943 – Do your homework first: Tom talks How CSI Hurts You

SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

Main Idea:
Tom redefines "CSI" as "Crappy, Stupid Idea" and explains how to validate business ideas before investing heavily, ensuring higher chances of success and avoiding financial disasters.

Key Takeaways:
1. All Ideas Start as "CSI":
Every idea, including Tom's, starts as a "Crappy, Stupid Idea" until proven viable. Validation with real data is crucial before committing resources.
2. Steps to Validate a Business Idea:
o Keyword Research:
Check if there’s market interest using tools and strategies discussed in episodes 1 and 130.
o Competitive Analysis:
Analyze existing products, their longevity, and pricing. If an industry is crowded, it often signals a profitable market.
o Surveys:
Use targeted surveys without offering incentives to gather honest feedback from people genuinely interested in your idea. Avoid relying on friends and family for feedback, as biases (both positive and negative) can skew results.
3. Prototype and Testing:
o Start small with a prototype or MVP (Minimum Viable Product).
o Focus on digital products or services initially for high profit margins and lower risk.
o Use customer feedback to refine your product or service.
4. Publicity and Marketing:
o Generate publicity for unique ideas, as exemplified by the Frisbee’s marketing story.
o Learn to pitch to journalists or leverage word-of-mouth for exposure.
5. Frugality is Key:
o Keep expenses low when starting out. Avoid luxuries like elaborate office setups to maximize resources for growth.

Additional Resources:
• Training Episodes: Access over 400 free training episodes here.
• Mentor Program: GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com.
• Online School: Learn high-demand digital skills at IMTCVA.org.

Closing Thoughts:
Tom emphasizes using a systematic approach to turn a "CSI" into a successful business, reducing financial risk while increasing the chances of success.

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Episode 943 – How CSI Hurts You
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody! It's Tom here with episode 943 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, I'm going to show you how CSI is hurting you. What's CSI? Well, I'll tell you in a minute. It's not what you think it is. All right. Hope you didn't miss episode 942. That was on branding. Pros and cons. I don't want you branding yourself into the poorhouse. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, and then the episode number. Hey, if you like our training episodes as opposed to our interview episodes, which are also great, you learn a lot from them, but we have all the training episodes at screwthecommute/training. I think there's well over 400 of them. It's a million bucks worth of free training, so check it out. screwthecommute.com/training and then also screwthecommute.com/automatefree if you really want to automate your business so you aren't wasting time on stuff. You have time to do the stuff you want to do. And also check out our mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com and our school at IMTCVA.org

[00:01:34] All right. Do you remember the TV show CSI Crime Scene Investigation? Well, that's not what this show is about. Or this episode is about CSI to me. To me means crappy, stupid idea, all right? And all ideas are crappy and stupid, including my own. All right. I'm including myself in this deal. They're all crappy and stupid. Unless you can prove they aren't with real numbers before you dump a lot of money into something. Wouldn't it be nice to know if it even has a chance of success? So the question comes up is how do you get those numbers? Well, the first thing is like the first episode of this whole podcast years ago, screwthecommute/1. And also updated at screwthecommute.com/130 its keyword research. See if there's a market, if there's enough people out there interested in your topic and what you have or what you want to have. And here's the other thing that people mess up really bad. They say, oh, well, there's already tons of products in this arena. Well, and they say, well, I can't really compete. No that's crazy. That's backwards. My next part of this how do you get those numbers is called competitive analysis. You look for other products in your field and their prices and how long they've been there and all that stuff. And if there's loads of products in that industry, guess what? People are spending money in that industry. If you can't find any products in your industry, it's one of two results. One, you just hit the lottery.

[00:03:28] In other words, you're going to clean up and sell gazillions of stuff. But most likely it's nobody could make any money in that industry. So that's why there's no products. So the first thing you do is keyword research. Number episode one is the overview. Episode 130 is the adjustments for voice search. Because people don't search on their cell phones and tablets like they do on their keyboards. So that's your first thing. Screwthecommute.com/1. Screwthecommute.com/130. See if there's people out there interested in what you got. That's the first thing. Then the second thing is the competitive analysis. You go out and search for products and services in that industry and see what their price range is whenever you can. Sometimes they hide it, and if they're hiding it, you know, it's really hot. That's my rule of thumb and see how long it's been up. Use the Wayback Machine, which is an archive of websites way, way back into the 90s. All right. So so you can do that. Then you want to survey a bunch of people in that target market. And I always recommend the book ask by Ryan Levesque l e v e s q u e. And the first part of the book, he's just bragging about how good he is. But the second part is I still use today is to survey people, but don't give them an incentive to fill the survey out because they'll just fill it out without thinking.

