Marilyn Monroe School Of Creating Products

I’m Igor Kheifets and this is The List Building Lifestyle, a podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world and help people improve their lives in the process, then this podcast is for you. I also invite you to attend a free workshop at Igor.ac, where I’m teaching how I made $21,779.25 in affiliate commissions by sending just 481 clicks to my affiliate link in one day.

I’m also explaining why I walked away from ClickBank and I don’t promote ClickBank offers anymore, as well as the five things I look for in a perfect affiliate offer. I’m even going to show you the one-page website that I used to make over half a million dollars in affiliate commissions this year. I’ll even bribe you to attend this workshop by giving you a $497 value course that shows you how to cherry pick high converting affiliate offers for your next affiliate promotion.

In addition, I’ll even give you the three offers I’m promoting right now that are making me money as we speak. All that and more at igor.ac. Now, it’s time to claim your list building lifestyle. Welcome back to another edition of The List Building Lifestyle with your host Igor Kheifets. Imagine you are in a bar somewhere in the 1960s and Marilyn Monroe walks in. Let’s just suppose that you had a big crush on her, and you just happen to work up enough courage that time to approach her and ask for her phone number.

Now, Marilyn Monroe doesn’t really have anything to write it on, and so what she does is she grabs a napkin and she writes her phone number on the napkin. This napkin happens to be a dirty napkin. There’s wine stains on it. Somebody just wiped their nose with it. Doesn’t matter. It’s just really dirty and really bad. She writes the phone number on the napkin. Question is do you take it or do you not take it? Do you say, “Wow. This is Marilyn’s Monroe phone number. I’ll grab this. I’ll put it in my pocket. I’ll memorize the number. Who cares about the napkin anyway.”

Or you go, “Oh wow. This is a very dirty napkin. No. I don’t care if it’s Marilyn Monroe’s number. It’s not acceptable and my standards require me only to use thick paper for sharing phone numbers or something.” Of course not. Of course not. If you do, if that’s your response, you’re an idiot. Of course, not. You’re going to grab the phone number. You’re going to thank her. You’re going to pinch yourself to make sure you’re not dreaming, and you’re going to run off and call her the next day. Hopefully she’ll pick up.

Because it’s not really about the napkin. It’s about the phone number or the content of what the napkin brings to you. This is a huge lesson in marketing, because when it comes to creating marketing material, when it comes to marketing anything online you will have to create, and this is something a lot of people don’t get. They think they can just stay in that consumer mindset and continue to try and get results that way. Eventually once you’ve gone through all the shiny objects, you realize, “Oh wow. I really need to create something before I can make some money.”

It may not be a whole sales funnel and a product but it still will be content, and websites, and emails and things like that. When it comes to creating, a lot of times what I see holding people back is the fact that they want it to be perfect. They’re waiting for that moment in time when their thing, again, could be an email, a sales funnel, a page, an e-cover, a podcast, doesn’t matter what it is, they’re waiting for it to be perfect. Or sometimes they won’t even admit it to themselves, and they will just wait.

They will just keep on waiting, keep on working on it, keep on working on it and they will never release it. The marketplace never gets to judge whether it’s perfect or not. Now, this is something I’m seeing a lot recently, because I got back into coaching people, where I’m now starting to walk people through building their own business from scratch. This is not an easy task, obviously. It takes a little bit of time. That’s why it takes us usually 90 days to coach someone through it.

What I’m seeing a lot, like I’m just started noticing it lately, and that’s why I wanted to share it with you is what’s holding people back could be fear of failure. I don’t know, but they just won’t release their stuff to the public. They’ll sit down and they’ll create it. They’ll write the copy. They’ll build a sales page using something like Kartra or ClickFunnels. They will write the emails. They will even get me to critique their emails but they will not hit send. They will not publish. They will not let the rest of the world see.

Oftentimes when confronted, they talk about, well, they still need to work on it. They don’t like this part. They don’t like that part. The reality is it’s never going to be perfect. It’s never going to be perfect, and if that’s your philosophy, if you need it to be perfect before it’s released you’ll never go on to release it. Because I don’t know anyone who creates anything who just works on something and then goes back, sits back and says, “Oh wow. This is perfect. This is ideal.”

