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Guest: Paul Potratz, founder of The Growth Mindset.
Host: Kevin Mako, founder of Product Startup and the leading expert in hardware startup consulting. A hardware entrepreneur since 1999, Kevin has advised more than 1,500 founders and built and scaled MAKO Invent through its acquisition by TriMech in 2024.
Building a Focused 90-Day Advertising Plan
Paul Potratz explains how product founders can find a target audience through social media, ask better questions, and respond when the message is not resonating. He also covers practical calls to action, concise one-line positioning, and a budget-conscious 90-day advertising approach.
Episode transcript
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Filip Valica: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Product Startup Podcast, a podcast that helps bring your product idea to life by chatting with successful inventors, product designers, and other industry professionals. This podcast is run by Mako
Filip Valica: Design + Invent and hosted by Filip Valica. Our goal here is to get to the bottom of what makes a product successful, from initial idea to putting your product on the shelf. We're taking you step by step to build a functional product and scale your product business. Now onto the show.
Filip Valica: The product startup, episode 35. In today's episode, we learned from Paul Potratz about promoting. promoting our business after we launch and creating a 90-day advertising strategy on a minimal budget.
Filip Valica: Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Product Startup Podcast, where we talk about turning ideas into successful products step-by-step. I'm Filip Valica, and thanks for listening today.
Filip Valica: In the last episode, I addressed some of the emails I get around procrastination, fear, and limiting beliefs like lack of money, time, or skills. And I also talked about my motivation for launching this site and podcast and for working on my own products.
Filip Valica: Sorry if you downloaded the episode twice, I exported my audio at one and a half times by accident, and that's the speed I edit at, and I forgot to check the episode before uploading. So now that I've scraped that teradactal egg off my face, make sure to check out episode 34.
Filip Valica: If you've sat on your idea for a while and you haven't done anything with it, or if you've lost your momentum, that episode is definitely for you. Before we get started, I wanted to highlight one reviewer on iTunes, Johnny 32190, who wrote,
Filip Valica: Finally, a place to learn about the steps needed to start and grow a physical product-based business. There are plenty of podcasts about being an entrepreneur, but only Phillips the product startup covers the challenges and subsequent solutions unique to having a physical product.
Filip Valica: Great guests, great information, and I've been binge listening for days. Johnny, thanks for leaving me a note and letting me know what you think of the show. And as always, I appreciate everyone that sends in comments and questions that lets me know
Paul Potratz: how I can make the show better for you. So let's get started. Hi, Paul.
Filip Valica: Thanks for coming on the show today. Phil, thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. I'm really excited to have you on because I think we have similar outlook at least when it comes to success. I believe in giving content freely and definitely think that the universe will provide.
Paul Potratz: There's a large enough slice of pie out there for everybody. So I'm happy to have you on the show talking about branding and marketing with us. Yeah, it's my pleasure. And I agree. I think we have the exact same mindset. And it was actually earlier this week.
Paul Potratz: I did a podcast with Bob Berg. I don't know if you've heard of him. But he is the guy. He's the author behind The Go Giver.
Filip Valica: And that's his entire strategy. He wrote this book years ago, but a fabulous book. But it talks all about what you and I believe. I'll put that in the show notes for everybody to check out. So we also culminated our corporate careers in the same way.
Filip Valica: We both worked jobs that we didn't enjoy. And you ended up building your,
Paul Potratz: business and podcasts through that because you were looking for some entrepreneurial resources yourself that were out there. So can you mention that just really quickly? Yeah, definitely. So yeah, years ago when I started that
Paul Potratz: agency and it was just me and my dog and that's what I started to call it Dundas dog agency. But I, you know, would go everywhere. I would go to the different organizations and try to learn and a lot of times the, you know, the
Paul Potratz: established business owners, established agency owners didn't want to share anything. They would keep it secret and I would go to the different you know, retired entrepreneurs and I'd ask about social media and they're like, what's that? So
Paul Potratz: I struggled. I feel like I'd be so much farther advanced if, you know, I could have really
Filip Valica: had that help there at that time. And that's what Svetis and I'm sure we'll talk about, but our newest venture called the growth mindset. Great that you finished on that point because what we're going to be doing today is covering a branding and marketing strategy for everyone that
Filip Valica: maybe hasn't started the business off in the right foot or would like some more information about, you know, coming up with something on their own, especially if they don't have the budget
Paul Potratz: to hire an agency. Can you maybe walk us through a 90-day plan or how you'd develop some sort of a branding, advertising strategy, what the high points would be? The first thing, you know, that you really have to figure out. And I mean, and we're going
Paul Potratz: through this right now and you think we would just be able to like, boom, boom, boom, be done on the growth mindset being that, you know, we're a full-blown ad agency and we work with clients all over the world,
Paul Potratz: but really understanding who is your target audience and what do they want. And then when I'm getting ready to say, hopefully everybody sticks on these words and hopefully I can explain it. You might have to translate it, though.
Paul Potratz: But so many times what happens is when we try to build an ad strategy, we try to tell everybody what we know or we try to tell them how great our product is or how beautiful our widget is,
Paul Potratz: but what we really need to do is turn it around and tell people. how beautiful our product or service or a widget is in the sense that how will it help them either save time, save money,
Paul Potratz: basically improve their life. So that will resonate a lot more
Filip Valica: than you saying something like, oh, this is, you know, for example, let's use a vehicle. Vehicle's got
Paul Potratz: 535 horsepower. Instead, tell how it's going to make you feel emotionally. Right. And you're talking about communicating the benefits instead of the specifications or the features. Right. And, you know,
Paul Potratz: And, you know, so many times we talk about that, you know, are you selling feature? Are you selling benefit? And it seems like when I go to the entrepreneurial groups and I talk to the entrepreneurs and I say that it doesn't really resonate until we really, you know, we get in, we dive in.