[00:05:02] Just to get the incentive or the freebie, you're going to give them to fill it out. So he only gives it to people that are gung ho, that don't want an incentive, that really care about the topic, and then he gets better results. But you say, well, I don't have anybody to survey, right? Well, here's a couple of things. Do you have any connections or influence with the target market? Do you have an email list? Do you know somebody that does have an email list where you could pay for them to send the survey out, or you could trade, you know, something to get them to send the survey out. Then another thing is to use if you have no none of that, you can use pay per click. But again, you've got to really learn what you're doing because you can lose your shirt on pay per click, but you lose. Use pay per click and you target people. You can do that on every platform nowadays. Facebook, Google, you know, you know, every place has pay per click now. So so then you get your survey in front of people. Now here's a warning okay. Don't be tempted to just use your friends and family.

[00:06:17] These are usually a terrible place to get ideas from. And I'll tell you why I always give you the hardcore, blunt answers to these things is. First of all, your friends may not really be technically your friend. They might be an acquaintance. They might be jealous of you and hoping you fail because they're sitting in their cubicle and not trying to do anything good for themselves. So you can't really depend on that. The other side of that coin is they might really be your friend and they love you to death, and they don't want to hurt your feelings, so they aren't going to give you honest feedback. They're going to encourage you, pat you on the back. Oh that's great. I never heard of that. That's wonderful. Well, neither one of those scenarios is worth a damn to you. In fact, both of them will hurt you. Okay, so so friends and family especially are terrible because of those reasons. All right. So then the next thing you do is create a prototype and hopefully you're not doing physical products. That's we I love people to create physical products that I can buy. But do I suggest them to any of my students? No. All right. Now, they might already come to me with something physical they have to sell. And yeah, I can help them.

[00:07:44] But the highest profit, lowest risk of starting somebody out in business is with digital products, say, 97% profit or a service. You know what? You're going to work for something, give them some kind of service. So? So anyway, you got to create some kind of prototype and test it out without spending a fortune. And your idea is to see if anybody will give you any money for this thing. If nobody will. Well, yeah, you did a lot of this research I just told you about, but you saved yourself from major disaster. Okay, so that's that. But if you do get some traction, then you might want to learn how to do publicity. I have an ebook called How to Be a Kick Butt Publicity Hound. It's a little bit old, but still a lot of the same techniques work today of contacting journalists and so forth. So. And what to say to them and how to pitch them and all that stuff. You create your prototype and and there's an old story about the Frisbee. The Frisbee. They didn't have any marketing budget. And so they went to TV stations. This is the story anyway, and started playing with the let the employees play with the Frisbee. And that's what kicked off the Frisbee. All right. So learn how to get publicity, especially if you have something unique and newsworthy.

[00:09:11] And as I always tell people, keep your expenses low. Don't be buying pool tables and massage things for your employees and feeding them all and everything, especially when you're beginning, because you can't afford it and you're reducing your chances of success. So take your CSI, which is your crappy, stupid idea. Just like I have crappy, stupid ideas. And go through this process and you'll have an infinitely greater chance of success, and you're knocking down your chance of a massive disaster, financial loss, and then going back to work for a living instead of having your own business. All right, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. This was episode 943 CSI. And check out my mentor program. GreatinternetmarketingTraining.com is the longest continuously running mentor program ever in this field. Uh, let's see, we've had over 1800, probably pushing 2000. I lost track a long time ago. Students in that. And then of course my school IMTCVA.org Is the best legacy gift you could ever give someone in your life, even yourself. But especially, you know, your children, your grandchildren. Uh, instead of a four year college or in conjunction with a four year college to give them an actual skill that's in super high demand. All right, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. We'll catch you all in the next episode. See you later.