157 | The 1 to $1,000,000 Rule

This is Grow the Show, the podcast to help you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Spidlin, I am your podcast growth coach and in this episode I'm going to share with you a rule that I learned very early on in my journey as an entrepreneur that served me extremely well and it is a rule that I have been sharing recently with several of my Grow the Show accelerator clients who are working on growing their own products and services so growing the revenue and selling more of whatever it is that they sell and that rule is the one to one million rule and this rule is especially for you solar printers and side hustlers who have more than one thing that you sell to your audience and I see this a lot solar printers who have a one-on-one program a group program seven courses and just all these many different things that they offer to their audience and so if that's you I think you're going to get a lot of value from this episode because I think the one to one million rule might serve you really well and so to understand what that rule is and how it could help you I'm going to share a story and this is a story from the early days of Grow the Show back in 2020 when I first launched this company I launched Grow the Show in July of 2020 and I decided that the product that I would sell would be called the Grow the Show accelerator and it would be a $3,000 group coaching program. Now the accelerator has evolved a lot since then it is no longer $3,000 it is no longer group coaching it is very different than it once was but that's what it was when I first launched the company now back in those days I was really excited and I was reading a bunch of books on online marketing because it was my first foray into an online coaching business and I came across the secret trilogy by Russell Brunson and in one of the three books I think it was dot com secrets Russell Brunson shares the one to one million rule and what he says is that entrepreneurs who are just starting out should pick one offer and one price point and sell only that one offer at that one price point until they make a million dollars and I was really surprised by this advice I was like well I thought it was best to have multiple offers or multiple tiers so that people can you know pick the offer that is right for them well as I would learn doing that having multiple offers early on actually make things way harder and so here's how I learned it you see when I originally read that tip in June of 2020 I was like okay sounds great I'm down I will do this I will sell this accelerator program until I make a million dollars with it but if you fast forward five months five growing months of being on several sales calls every single day and all but five people saying no saying this is too expensive saying this doesn't make sense for me I was in rough shape I only sold five folks at three k and so that was fifteen thousand dollars over the course of five months which was not enough based on the expense the living expenses that I had at the time and I was in trouble I was about to run out of cash and credit and so it was in November that I was still taking sales calls still getting those and there were a bunch of people who said it was too expensive three thousand dollars was too much and so I started saying okay that makes sense I've been hearing that a lot so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to launch a smaller program it's just gonna be a course it's not going to include anything done for you it's not going to include any coaching or a community or anything like that and it'll be much cheaper does that sound good and those people said yeah that sounds great and I said okay I'm gonna do that and it was one week that I started saying that I think I said it to three different people and there was one woman in particular who was really really given it to me about charging too much that three thousand dollars was just way too much to charge a podcaster and so I started listening to our and I started taking what she said to hard and I actually kind of made me feel bad so that weekend after I made the decision to create something that was more affordable I was catching up with a friend who is in town that I hadn't seen in a couple years and he asked me to give me an update on his business and so I shared this new strategy with him I said what I'm gonna do is offer something cheaper and as I was saying it to him as I was sharing this pivot with him and as I heard the words coming out of my mouth I thought crap I'm breaking the one to one million rule because here's the thing there were five people who had purchased the program at three thousand dollars all of whom had seen podcast growth and all of whom were really happy in fact they were referring people to me they were saying this is awesome I'm so happy I did this so I already had five people who had bought the three thousand dollar thing and it got them results and they were happy with it and as I was telling my friend that I was going to make a cheaper version I thought hmm I'm breaking the one to one million rule and literally in the middle of the sentence I said you know what I'm actually not going to do that I'm not going to offer a cheaper course I need to learn how to market and sell this three thousand dollar program better and my friend who's not a business owner was like I mean whatever he didn't get it but it was a cool but scary moment because I thought man I've been trying to sell this thing for four months and it's not working but I'm back to the one to one million rule and I said no I'm going to power through I'm going to make it happen four months later in February 2021 I did my first forty thousand dollar month selling only that program only the growth show accelerated program for three thousand dollars and the business stayed there for good it never looked back and a year after that the business was doing over a hundred thousand dollars in revenue and almost exactly a year to the day after I hit my first forty thousand dollar month so about a year and a half after I remembered the one to one million rule the business hit one million now I actually didn't add another offer it wasn't like I said okay great I hit a million it's time for another offer because at that point the offer was killing it I didn't need to have another offer because it was doing so well and so I kind of forgot about the one to one million dollar rule and so if you're somebody who hasn't hit a million dollars in total revenue yet and you you find yourself offering a million different things I'm not saying you should throw away all your offers I'm saying consider this there's a reason why the one to one million rule works and the reason why is this you see when you first starting out offering a product or service you're selling directly to folks whether it's coaching or a course or a digital product or whatever it is number one your product probably isn't that great because it's an early version number two you are inexperienced selling it right you haven't sold that product and you might be completely inexperienced with sales itself so you're not super super good at selling it quite