the goose

Date: 8am, 22^nd of September 2008

Team: Building contractor, Solicitor, Business Coach, Programmer

Objective: €6k in 6 months

Strategy: Intellectual Property product (eBook)

Expenditure: €30

Income to date: €20

Website: ip4dummies.com

I have to admit. I was a little nervous. This was our third sprint event – and I was starting to wonder if we’d fail to come up with an idea for income generation. It is a big asks. Four complete strangers in a room with nothing but our wits to magic cash up with. I needn’t have worried as it happens. There was a more diverse core group time around than ever before – but that only seemed to add to the mix. We met in the newly rebranded Maldron Hotel at 8am, and having installed the participants with coffee 1.0 and booted up the sticky pads and markers – we set about coming up with what turned out to be some cracking ideas. We had a review of the various different methods of building something people would pay for online and then got stuck into our ‘contact groups’. Something that I learnt from the second sprint was – without a route to market , the best ideas in the world are useless. With this in mind, having completed a primer on internet businesses, we started ‘auditing’ the contact groups we had in the room. Between us we had a fairly healthy mix. From lawyers to business owners and even the odd rock star, we had a good base to work from. By coming up with lists of people we know, the idea goes, that we have a defined path to selling our product, even if we didn’t know what that product was at this stage.

We had already come up with a list of ideas for products based on the primer session. The next step was to start whittling down the 40 some product ideas we had generated. We did this by matching up the ideas with contact groups. The logic went – that if an idea didn’t have an identifiable group of people to sell to – there wasn’t much point in developing it. ”If a tree falls in the woods and no one was there to hear it – did it ever fall at all” or “if a product has no one to be sold to, was there any point in it in the first place?”. This process actually whittled down the remaining ideas pretty quickly. We then set about defining our ‘investment criteria’ as a group and used that to come up with a winner. In this case – the winner was an intellectual property product eBook called “IP 4 Dummies”. Using the solicitors specialized knowledge, the contact spheres of the other members and the technical know how of our programmer, we managed to get a site up pretty fast. By the following Saturday the product was pretty much there and we were able to concentrate on marketing.

The marketing plan this time around concentrated mainly on email. We only had a list of about 6,000 people – and we figured out that we weren’t going to hit our target income of 6k based on that list alone. A rogue’s gallery of promotional ideas was trotted out. Everything from PR to TV to Google adwords. Time will tell which work out. Funnily enough – we had our first sale before wee even started a marketing plan. We were using Tradebit to host our eBook. For 25% of the cover price, they handle emailing out the eBook to those purchasing the book as well as collecting the money via PayPal. They also list the book on their own index – and it was through this index that we had our first bite from a buyer in the UK. Unfortunately for us – we had set the price at 50c for testing purposes. Thankfully the first full price sale came the next day.