Transcript

Episode: How to Create New Products

This episode of Lead to Win is brought to you by the Full Focus Planner, a paper planner to help you plan your year, design your days, and achieve your biggest goals. Find out more at fullfocusplanner.com.

Michael Hyatt: North, south, east, west. These are the four cardinal directions on a compass. Using this marvelous device, sailors have been able to navigate treacherous waters for centuries, Boy Scouts have survived countless wilderness hikes, and surveyors can establish a line that defines where your property ends and mine begins.

Megan Hyatt Miller: The magnetic compass is one of the four great inventions that came to us from ancient China, along with gunpowder, paper, and printing. The Chinese compass is incredibly useful for finding your way, but it’s not perfect. Because a standard compass points to magnetic north rather than true north, as determined by the earth’s rotation, it can misguide navigators slightly. Worse, the steel hull of a large ship can pull a magnetic compass way off course.

When navigating a treacherous ocean voyage, an accurate compass is an absolute necessity. The Chinese compass was good, but navigators desperately needed something better. Fortunately for sailors, Boy Scouts, and, well, all of us, the compass isn’t just an invention; it’s also a product, and the product development process leads to improvements. Through successive iterations, good products can become great ones.

Michael: In the case of the compass, a man named Hermann Anschütz-Kaempfe came up with a great improvement. He invented the first gyrocompass in the early 1900s, and he founded a company to manufacture it and market it to navigators. With the help of a gyroscope, the earth’s rotation, and some math that would make most of our heads spin, the gyrocompass has helped generations of sailors find their way.

With the introduction of the gyrocompass, the good product became a great one. Not all products require that level of sophistication, but most successful products have two things in common with the gyrocompass: they meet a need in the marketplace, and they help lost people find their way.

Hi, I’m Michael Hyatt.

Megan: And I’m Megan Hyatt Miller.

Michael:  And this is Lead to Win, our weekly podcast to help you win at work, succeed at life, and lead with confidence. In this episode, we’ll show you a simple formula to create new products, particularly information products, that succeed in the marketplace.

Megan: New products are the lifeblood of a company, but product creation can be overwhelming for many business owners. Here at Michael Hyatt & Company we have loads of experience in launching successful products. We’ve created a five-step formula that will help take you from drawing board to marketplace. Now you can avoid the common pitfalls on your next launch, and you’ll generate new revenue with killer new product offerings.

Michael: If there’s one thing that gets me excited it’s product creation.

Megan: It’s true.

Michael: But we have to be honest: product creation is difficult. At Michael Hyatt & Company, we’ve launched some winners and a few duds. We have to be honest. Right? We had one product that we were so excited about. We created a landing page. We shot some intro videos. We did the whole thing, and then we got one order. I still can’t believe it. I still believe there has to be a technical glitch in that whole mix.

Megan: To that point, we kept checking for a technical glitch, because we were sure it couldn’t have been our bad product idea, that it must be a breakdown in the system, but it wasn’t.

Michael: At least we gained a lot of experience. Product creation is difficult. Why do you think it’s so tough?

Megan: Well, there are probably a few reasons at least, but one of them is that we already have a full-time job. Most business owners and leaders are busy running their business as usual. That is a full-time job, whether it’s finance or operations or handling personnel or sales and marketing for existing products. It’s not like most of us are looking at our agenda for the day and thinking, “I have five hours. I’m not sure what to do with them. Maybe I should make a new product.”

Michael: It’s so true. As you were saying that, it occurred to me that another reason it’s so difficult is because it can feel so overwhelming. When you create a new product, there’s a lot of innovation that has to happen. There’s a lot of deep thinking that has to happen. You have to come up with frameworks, particularly in information products. You have to do all this stuff, and it just seems like so much to do. I can speak from experience. When I’ve created products in the past, particularly when I was a solopreneur, I just kept procrastinating, because I couldn’t figure out how to get it all done.

Megan: The other thing I just thought of (and this may be the biggest one of all) is that we’ve tried and failed in the past, kind of like our example when we sold one. It could be that you created a product you thought was the solution for the need of your customers, but it really wasn’t, or you got the pricing wrong or the offer wrong or something just didn’t work with it, and you’re kind of gun-shy, because it’s embarrassing. When we launched that product and sold one unit, it was embarrassing, and that has happened for us on other occasions as well. It can be challenging to recover from.

