she started selling a course that helps female musicians avoid the “starving artist” lifestyle. The community paid her $20,000 for the course.
#18. Sol Orwell grew his email community to 125,000 subscribers. Then he offered them his products. Result: he earned $100,855.
#19. John Meese grew his email community to 250 subscribers, then offered them a course on how to configure their website theme. Result: $10,541 in sales.
#20. Grant Baldwin grew his email community to 29,197 subscribers. Then created a course on getting booked — and paid — to speak. He offered the course to his subscribers. Result: $250,090 in sales.
#21. Gina Horkey grew her email community to 5,582 subscribers. From time to time, she creates new courses and offers them for sale to her community. Result: over $20,000 in monthly income.
#22. Justin Rhodes grew his email community to 1,821 subscribers, then notified them about his Kickstarter campaign. He raised $35,048.
#23. Elena Favilli grew their email community to 30,154 subscribers, then notified them about her Indiegogo campaign. She raised $1,278,387.
#24. Allen Martin grew his email community to 4,110 subscribers. Then, from time to time, he sold courses and coaching. Result: in the last 12 months he has earned $732,042.
#25. Kelsey Baldwin grew her email community to 1,317 subscribers. Then offered them a course on design. The community members paid her $20,034.
#26. George Sisneros grew his email community to 1,355 subscribers. Then he notified them about his Indiegogo campaign — and raised $22,750 to build a school in Guatemala.
#27. Matty McLain grew his email community to 355 subscribers. Then he offered to sell his sales coaching program. Result: $14,973 in monthly recurring revenue.
#28. Jeff Rose grew his email community to 1,143 subscribers. Then he offered them a course: “The Online Advisor Growth Formula”. Result: $39,953 in sales.
#29. Cathryn Lavery grew her email community to 3,250 subscribers. Then she notified them about her KickStarter campaign. Result: $322,695 in revenue.
Do you feel like I felt in November 2015? As if you saw an elephant in the room?
I’ve prepared a few more mind-blowing facts for you, ones that exploded and collapsed a wall in front of my blind eyes.
Organic reach on social media declining
#1. Did you know that organic reach on Facebook constantly drops (6% in 2014, 1% in 2015), even as its stock price rises?
#2. Did you know that email gets 27 times more engagement per subscriber than Facebook posts per fan? LinkedIn posts get 109 times less engagement than email. And Twitter gets 222 times less engagement than email.
#3. Meanwhile, the average email open rate of good blogs is 20% -40%
#4. The open rates for GrowthHackingIdea are between 30% and 50%.
#5. TheSkimm:
1. Gained 3.5 million email subscribers.
2. Sends daily emails.
3. And has an open rate is 40% (since 2012).
Email generates the highest ROI
#6. Research shows that email generates the highest ROI.
#7. Josh Earl launched a sale among his Twitter followers and email subscribers to discover which audience would deliver more revenue.
Result: every email subscriber generated 2,131% more revenue compared to a Twitter follower.
#8. Research: “Which channel makes the biggest positive impact on revenue?”
Result:
1. Email (26%).
…
4. Social Media (5%).
#9. Did you know that email has higher conversion rates per session (4.16%) than search (2.64%) and social (0.48%) combined?
#10.1. Email is the most popular activity on smartphones among users ages 18–44.
#10.2. 91% of consumers check their email at least once a day.
#10.3. Over 70% of mobile purchasing decisions are influenced by promotional emails.
Email marketing has an ROI of 4,300%.
There are 2.6 billion email users
#11. Did you know that 2.6 billion people use email (more than all social networks combined)?
Email is the only independent, decentralized platform out there.
Feel the power of your email community
What do you see here?
This is a stadium filled with 20,000 people.
This is what an email community of 20,000 subscribers looks like.
A stadium of 20,000 people who read what you say,… and sell every week.
Do you feel the power of your email community?
I couldn’t wait to apply the “Startup No Fail” approach
Bullets #1, 2 and 3 were already completed — I already had my email community.
Three months after I launched the GHI, my subscribers were asking me about my email referral system:
How did it work?
Can we use it for growing virally our email communities?
So bullet #4 happened naturally.
People wanted to know how to grow their email communities virally.
Bullet #5. The easiest way to help my subscribers solve their viral-growth problem was to share my secrets through a video seminar.
It was easy to create the seminar that I decided to skip the “prepay” step.
For a few days, I wrote down all my secrets about my email referral system.
Everything that I had tested, everything that worked.
Then I recorded the audio, added some funny slides, mixed them together — and my 33-minute video seminar was ready.
In 2 days, the subscribers would receive my first sales email…
I was waiting.
Impatience ran through my veins.
If that story about the approach was a fairytale, it would be sad.
So, in order not to be frustrated, I told myself not to expect anything good from this test.
I‘d just test it, and see how it went.
How it went
After all the sales emails were received, I suddenly saw $2.5K in my account.
$2.5K in one week!
This, after 5 years of making no money! (I didn‘t count making money from creating growth-hacking plans for startups, as it doesn’t scale)
I was as happy as a man who was lost in the desert for 5 years and suddenly discovered how to dig a well with his bare hands.
I was happy as my daughter would be in a year, when we traveled to sunny Egypt from cold, snowy Ukraine for a New Year‘s vacation.
I want to make you happy too.
Right now.
