Trey Lewellen

We are ready on our side. We’re sounding good. You guys look fantastic on your side.

Trey Lewellen

I’m ready to rock.

Trey Lewellen

What does it mean? That’s a huge stumbling block for me. I’ve had that for a long time before we figured out our way, and you hit it just right on the right button there.

Do I start with product first approach or market first approach?

Here’s my explanation to what the heck does that even mean.

Trey Lewellen

For some, one of their business ideas to make money is a product first approach. It is when you go out and you’re like, “Oh my, gosh. I found this amazing product. It’s this water bottle that sprays water from the bottom instead of from the top. It’s going to be this amazing thing and everybody is going to love it.”

You start inventing the product. You get patents, trademarks, videos going in, and a website built. You get all these things ready to go up and you go for launch. You’ve run your first Facebook ad. You tell your neighbors or whatever and no one buys like it’s crickets.

That’s a product first approach. You think something that’s going to sell and you go to sell it. You did all the back end work, and no one buys it.

We could talk about podcast in a way too where you build all this huge content from a podcast, interview people, and you get your first five episodes recorded. You go to launch and it’s crickets. Nobody’s listening. You’re like, “Are these guys even interested?”

Trey Lewellen

And so, I look at a market first approach, and that’s one of the best business ideas to make money and one of the golden secrets we keep pretty close to our chest or reveal it here for you guys. That is a market first approach and I learned this from a good old mentor of mine about three years ago named Carl White.

I and Carl White were on a phone call, and he goes, “You can look at how to sell a product or you can do getting in front of parade.”

He didn’t call it market first approach. He called it “Getting in front of parade.” He made it a lot simpler and more Layman terms.

I was like, “What do you mean by getting in front of a parade? What does that even mean?” He goes, “Let’s say the Fourth of July is coming up like July’s the next month. You know there’s going to be a parade there. You’re going to take your kids down there. It’s going to be awesome but what’s interesting about that parade is that people are going to be there.”

Someone has put together this event, not you. He or she took a lot of time to make a lot of people congregate in one place. So how can you get in front of that? What if you could just go down there and step in front of that parade with a product? Well, not just a product but a market first approach product.”

Trey Lewellen

Whereas let’s say you and I got on Facebook and we created an ad. It was “What do you love to drink? Do you love lemonade? Do you love Kool-Aid? Do you love soda? Do you love water?” Give them five choices.

The survey comes back and says “The people in that area love Coca-Cola.” Perfect.

If I did a product first approach, I might say “Well, I love lemonade.” And since I love lemonade, other people must love lemonade. I go and spend all of my money and revenue. I go buy tons of lemonade from Walmart and I go down to sell lemonade.

Versus the guy doing a market first approach, which who did a survey, finds that they love Coca-Cola. So he would take all his money and go invest in Coca-Cola.

Both parties are at the parade selling Coca-Cola and the other selling lemonade. Who do you think has the best business ideas to make money and is going to sell more? It’s the guy with the Coca-Cola because he went out and he surveyed the audience. He got in front of the parade. That’s exactly what we do.

We take our market so we’re in specific niches. That’s one of the best business ideas to make money.

Trey Lewellen

I’m in two niches. The first niche is more of survival gear. The preppers are the people that think the world is coming to an end. Then, we have the Lumitact brand, which is our flashlights, solar panels, and flood lights. Those are the stuff we sell on that side and that’s more of our tactical kind of guy. We do the same thing with them.

When we go to China, we don’t go and just look for products. We know what we’re looking for because we’ve surveyed. We’ve asked questions like, “Hey, what do you guys buying right now? What’s the biggest thing that’s on your bucket list to go and purchase? What do you looking for?” They might say, “Oh, I’m looking for a flashlight that has five modes. It’s this bright, and it does this, and it looks like this.” Perfect, that’s exactly what we’re going to go create.

Versus us, on the other side trying to figure out what the next flashlight might look like, we ask our audience first which is one the best business ideas to make money.

Trey Lewellen

That’s a good question. I’ll give you a statistic, and then we can run into that.

Statistics

Here’s a statistic on that since we’ve done this multiple times. When you go out for that product like saying, “This is the best product,” you’ll have a success rate about 5%-10% of selling that. That’s the success rate of being able to sell it at a large volume of numbers.

When you survey the audience before, and you go into finding which product they are currently buying, you have 90%-95% success rate of selling that.

You have 1/10 success rate on a product-first approach.

You have 9/10 success rate on a market first approach.

Pretty astonishing results is what we’ve found.

Survey Tools

So, on the survey wise, we use things such as like SurveyMonkey, or we’ll use Google Survey.

Trey Lewellen

Google forms, yes.

Trey Lewellen

There we go.

Trey Lewellen

They can go on forever. And sometimes, you have to.

First off, you got to figure out why someone would want to take your survey. For us, the best business ideas to make money is we always give away a GoPro camera. If they enter their email in at the end, that’s the way we can contact them. That’s give them a reason to fill out the survey, and we usually get around to 200 – 1000 survey entries from that, and we just post it to our Facebook fan page. Our fan page has around 300,000 likes.

But the questions are simple either depends on what we’re targeting or what we’re looking for.