Michael: It can, because it has a huge negative impact on your confidence, which makes you less likely to venture out and try something in the future. When I come off a product launch that does great, suddenly I have 10 ideas for new products, new stuff I want to create. Why? Because my confidence is up. But you come off a negative thing, like we just did that one webinar recently that didn’t go so well… It dinged my confidence, and I thought, “I’m not sure I want to do webinars anymore.” Fortunately, I had the team to talk me off the ledge.

Megan: That’s right.

Michael: So, even though it seems daunting, we have to continually develop new products. That’s the lifeblood of any business. Even a company as successful as Apple, on this day when we’re recording this, has a big product reveal today. They’re supposed to refresh, perhaps, the iPad Pros and the MacBooks. Who knows what it’s going to be. For a company that’s a trillion-dollar market cap company, that’s a company that still relies on new product introductions. It’s the lifeblood of that company’s health and well-being. I’m glad, for one, they do, because I love their gadgets.

Megan: So we’ve come up with a five-step process for creating new products that will succeed. By the way, we should acknowledge that this formula is really intended for creating information products. There will be overlap with other kinds of product creation, like physical products or live events or things like that, but just keep in mind that that’s a little bit more complex, so you may need to expand this if you’re thinking about those kinds of products.

Michael: That’s our context, and we have to talk out of what we know.

Megan: Absolutely. So let’s jump into step one.

Michael: Okay. Step one is the problem. You have to identify the problem you’re trying to solve. This begins with understanding that you’re in business to solve customer problems. You have to know at least two things about your customers if you’re going to really meet their needs. First of all, you have to know what their aspirations are. What is it they’re dreaming about? What is it they want to accomplish? What are their hopes? What are their dreams for the future?

Then what’s getting in the way? I love this. What are the challenges? What are the obstacles that stand in the way between them and their dreams? If you can identify where they’re stuck and help them get over that obstacle in a way that’s faster, cheaper, bigger, whatever, then all of a sudden you have a chance of creating a product that’s really going to work. They’re going to gobble that up, because they’re going to see the connection between that and ultimately getting what they want.

Megan: By the way, if you’ve had trouble doing this, just know you’re not alone. We’ve coached many clients through this particular process, and it can be challenging, especially because sometimes your vantage point is a little bit too close to the subject to have the kind of clarity you need. Don Miller’s StoryBrand process is an excellent tool for this. His book called Building a StoryBrand we love and recommend on a regular basis. So if you’ve struggled with this particular step, that can be a great resource for you.

Michael: Yeah. I want to say also, Meg, that the best way to get at this is to ask. I think so often we sit in the ivory tower and try to generalize out of our own experience, but here’s the truth: our experience is limited. I’ve made this mistake in the past, where I’ve tried to generalize out of my own experience, and then I’ve gone to the market and asked them and found out that, no, they don’t think anything like I do.

They don’t have the same environment or they don’t have the same set of experiences or they don’t have the same personality that I do. The best way, the shortest way, the most foolproof way is to ask. If in that particular product that failed we had just asked the market what they wanted, we would have saved ourselves so much grief and so much expense.

Megan: Absolutely.

Michael: But we didn’t do that.

Megan: And, by the way, embarrassment.

Michael: There’s that too. We had to go back to that one customer and tell them we weren’t going to create the product.

Megan: It makes a great story now.

Michael: So at least we only failed in front of one.

Megan: That’s right. What you’re really saying is that customer data is mission-critical for creating a product. When you think about that, what are some ways that people could gather customer data that might not be readily apparent?

Michael: One of the things I want to say here, too, is we’re not doing that thing where we’re doing market research about the solution. Remember what Steve Jobs said? If he had asked his customers what they wanted they would have never come up with the iPhone.

Megan: You’re kind of leading the witness in that case.

Michael: Right. But research about the problem? That’s an entirely different thing. Once you understand where people get frustrated, where there’s friction in their experience, you can overcome that and create a great product. The way to think of it is this: aspiration or dream plus challenge or problem equals a great product. That’s the formula. You have to know those two things. What’s the aspiration or the dream? What’s the obstacle or the problem?

Megan: One of the ways we’ve recently done this and have recommended a lot to our clients is to survey our clients. We do this in a couple of ways. We do this through our email. We also do this through Facebook groups. Wherever your customers are gathered, there certainly are a certain percentage of them who will respond to a survey, especially if you’ve built a high-trust relationship with them. They really feel invested in what you’re creating, and they like to respond. We tend to get a very high rate of response from our customers when we send out a survey because they want their voices to be heard.