Paul Potratz: We start giving them examples and I start showing them how to write copy and, you know, write headlines and, you know, things to put on their website. And, you know, we like websites, for example, you know, we talk about, you know, doing the drunk man test.
Paul Potratz: And what you want to do is, you know, get some of your friends around, get them really drunk, and then have them look at your website really quick, make sure that they're kind
Filip Valica: of brand new friends, and then, you know, shut the website down and say, okay, what was the website about? And if the drunk guys can't tell you what your website was about, you need to go back to the drawing board. I agree with what you're saying.
Filip Valica: I have the squinty eye test where I squint my eyes and everything goes blurry, and then the things on the page that are most important will pop to you. So I can associate with that. you mentioned making sure that we have the right target audience and I think this is something
Paul Potratz: that can't be understated because it happens from a product side as well when you're developing a product you might not have an accurate picture of who your audience is or you may end up having to pivot can you talk about some ways of making sure that we're talking to the right people
Paul Potratz: yeah definitely so finding your target audience is a lot different than it used to be I mean it to be that we would, oh, I need to buy, you know, adults 25,
Paul Potratz: 54,
Paul Potratz: and income is in this range. I mean, that's the radio TV newspaper mentality. But today we have so much more ability to really, really target. And you've, so finding your target audience, for example, let's say you're creating
Paul Potratz: a product for moms, but is it moms with a first child? Is it moms with a second child? Where do these moms live? What do these moms, you know, where do they drive for a vehicle? What kind of income. What kind of profession are they coming from or are they in? What kind of profession is
Paul Potratz: their husband in? So really finding out that target audience and there's so many ways to do it. You might think you know who the target audience is, but maybe you don't. And ways to find out
Paul Potratz: is really use social media and start asking the questions. And that's a great way, a great free way to promote your product and see if it really has any legs, you know, who's going to really latch on to it.
Paul Potratz: I'll give you a case in point. So it was last month, I was speaking to a group of entrepreneurs. They're in this type of a, like a startup or whatever, like an incubator thing.
Paul Potratz: And I was talking to this one woman and her idea and she'd already kind of really put it in, you know, she had her little development project, I guess, I mean, whatever you would call it. She had her product ready to go, her template of a product.
Paul Potratz: And it was a phone case, but the phone case would hold two phones.
Paul Potratz: and I said, all right, you know, and she was asking me, would you like to take one of these and try it and tell me what you think? And I'm like, well, no, not really, because I don't like putting my phone into a case.
Paul Potratz: But what I did is I did a Facebook live video with her explaining the phone case and I was asking her about the different materials and, you know, could I put a smaller iPhone and a larger iPhone? Does it work for a droid?
Paul Potratz: But I posted that on Facebook and asked the question, would you use this? And then it was interesting to see the people that were commenting.
Filip Valica: I would. Yes, I would. No, I wouldn't. That's stupid. Some people are kind of nasty about it.
Filip Valica: But that can help you open up an opportunity and find those individuals that can more or less be your, I guess you can say, you know, I'll steal the word. It could be a tribe for you and talk
Filip Valica: about the product and do some test studies. Yeah, and that really is kind of the first step, right? Because if you don't have any positive response or some affirmation that you're going
Paul Potratz: the right direction, I mean, this is not even people taking their wallet out for you. They're just paying attention to what you're doing on social media and hitting a like button or commenting. And so if you feel that you're not even getting that type of response, to me it sounds like
Paul Potratz: you might not have the right audience. What would you do in that type of situation?
Paul Potratz: Well, I think one of the things that I've learned, you know, as social is growing, and I keep on talking about social, social, social, but is to create a tremendous amount of noise on social. And I don't mean noise in the negative sense in the manner.
Paul Potratz: But find, you know, keep on talking to the people finding the different groups and you know that's one of the recommendations that I gave her I said go into the different groups go into the entrepreneur groups go into the sales groups
Paul Potratz: going to the real estate groups and it just asked the question would you use a product like this and she's like oh that's a good idea so that's what I'll do and I said you you can end up finding
Paul Potratz: that niche market that will really like your product and it will just fit in their daily life or the way they're doing you know life and business and everything else and when you find that niche, you'll be able to grow within that group. And then who knows, you know,
Filip Valica: we've all heard about the tipping point. There could be possibly a tipping point, but this would give you a great way to say, you know what, I think I'm on to something. I've got an idea. But after you go through all of these various groups, and again, think about groups,
Filip Valica: and you're not getting
Paul Potratz: anywhere with it, chances are your product probably needs to go back to the drawing board. The hardest part there is to know if you have the wrong audience or the wrong product. And differentiating between the two and knowing when you have to push forward versus go back
Paul Potratz: a step and maybe refine the product or service with it. Yeah. And
Paul Potratz: she asked the same thing. She said, well, if I do that, how do I know that I'm hitting the right audience? And I say, well, I think, you know, I said, what do you do in the evening? And she said, what do you mean? I said, well, after you get home and everything else and she says, well, I fixed dinner and all that. And then finally
Paul Potratz: she got to the point, you know, then I watch TV and I was like, all right, well, get your iPad out and start. There's thousands and thousands of groups and I was just given her because she has no budget.
Paul Potratz: So I was just given her ideas and I said there's thousands and thousands of groups.
Paul Potratz: Start finding the group. Start thinking about the different friends that you have and the profession that they're in, their chosen career and start finding the group that you know that you have
Paul Potratz: that you think your friends could be in and start posting that video of that product review in there and asking for input because people love to help. People love to give advice.
Paul Potratz: And this would be a great way, you know, once you start seeing which group is interacting,
Filip Valica: now you can see what does this person look like in this group. Are they male? Are they female? How old are they? So it can give you a really good feeling of, you know, where am I going with this before you start
Paul Potratz: spending money on, you know, let's say pay per click or, you know, websites or whatever, you know, the strategies that need to be part of your product, depending on who you're trying to reach. Yeah, so let's talk about that a little bit.
