I’m getting ready to relaunch my first business…it’s going out as two different products: one as a completely licensed trademark / software / recipe and operations solution for personal chefs; two – as a complete list of recipes that are ‘ready to cook’ as opposed to ‘ready to eat’ which most personal chefs offer.
I’ve had this solution in my back pocket since we closed The Food Experience when our daughter was born. It’s only been the last 6 months that I’ve started to focus on how to market this to personal chefs as a solution.
Now that I’m digging into it, I’ve been watching some great free videos from Jeff Walker (self proclaimed product launch guru) and Brendan Burchard (Experts academy). I haven’t subscribed to either service and I’m not affiliated with either of these guys….I’m just calling them out because they’ve both provided a lot of value to me & I’ve been able to get a lot of ideas which I’m going to put into practice with this first launch.
I have to give props to my wife here as well. As I started to pull together the presentations for launching this business to personal chefs, she was reviewing it and pushed me to get it organized. I took the time to follow the product launch activities from Jeff where he suggests having multiple events over a set time period before the launch, this can be over a week or more.
With that in mind, I put together a 2 page powerpoint presentation explaining each pre-launch event – mostly to help my wife understand what I was trying to accomplish, but it really helped me get organized. For this launch, each event will be a video / presentation. In the overview planning document I put together, I laid out the basic facts about the content for each video; including description / purpose / goal, etc. This planning document was critical in helping me layout all of the content I want to provide to my targets, get it organized & put into a sequential, logical order.
So, now that I’m organized, I have a focus on creating the content for the release presentations. I’ve also done some trials of video taping myself to see how I sound & look on video. Those trials led me to investing in some soft lights and a backdrop for making parts of the video. After all of this, one big thing was really nagging at me. HOW WAS I GOING TO GET A LIST COMPILED TO SEND THIS PRODUCT LAUNCH TO?
Yesterday, again, I was watching another of Jeff’s videos, and he doesn’t really say HOW to build a list, he just says that the size of the list doesn’t matter. Just get started. That’s bullshit, I thought. I mean, I have ZERO targets for this list and I’m not about to spend thousands of dollars for Jeff to tell me how to build a list.
That’s when I hit the net….I started doing searches for “Personal Chef Lists” and there it was…listings of lists. I mean, it wasn’t that obvious, but the lists were there. I found one that had about 100 personal chefs on it. Drilling into each listing, I found an image of their mailing address on the site, so couldn’t just cut and paste it because it was an image or a picture, not text. BUT, I could re-type it into excel, so I started typing. Before long, I had the beginnings of a list of 60 targets.
I continued down the GOOGLE listing when it hit me……check the personal chef associations & look up people there. Again, another jackpot!
The problem with this approach is it’s very time consuming. The good news is, however, I KNOW the results are also extremely targeted.
I’ll be honest, I don’t have the time to navigate through all of those pages and get the email addresses off of their individual sites, but someone on ODESK.COM does….I posted a job on odesk.com at 1:00 am Sunday morning asking for people to bid on the task of gathering emails by surfing the web. After I posted the job, I took 30 minutes to write up the instructions on where to go and what data to pull. I included screen shots and some ‘if / then’ scenarios and got ready to hire someone from odesk.
Now, in my job posting, I said I’d entertain bids between $1.00 and $3.00 per hour. YES, you read that correctly. I had 22 bids ranging from $1.00 to $3.00 within 30 minutes of the job being posted. I evaluated the people based on prior billings & buyer feedback & the basic cover letter they sent with the bid. I selected someone in the Philippines who bid $1.50 / hour plus odesk markup, I’m paying $1.67 per hour. I hired her immediately without an interview. I figured at that price, I could hire her without an interview and fire her with a click if she didn’t work out.
After a few quick emails back and forth, I sent her the instructions and she was off! Within two days and under 7 hours of tracked work, she got through the assignment and I now have a list of 802 targets. All for the total price of $11.41.
This worked so well, that I gave her another assignment today. I’m not anticipating that the second assignment will have as many good results, but I’m hoping to get my list to over 1000 targets.
Target list started!
What have I learned?
1) think differently and ask questions on search engines – you’d be surprised at what comes back if you ask the right question
2) apply low cost resources to repeatable, instruct-able tasks
Now, I’m free to focus on building out the content for this launch! I’ll let you know how it goes!