One of the things we’re doing right now is talking about opportunities for extending the Full Focus Planner brand. What is that going to look like in 2019? I saw a survey yesterday to a certain segment we’re considering taking this product to. It had nothing to do with the product, which in this case is the Full Focus Planner. It had everything to do with their unique problems and solutions. What was the biggest pain point in this area of their life? What was the biggest pain point in another area of their life? What were they hoping to do if they had more time? If they had an extra 5 to 10 hours a week, what would they spend it on?

Those are things that not only will inform our marketing, which is another great application of this, but certainly the creation of the product itself, because we want the product to serve the needs our customers actually have, not the ones we think they have.

Michael: That’s great. Okay, step one is to identify the problem. Step two is…what?

Megan: Step two is to craft your promise. This is really, really important, because so often we, as product creators, think a lot about our solution, but really the point of the solution is to create a transformation. We have to ask the question…What is the transformation this will produce for our clients and customers? Where do they start, and where are they going to end up after they use our product? Because people are not buying our products; they’re buying the results or the transformation they expect to get from them. That is a key distinctive.

Michael: This is so important. We say in our company, “Don’t sell the product; sell the transformation.” Whether we’re creating a sales page or copy for the product…whatever it is, we want to focus on the transformation. I remember hearing Lisa Sasevich talk about this. She’s kind of the master of how to sell products from stage, and she uses this metaphor. She said when you’re buying an airline ticket, you’re not buying the experience of sitting on a jet for a couple of hours; you’re buying the destination. So anybody who’s in the business of vacations is selling the destination. That’s what we have to do here as well. The transformation is the destination.

Megan: Absolutely. We think of that transformation as the value proposition. Really, that becomes a compass where you can focus your product, and ultimately it’ll guide you toward true north, which is the transformation you want to create for your customers and clients. Here are a couple of well-known examples. For example, GEICO: “Fifteen minutes or less can save you 15 percent or more on car insurance.” I think my kids could do this in the back seat. It’s so common.

Michael: I know. We’ve all memorized it.

Megan: Walmart: “Save money. Live better.” Which is really a brand promise, but still directionally it’s the right idea.

Michael: It is the right idea.

Megan: For us, when we think about Michael Hyatt & Company: “Win at work, succeed at life, and lead with confidence.” That’s the transformation we’re promising through all of our products and services.

Michael: Or another example from one of our products, Free to Focus. That’s on my mind because we’re about to do the live workshop. That’s “Achieve more by doing less.” That’s the promised transformation or the destination you’re going to get to by going through the course. I want to drill down a little bit farther, because this really is a formula, this value proposition formula. The value proposition consists of three elements. We’ve taught this in the past with four elements. We’re going to omit the first one here because it’s not really relevant. Here’s what the template looks like:

  1. “I help…” Here’s where I identify our target market and what their problem is. What is their primary obstacle?
  2. “…do or understand…” Here’s where we state our unique solution.
  3. “…so that…” This is the promised transformation. This is where you want to get to. Meg, give us an example.

Megan: This is ours for the Full Focus Planner: “We help overwhelmed high-achievers get focused on the activities that drive results so they can achieve their most important goals.” That’s what we do in the Full Focus Planner: help people get focused on the activities that drive results instead of getting distracted, and in doing that they’re able to achieve their most important goals.

Michael: The way to think of that is that they have this aspiration, which is to achieve their most important goals. What’s getting in the way? They’re overwhelmed. Your unique solution is the answer to that. That’s what gets them from their problem to the transformation.

Megan: That’s really what we can do for them that they can’t do for themselves, and that’s a good way to think about it. One of the things we have seen a lot with our clients when they’re thinking about creating products is they go right to the product they want to create. They’re in the how-to mode of “What do we want to make?” and “How are we going to do it?” and they forget to think about their customers or their clients first.

That’s why this value proposition and thinking about the promise is so important, because at the end of the day, you’re never going to create a successful product unless it’s answering the challenges and the aspirations your clients and customers have. So it’s important to slow yourself down at this step and really nail it before you move on to the next one. So, step one is to identify the problem. Step two is to craft your promise. Dad, what is step three?

Michael: Step three is to plan or create your product plan. In other words, you have to develop a clear framework. This is one of the things people are buying from you. They want clarity about their problem. They’re not looking for more complexity; they’re looking for something simple to get them from where they are to where they want to be. That’s where you, particularly in an information product, have to come up with a framework that makes it more clear, more simple, easier to get from where they are to where they want to be. This is kind of the overarching plan for your product.

