Fed Up?
Why it's time you got off your ass and started building your empire.
Here's a question for you. Are you fed up?
Fed up with "the way things have always been"?
Fed up with "how we do things around here"?
Fed up with only marginally improved results, year after year?
Fed up with being told, "No one would buy that"?
Fed up with playing it "safe" and falling further and further behind?
Fed up with barely or not even keeping up with inflation?
Fed up with not being taken seriously?
Fed up with being undermined at every turn?
If so, you, my friend, are ready to become an insurgent.
10,000 Fans
I have some good news for you, but it's going to sound like harsh medicine: The problem isn't everyone else. It's you.
You're the one choosing to listen to those voices. You're the one accepting the wages being offered. You're the one burning all your energy and capital to please anyone and everyone other than yourself.
Knock it off.
The only thing you need to become financially independent is 10,000 fans. It's not that much, in the grand scheme of things.
Let's break it down:
There are roughly 8 billion people on the planet.
If you can come up with SOMETHING that just 0.00000125%, or 1 out of every 800,000, finds appealing, you'll have 10,000 fans.
If you can get 10% (1,000 Fans) of them to give you $5 a month, you'll have $60k per year.
Convince 1% (100 Fans) of them to pay you $50 a month, and you'll be up to $120k per year.
Convince another 0.1% (10 Fans) to pay you $500 a month, and you'll be raking in $180k per year, putting you in the top 10% of earners on the planet.
Bonus: No one can fire you.
So that's the simple math. But what are you going to offer them?
Passion and Expertise
Nothing is as attractive to another human being as self-confidence. We're pulled to it like a magnet because we want some of it for ourselves. And nothing oozes self-confidence like passion and sharing your expertise.
This can take a few different forms. Let's start with the simplest example.
Newsletters
It seems appropriate to kick off this newsletter by blatantly explaining my entire business model. If you follow along, you'll be able to see whether I know what I'm talking about by seeing whether or not I'm able to make my dreams a reality.
Following the math above, my plan is to:
Attract 10,000 fans who will sign-up to my free newsletter. (You're reading it right now. Care to sign-up?)
Convert 10% of those sign-ups to pay a mere $5 a month for enhanced content, like how-to guides, ebooks, reports, etc. If I hit my goal, I should have 1,000 paying subscribers.
Convert 1% of my sign-ups (or 10% of my paid subscribers) to a $50/month membership plan, giving access to chat and daily office hours, where I'll be offering my expertise at no extra charge to anyone who shows up. 1% = 100 members.
Finally, convert 0.1% of my subscribers (or 10% of my members) to becoming clients of Insurgent Marketing on a retainer of just $500/month. 0.1% = 10 clients.
To be clear, at the time of this writing, I haven't launched the newsletter yet. So my subscriber base on Day 0 is... 0. But my goal is to reach the targets above within a year.
Does this approach work for other types of businesses? You better believe it.
E-Commerce
Let's say you sell an assortment of products online. If I were looking to increase my sales by $180k/year, I would:
Create content that attracts 10,000 people to subscribe to my Deals and Hot Items newsletter.
Every month, I would aim to sell something for which I make a $5 profit to 1,000 people. Maybe it's a $15 t-shirt that costs $10 to produce and ship. (I might even offer a t-shirt subscription service.)
Every month, I would aim to sell 100 people an item with a profit margin of $50 per item. Maybe it's a $100 pair shoes.
I would aim to attract just 10 people who are such die hard fans that their monthly purchases tally up to $500 per month.
The math works out the same:
Everybody wants the die-hard shoppers, but by focusing on the bulk of people who won't buy -- the cheapskates -- you ironically will find yourself catching more of the small, medium, and large-scale customers.
Food & Beverage
OK, so you have a business that requires items to be delivered fresh. You can't ship all over the world. Does this model still work? You bet your ass it does.
Create a (you guessed it) newsletter where you give away your recipes and kitchen secrets. Attract 10,000 foodies.