Trey Lewellen

Let’s say it’s a T-shirt. Let’s say we’re going to go sell a T-shirt to him. So we might say, “What’s your favorite color of T-shirt that you love wear.” Soon, they might say, “Oh, it’s pink” or “It’s white” or “It’s black.” I’m like, “Okay. Majority says that they wear white T-shirts.” So that would be the color of our shirt.

And then, we say “Do you wear shirts that have designs on the front or that they have on the back or they’re on both?” Okay. Majority says they just wear designs with them on the back.” Perfect. Now, we know where to put the design.

And then, we say, “Take a picture of your favorite shirt and send it to us.”

And so, then, you get all these photos of all these favorite shirts, of course, because they want to win the GoPro. And then, we get to analyze these shirts and see what they’re using? What’s the common denominator? What’s the saying like? What’s the image like? What’s it look like? What’s the feel of the shirt? That’s a good way for us to find out how we’re going to sell shirts. That’s one of the best business ideas to make money.

Trey Lewellen

For different products, you might be just asking them, “What’s your favorite survival tool?” and they might come back with knives. “Well, what’s your favorite type of knife? Is it a folding knife? Is it a straight edge blade knife? How long is the knife? Does it come with a sheath?” You can ask for things like that. “When you’re buying a knife, what do you look for in a knife?” And they’ll comment and talk about it.

So basically, they’re describing to you their perfect knife as they see it in their eyes, and then we go and manufacture that out of China.

Trey Lewellen

Yeah, it sounds super simple. Maybe it’s just like your home cooked brownies.

Trey Lewellen

Yeah, it’s a drawing.

Trey Lewellen

A GoPro camera, where do I sign up?

Trey Lewellen

Perfect.

Trey Lewellen

I started with one like, and that’s a big thing that we catch out. People get bound onto that too. Like, “Oh my gosh. They checked out.” They heard me and say, “300,000 likes.” like, “Ugh! Never mind. I only have a one like.”

You have to understand that I didn’t have a like either.

I started with one like. I started with one email. You started with one podcast listener and that’s what’s amazing about when you do things on a consistent basis is you grow. We grew the 300,000 likes overtime. We grew our email database to 1.2 million people overtime.

Trey Lewellen

When you don’t have that parade, you have to go out and get in front of the parade. You can do that through Facebook. Facebook’s a great resource because if you’re running a local business. You can target within an area, within a zip code, within ten miles of a radius.

I used to sell insurance. If I was looking to know what the biggest problems were when buying insurance, I would survey my entire clienteles.

Trey Lewellen

I had maybe 12,000 or 20,000 clients. I would mail them the survey. I’d say, “Hey. Here’s a stamped envelope. Here’s a two page survey. Can you complete this for me? Do me a solid and send it back.” We’d have a high response rate on that because they’re used to getting mail from me.

If you’re running a local business, you could totally do that. If people are coming in, you could say, “Hey. Fill out the survey and we’ll give you a chance to win a free dinner. It’s pretty simple on the survey and getting those results.

Then, compiling those results is the fun piece to figuring “What is it that they’re wanting? Do they want a cheeseburger now? Do they want a different type of lettuce?” “What are we missing? What are we doing wrong? How can we improve? How can we increase our core values?”

And that’s when we get into what I call funnels or carts.

Trey Lewellen

That’s the biggest piece.

So then, it comes down to doing your due diligence and looking up.

Hack To Survey

So if you’re selling products, a good sneaky hack to surveys is when they enter those email addresses, you can go over to Amazon and there’s something called Amazon Wish List.

Maybe you’ve added items to your wish list before but the Amazon wish list is a sneaky way of finding out what’s your avatar? What’s your person? Who’s this new client that’s coming into your space? What are they buying? What are they currently purchasing on Amazon?

With the wish list, you can go in and type in their email. You’ll get about 30% returns on that. So out of 100 people, you get about 30 people that you’ll get to see their wish list. Because most people don’t know, but everybody who signs up for Amazon, their wish list is public. If the email is the same as their Amazon login, that wish list will appear.

And so, what we do is we use that for recon. We’ll go in and look at our database of people who we have on our email list. We’ll see what they’re buying and what they are saving to their wish list. That will give us a good idea of common products that our types of people are purchasing within our niche. That’s one of the best business ideas we have.

Trey Lewellen

Absolutely.

Once you have a product, you need to be able to sell it. You need a platform to sell it on, and what we use is ClickFunnels.

ClickFunnels allows us to show the product, collect credit cards for the product, and then ship out the product. And so, I wanted to give you guys or your audience at least, the exact funnel we used to make our first million dollars. We optimized it. It’s to perfection. It’s our Wolf Oil funnel. It’s where we sold gun oil to our gun members. I can give you that link.

Trey Lewellen

That’s one of the best business ideas to make money. You can’t get caught up in the little cracks of the world and bottlenecks that comes against you. The biggest step is to start implementing today.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a fan page. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have an audience. It doesn’t matter. Just start.

I started with one fan page like. I put my pants on the same way you guys put your pants on, the same way your listeners put their pants on. There’s no difference between any of us.

Trey Lewellen

It’s there and you just got to start. That’s all it is. Just start moving forward. Start moving up the stairs.