The Dream 100

Finding new customers ain’t easy.

Gone are the days when SMB marketing equated to posting a card on your local bulletin board and throwing a classified ad in the newspaper.

The internet has fragmented our attention. How many of you still read the newspaper or exclusively watch channel 3? Remember those days… Instead of one or two mediums consuming all our attention. We spread it across 100’s of different apps, podcasts, websites and all else.

This is both exciting and scary for SMB’s.

We now have an in; we don’t need a $100k ad budget to get on TV. We can do a lot of damage with just a thousand dollars on Facebook or Instagram.

The problem is, our businesses are all different and so are our customers.

What works for my gym won’t necessarily work for your consultancy or ecom business. So we can’t just copy what’s working for joe blogs next door.

We need to find what will work for us, instead of copying them.

The trick most marketers won’t tell you is you don’t need to go chasing your customers everywhere. Just find a few mediums that work and throw the kitchen sink at them until there’s no juice left to squeeze.

So, where do you start?

Enter ‘The Dream 100’. Loved by the co-editor of this newsletter, Kale and his marketing company K&J Growth. They’ve used this technique to help 100’s of companies find new customers online.

It’s easy to do and virtually guaranteed to work. Want to know how? Kale walks you through the whole process here (~15-minute watch time).

What’s Going On

What if I told you two Chinese streamers just made $1 billion+ in 1x 12-hour stream #Influencers

Inflation is alive and well. NZ is fast catching up with the US, we just hit 4.9%. Turns out you can’t print money for ‘free’ #Economics

Speaking of marketing. Apple just made life tough for those of us who rely on FB ads, but TribeWhale might have the answer. #Marketing

Dog Ramps… Are Big Business? | Only In Murica

Finding small businesses that can go from $350k to $35 million

“Some people are good at going from zero to one (builders). Others are good at going from one to ten (scalers). I’m not good at building. I’m better at scaling.”

Ramon Van Meer likes to keep life simple.

His mantra is to buy low and sell high, and he has easy-to-follow rules that you can use to achieve what he has.

Ramon has built a mid 8 figure bank balance for his family with no business background, business mentors or financial help by keeping it simple and seeing opportunities where others don’t.

Why It’s Easier To Buy

Some people are good at starting businesses; others are better at scaling them. Ramon says he’s the latter. That’s why he prefers buying to building.

Buy an established business gives him history and a data-set to work with to find the right areas to focus on to grow them fast.

Avoiding Business Lemons

If you’re a business novice, the best way to ensure you’re not buying a lemon is by hiring a due diligence company to look through the website traffic, revenues, and other data to find out whether the business is worth the asking price.

You Don’t Need To Do Everything Yourself

When Ramon was younger, he ran a construction business. On his very first job, when he couldn’t do the wiring work, his client advised him to hire contractors to do the stuff he couldn’t do.

“You don’t have to know everything or do it yourself. If I were you, I’d find freelancers. You focus on getting the work and outsource it to freelancers.”

He ended up scaling his construction company to multi-millions in revenue by hiring contractors to do all the work while he focused on sales.

What To Look For When Buying A Business

• Ramon looks for websites with product/market fit and sales traction but is poorly optimised.
• He also looks for businesses that solve real problems, have low competition, and have a large market size. These factors combined equate to high potential, i.e. a dog ramp company.
• He wants websites selling a product that solves a problem and researches the product to ensure there is a need.

You can see how many people are looking for a product or solution with Google trends and other keyword research tools like Keywords Everywhere.

Social media is another medium he researches for sound signals. Does the product have a fanbase, or are there large audiences with interests related to the product.

To get an idea of possible sales volume, he uses the ‘Helium 10’ chrome extension to see sales volume on Amazon.

“Are the traffic channels diversified? It could be risky if it’s all paid traffic from Facebook.”

Alpha-paw started with dog ramps. He said the website was selling a lot of products even though it sucked, so the potential was obvious. He switched the website to Shopify, improved the content and images, and immediately saw sales improve.

“I like the types of niches that not a lot of people think about but have a huge search volume.”

Who would have thought “Dogs probably get asked more rhetorical questions than any creature on earth.“

Not All Intervention Is Good

This could be costing you bags of money.

We, humans, love an opportunity to intervene, but not all interventions are good ones.

How many times, when asked for feedback, have you said you don’t have any? How many times, when presented with negative information, have you decided that no intervention is necessary?

Iatrogenic is a well-known but not often mentioned term in medical circles. Every so often, you’ll hear of, or less, fortunately, you’ll experience a negative consequence from the hands of the world’s most practised interventionalists, doctors.

‘Medical misadventure’ is how the papers report it. ‘that doctor cost my uncle his life’ is how you’ll hear about it at the pub.

We’ve been historically bad at medical intervention. Data suggests that it took until around 1950 for medical intervention on average to be life-extending rather than shortening.

This malpractice of intervention isn’t limited to the medical profession. You can find it everywhere.

Take the ‘writer’s version of Chinese whispers. You can write an article and present it to an editor, who’ll edit it as their job title suggests. You can then pass it onto another editor, who’ll edit it again and. Send it to another editor, and the process repeats. Those editors will keep on editing until not a single word of yours is left and their intervention has made you redundant.

How often have you read a sales report or looked at social media metrics and felt the urge to react immediately?

As the ‘business owner ‘, the manager’ ‘the marketer’, it is our duty to respond when the numbers are bad, right?

But what if, like the practitioners of medicine, not all intervention is a good intervention? What if, on average, your intervention is producing a net negative?

Nassim Taleb thinks we at least need to weigh up the probabilistic chances of causing good vs causing bad when our tick to respond shows itself.

What are the chances of me producing net good for my business? What if I do nothing? I’m guilty of this 1,000 times over. Even in the last week, I can think of two occasions where my intervention was worthless in the best-case scenario.

I don’t know what the solution is, but it has got me thinking. Interventionists, beware.

Have a question or want to chat about anything you’ve read this week, join our community slack channel. Got someone in mind who needs to know about the method, send them here. As always – Thanks for Look’n.