Paul Potratz: You mentioned that knowing your audience is probably one of the first steps that you need to establish a brand and coming up with a marketing strategy. What are some of the continuing steps? Let's assume that you've got a 90-day strategy.
Paul Potratz: The first thing you want to do on that product is you want to figure out that product, what is it going to be the unique benefit to the individual that's going to be interested? In other words, how's it going to save them time, saving money? How's it going to make them feel different? You've got that, find your target audience.
Paul Potratz: Now that you have your target audience, look at what they're saying about the product.
Paul Potratz: really find out what they're saying that can be that can help you reestablish what you're going to promote your product and what you're going to say about your product because you might think it's going to fix a problem that the whole reason you developed it but other people start
Paul Potratz: talking about the problem it's going to fix for them so now you're getting more or less your one-liners your your call to actions you're you know the things that you're going to use in
Paul Potratz: promoting that product then you keep on working that group where you build that group and then the next step is get a website up, you know, either a website or if you don't have the money to get a
Paul Potratz: website, do a Facebook page that's specific to your group and start growing the audience in your group. This is the key to everything is grow the audience. So now as you're growing the audience in that group, you've got to make sure that you have consistency. A lot of times I see people
Paul Potratz: that post, you know, once a week, once every three days or they say, I don't want to overshare, start oversharing and start talking about how, you know, your development of your product, if or going through development or talk about how it's helping people so you're constantly posting
Paul Potratz: in that group, you're creating interaction. Find some people that are in that group that you would call like your social lions, the individuals that have a lot of followers or not necessarily
Paul Potratz: followers, but have a number of followers. But when they're commenting, when they're talking about stuff, people are engaging them. So find the individuals. It's pretty easy to do. See the individuals that have good engagement on what they do. And see if they'll sample the product. See if you
Paul Potratz: can send that product to them or if you don't have a product let's say that you have a service because you know most of my clientele is a service then get them on the phone and talk to them
Paul Potratz: and see if you can become a consultant see if you can help them see if you can kind of give them a sample to your service because you want to make them the spokespeople of what's going on and now once you have you start to establish there now you've got moderators for your Facebook page
Paul Potratz: or your Facebook group,
Filip Valica: and they can keep the discussion going and everything going with that. So that's the way I would start it out, and that's going to take you a 90-day process before you start spending any money.
Filip Valica: But there's one thing that I would say definitely set up, and that would be your Facebook retargeting, and I think it's pretty exciting. Instagram's coming out with shoppable ads.
Filip Valica: It won't be available to the general public yet, but it's coming out soon.
Paul Potratz: Yeah, I saw that the other day. And you alluded to one thing is you're talking to your audience, getting some of that feedback in their words.
Paul Potratz: And I found that to be really helpful in marketing is repurposing some of their terminology back in your own marketing
Filip Valica: because some of the words that I might be using, especially for myself, because I might be overly technical, might not translate as well as someone that's part of that audience. Right. Yeah. And so many times, I see so many businesses do that.
Filip Valica: they think they know what their product or service is filling in someone's life, what it's doing for them, but they're, you know, a little bit off. So yeah, you definitely want to start
Paul Potratz: listening. So what are your thoughts about having, talking about engagement now, about having one of those chat boxes on the side of your site that links up to your phone and you can try to
Paul Potratz: engage people that land on your website? In addition to connecting with people on Facebook, you might have some traffic already coming into your site. How would you try to get the feedback back from people that are visiting your page.
Paul Potratz: Even though your bounce rate might be low, you might not be getting any interest or sales.
Paul Potratz: Well, with chat, you know,
Paul Potratz: we've definitely, we've used chat for a number of years and so of our clients. The hard part with chat, you've got two different types of chat. You have managed chat or where someone else does it outside of your office. They handle your chat for you.
Paul Potratz: And then you've got chat that, of course, you're going to handle in your office. Where we've run into difficulty, though, with that is we're a very impatient society now that we can't even wait 30 minutes for a pizza.
Paul Potratz: So if you're going to have chat, you've got to make sure that you're going to manage it and, you know, have it on all of your devices. And even then, you're going to miss some of the opportunities.
Paul Potratz: So one of the things that we taught that we've been playing with and using is a program called Hot Jar. And Hot Jar is free to start and then really inexpensive after that.
Paul Potratz: But it allows you the opportunity to also have, like, polls and surveys. And that's a great way to engage the audience on your website because now you can build all
Paul Potratz: these different polls and surveys specific to the page or where they're at, specific when they get ready to leave, how long they spend on the website, how many times have they visited the website, those type of things. So now you can start to get that engagement. You can ask for their email address.
Paul Potratz: But you think about it, the vast majority of websites that you go to are really a glorified business card that it doesn't engage with an individual it's just like oh I'm going to go there and I'm going to read stuff but people want to engage and with a survey you can start to ask you know
Paul Potratz: when you're creating a survey you can ask questions and say oh you know more of us hey we're going to do uh here take this quick survey and we're going to tell you which product you should get or which service you should get you know so kind of think about it this way I'm going to kind of give you an
Filip Valica: analogy that if I was to go to a website and it was a weight loss website um or, you know, get healthy website if they had a survey that asked me the question so I could tell you specifically of what I'm wanting to do.
Filip Valica: Maybe it's like, you know, I want big arms and I want a six-pack, but I don't really care if I have a little skinny legs.
Filip Valica: So having a survey for me to tell somebody that will make a world a difference because now I feel like that they understand where I'm coming from and they'll engage, you know, it would just be much more of an engagement level instead of a one-size fits all. I hope that made sense.
Filip Valica: Yeah, you're trying to basically substitute for two-way communication or, you know, encourage people to kind of give some feedback and you give them something in return.
Paul Potratz: How do you incentivize people to take that survey? And the reason I ask is because I've got a survey on the side of my site for this exact reason, because I wanted to segment my audience properly.