Megan: That’s really true, because the truth is all the information that anybody could ever want is available on the Internet. There’s nothing we can tell people as product creators that is not already out there somewhere on the Internet. The value we provide is in our ability to curate and synthesize and simplify so people can take action on what they’re looking for as opposed to just a bunch of disjointed pieces that are out there on the Internet. That’s really critical, I think.

Michael: What’s funny about that is a few times I get somebody who comments, “Well, all this information in [whatever product it is] is already available on the Internet.” I’m like, “Yeah. You could also make your own clothes. You could grow all your own food, but for most of us, we don’t want to do that. We want to basically get a prepackaged solution that makes it easy, because what we’re doing is buying back our time.”

Megan: Yes. Super important.

Michael: Okay. Let’s give some examples of this. What would be a clear framework? For example, when I talk about setting up your goals, one of the things I created in the book and in the course for Your Best Year Ever was a five-part framework. The first one is to imagine the possibility. The second one is to complete the past. The third step is to begin to dream about the future in terms of your goals, find your motivation, and then get down to business and actually accomplish it. You kind of divide it up into the logical divisions and make them bite-size so people can consume it. That’s the process of creating the product and coming up with a product plan.

Megan: This is true anytime you do a 5-day challenge or a 21-day makeover. Like, we have a 21-day productivity makeover that walks people through the process of watching our course videos on productivity and then using the tools and worksheets to implement what they’ve learned during that process. It tells them exactly what to do each day to complete the process in just three weeks, and I think that’s what people want. Just like, “Grab my shoulders and tell me what to do next,” because most of us are feeling overwhelmed. Back to that pain point we’ve identified in our target audience.

Michael: Another aspect of this that’s critically important is to model it financially. We’ve made this mistake too, where we’ve launched a product or an entire product line and didn’t really do the hard work on the front end of figuring out how it was going to work on paper. Dave Ramsey talks about “Spend your money on paper.” We didn’t quite do that, and then we were surprised to discover that it wasn’t quite as profitable as we envisioned it before we put pencil to paper. So do this on the front end. Model it financially. You’re probably not going to get it 100 percent right, but let me tell you something: if it doesn’t work on paper, it isn’t going to work in real life.

Megan: It’s so true. You need to take into account all of your costs here. You need to project realistic sales revenue. Try to be realistic on the cost, but then be conservative on the revenue you project. This is really difficult for people who are innovators or entrepreneurs or business owners. They over-project the revenue and under-project the cost, and it just kicks them in the rear end every time.

Michael: Yeah. Don’t ask us how we know this.

Megan: This is where a lot of products fail. You also have to take into account the staff time or just the human hours it’s going to take. So, not just your marketing costs and the production costs but actually the human costs, which are often the most costly of all. It’s important to consider.

Michael: So true. One of the things we also have to mention here in terms of creating your product plan is the design. Sometimes people think that’s just the packaging, that somehow it’s ancillary or not really integral to the actual product. You know, dress it up and make it nice to sell. But I think design is as important as the content. Again, I keep referring to Apple, but part of what you’re buying when you buy an Apple device is the design. It’s beautiful. It’s elegant. When you can appeal to people’s sense of beauty for their desire for beautiful, elegant devices or content or whatever it is, it just makes it that much more digestible.

Megan: I think what you’re really saying is that a product is an experience.

Michael: Ooh, that’s better.

Megan: It’s an aesthetic experience. There are a lot of different inputs there. If you think about it just like learning, simply learning, information transfer, that’s a limited way of thinking about it. What you want is a wow experience. From the minute someone considers buying your product through the sales process, through the use of the product, and then afterward, every touch point they have should be excellent. That’s what we’re trying to encourage you to do.

Michael: All that together is your product plan.

 

Mike Boyer: Hey, it’s Mike Boyer here. I’m on the content team here at Michael Hyatt & Company. I wanted to let you know that every episode of Lead to Win comes with a ton of supplemental materials to help you get the most out of listening. First, remember to check out the show notes for every episode at leadto.win. There’s always a complete transcript of the show, including sources for any of the data we present here.

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Michael: Okay. Step one: identify the problem. Step two: craft your promise. Step three: create your plan. What’s step four?

Megan: Step four is your pitch. You have to form your pitch. The first part of this is to set your price. Permission to charge is granted. We often see with our clients that they struggle with this, because they want to charge too little or they’re really hesitant about the price they’re offering. We have told people on more occasions than I can count, “You need to double,” or in some cases, “triple your price.”

