SFR 86: Lessons From My Very First Info Product

The good and the bad of my very first info product...

 

What's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen and you're listening to the best podcast on planet earth in my opinion and in reality of course. Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio.

Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio, where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business using today's best internet sales funnels. Now here's your host, Steve Larsen.

Hey, you guys...

Hey, I'm excited for this episode. This is something that's been on my mind for probably four weeks now. I've just not ... I don't know. I haven't had the time to actually make it, but I've been making this list and I've been writing this list for a while.

I keep walking into my office, my home office, and I look over to the right and I've got whiteboards all over the place and quotes stapled to my wall. A huge black sheet stapled from the top of the ceiling down to the bottom of the floor. I've got big flood lights and film equipment.

I've got a whole set up in here. I got a whole studio, but all over on the side of the wall over there, I've been writing this big list down. Weird as it, whatever it is in the morning, my brain turns on real fast.

What's been on my mind for the last sort of while is kind of lessons from my first info product. When I first started coming up with this product idea, my little girl was about to turn four years old. Super excited. She's a cutie, a lot of fun. Love hanging out with her. It's fun though.

As she gets older and older, it's not that she wasn't fun before, but even now we can have like more conversations, which is crazy. She's only four almost, which is nuts. When I look at her too, I also remember weirdly enough this first info product that I launched is around the same time when we found out that she ... That my wife was pregnant with her.

My wife came running out of the bathroom one day and we were excited...

We were trying to have a kid. She ran out and she was like, "Oh my gosh. We're pregnant. Ha, ha." I was like, "Wow. Yeah. I'm so pumped." We were so excited. We're so excited. I have, how should I say this, almost the bitter taste in my mouth also during that moment. It has nothing to do with my excitement for the kid. I was so excited for my little girl, so excited for her to come, had nothing to do with that. What the bitter taste comes from still is that I mean we were just broke. I mean broke, broke.

I didn't know how to pay for the birth. I don't know how I pay for those. I mean it's one of the reasons I joined the army. I mean I always wanted to anyways, but it is one of the root reasons.

It was like, "Crap. I had not figured out how to sell stuff," despite the fact that I have been constantly trying. Up until that point I had been doing real estate, both commercial and residential, door to door sales. At that time I was getting into like eBooks and I was writing a lot of stuff, which I never launched one of them by the way. It'd be kind of cool to show and actually finish that one one day.

It's cool how on point I was four years ago when I was writing that thing. It's like right on point. All of it's still valid. I was like, "Oh my gosh." Anyway, different subject. It was hard because like I really just didn't know how we were going to live, how are we going to eat. I was trying to be fiscally responsible....

We didn't have expensive habits. Thankfully neither my wife or I we really had like super expensive taste. It's not that we didn't want to, but we were okay with the fact that we didn't have the money to...

Neither of us have really ever been concerned about the other spending a whole bunch of money randomly. You know what I mean? That's not ever been us, but at the same time, we just didn't have any money. I was in school. I did great in school. After a while when I learned how to learn that I started getting straight A's every semester almost, which is awesome. I was deep into school. I was trying to learn. I was trying to outdo my other peers. I'm very competitive on purpose. I was trying to beat them on everything.

I was trying to beat my professors even, my marketing teachers. I was trying to show them that they were wrong on a few things. I mean it's just my personality. I run. I'm a sprinter. I know that. Anyway, this product idea though came at a moment when I was really needing something the most money wise. Not almost the most. There was one more intense time than that. I remember I was sitting on the couch at 2:00 AM and it was freezing.

I was in our cold apartment. This is in Eastern Idaho, Southeastern Idaho, which if you don't know in the wintertime and even during the summer, like the wind just always blows there. I don't know what is going on over there, but it always blows wind.

I'm from Denver. My wife and I are both from Denver. It doesn't blow like that over there. Anyway, I had this idea and it's not like it hit me all at once. The core of it did, but it continued to develop over the course of several weeks. The idea was to create this info product that I could not find anyone else in this particularly industry creating. No one else had done it. No one else understood ClickFunnels enough to pull it off as far as I could tell.

ClickFunnels was pretty new. I'm sorry. Let's see. Yeah, okay. This was about three and a half years ago right after ... Timeline wise, ClickFunnels had just opened up, so not quite four years ago then. It's amazing how much has happened in that amount of time.

That's crazy. Holy crap. Anyway, I had this idea and I was excited and I didn't totally know what I was doing, but I figured that I needed to go create this product and then start to sell it because it was a blue ocean. No one else had really done it.

There was enough people that I could go funnel hack to get kind of an idea of the thing that I should create, like what would be accepted content wise, but I was going to deliver it up in a completely different way than that market had ever experienced before.

I was like sweet. Cool. I mapped the whole thing out many times. I wrote out the value ladders. I literally went page by page through Russell's DotComSecrets Ignite program.

It was a workbook that he gave for free. After the DotComSecrets book on the thank you page there, he was like, "Hey, I don't want you to sit around, wait around just being bored, so here's three days of this event and the workbook with it." I was like what? Oh my gosh. I took the workbook. I printed it out. It was like a hundred pages.

I got it spiral bound and I started hiding in the basketball ... On campus, the basketball stadium box office seats because you could jump through the front window and it was kind of like dark, really fast internet up there. No one would bother me. I would just kind of dodge security when no one was looking and I'd jumped through the window. That's literally how I learned this stuff you guys.

That's how I did it. I was just hustling my brains out. It hasn't really stopped. I just haven't stopped since then. I learned it around this entire product. This product was how I learned funnels. That's why it was so near and dear to me. Now I had created stuff before, but not ...