Paul Potratz: There's a lot of listeners of the product startup that come from different backgrounds. I have a pretty decent amount of traffic to the site, but until now I've only had 18 people take the same. survey and it's a single question survey where it's visible in the right bar you hit a button
Paul Potratz: and click okay and that's it what would you do to encourage more people to interface with your site and some of these things that you're putting up right so i would do testing i would do you know
Paul Potratz: we talk about ab testing multivariate testing so i would come up with different ways because you know in the right hand because you know like one of the ones that we have on our website or my website actually on the Paul Fodran's website. It's on the bottom, which is through hot jar,
Paul Potratz: and it's on the bottom right-hand corner,
Paul Potratz: but a lot of times people don't really see it. And we are so click-happy, too, that when we do see it, we don't take time to read it. And we just like, oh, make that go away real quick. And just what we do with chat.
Paul Potratz: So as you're writing your content, as you're doing your podcast,
Paul Potratz: if you're doing blogs, whatever it is,
Paul Potratz: and, you know, really kind of interject that into your,
Filip Valica: your podcast, you know, below your podcast, you know, where you have a call to action button, but you have to turn the messaging around of, if they take time to do the survey, how's it going to benefit them? What am I going to receive? Because the vast majority of people come,
Paul Potratz: you know, we're all this way. We're all selfish and we're like, I don't have any time. I don't have time for that. Just give me what I want. So you've got to turn the messaging around of what's going to be the benefit to them. But play with it, move it around your website, put it into your
Paul Potratz: content and not only that use it in social media you know post on social media you know what is take the survey and then that way you can start understanding you'll you'll see a lift in it basically
Paul Potratz: yeah and while we're on the topic of surveys i'm a fan of keeping them short and sweet so what do you think is the ideal length for a survey and the types of questions that you should ask to get the
Paul Potratz: most value out of people taking their time out i think it's all in relation to what am i going to get at the end of the survey.
Paul Potratz: So if it's a survey that's going to benefit me as the business owner, which of course it is, but if there's no way I can spend it around and say, if you take this survey, this is what's going to be the benefit to you. For example, one of the surveys that
Paul Potratz: we offer is a website report card.
Paul Potratz: And with the website report card they have, I think it's 12 questions that they've got to answer. And then we do the rest of the work, but that 12 questions we'll take them probably 12 to 15 minutes to fill in.
Paul Potratz: And we have to pull it down because we get so many, you know,
Paul Potratz: people filling in the information because we tell them at the end of the survey after you answer all these questions,
Filip Valica: we're going to do an evaluation of your website.
Paul Potratz: We're going to come back and tell you how you can increase the leads to your website.
Paul Potratz: So it's… Wow.
Filip Valica: So you really got to, you know, think about it that way.
Paul Potratz: It's all specific to that. and it's like I have a friend that has a membership website and boy his survey is painful and I try if I have I've gone through it because he said can you go through and do the survey for me and
Filip Valica: see what you think and I came back and I was like Darrell boy that thing is horrible and he's like really and it's like yeah but I'm not really interested in your product you know or your service it's what you're offering and so it's kind of hard for me to gauge it so let's just gauge it on
Filip Valica: people coming to your website and people come to his website he's around 38% completion on a survey. Wow, that's really high.
Paul Potratz: Yeah, it really is, but it's so painful. And I mean, the questions are stupid, too. We laugh about it. Can you share what the incentive is for people to fill out that survey? Just to see if you can join his membership website.
Paul Potratz: That's really what it is to see if you're a real man.
Paul Potratz: Nice. Yeah, it's crazy. I don't get it. But oh, well, you know, it works for him. Well, while we're talking about surveys for a while,
Paul Potratz: It was really popular on Facebook and some of these other sites to share these quizzes that people would take to find out, you know, what your favorite color is or are you this type of person or what's your celebrity match? Mm-hmm. And that used to go viral.
Paul Potratz: So are you recommended to put in an angle that's enticing in a certain way or can you just be your business without having to pull any… Pull tricks? Yeah.
Paul Potratz: I think it depends on your business model. You know, you're really not your business model, but there's a brink. brand that you have. I mean, is your brand a higher level, more professional brand, you know, that you're promoting? Because you've got to really figure out what is your persona that you're going to have.
Paul Potratz: And if it's, you know, like Daryl's is like in your face and, you know, rough and gruff and, you know, he uses foul language and all that. And that's not me. So I think it can, you know,
Paul Potratz: you know, you know, is, you know, are you a pansy, boob, whatever? And so it works for him. So I think, you know, the business owner has to decide on, on what it is.
Filip Valica: Granted, I mean, you have to really understand your clientele or prospective clientele and what are the problems, you know, what are their struggles?
Filip Valica: And you can be very blatant about that. You know, like with, you know, we have one that's running now for our ad agency and for Protrats.
Paul Potratz: And it says, are you tired of, you know, are you tired of trying to come up creative ideas or something like that? So, I mean, but we keep everything, you know, professional and. you know, just addressing the problems. You know, I have a hard time coming up with creative ideas.
Paul Potratz: I'm, I'm tired of, you know, wasting ad dollars and, you know, those type of things. So that's the direction we go in our messaging versus, you know,
Paul Potratz: let me give you seven ways to be able to, you know, create pennies, you know, create leads for pennies on the dollar. Granted, we've done webinars like that that's done really well, but, you know.
Paul Potratz: So do you think that type of strategy when you're advertising your product fits luxury products as well or products that have, Maybe the value is a soft type of value. It might be harder to differentiate a product.
Paul Potratz: Let's say you're advertising perfume or it's something a bit more esoteric. Boy, it's kind of a hard question, really, because you can see successes in both. And I'm trying to remember the name of the cologne. There's this cologne that's out there.
Paul Potratz: And they call it the world's most expensive cologne.