Michael: We have to be honest here, though. We struggle with this.

Megan: Yeah. I think this is just natural.

Michael: Everybody struggles with this.

Megan: It’s easy to devalue your own expertise.

Michael: It is. You can see the value in somebody else’s offering, but it’s hard sometimes to see the value in your own offering, and we tend to discount it or diminish it. But if people don’t pay, they don’t pay attention. One of the things we’ve seen that’s kind of counterintuitive is sometimes the more people pay, the more invested they are in their own outcome. It’s an investment in themselves. Sometimes the lowest priced products result in the least transformation.

Megan: And the worst clients.

Michael: And the worst clients, because they don’t have that much invested and there’s a low barrier of entry.

Megan: Yes. So you want to do some competitive analysis. You don’t want to just pull this number out of the sky. Kind of take an inventory of what else is happening in your industry. Remember, too, pricing is more art than science. It’s not like you can just work an algorithm and it’s going to spit out the perfect price. You’re going to have to do some guessing, but it can be educated guessing.

Michael: Don’t wait until you get it perfect to launch. The market will tell you.

Megan: So after you’ve set the price, the next thing to do is evaluate your offer. Meaning, what are the components of what people are buying? How are you packaging the purchase for people? It ought to be a no-brainer for people. It should be the kind of thing that they can do the math in their head of what the transformation is worth, and when they think about the investment on their side of things it’s an absolute no-brainer. Of course they would trade, for example, $500 to accomplish their most important goals. That’s a no-brainer offer.

Michael: You almost have to do a cost-justification of that so you can prove to them that the investment is worth 10x what the investment is in terms of the likely return. Then you have to address their objections. This is where you have to sort of enter into the psychology of the prospect and ask, “What are the natural objections they’re going to throw up as they consider this product?” Then address them one by one in your sales copy, in the product copy, and make sure you’re overcoming those objections, because they need a pathway to get from where they are (naturally skeptical) to where you want them to be, which is trusting and buying.

Megan: Some examples of objections are going to be things like, “Is it right for me? What if I don’t get the desired result? Am I skilled enough to use this? I’m not sure if I can justify this purchase with my spouse.” Those are all of the things that are going through people’s minds as they’re trying to evaluate a purchase decision.

Michael: I think also take the risk out of it. This is part of creating the offer and creating the pitch. Take the risk out of it. The best way to do this is what copywriters call risk reversal, where I assume the risk. In other words, I’m going to give you a 30-day money-back guarantee. We do this all the time with all of our products, and the refund request rate is always very, very low. People get scared sometimes of doing this because they think, “What if I have a deluge of refunds?”

Honestly, if you have that fear seriously, you need to go back and reengineer the product, because if you’re actually achieving the intended result, if you’re delivering the promised transformation, you don’t need to worry about this. Our product refund rate runs typically about 6 percent, and that’s fine. I want people to take a risk on it. I want them to give it a try. So, use a money-back guarantee as a way to do that.

Megan: That’s a great point. Finally, the last point of forming your pitch is to call for a single action. I’ll tell you what. This is where very often pitches fall apart. People will have multiple calls to action. For example, “Purchase. Learn more. Check out our FAQs.”

Michael: “Subscribe to our blog.”

Megan: People are just overwhelmed and confused. They don’t know which option to choose, and especially if you’re trying to get them to buy, you’re likely sending them on a totally different track. It’s very, very important to pick one action.

Michael: By the way, one subtle call to action you may not realize is a call to action… When I first started creating my sales pages, I would have links to other things I was citing, like research or whatever. That’s an invitation to click on that link and leave your sales page. Don’t do that.

Megan: We’re not just talking about a choice between two things to buy, although that’s the most obvious form of conflicting calls to action. We’re talking about any action people could take besides making the purchasing decision you’re trying to lead them toward. You really want their decision to be “Buy it or don’t buy it,” not all of these other things we’re talking about.

Michael: Exactly right.

Megan: All right. Step one is to identify the problem. Step two is to craft your promise. Step three is to create your plan. Step four is to form your pitch. Let’s go to step five, which is the final step here.

Michael: Step five is to promote your product. I have to say at the outset this means selling from your toes.

Megan: Okay, what does that mean?

