T R A N S C R I PT Customer mind reading A few years ago, we set out to create a new product, and the original idea was to make a product showing students how to earn a couple of extra hundred bucks quickly and easily using Airbnb, Fiverr, Upwork, Mechanical Turk, Craigslist, Uber, etc. Six months later, here’s what we actually launched. Notice anything different? Yeah, I do. This is completely different from our original idea. Instead of side hustles, it turned out to be a prod- uct on advanced personal finance. Instead of targeting a massive market of people interested in earning more, we decided to target a super niche group of top performers. And instead of $500, this product now costs $1,000. This product beat our projections and earned over half a million dollars on its first launch. In hindsight, if we had launched the original side hustle idea, we now think that it would have flopped. So in this video, I’m going to walk you through our secret for going from nice-to-have, mediocre products to “oh my god, I need to buy this right now” products that will fuel your busi- ness for years to come. Let’s start by taking another look at that sales page. Now, there’s a lot going on here. But see if anything stands out to you. What stands out to me is all the quotes and real language that we use. Look at these phrases: How to win the game of advanced personal finance. What do mil- lionaires know that other people don’t? And why do I feel like I’m missing something? This copy is so good that we can charge $1,000 for a personal finance product to a hyper niche advanced audience when many others struggle to sell a $10 ebook. So what’s the secret here? Well, we did something that very few of our competitors did. We went out and we talked to real customers and we talked to a lot of them. In fact, every single word you see here came straight from customer research. For example, look at the name, “How to win the game of advanced personal finance.” We didn’t come up with that idea. It’s actually not my first choice. Instead, it was inspired by this exact quote from an email that we received: “After reading your email, I thought, ‘have I finished the game? Are there only 10 levels to this financial role-playing game?’ Max your match, max your Roth, reduce your debt, etc.” Or what about this question? “What’s next?” You can see it’s in the first part of the sales page twice. That came directly from a survey where one of our readers said, “People who bought the book in 2009 should be ready for the next step by now. What now?” We heard this phrasing over and over and we never would have thought of it ourselves. Same goes for the phrase, “I checked all the boxes.” That, too, came from a direct quote from a customer research call with one of our readers where she said, “We checked the boxes. We have no debt. We maxed out our 401Ks pre and post-tax. Now what?” Talking to real customers is the lifeblood of our business. And these insights that I get from these conversations are what allow us to create amazing products that earn us millions of dollars in revenue each year. When you can get deeply in the minds of your customers, you can create exactly what they need, exactly how they expect it, and position it in a way that deeply resonates with them so they buy it and apply it. If you followed IWT for any amount of time, you know that I’m obsessed with getting deep into the minds of my customers. I talked to them via email. Even though I have hundreds of thou- sands of email subscribers, I still read every response. I talk to them via Instagram DM. I talk to my friends over drinks if we’re considering creating something, because I want to bring up these juicy topics and see what they think about. And I want to know, what are the biggest challenges they face? More importantly, what are the words they use to describe them? For example, very few people would actually say, “I’m unsure of what to do next.” What would they actually say? They’d prob- ably say something like, “I don’t have the time.” Very few people would say, “That’s just not a priority for me.” Instead, they would actually say, “Yeah, I really should do that one of these days. Those simple distinctions, what they would actually say versus what you think they would say, can be the difference between five sales or 5,000 sales. I call this playing detective. It’s kind of like hiring a private investigator to go out and learn everything they can about your target mar- ket so you can create exactly what they want and need. The only difference is, you don’t need to hire a PI. You need to do it. And that’s what we’re going to teach you. Now remember that most business owners don’t do this. A lot of them are obsessed with opti- mizing their landing pages and Facebook ads and tinkering with analytics. You know what the thing they’re missing is? The people. When it comes to a new product, I spend 60 to 80 percent of my time studying real people, and for the advanced personal finance product that I showed you earlier, my team and I interviewed over 25 people. We analyzed hundreds of survey respons- es, and we actually beta tested the material with a small group of potential customers. So by the time we sat down to build the product, we weren’t wondering about whether it would be an ebook or a video course or if we should charge $400 or $4,000. Frankly, those are all trivialities, once you understand the customer. Once you’ve become immersed with your customer, then you can articulate their problems bet- ter than even they can. And at that point, you earn their trust and you earn their business. So if you’ve already landed a customer, you’re way ahead of the game. You already