Paul Potratz: And boy, I wish I could remember the name of it because I actually have a bottle of it. and I mean it's pricey it's definitely pricey but just and I mean the bottle you know the way it's
Filip Valica: bottled it's in a gold bottle it's got that very you know I guess Trump feel and it's just like and but you know the world's most expensive cologne a billion dollar clone or something
Paul Potratz: stupid like that but it smells good but I almost didn't buy it because I'm not drawn to that type of, you know,
Paul Potratz: look at me and my, you know, whatever, my name, whatever name, high-end brand you want to do. So I think it's, again, it's back to who do you, who do you
Paul Potratz: want to target? Who's your market? I mean, because if you go to Instagram, which amazes me, you go to Instagram and you see all these different billionaire luxury Instagram feeds and all that, and they've got, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of followers and people showing their
Paul Potratz: Lamborghinis and all that, but that wouldn't appeal to me. So who do you want to appeal to? Yeah, and I think what's interesting there, too, is that a lot of the people that are following
Paul Potratz: these brands don't have the money for a Lamborghini. And so there's a set of consumers that want to be included in a certain group, but they're not. How does that work with marketing?
Paul Potratz: Well, I have a friend of mine that's very successful and the way he markets himself.
Paul Potratz: And so he talks about, I mean, he was on, his last book was 10x.
Filip Valica: And we've done, you know, workshops and conferences together. And it's 10x, 10x. I don't know if you know him, Grant Cardone. And,
Filip Valica: but he has quite the following and, you know, how to make millions on the phone and how to be a millionaire and, you know, become a millionaire and don't be a, you know, don't be a bitch and don't be a sissy and all this stuff. I was like, wow, really?
Filip Valica: But it works great for him.
Paul Potratz: And then you kind of, so it makes you wonder. You know, there's that type of clientele. And he's selling his training courses and everything else for, you know, well,
Paul Potratz: generally it's around $1,000 for a training course. And right now he's doing 90% off or something. I don't know.
Paul Potratz: So, you know, it's kind of hard. And I think you just have to pick, what are you comfortable with, you know, how How do you want to position your product? How do you want to position your brand and just go after it and don't waffle and stay, you know, full steam ahead?
Paul Potratz: No, I'm definitely familiar with Grant Cardone. He's got quite a huge following. While we're talking about that, is there a place for an entrepreneur, a small business owner's beliefs or their moral and value compass?
Paul Potratz: You know, as we're building products, it's usually something that speaks to you because the problem that you're solving is close to you.
Paul Potratz: But now as you're going out marketing, you may find that your audience wants to be marketed in a certain way and it doesn't really match your values. How do you line that up?
Paul Potratz: Well, I think you and I talked about this last week, though, that there's break the audience into thirds. There's a third of the audience that's going to love you,
Paul Potratz: you know, that you can really talk to. There's a third of the audience that could be swayed to love you or hate you. And then there's a third of the audience that's going to hate you.
Filip Valica: So pick the third that you want to go after and just make sure that the third that you're going after is that don't do it for the money.
Filip Valica: Do it for what makes you. And I mean, you know, some people are going to go to the money makes me happy. Well, money is only part of it. If you're doing everything for money, I really don't think you're going to be as successful as you could be.
Filip Valica: So do it for much more than money.
Filip Valica: And, you know, if it truly is a good product or if it is a good product or if it is a good, good service. There's a third of that audience out there that's just waiting for you to come to market with it and reach them. And it's not going to happen overnight.
Paul Potratz: But, you know, you have to make sure you're day in, day out, going after it. You know, don't go for three weeks and have some success and decide that you're going to party for the next two weeks. You've got to keep on
Paul Potratz: going after it and going after it and you will grow it. I mean, there's a, there's only a, you know, so many homes that you can own and so many cars you can drive. So you've got to decide, you know, are you going to sleep well at night?
Paul Potratz: And if it truly makes you happy and brings you enjoyment and fulfillment, you will be successful.
Paul Potratz: I subscribe to that for sure. So thanks for sharing that. We were talking about our 90-day strategy here. With that 90 days that we have, we said we're going to create a website or create a Facebook page,
Paul Potratz: start having conversations with people in our target audience, start refining our marketing message,
Filip Valica: and maybe even start advertising to see if people will convert, we'll come to our site. How would you scale that from that point? Let's say you had a $1,000 budget just for the sake of scale, because you can add zeros to that.
Filip Valica: How would you chop up that budget in terms of what you would spend money on in the beginning?
Paul Potratz: Like what's most important to get right?
Paul Potratz: Oh, boy.
Paul Potratz: It's going to be a hard one because it depends when someone is listening to this podcast. and how far out they are.
Paul Potratz: So asking me that today, at this time,
Paul Potratz: the way I would spend the money, because let's be honest, $1,000 budget is not a whole lot.
Paul Potratz: And, I mean, it might be, you know, it is a lot, but it's not a lot when you're trying to reach its scale. So, I mean, be, you know, don't anybody get insulted by that. But I would focus that money again, and it depends on, and I hate saying that it depends, it depends, it depends,
Paul Potratz: but it depends on the product or service you're selling. But I think the best bang for your buck right now is probably Facebook.
Paul Potratz: And the way Instagram is coming on strong since Facebook owns it, I think Instagram could be a very good tool for you and one that we've been playing with for a while.
Paul Potratz: And we've had, you know, success hasn't been phenomenal, but it's definitely been a return on investment as Pinterest. Yeah, that's a very good point. And I think it's something that we didn't touch on also is that each social network has their own particular demographic.
Paul Potratz: I mean, even though you can find almost everybody on Facebook, Instagram responds really well to certain types of people or products and businesses better than, you know, some of the other networks, Pinterest, the same. So definitely know where your audience is hanging out. Yeah.
Paul Potratz: And there's one thing I want to add to that, though, too,
Paul Potratz: that here I, you know, I'm talking about all the technology and such.
