3 Product Ideas You Can Launch Even With No Email List And No Following
There are a million entrepreneurship gurus, all pushing their strategy for making millions online. Ecommerce, dropshipping, membership sites, ebooks, consulting, SaaS products, apps… the list goes on and on.
These are all great business models. In fact, we use quite a few of these in our businesses today.
But most of them come down to one fatal flaw: they’re not the right fit for the average beginner.
Sure, other people make millions with these business models. But if you’re looking for a way to escape your 9-to-5 and create financial freedom for yourself, there are better options out there. So in this article, we’re going to share 3 product ideas that any beginner can use to kickstart their entrepreneurial journey. But first we need to lay a foundation…
The Problem Most Beginners Make
We need to start with some terminology: B2B and B2C.
B2B means “Business To Business.” B2C means “Business To Consumer.”
When you go to the supermarket to buy your groceries, that’s B2C. The store is the business and you’re the consumer. When the companies that supply the store deliver truckloads full of products, that’s B2B.
As the consumer, 99% of your perspective is B2C, right? You walk up and down the aisles and see products on the shelves. But unless you catch a glimpse of a delivery truck parked in the loading dock behind the building, you don’t see all of the B2B work that goes on behind the scenes to keep the shelves stocked.
This is pretty basic so far, but here’s why this is so important…
The internet is the same way. When you’re scrolling through Facebook or searching on Google, 99% of what you see is B2C. Companies are advertising to sell you products as the consumer.
As a result, when most people think about starting their own online business, they think of creating a B2C product. It makes sense: their entire perspective is in the B2C space, so all of their ideas are going to be B2C as well.
But you have to realize that for most beginners, this is the wrong approach. To understand why let’s jump back to the grocery store analogy for a minute…
The Best Way To Get Started In Entrepreneurship
Imagine you were going to start your own supermarket. You’d have to build a huge building. You’d have to invest in massive amounts of inventory. You’d have to hire a large staff. And even after you invested millions of dollars, you’d only be making your money back $50-$100 dollars at a time (whatever the average customer spent on their shopping cart full of stuff).
It’s a tough way for a beginner to get in business.
But now imagine you started a B2B service instead. Maybe you help manufacturers get their products in more stores. Or you help trucking companies run more efficiently so they lower their shipping costs. Or you create better packaging to make products stand out on the shelves. Or a million other ways to help businesses make more sales and save more money.
It’s not hard to imagine one of these services being worth millions of dollars to a company, right? So rather than investing a fortune to sell groceries to consumers, why not create an offer where you can approach businesses and close a single contract worth tens of thousands of dollars?
For the average beginner, it makes so much more sense. And going back to the internet, the same lesson holds true.
Your social media feeds are full of businesses spending advertising dollars trying to get you to buy their stuff. Rather than investing money to compete with them, why not serve them instead? They’re already spending money, so if you can help increase their ROI it’s a no brainer for them to send some of that money your way.
And the best part about approaching businesses is you don’t need an email list, a social media following, or a big marketing budget. Rather than creating content and hoping you can convince people to buy your products, you can create a service and proactively put it in front of prospects and close sales.
We teach our students how to create offers like this and pitch them to dentists, veterinarians, therapists, lawyers, real estate agents, and other local professional services. Add these up and you’ll quickly realize there are millions of business owners across the country and around the world that would benefit from your services.
Create Massive Success By Solving These Problems
No matter what industry you decide to focus on, realize that all businesses have a few things in common:
- They never have enough time in the day.
- They need more leads.
- They need more customers.
- They need to sell more products.
- They need to increase their prices.
If you could approach a business and say, “If I could help you get more customers and sell them more products, would that be interesting to you?” there’s not an owner in the world that wouldn’t say yes.
In fact here are 3 of our favorite products that can work in just about any niche you can think of:
Idea #1: DFY Marketing Services
All businesses want to find new ways of getting customers. They want to create new marketing channels to get people to walk through their door.
And in fact, most businesses need help fully exploiting their current marketing channels. The overwhelming majority of business owners we talk to say things like, “We have an email list but we don’t email them nearly as often as we should.” Or, “We’ve tried Facebook ads before but we just don’t have the time to really learn how to use them.”