yet and number three you might be trying to sell it to the wrong people because not every product and service is for everyone and in fact most great products are for a very very specific set of people because you have at least one or maybe all of these problems your product isn't that great you're an inexperienced selling it and you're trying to sell it to the wrong people people aren't buying it but here's the killer here's the thing that gets you when they're not buying it they're telling you that the reason that they're not buying it is either that it's too expensive or that the product doesn't have what they need and that might be true it might be too expensive for them and it might not include what they need that might be true but when we hear that feedback and especially when we hear it over and over we think that that individual person is speaking for the entire market so when someone says it's too expensive we don't add the it's too expensive for me we internalize it as it's too expensive but the problem is not your price point you can have a successful thriving business at literally any price point a dollar a hundred dollars a thousand dollars a hundred thousand dollars they all can work you just need to find product market fit which means you have a good product at the right price for the right people until you have product market fit your problem again is one of one or more of three things number one you're trying to sell it to the wrong people number two you are not skilled enough at selling it yet and or number three the product needs to be improved to be seen as worth more than what you're asking for it and so here's why the one to one million rule is key during the period before you achieve product market fit before you reach that point where you've got the right thing it's at the right price and you're selling it to the right people before that's true you're going to be trying to sell what you have and people aren't going to be buying and again that's they're either going to tell you that it's too expensive or that it needs to be different but they're saying that for themselves but the thing is you need sales you need money and so you're going to listen to them you're going to say I need this person to buy for me or you're going to internalize their feedback as them speaking for the entire market and so what you're going to do is you're either going to make tons of changes to your offer or you're going to create new offers or add different tiers and service levels but the problem is for every single offer that you have in order for it to work you need to have product market fit you need to sell it to the right people you need to be skilled at selling it and the product needs to be good enough to sell at that price so while you think you are solving the problem that the prospect presented to you when they said no by giving them different options in actuality what you're doing is you're just creating new offers that also have those same three problems so instead of solving three problems you're just giving yourself three more and so if you have three offers that aren't selling that means you have nine problems right it's kind of like if you've ever heard somebody who just got a puppy recently I feel like there's been multiple times in my life where I've been talking to somebody who has a puppy that's between three months and 12 months old and the puppy is a monster it means full attention all the time and it's just totally misbehaving and it's ripping everything apart and it just needs your full attention and I swear multiple times I've heard these puppy owners say that they're considering getting another puppy and the thinking is if you get another dog then the two high energy dogs are just going to play with each other and cancel each other out but that is so not what happens the person gets another high energy dog and then they just have two high energy dogs who misbehave and require all of your attention it doubles your problems it doesn't solve your problems they don't cancel out the same thing is true with offers if you have an offer that's not selling that doesn't have product market fit adding a second offer that doesn't have product market fit is not going to solve the problems that you have it's just going to give you more problems this is what the one to one million rule does for you by committing to one offer at one price point until that offer reaches a million dollars in sales you are forcing a constraint on yourself that you cannot solve the problems that you have by adding new offers you have to solve the problems that you have through the single offer that you're currently offering you need to figure out who the right people are for that offer specifically you need to learn how to successfully sell that offer to those right people and you need to learn how to make it so that the product successfully delivers on the promise that it makes and the number one reason that I was able to take the grow the show accelerator to one million dollars in total revenue by about a year and a half was the one to one million dollar rule because back in November of 2020 if I would have listened to the market and said oh okay let me create a cheaper course sure maybe that would have done okay but I'm very certain that all that would have done was increased complexity in my business so that I would then have two offers that I need to sell and fulfill and manage and I also know for sure that it would introduce confusion to my audience well do I buy the cheap course or do I buy the coaching program hmm you know what I'm not really sure let me just decide next month it happens all the time and by the way that woman that I mentioned earlier who made a big stink about the product being too expensive at three thousand dollars and then I was charging too much and then it wasn't fair and that I was gatekeeping guess who bought the program a year later at five thousand and gave me a glowing testimonial that same woman I'll never forget when I saw that sale come through because at that point I wasn't taking the sales calls I had a sales rep who's taking my sales calls for me and I saw that income through and I thought no way and I looked and oh my gosh it was the same person who a year and a half prior made a huge stink that three thousand dollars was too much and then they bought the program at five thousand and they were a great happy client remember in order for a business to be successful it's offer needs to have product market fit and before you have product market fit you might be trying to sell the offer to the wrong people you might not be skilled enough yet at selling it and the product might need to be improved to be worse what you're asking for it and so if you're running into those issues try to refrain from solving those issues by adding new offers because like the crazy puppy two offers that don't have product market fit are not going to cancel themselves out you're just going to have two offers that have product market fit and you'll have to solve the problems for all of them until next time I am your podcast growth coach for grow the show my name is Kevin Schmidland and I'll see you in the next one