Paul Potratz: But I think, you know, something that's critically important that you've got to, you need to really, really invest in in the early. And don't be like me. you know, like, oh, let's, let's find the newest, you know, the newest and the best is a CRM.
Paul Potratz: And I think most business owners miss out on that, that they need a customer relationship management tool. And you don't have to go to the high dollar expensive ones.
Paul Potratz: There's a lot of them out there that are like $30 a month and there's even some that are free or, you know, $5 a month, $10 a month. But get a CRM of some type and make sure that you are a very, very, very, very,
Paul Potratz: diligent and every business card you get, every person that you meet, every time you go and speak somewhere, you know, offer, you know, email me for my presentation, you know, any opportunity
Paul Potratz: you can get to gather individuals information, do it and make sure it gets into that CRM
Filip Valica: and spend time before you start building that CRM knowing that you don't want just email addresses. You want to know their name. You want to know their email address. You want to know their address. So now you can start seeing where are you having success, depending if you're selling
Paul Potratz: nationwide or you know worldwide or whatever so get all of the information that you can get if you can get their mobile number definitely definitely get their mobile number because you can do as you
Paul Potratz: start to expand you can do what's called like a ringless voicemail drop and there's nothing better than old-fashioned phone picking up the phone and calling somebody too so CRM is something that's and I'd say
Paul Potratz: the CRM is something that you need to get way early like that should be number two right after you get your business cards printed and I assume all that is after you you have your website up and everything like that honestly if if i was sitting here listening to this
Paul Potratz: podcast and i was thinking you know what i'd like to start a business or eventually i'm going to start a business you need to start a CRM like as soon as you finish listening to this podcast and start
Paul Potratz: researching find a CRM and start building that database and ideally if you can find a CRM that has really good social media integration that will start pulling people from twitter and facebook and so on and so forth
Paul Potratz: that's engaging with your content so you can build a list of influencers, individuals that are engaging with your content and have an audience that's engaged with them know who those individuals are and start establishing that conversation,
Paul Potratz: start knowing who they are, start talking to them more and continue to do that because then when it's time to launch that product or launch that service, if you have that audience to go to that knows you, you're going to go so much further, so much faster.
Paul Potratz: Until now, I thought CRMs were really for high dollar services or larger products. I wouldn't have never thought it was something that would be useful for someone that's selling, you know, their own, you know, cake mix online or something.
Filip Valica: Yeah, and I mean, and we talked about it offline and I'll just mention that to talk about the why you need a CRM, you know, I'll harp on that forever.
Filip Valica: But, you know, it was for years that, you know, I worked at radio stations from the point of being a sales guy and, you know, who has radio on TV because I,
Paul Potratz: just popped around. I started an ad agency world first. But I started working with a CRM and the CRM I used. I don't know if it's in existence anymore is called ACT.
Paul Potratz: And so I used ACT as my CRM that I would load on my PC and, you know, it's a CD. And, but,
Paul Potratz: you know, I've carried that CRM as it's went through. And I mean, it's been through so many different, you know,
Paul Potratz: programs to run it. But when I, you know, I, finally, you know, said, all right, I'm going to start my ad agency. I had an email database of like 275. And some of those email addresses were still Juno. I don't know if you remember that.
Paul Potratz: But so I had 275 email addresses and I started emailing that database when I started rolling out my video series to the point now that we built it and built it and built it that were, you know,
Paul Potratz: over 211,000 contacts. But I can pull out my CRM and I can see where people are located. I can see what part of the world they're in, where are they engaging with the content and so on and so forth. And again, we talked about this offline.
Paul Potratz: But doing that, that CRM and by me out there making noise has given me the opportunity to where I've been to Paris, France, I've been to, you know, Denmark, I've been to Germany, I've been to Australia, you know, I've been to Puerto Rico,
Paul Potratz: I've been all through Canada, and I go there and I speak. And that's because of that CRM and working that CRM. Yeah, and by working that CRM, you mean just tickling that thought.
Paul Potratz: every X amount of time and sending emails to people to say, hey, you know, here's something that's, I found that's interesting for you or, you know, thanks for sharing this or that. Here's
Paul Potratz: something else. Is that what you're saying by working your serial? Yeah. Well, you know, I would always try to come up with creative ways. Like when I was the radio sales guy, what
Paul Potratz: I would do is, you know, I had the CRM. Of course, there was a lot of fax numbers in there at that time. And I used to do a fax blast. And it would come out. It would start on Friday evening and go all through the weekend because the
Filip Valica: database that just kept on growing and growing and growing. And I would do what's called the Monday morning memo. So they would show up and somewhere, it was on some fax machines and I know that's old school. And it was in some people's email accounts. And my Monday morning memo was just where I would
Filip Valica: write a story. And it could be a story about anything. It could be a story about something my dog did.
Paul Potratz: It could be a story about, you know, my perspective on life and happiness or whatever it might be. It wasn't a sales pitch. It was just a story. Well, at the end it would be a sales pitch. And it's like, hey, if you enjoyed my story, you know, be sure and give me a call so we can talk about your marketing,
Paul Potratz: advertising, whatever it was. And so I could feed my dog. And, you know, so they would, people got used to having that to the point now. I mean, you know, years ago, that's where I started doing my video podcast, Think Tank Tuesday.
Paul Potratz: And it happens every Tuesday. And it, it's regardless. I mean,
Paul Potratz: every single Tuesday. And it's happened for years, whether I'm doing it or if I have one of, you know, coworkers do it but people expect to receive it and I have a very so it's every week and my unsubscribes
Paul Potratz: is extremely low and there's a lot of people that will share it and a lot of you know every week I'm getting more and more and more sign-ups so do something that's going to help the person when you're working that CRM instead of making it a sales pitch make it where it's a resource
Paul Potratz: where they're going to they're going to look forward to it coming and they're going to open it up whether it's a video, whether it's just an email, whatever it might be. And then you can see how they're in, you know, you can get more advanced as you move on.