This is a fantastic place for beginners to start. And one of the best ways to find profitable services is to see what businesses are already having success with and offer it to others.
Here’s a great example…
Last year we made a video about how you can film one video and turn it into 10 pieces of content. Even though we gave our followers the exact blueprint that we personally use in our businesses, over a year later people still ask us every day how we do it.
There is clearly a need in the marketplace, so you could take this strategy and use it as the blueprint for a B2B service. Approach local businesses that need to create more content but don’t know how. Tell them you’ll help film videos, then repurpose it into more content to share on all social media platforms. Then schedule all of the social media posts for them.
The value for the business is incredible: they create a single video and then they don’t have to worry about social media for the rest of the month.
And this is just one idea.
Whatever your industry is, look up the most successful businesses, coaches, and publications in your niche. Follow them on social media, subscribe to their email newsletters, and add them to your Feedly account. Every day set aside some time to analyze what they’re doing. Pull out the best ideas and think about how you can offer their strategies as services for other businesses.
This goes great with my “3 Niches Down” strategy. If you see a business doing something really smart, think about how you can apply it to a specific niche. Then apply it to a niche within that. And then apply it to a niche within that.
So let’s say you see an online business using a really smart marketing tactic. Offer it as a service to female veterinarians who are also trying to raise kids. Now suddenly you’ve carved out your own playing field where no one else can compete with you.
Idea #2: Lead Magnets
Another thing that all businesses need is leads. The more potential customers they can talk to, the more people they can convince to walk through their front door.
A great way to do this is with lead magnets. A website can offer a freebie in exchange for your email address. It could be an ebook, a guide, a report, a worksheet, a checklist, or any number of other digital downloads that are valuable for their prospects.
Despite that list of ideas, here’s what 90% of local businesses do: they write a monthly newsletter and ask people to subscribe to it. That’s a great way of talking to your current list, but it’s not a juicy offer that will get new prospects to give you their email address.
And actually let me rephrase that… that’s the strategy most people use who actually collect leads. But the problem is, most local businesses aren’t collecting leads at all!
And that’s where the massive opportunity is for you.
You can approach local businesses and offer to create these lead magnets for them. If they have blog posts, you can create freebies specific to each blog post. The reader can enter the email address to get a checklist or a worksheet that gives extra value above and beyond the article. Think of it as “premium content.”
You could also create ebooks or guides they can advertise on their social media feeds, to get the email addresses of their followers and start marketing to them.
You can even get creative and organize giveaways, partnerships, virtual summits, content roundups, and countless other ways for businesses to share audiences and collect email addresses. Use the “Feedly” strategy above to find strategies other businesses are using and pitch them to your prospects.
Idea #3: Digital Products
Another thing that no business owner will ever say no to is a new revenue stream.
Imagine you approached a dentist and said, “You probably see all of these entrepreneurship gurus talking about making money online. Meanwhile, if you’re not in your office every day, staring directly into a client’s stinky mouth, you’re not generating revenue. Well what if you too could make money online?”
You could instantly get the attention of any dentist in the world. And there are lots of ways you could do this.
Interview them and turn their expertise into an ebook.
Film them answering the most common questions they get and turn it into an online course.
Help them do private video calls every week or every month and turn it into a paid membership site.
In fact, you can even repurpose the work they’ve already done. Have they written articles for their website that no one reads? Have they been interviewed on podcasts before? Did they make a big social media push years ago but no one sees those posts anymore?
You can take all of that old content and repurpose it into ebooks and other digital products.
Approach businesses and say, “You have 5,000 people on your email list. If you only sell 20 copies at $50 each, that’s $1,000. I’ll create the product for you for only $500.” Make the math a no-brainer for them.
Or you can remove the risk for them by taking a percentage of each sale up to a certain dollar amount. Now there’s no reason for them not to say yes.
Get Creative And Take Action
These are just a few ideas you can use to launch or grow your own digital agency.
Don’t get stuck on these specifics though. Remember the underlying principle…
Resist the temptation to do B2C when you’re starting out. Focus on B2C instead because that’s where the money is. It only takes a few contracts to move the needle in big ways.
Then after you’ve liberated yourself from your day job and created financial freedom for yourself, you can create your mass-market B2C product on the side and make your millions!