Convert 1,000 of them to treat themselves a couple of times a month to a $5 treat, where your margin per treat is 50%. (i.e. to spend $10 with you per month, where you get to keep $5.)
Convert a mere 100 of them to make a more significant purchase, or to keep coming back several times a week, so that your profit on each of them is around $100.
Sell just 10 catering or large-group reservations per month, for $1,000 per booking, and keep $500 as profit.
That doesn't seem so difficult, does it? It's hardly anything to write home about. But once again, the math works out:
Attracting Customers vs Finding Customers
Here's why it's so hard for people to find 10,000 fans: They're impossible to find.
Imagine a haystack with 8 billion hay straws, and your job is to find 10,000 needles in it. What's the best way to do it?
One way is to painstakingly sift through the entire haystack looking for needles. In all likelihood, you'll find a few, but you won't find all 10,000. It's too difficult.
Now imagine passing over the stack with a giant magnet, and seeing those needles come to you.
Which sounds easier?
Conventional marketing theory these days tells you that you need to use massive amounts of data to find and target your ideal customer. The problem with this is that people are complex. The more you try to define your customer, the more of them you're going to miss.
Take, for example, my day job at Legend Boats. We do a lot of targeted advertising, but we also do a lot of content marketing. And there's a reason for that.
The typical boat buyer in Canada is a Caucasian male in his 40s or 50s. He's married. Commonly blue collar.
If we relied on those demographic characteristics to find our customers, we'd never sell a boat to anyone under 40. We'd never sell to women. Or people of colour. Or single people. Or office workers.
It turns out that when you try to define your typical buyer, you end up with a description that most of your customers do not actually match. They may match aspects of it, but not all of it.
So as you try and hyper-target your advertising based on all this data, you'll get a handful of people who are a perfect match and desperately want what you're selling, but you're missing the other 99% of potential buyers.
This is like sifting through the haystack, searching for 10,000 needles, but settling for a mere 100.
The other option is to attract them.
Here's a little secret: If you sell something that solves a real problem, and you create a website that helps people solve that problem better than any other website out there, your customers will find you.
You don't need to know anything more about them. You don't need to care about their age, gender, occupation, income, relationship status, how many kids they may or may not have. None of that matters.
Just solve the damn problem, and create great content showing how you solve the problem, and before you know it, they'll find you.
A rant about "content marketing"
Few terms get me worked up as much as "content marketing", and I'll tell you why. People think content is a shortcut. It's not.
Content can never be better than the product/solution it promotes. If you sell a crappy product, I can write incredible content about it, and I can get people to buy it. Once.
The problem is they'll never buy from you again. They'll never trust your content again. And they'll tell everyone, because someone like me wrote this incredibly promising content, and you let them down.
Do NOT do that.
First, solve real problems. Solve them better than anyone else. Then, and ONLY then, should you tell the world about it. Great marketing can make or break a product. It'll help a great product to succeed faster. It will equally help a bad product to fail faster.
How do I find a problem I can solve better than anyone else?
This is where you're probably hoping for a formula for success. A trick for finding all the unsolved problems in the world.
The trick is to lean into your passions. Everyone is passionate about something. When you're passionate, you develop expertise. And as you develop expertise, you start to see the cracks. The things everyone else is missing. The gaps in the market.
Big businesses can afford to pay research consultants to find those gaps for them. And sometimes they can adequately service those gaps.
But you and I don't have the time or money for that.
Rely on yourself as a focus group of 1. What do you know better than anyone? Or, what can you pursue with enough passion to become such an expert?
It can be almost anything. Maybe you're into poker. Or baking. Or building things with wood pallets. Or hamster grooming. I don't care what it is: There are at least 10,000 people on the planet interested in the thing you care so much about.
Your job is to lean into that. Ignore everyone that says "There's no market for that". They're bad at math. When you only need 1/800,000th of the population to pay attention, there's room for every idea. As long as it's good. As long as it solves a real problem.
There's no room for 2nd best, which is why you need to focus. Be the best in the world at something, even a small thing, and you'll find the world comes beating down on your door.