Paul Potratz: You know, you can use something like MailChimp, which has a CRM in it and also watches the behavior when they come to your website. So now you can start reaching out to those individuals when they come to your website and have a conversation with them. Yeah. So that's interesting that you say that because,
Paul Potratz: so you were one of the original newsletter senders. Yeah. Fax blasters, fax spammers, whatever you want to call it. Speaking about that outdated technology, what do you think that works today that didn't before or the other way around?
Paul Potratz: What has maybe worked before that doesn't today? And for everyone listening, we're recording this at the end of 2016. So keep that in mind. Yeah, exactly.
Paul Potratz: If we have people that are listening right now and if they're old school marketers, meaning radio, TV, or newspaper, think about that form of advertising. That form of advertising is an interruption. advertising you've got to do whatever you can do to get their attention in the first three seconds
Filip Valica: so that's that type of advertising but a lot of times what happens is when individuals start you know into
Paul Potratz: new media meaning your website your email marketing your social media post you know those type of things there's still a lot of individuals that are trying to be an announcer trying to announce and trying to
Filip Valica: spam and grab somebody's attention. You need to turn that around and think about what the internet is. The internet, we call it the information super highway. Thank goodness to Al Gore, right? And so if
Filip Valica: it's the information super highway, I mean, how do we use that tool? And if we're going on, when we go online, we're going to research. We're going to find out more information. We're not going to be sold. We're going to be educated. So that's what you need to do on your website. You need
Filip Valica: to educate on the website. On Facebook, we're going to be engaged. We want interesting stories. I mean, so many times you see businesses out there that, you know, they'll have a customer that will do a purchase and they'll take a picture of that customer and go, oh, look, you know,
Filip Valica: Mary Jane and, you know, Jack just purchased blank.
Paul Potratz: And they don't even tag the couple.
Paul Potratz: You know, they haven't even connected with them and tagged them so all their friends and family can see it. Instead, turn that around. A, tag them so their friends and family can see it and tell a story.
Paul Potratz: story. Why did they buy from you? How did you fix a problem? I mean, about them tell the story, though. And then you go to Instagram. Why do we go to Instagram? We go there to see really cool pictures. And so many times I go to Instagram and I'm like, really? What were they thinking? Why did they post a picture of that? That's a picture
Paul Potratz: like what I would see in the newspaper. So get creative with your pictures. Get creative with your storylines.
Paul Potratz: And, you know, the truth of it, the truth of it all is you've got to use a lot of different platforms to reach people because that's how you create frequency. It's not frequency. the way it used to be, oh, I'm going to run a frequency of three on TV or a frequency of three
Paul Potratz: on radio. Now, you've got to hit people on a lot of different platforms. It's a lot of work.
Paul Potratz: But, you know, the cost is time. It's not necessarily money as much. You mentioned frequency of three. You mean people saw that particular ad three times.
Filip Valica: Yeah, and that's old school thinking because it's kind of interesting. Five years ago, if you were doing radio or TV, you would say, oh, get a frequency of three, But we're getting bombarded with so many ads now for you to cut through the clutter. You've got to hit a frequency of 21.
Filip Valica: Who can afford that now? Yeah. Even on Facebook, the natural organic stuff that used to get eyeballs doesn't anymore.
Filip Valica: You know, Facebook has been prioritizing live video, then recorded video, then photo posts, for example, and then text posts and then maybe links last, depending on what your friends engage in, or at least that's been my experience. Yeah, mine too.
Paul Potratz: It's been frustrating because really what Facebook has turned into, for me anyway, it's been a way for me to connect to my target audience if I want to have conversations with them
Paul Potratz: and maybe to do some targeted advertising. But in terms of a publishing platform or a place where I can put articles or content and get feedback that way, it just hasn't been there for me. Yeah, well, they're forcing you.
Paul Potratz: You have to spend money now. Well, one of the things that we do, like with our, you know, and what we'll do like where you and I did the podcast is when we do what's called custom audiences.
Paul Potratz: So with a custom audience, you take your email database, hence another reason you want to build a CRM, you take that email database and why you want to have those mobile numbers in there. You go into Facebook, you can upload it in the back, you create a custom audience.
Paul Potratz: It will try to find those individuals based on their email address and their mobile number. So now all those individuals that are in your database will see your social media post that you put into a custom audience. audience and you boosted it. And then you can do what's called a look-like audience too.
Paul Potratz: So you're targeting your your custom audience of people that in your database that are your target market that have shown interest, expressed interest, downloaded white papers off your website or product guides or whatever it might be.
Filip Valica: And it will go out and say, okay, well, if these, what are other individuals like these have the same interests, the same hobbies, the same profiles, the same income, so on and so forth. So that's a great way to increase your audience and your reach. And it's right now, it's still pretty low cost.
Paul Potratz: Yeah, it definitely depends on the audience size. So taking back a step, I think we mentioned installing the Facebook tracking pixel. Definitely do that if you haven't already because it's going to take days to get all that data. The reason for that is because Facebook wants to anonymize the data that's coming back.
Paul Potratz: And so it needs a certain amount of data before it can show you that custom audience that you've created. When I've tried to extrapolate that audience out and target all visitors of my site within 90 days and create a look-like audience from that,
Paul Potratz: the audience just ends up being massive. And I find that my ads are way less effective than a really targeted audience in a certain area. How would you chop that up so it's getting more bang for the buck?
Paul Potratz: So what I've done is back into my CRM again. So I look into my CRM and where are we having the best, you know, really, I guess the best interaction, the best engagement and what part of the country? Is there a city? Is there a state? Is there a country?
Paul Potratz: And does that match up where we're trying to sell, where we're trying to promote? Maybe we won't have a conference there or whatever it might be. So based on that information, so that helps us bring the audience down. So it's not, oh, look, we're targeting, you know, 2 million people instead.
