Amy Hoy

Teacher for programmers and BootStrapping One Man Show-s.

http://unicornfree.com/

http://unicornfree.com/about

30x500 course: http://30x500.com/ $2000 (2021 - was $1500 in 2014) for 2 days of live-online process.

• name/frame: $30/mo x 500 users = $180k/yr

Spoke at MicroConf-2012. The customer is the MVP, not the product. We should perhaps call it “minimum viable customer.” Someone probably already said that, but I’m going to pretend that I came up with it. If you look at the customer, the customer will tell you what real pain is. They will tell you what value is to them, which will let you create a USP.

Her process

• Who am I serving? (Pick a very Warm Niche for your Audience) Your Audience needs to...
  • Have a problem
  • Be aware of it & consider it a problem
  • Really want to solve the problem
  • Happily pay for things that solve problems
  • Be generally polite and kind, people you like
  • Speak the same kind of language you do
  • Value the approach you enjoy taking to a product
  • I’ve always told people, in 30×500 and “Year of Hustle”: do not sell to consumers. And some people will say, “But I have this idea.” I’m like, “No. You can do it, but I’m not going to support you because you’re going exactly against what I told you to do.” For that reason. For that reason. You can sell on value to businesspeople. (B2B not B2C) The people who most reliably, comfortably, & happily pay are businesses. That could mean anybody from “a person who makes and sells custom jewelry” to “a freelance developer” to “a 5-person consulting firm.” The point is, they have an upside. They are constantly thinking about money, and about earning more money, spending less, and having a smoother, more enjoyable time — 40 hours+ a week.
    • But in their sample video of the Sales Safari process deals with candle hobbyists (buyers, makers, but seemingly not even sellers).
• What do they need/want, and are ready to buy? You do this by researching online forums, not with your gut (note this assumes your target Warm Niche is reachable online). Write down pain points, beliefs, or World View-s, complaints, questions, struggles, products, desires. Do this a lot… 10, 20, 30 hours, before you set out to try to create a product. And once you’ve gathered a good base set of data, you: Organize it, distill it, label the patterns. Use these to brainstorm nearly infinite product concepts.
• How can I reach them and persuade them? Because of your pre-development research, this should be "easy" - you have a communication channel (Sales Channel), and the language to use.
  • pitching on your Landing Page
• Start with an Info Product ("EBomb": Actionable educational Content Marketing... Ebombs come in dozens of formats (from code samples and templates to live presentations), but for today, we’re just talking about their simplest format: blog posts.) (for the same Warm Niche).
• Don't expect to be an overnight success. It's all about Stacking the Bricks.
• Execute via Working Backwards.