You know what, whenever I felt that way, and it happened to me maybe twice out of the last 10 years of me marketing online, anytime I felt that way it bombs. Usually it bombs. Most of the time it’s the things that I’m scared about that end up working really well. The things that I’m confident about tend to bomb big time. Now, but the big lesson here is this, your customer doesn’t really care all that much about the quality of your product. I know, I know, I know there’s probably some of you out there who disagree with me. That’s cool. You have the right to disagree with me, even if you don’t understand what I’m saying.

For example, I’m an Apple geek. I’m basically anything Apple, I get it. The new iPhone came out, I got it. The new MacBook came out, I got it. It doesn’t matter how many MacBooks and iPhones I bought the previous years. It really doesn’t matter. I get it. One of the reasons I get it, one of the reasons I buy Apple products is because they feel nice in my hand. They’re very slick. They’re beautiful. The interface, the design, awesome.

Yeah, there is room for the aesthetics of it and the perfection of it. No product out there is perfect. If you want a great example of seeing someone making billions of dollars with a product that’s not perfect, call up Bill Gates. Bill Gates is the most amazing example of how you release a bad product, now genuinely bad. I mean if you ever used Windows when it was like the Windows 95 and Windows 97, 98, XP, I mean the amount of times I reinstalled Windows XP on my computer. Wow.

My routine my average day back in the early 2000s was basically wake up, have breakfast, do my homework because I was still in school, and reinstall the fricking Windows XP because it’s lagging again. That was pretty much all I was doing throughout my childhood. It was that and school. It’s Windows XP reinstalls and school. I had a special folder with my passwords on an external drive. I knew exactly how to reinstall my games in the fastest time. I had everything backed up on CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs. I was ready, and that was a routine. It was accepted. It was just basically the way of life. Bad product.

Bad product, yet, we all gave money to Bill Gates. Well, maybe not me. I’ve actually always downloaded cracked versions. Bill Gates made a lot of money with that product and continues to. Now, they’ve improved the product over the years. It’s becoming better. It’s more stable. It’s faster and a lot of people are happy with it now. It took them fricking 30 years to do it.

Yo, it’s Igor. If you’re loving the content, hop on over to listbuildinglifestyleshow.com for more free training and a free transcript of this episode. I’d really appreciate if you logged into iTunes and rated the show. It really helps. Thanks.

If Bill Gates would be like, “Well, let’s wait until it’s perfect,” we would have never been even making money online. Because no one would have a computer in the first place. There’s a huge lesson in it, because when you deal with product development in the software industry, or when you run a startup, you recognize this. You have to launch it as being good enough for that particular point in time.

You can’t just wait for it to be perfect, because it will never be. It’s only your customers who are going to provide you with that valuable feedback to make it perfect. Because as much as you think about yourself as being smart person, you don’t know. You just don’t know what the customer wants. Again, if you have any development experience, if you’ve ever released a software, or if you ever worked in a software, or if you ever worked in a company that worked on software, you know that they all use the concept of lean launch.

They don’t wait for the software to be perfect. They don’t spend 20 years developing something and then put it up on the market, because otherwise they wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. They invest a little bit of time and a little bit of money to create a beta version, put it out on the marketplace and then let the first wave of signups, the first wave of people and customers who sign up and use the software to tell them what they want improved. Be it by recognizing bugs in certain places, which they need to work out, or be it by saying, “I really wish the software did this.” Then they code that feature. That’s how software companies develop and evolve.

We as marketers, as info marketers or people who just create marketing material, we evolve in the same way. We must create a version 1.0, even if it’s a really bad crappy version, and we just have to put it out into the world and see what happens. You’ll be surprised how 99 times out of 10, or 99 times out of 100 your customers will not be upset with you nearly as much as you think. In fact, a lot of them will come back thanking you because they like your product, even though you kind of secretly hate it.
Igor Kheifets: Again, it’s really hard to perceive this. It’s really hard to accept it until you’ve lived it. I remember when I was selling my $8,000 coaching program, I started out by just recording a bunch of webinar trainings. I put it all in the members area. I charged people eight grand for that. I honestly felt, every day I would go to bed and I would wake up in a cold sweat thinking that I’ve got a refund request, thinking that I’d get chargeback, thinking that I’ve got a lawsuit coming because my product is crap.