have a real person to work with to understand the real problems and the real language they use to describe them. Unlike other parts of growing your business, that can be really tactical. This one is going to be different. This one’s going to be playful, creative. It’s going to be organic. And truthfully, that makes it hard for a lot of people. A lot of people want me to sit here and say, “OK. Open up Excel, cell D6 to E4. Subtract two. And that’s the answer.” That’s not how this works. OK? This is organic. It’s going to take a little bit of playfulness. You’re actually going to have to inter- act with real people, not your stupid Excel model. Trust me, it’s way worth it. Because once you put yourself in this playful sort of approach, this approach where you’re listening to people, you’re talking to them, you’re having real conversations, you’re saying, “Wait, you know, you said that that’s really important to you. But I noticed that you haven’t done that. Tell me a little bit about that.” Suddenly, this whole world of what people say versus what they do is going to open up. As you can tell, just from the look on my face, I love this stuff. And I love doing it. I also love teaching it. I love it because it shows us how complex and multidimensional people are. And when you learn this, then suddenly your business will start to grow and grow and grow. See, we obscure what we really mean. We hide it. We shade it. We obfuscate it. So you as a business owner, you get to dive deep to understand it. You’re just playing. And that’s what we’re gonna do here. We’re gonna play. And we’re gonna see how the pieces fit together. When you do, when you start to understand people, you’re going to essentially crack the code. That’s when your busi- ness is going to really start to grow. So how do you get deeply in the minds of your customer? Well, let’s walk through it with an example. Let’s pretend I’m just starting out researching our personal finance product. Well, I would start with the low-hanging fruit. I’d say, “What do these people read?” So we start on Google and we just search for personal finance. I see a bunch of different articles and sites and I start to say, “Oh, wow, there’s a lot of different people here.” There’s people in debt. There’s people interested in investing. There’s people talking about cryptocurrency — people who will soon lose all their money. There’s the “financial independence, retire early” community. There’s all kinds of different stuff. So I’m just making notes of this. And now I’m starting to get a basic sense of the different categories of people in this space. This should take you just a few hours, maybe a day or so, to get the lay of the land. Next thing I do is I go to Amazon. Amazon reviews are a goldmine of information about your product. People are gonna say, “This book was amazing because of X, Y, Z,” which I’m writing down. OK. People like that. “But I really wish this book had included A, B, C, which this other book included.” Mm. Okay. Interesting. I’m analyzing, also, how these products are marketed. For example, here are some real notes we took on the Tony Robbins book, Unshakeable: “It’s in- teresting how this book is framed as a step-by-step playbook for financial freedom.” I’m writing that down. Oh, people, do they like freedom? I don’t know, we’ll find out. Next, I’m going to forums. You can find a lot of fascinating information in forums because peo- ple build these communities where they really share openly what their hopes, fears and dreams are. For example, check out this Reddit thread entitled “What is a good subReddit for advanced personal finances, but not necessarily F.I.R.E.?” Now because I understand what F.I.R.E. is, I’m really interested in this question. This is a market I hadn’t seen before in my earlier Google search. Almost all of the advanced material in the market seems to focus on retiring early, but that’s not a good fit for everyone. So I write this down as a potential market. Here’s another thread we uncovered: “Still feel guilty about spending money even when I’ve achieved saving over 50 percent of post-tax income.” This turned out to be a huge problem for people in this market. Now check out what we included in the final sales page. Look familiar? Yeah. Alright, I’ve looked at websites, forums, Reddit, Amazon reviews. I’m starting to get a better sense of what people are talking about and what’s on their mind. I’m also seeing how potential competitors talk about it. At this stage I’ve got a document full of interesting quotes and phrases that I’ve found. It’s just a messy Google Doc. It’s got links and comments and rough ideas. It’s not organized. It’s creative. I’m not worried about quantifying things, not at all. I’m just looking for phrases and ideas. I’m looking for mindsets in this customer market, nothing too heavy. Just keeping an eye on what’s out there. Sometimes at this stage, I like to summarize my thoughts with an initial thesis of what the product could look like. Here’s an example. This is an early draft of the target market for the ad- vanced personal finance product: “People who have mastered the basics of personal finance and are now facing new challenges not covered by basic personal finance advice.” It’s not perfect yet, but there’s something interesting about it. At this stage, you should also have a list of things you are not going to pursue. This is where we scrapped our idea for creating that side hustle, Uber, Airbnb thing. We Googled around, we sent out a survey. We realized pretty quickly that the market was relatively low quality — would not be willing to spend $500 for a product that paid ‘em $10 for driving Uber. And if we