Paul Potratz: We're targeting a much more specific audience. And then you constantly have to be doing different ads and testing, testing, testing,
Filip Valica: and see which ones are going to get the highest engagement. But then I would also supplement that with Facebook live videos. that's been pretty successful for a number of our clients.
Paul Potratz: I need to do a better job of it. But in Facebook Live videos, it's coming really fast that you're going to be able to do ads within the Facebook Live video too. But at Facebook Live, it's free. Why not use it? I mean,
Paul Potratz: we used to use the pitch so many times when I sold radio and TV. It's like, let me tell you how our audience is. We've got X number of people in our audience. And if I could give you a megaphone
Filip Valica: and you could stand in the middle of the Coliseum and you could tell everybody about your business to, you know, 2,000 people, would you do it? And they're like, oh, yeah, I would do it. Well, that's what you can do with Facebook Live. Yeah, if you're connected to the right people, I suppose,
Filip Valica: or how does that work? It's basically your friends see that notification because I'm always notified of people going live on my feed. I think it's just people that I follow or pages that I subscribe to or who sees that feed. It's supposed to be individuals that you're connected with,
Filip Valica: So your friends that you're connected with is what it's supposed to be. But, you know, it's interesting, though, there's been, well, every time that I go and do a Facebook live video,
Filip Valica: there's people that come in and start watching the video that I'm not even connected to.
Filip Valica: So how they're seeing it, I don't really know. But it's like Grant and I, we were talking about this because we've done conferences and everything. And his philosophy is just throw it all against the wall. It's free.
Filip Valica: you doing it for example right now you know because i've got a podcast coming up with him there's no doubt he's going to have a camera running he's going to have you know instagram video running he's going to have facebook live running he's going to have everything every social site he can have running
Filip Valica: focused on when we're doing the podcast to increase his audience yeah just be everywhere everywhere and i mean he's to the point that people like oh man i'm so tired to seeing him but he just
Filip Valica: and but i don't know what's wrong with me my hesitation because really i'm introvert, I'm shy,
Filip Valica: but, you know, and that's what we need to do as business owners is create a mass, just a massive amount of noise, but you want to make sure that that noise,
Filip Valica: as much as possible, is a resource, is a benefit to the people watching it, that they're like, oh, that's good information.
Filip Valica: Excellent tips, Paul. We're nearing the end of the show here, so could you tell everybody how they could find you and get more information about your podcast and your business? Sure.
Filip Valica: So I'll give them probably the easiest way is just to do a search for me, my first name Paul and the last name, POTRATs, which if you spell pot rats and put a Z on the end, you'll have it, which is P-O-T, R-A-T-Z.
Filip Valica: So I just do that search, and then you'll find the, you know, or my website go there, check it out, or social media of choice because I am a social media prostitute the best I can be. Awesome. I appreciate it. Thanks, Phil. Thank you very much, sir.
Filip Valica: here are three takeaways that we can apply to our businesses number one benefits versus features and specifications so oftentimes we're neck deep in our businesses and we talk to friends spouses
Filip Valica: other family members and have code about some specific detail of our products it's really easy to get lost in the specifications and we talk about all the ingredients how the sausage is made and
Paul Potratz: not really how it tastes i need to make a conscious effort to switch gears when i talk to potential customers about my products and services and I really need to make sure that I lead with the benefit to that person or company. How will this product save them more time or money or bring them more
Paul Potratz: joy to their life? What urgent need am I solving? This is really how we should be leading conversations with our target market. Number two, DIY validation. As Paul illustrated, it's technically not
Paul Potratz: difficult to get feedback on our product ideas and get the word out about our business, even on a minimal budget. We can strike up conversations with our target market and get their thoughts without asking leading questions. I do this as much as I can on the product startup and the emails and
Paul Potratz: Skype calls I've had with many of you shaped how this show sounds today. It's the same with my product on Amazon. I use a service to send an email to customers one of my product ships and I follow up after
Paul Potratz: receipt of delivery. Even with some tweaks I get maybe 10 emails a week on 200 orders. But I know I wouldn't be able to improve on the design of the product otherwise, there's just no way to get that info without speaking to customers directly. It's definitely worth the time and effort to parse through
Paul Potratz: the noise. We just have to sit down and do it. Number three, you can't please everyone. Pick the one-third of your audience that makes you happy and push forward. We all know that if we take a stance
Paul Potratz: on something, chances are some people won't agree with it. Product design is really no different. We're putting our opinion, our view of the solution out there. And from where I'm sitting, building a business is hard
Paul Potratz: so I don't want to overcomplicate my life by working with people who don't appreciate what I'm putting out or even worse, turning into someone that I'm not and forcing myself to keep up appearances.
Paul Potratz: I love the classic Churchill quote, you have enemies. Good. That means you've stood up for something sometime in your life. So if you've got any questions or comments, I've put all the links that we've covered under the show notes posted on the product startup.com slash 35.
Filip Valica: Join me next week as I speak with Gavin Christman. He's the co-founder of Green and Blue at Product Design Company based in Southwest England. Green and Blue creates a beautiful range of innovative award-winning products for wildlife and nature,
Filip Valica: and we're going to take a closer look at their work in ceramics and concrete. So tune in next week to hear that episode. Have you brought your own physical product to market or do you know someone that has? Let me know. Drop me a note by going to the product startup.com
Filip Valica: or emailing me at philipat the product startup.com. I'd love to have you on the show. So thanks again for joining me today, and I'll see you next week.
Filip Valica: Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Product Startup Podcast, the show that teaches you what it really takes to bring your product to market and turn it into a big success. This podcast series is brought to you by Mako Design + Invent, the first firm in North America
Filip Valica: to provide global caliber end-to-end physical consumer product development to startups, inventors, and small product businesses. If you're looking for product development help on your invention, head over to macawdesign.com.
Filip Valica: That's m-a-k-o-design.com for a free consultation from one of Mako-design's four design studios from coast to coast. Thanks for listening and see you next time.
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