I prepared a surprise for you
You can download PDF version of that video seminar for free: (subscribers were buying it for $199)
More!!!
Wow!
If it worked with my broken Ukrainian English and my horrible sales skills, then…
I wanted to sell more!
What else could I sell?
I asked my community about their biggest problems, and offered solutions. After they chose the most popular one, I asked them to prepay for it.
Meanwhile, I was creating my big, 2.5 hour Growth Hacking Plan video course: How I create growth hacking plans for startups for $10K.
I launched it right before New Year‘s Day, 2016.
The result: +$4K on my account.
This was me before New Year:
$22,000
It was a regular August day, one month after I had returned home with my family from the Black Sea.
We‘d been resting there for a month.
Before noon, I was creating a new automated sales funnel on GrowthHackingIdea.
I had learned a few new tricks on how to boost my sales, and couldn‘t wait to implement them.
A few hours later, we were sunbathing, swimming in the sea, discovering new cafes, restaurants, parks, museums, etc. or hanging out with my dad:
At the end of our vocation, my new updated sales funnel generated $7K.
And cumulatively — $22K (twelve months after the day GrowthHackingIdea was launched):
I felt confidence, happiness inside my soul.
I had calm and kind eyes, suntanned skin.
I was rested, full of energy.
Loved these feelings, much more than the never-ending fever of failure I was in for 5 years
In July, I finally found a way how to combine business and family.
I fell asleep at 8:30 pm and woke up at 4:30 am.
Kissed my wife and daughter.
Ate my breakfast, put on my clothes and went to a nearby coworking space.
From 6:00 a.m. I was able to focus on my business in an empty coworking space.
Nothing interrupted me.
I love an efficient, productive, focused work process.
It helps me do more in a shorter period of time.
This new process allowed me to do everything I had planned by noon, and then go home for dinner, play with my daughter and wife in one of the numerous parks in Kiev, Ukraine.
Or have a dinner in one of numerous restaurants, cafes.
Or go to the circus, an exhibition, museum, etc.
Or do a lot of other interesting things.
That day I received an email from a community member asking me where he could get the same email referral system as I use on GrowthHackingIdea.
This was approximately ~300th email asking me the same question
For over a year, I replied that this was a custom-made solution and I couldn‘t sell it.
It’s just pure hard code
I didn‘t even have a control panel — I did everything right inside the database.
I was not thinking seriously about turning my software into a SaaS, because it
would take me a hell of a lot of time.
The other reason was that it was not only about the software.
It was also about special knowledge, the secrets I had gathered and tested for over a year.
And if I created an SaaS, I’d also need to create in parallel a massive course on how to grow an email community virally and make money from it.
These thoughts were too overwhelming, and just avoided them.
But that ~300th email made me think about it again.
This time, mentally and energetically, I was ready to dive into this adventure.
But I didn’t want to write even a line of code without being sure it would be worth it.
So I decided to apply the 8-step “No Fail” approach I described in my previous email.
I called this hypothetical mix of SaaS and software the “Get 10K subscribers + Earn 10K USD” program.
A few days later, the sales funnel for prepayments was set up and ready to reveal whatever was going to happen.
The result: $3,065 in prepaid recurring revenue.
What has changed?
This time I didn’t follow the “never-ending Lean Startup fail-fast” approach:
1. Everything started not from an awesome idea for a new product that came into my head.
My email subscribers just told me what they want to pay for.
2. I didn’t invest my or investors’ money into developing a product.
My email subscribers pre-paid me for it.
Only after that, bit by bit, I started to create video lessons…
And develop the SaaS:
… the settings…
… the email schedule …
… the automated sales funnels …
… the automated viral funnels …
3. In December 2016, when I launched first MVP of the SaaS, I was not staring at “Nobody stands in line to buy my awesome product.”
My students, who had prepaid for the program, were standing in line for 3 months.
They were excited to get access to the program and after a while, started to launch their own email communities.
4. This time I didn’t have the fear of running out of money. I received recurring revenue every month.
5. I slept good. Nothing paralyzed my happiness. I was doing what I love and had time for my family.
… because this time I followed the 8-step “No Fail” approach.
Conclusion
You’ve heard my story about what helped me to redirect my life from a never-ending loop of failures to actually making money, helping people, and doing what I love.
What’s the secret sauce? — The 8-step “No Fail” approach.
Anyone can apply it:
1. First, you need to gather an email community around a certain topic.
2. Then you need to share valuable content on a weekly basis.
3. The regular value you provide generates something super important: rapport.
People start to trust you.
You‘re no longer a random dude from nowhere.
You turn into a friend who regularly offers something valuable.
People look forward to new emails from you.
4. Once you gain trust, you ask people about their biggest problems, struggles (regarding your topic).
5. Then you choose which of the most popular problems you can help them solve through a book, a course, software, hardware, etc.
6. Then you tell your audience that you can create this solution, but only if they prepay you for it.
Will people prepay you if they don’t trust you?
No.
This is why rapport is so important.
7. If not enough subscribers prepay, you refund those who did and don’t invest your time/money into a solution that people don’t care enough about.
8. If enough subscribers prepay, you‘re golden!
You have achieved Product/Market Fit, without writing a line of code.
If you need any help/software to create your own viral email-community, feel free to let me know via admin@growthhackingidea.com