Michael: A lot of people are very reluctant to sell. They’re selling from their heels. That’s the opposite of selling from your toes. You’re not leaning into it; you’re leaning away from it. Several years ago, I was having coffee with an author who was so excited to tell me he had just finished a brand new book. I said, “Awesome.” We talked about the book, and I got excited about it, and I said, “What are you going to do to sell it?” It’s like his whole countenance changed. He said, “Well, I’m not going to do anything to sell it. I am so gun-shy about promoting my own stuff. I feel like that’s self-promoting, and I just can’t do that.”

I said, “Dude, you wrote this book. You took months. You told me about all the research you had to do and how difficult it was but how important you felt this book was. Well, this is where the rubber meets the road. Do you think this is important or not?” He was already posturing himself to sell from his heels, not his toes. He wasn’t leaning into it. If you’ve created a solution that really will solve people’s problems… Imagine the most crazy example of this. Let’s say you found a cure to cancer. Are you going to be reluctant to promote that?

Megan: No.

Michael: No, of course not, because people need the solution you have to offer because it’s going to deliver the promised transformation. So if you’ve done your work on the front end and you’ve really identified the problem, you have a promise that really is compelling, you’re going to want to promote it, and that’s what you have to have. That’s the mindset you have to have when you move into this marketing phase. You have to get people to buy this. Why? Not because you need the sales (well, you do) but because they need it.

Megan: Right. And if you’re not willing to promote it, people are going to be deprived of the transformation you believe so much in and you identified earlier in the value proposition.

Michael: Exactly.

Megan: That would be a terrible thing.

Michael: Marketing matters. I think this is something we have to say to ourselves, because it’s a noble, it’s an honorable part of the whole process. Don’t demean it. Don’t discount it. It matters.

Megan: I also think, practically speaking, you have to pick a sales and marketing plan. You either have to create one on your own, like, “What are the steps of actually getting this product out to the world?” or you may want to use an existing model, like the Product Launch Formula from our friend Jeff Walker, which we have used quite a bit in the past and had great success with. There are so many models you can use. The point is you just have to have a plan. You can’t just wing it. You need a plan and a road map to go forward with.

Michael: The other thing I would say, too, is don’t wait to pick the perfect plan. Consider this beta. This is a test. You’re going to try something. If it works, great. If it doesn’t work, you’re going to try something else. We’ve used everything from Jeff’s plan to webinars to Facebook Lives. We’ve tried all kinds of things. Sometimes even in the middle of a launch we’ve pivoted and tried something else because the first thing didn’t work. The important thing is to have a plan you’re going to start with. You have to have a plan to promote. You can’t just create the product and then somehow hope people are going to find you. You know, build it and they will come. That doesn’t work.

Megan: Okay, here’s a question for you. What percent of product success do you think is dependent on marketing?

Michael: I would say probably 90 percent.

Megan: You heard it here, folks.

Michael: No, seriously.

Megan: That’s a serious statistic if that’s really true.

Michael: Well, think of it this way. If you create a great product and it just sits in your warehouse and you don’t tell anybody about it, the chances of people actually finding it are pretty low, especially in a world where there are tons of products out there, probably in your product category. If you will just market it actively and think through it actively, you have an edge on everybody else in your market, because so many people are reluctant to sell, and that’s a good thing for you.

Megan: Conversely, if you have a bad product, your marketing is probably going to make it fail faster, as we have said on many occasions.

Michael: I love to quote David Ogilvy, the advertising guy, who said, “Great marketing only makes a bad product fail faster.”

Megan: Let’s be honest. You want to know if it’s a bad product sooner than later, so that’s not a bad thing either. It’s kind of like our example that we shared earlier. We probably had pretty good marketing for that product that sold one unit, and I’m glad we knew quickly so we could move on to other things.

Michael: True. You have to have a promotional plan.

Megan: Today we’ve shown you how to launch a successful product. Follow these five steps, and your product is virtually guaranteed to succeed in the marketplace. Before we sign off, I just want to remind you that the product you have bottled up in there could make the world a better place. Don’t be afraid to launch it. Dad, do you have any final thoughts for us today?

Michael: This is a process. You’re not going to be good out of the gate. You’re going to get better with practice. The most important thing is to get something out there in the world, start making a difference, and iterate on it. You’ll get better at this over time.

Megan: If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, you can get the show notes, including a full transcript, online at leadto.win.

Michael: Thanks again for joining us on Lead to Win. Also, please tell your friends and colleagues about it, and remember to subscribe on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. We invite you to join us next week when we’ll take this topic one step further and show you how to deliver a great product on deadline. Until then, lead to win.