Over the years, and I sold that product for, I think, three years total, we’ve generated, I think, 88 full-time success stories, like people who actually made money, even though the content wasn’t organized correctly, even though the website didn’t look nice, even though Denis would literally call me up every other day and be like, “Dude, we have to do something with that user experience on your coaching program website. It’s not good.” I was like, “Dude, are people buying it?” Yes. “Dude, are they using it?” Yes. “Are we getting success stories?” Yes. “Then let’s not fix what’s not broken.”

We had the conversation for years. Obviously now that we have more resources and we have higher standards, our membership sites look differently. Back then when all I cared about was just getting my product in the marketplace, that stuff didn’t matter. The design was crap. The layout was crap. The content was good, but it was delivered in a way that wasn’t necessarily the best delivery method. Still, people loved it. People paid us a lot of money for it. As long as we delivered on our promises and were attentive to what they were saying, we were on the right path.

Again, let the customer tell you what’s wrong with your product by either not buying the product, so you can then go back and rework it, or by buying it and saying, “Hey, I really don’t appreciate this about the product or about the journey, and I would really like to see this.” Because people will tell you even if you don’t ask them. Trust me.

If you do, if you do tell them, “Hey, you’re now becoming a part of a 1,000-person beta tester group. You’re one of the first few people who get first dibs on this. I’ll give you lifetime updates and here’s a few other bonuses for acting fast. Your job is not just to use the product but also come back and say, ‘Here are all the things that I find annoying. Here’s something that I would really love to see this product do or this thing do.'”

By doing so, by just putting it out there and letting the market tell you what to do with it, first off, you’ll move so much faster. You won’t even recognize yourself in 30 to 60 days. You’ll be really moving forward. You’ll feel like you’re making progress, and you will also make money, which is the best part. Because to develop your products, to develop your funnels, to develop your business, to grow your list, to get more leads you need money. That money will come from someone else.

No one will give you money unless there’s a value exchange happening. The value exchange cannot happen until you release something into this world, until you claim a stake in that marketplace, until you climb that mountain and stick that flag in the ground and say, “I’m here. Here’s what I’ve got for you. Here’s what it’s going to do for you and here’s how to get it. Because it’s the first time I’m offering this, become a beta tester. Get these five bonuses, and I’ll also give you lifetime updates in exchange for your suggestions about how to improve this product.”

Trust me, you do that, you’re not going to get an astronomical conversion rate, but you’re going to have plenty of people who will appreciate your honesty, and who will go for it because they want to be one of the first few people to try it. Because they want to help. Because they just want to work with honest people, and they will recognize the mission you’re on. Or maybe because they just like your personality.

Whatever the reason, there’s always going to be a group of people who will jump on board even though you have no proof, even though you’re just getting started, even though the product isn’t perfect, even though fill in the blanks with the excuse that works for you. Point being is that get the version 1.0, no matter how crappy, out there. It could be an email. It could be a sales funnel. It could be a product. It could be a webinar. It could be just a headline. It could be anything at all.

Trust me. People do not care as much as you think. All they care about is really just themselves. People just want to solve their own problems, and even if you help them solve these problems in a very ineffective way, a lot of them will still appreciate you for it. They’ll tell you that the way’s ineffective, but they’ll still appreciate you for it, giving you an opportunity to fix it, and make it a little bit more effective. Which you often cannot do. You can’t do it without the input from the customers. Again, you can’t get the customers until they buy the product. This is like a catch 22.

It’s like a cycle that you have to step into. The first step is to release the product into the marketplace. Nothing happens until that happens. If you’ve been procrastinating about writing that email, if you’ve been procrastinating about creating the funnel, if you’ve been procrastinating about creating the product or recording a podcast, getting on that YouTube routine, whatever you’ve been procrastinating about it’s time to put the version 1.0 out there and see what happens.
Igor Kheifets: This concludes another episode of The List Building Lifestyle, and until next time we chat have a good one. Thank you for listening to The List Building Lifestyle. Get access to previous episodes, the transcription of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also, don’t forget to claim your free seat at the workshop I’m hosting this week, where I show the two-step system that made me the top affiliate for people like Matt Bacak, John Crestani, Richard Legg, Michael Cheney, and many, many others.

In fact, on this workshop I’m going to show you the exact approach I take whenever I promote an affiliate offer, the exact offers I promote, as well as how I was able to make over half a million dollars in commissions using my small list of just 18,000 people promoting a weird type of product that almost no one else promotes. All that is yours at igor.ac. Go ahead, claim your seat right now and I’ll see you there.