can’t find it during research, how are we going to find it during sales? So we scrapped it. So let’s talk about the next step, which I highly recommend if you’re going to want to build a profitable business. And that is to get out and talk to real people. A lot of people don’t like to do this, because it’s easier to sit behind your screen and Google around. But the most powerful and profitable thing you can do is actually get up, get out of your chair, get out of your house or apartment, and go talk to people in your real market. We’ll show you how to do this in this playbook. Simple way to do this, reach out to someone you’ve got in your life (your friend, cousin, cowork- er) and ask them a few targeted questions. I have an example. I have a friend who’s become a very successful fitness coach, and she actually started after she lost a lot of weight after having two kids. All of her friends were young mothers. So they looked at her and they’re like, “How’d you do that? You look amazing.” They even said things like, “God, I hate you. You look incredi- ble.” What a fascinating phrase: “I hate you. You look incredible.” So emotionally evocative. You know something’s going on there. So she started to write these phrases down as part of her research. She actually took some of her friends out to lunch and just asked them questions about fitness. She’s not trying to sell anything. She’s not trying to trick anybody. She’s just listening. And here’s what she heard. She heard them saying things like, “I’m so frustrated. I just want to get back to how I used to look before having kids. I don’t know what to do.” So she was noting all these things down. She didn’t necessarily have to be sitting there with a formal notepad, formally interviewing her friend, but she’s just remembering them. And when she went home, she might write them down. After a while, she learned about some very subtle things that her friends said, and she would only have known this if she talked to people in person. So I can’t emphasize this enough. If you’re deciding to go after a certain market, you probably have a few friends in it, or acquaintances. Just go out and ask ‘em a few questions like, “Hey, have you thought about this? Is this something that’s on your mind? How do you think about this?” And if you do this with open innocence and curiosity, I’ve found that most people will actually be happy to share their thoughts with you, especially when they know that you don’t have some agenda. You’re just going to say, “Hey, I’m thinking about something like this. I noticed that this is what happened to me. And I’m curious how you think about this. How have you approached it?” You will find that people will be super responsive. When we did this with our advanced personal finance product, all of these ideas came up that we never would have thought of. For example, people kept saying things like, “What’s the goal?” Or, “What should I do now?” At first we dis- missed that, but after people said, “what’s next?” 500 times, then we put that front and center on our sales page, twice. Or, we noticed that almost all of our competitors talk about financial freedom and retiring early. But when we talk to real people, they say things like, “I could try to be financially independent by 53 and retire by 55, but I love work. So why would I?” Or some of them said, “A lot of the ad- vanced stuff, financial independence, retired by 35, doesn’t really seem applicable to me. I like the idea, but I don’t want to be a hyper-frugal person.” One person said, “Living on 20 percent of my annual income would require so many dramatic cuts that it’s like what’s the point of doing this?” So now we really started to lean in, listen, and it uncovered an entirely new positioning angle for our products, one that we talk about on our sales page. And that is a very powerful concept that I wouldn’t have thought about highlighting myself. So if you can do this, if you can step away from your computer, reach out to real people, that is when you can discover these breakthrough insights. The goal here is to build massively valuable products that are going to stand the test of time. That is why we’re doing this. So, what I want you to do is start off by going out and doing just a little bit of research: What does my market look like? Where do they hang out? What are my competitors talking about? And what are they not talking about? What do the Amazon reviews say? What blogs are people reading? Keep a running document of everything interesting you see. Whatever you do, don’t paraphrase and don’t summarize. I want you to write down the exact phrases people use, so that eventually, you might be able to put those directly into your market- ing copy just like we did with this product. Again, you’re not trying to summarize. You’re trying to stay as close to real words as possible. So I’d recommend spending a few hours this week. Try to immerse yourself, play this game of detective and actually realize that it never stops. Once you put on your detective hat, you kind of start to see the world in a totally different way. That’s what I do. That’s why I’m always digging in and sniffing around like a hound dog and trying to find out what people really want as opposed to what they say they want. That is when you get the chance to dig in deeper to your customers’ psychology When they talk to you, when you’re working with them, when they buy one of your products, even when you’re talking to your friends at lunch, you’re just listening. I can tell you, I’ve been in business for over 15 years and I am still having these conversations every day. And that is how we build products that stand the test of time.