How to double your business' income with one product
Some business-owners bank on variety. Parking product after product or services packaged together as a strategy to scale revenue and grow their company. However the last couple of decades have seen the evolution of companies that have been built on the back of only one product.
You may have heard of Spanx, Roku, Michelin or Gorilla Glue. In the last decade we’ve also seen a wave of digital start-ups literally take over the world. These products or services don’t have delivery logistics to worry about because it happens entirely on the web.
They are often companies offering digital products that we didn’t know we needed, such as Hubspot, Hotjar and Mailchimp. And also edupreneurs like Marie Forleo who built a multimillion dollar company on the back of one 1 online course.
The great thing about this passive income business model is that it’s very lean to start-up. As an established company looking to scale, extending into online digital products with little need for logistics and delivery, is a great low-risk investment that can pay great dividends in a relatively short time.
So how can you know if this will work for your business? You can effectively create a product that scales easily if you have the resources below.
- Project Management
You will require the time of a project manager. Ideally an in-house employee that is a good all-rounder with some understanding of marketing would be a great asset. Make sure that you give some tasks to others to help them make room for this project. It will never get completed if it’s a project that is a burden on top of the day-to-day and there's never any time. - Budgeting
Treat your new digital product like a start-up. Sure it will at first be funded by the profits in your main company. However you need to view this as an investment in a start-up. And this start-up needs to have a detailed plan on how funds will be spent and how the product will scale to pay for itself and become profitable as fast as possible. Your investment will probably need to be around 5,000 to 15,000 dollars to build a website and create the digital product. And around 3,000 to 6,000 per month to market and grow the audience for the product till you get a return on investment higher than you invested and can start to scale using the additional revenue instead of investing. - Test the product offline, it must be sellable offline before you can sell it automatically online. Offline you will see the buyer’s reaction faster, adjust the product, price and sales process. This is input you need to succeed online.
- Win-Win
In order to make it easier to scale up and kick-off faster, choose a product that appeals to the audience you already have in your business. This will allow you to tap into the low-hanging fruit of clients that already trust you from your other business whilst you build an online audience and start selling through your website using SEO and Online Marketing Strategies. This will also help you in your current business because you can tap into the new audience you created. - Timescales and Business Plan
Make sure that you create a business plan and ideally also a management committee that supervises the performance of the new company like shareholders. If at all possible pick people from your company that are qualified to do this. Have experience building a company, marketing it and deadlines with the financials. Offer them a ‘shareholding’ by means of profit-sharing from this product to make them feel like they have a stake in the success of the product. - Partners
The final step is to partner with a company that has made this happen before. Make sure that the specialists you pick to help you create the product and sell it, have done this for others successfully before. It sounds logical but you’d be amazed how many businesses prefer to pick the agency down the road to the one with a proven track record.
If reading this article got you all excited about creating a digital product that you can easily scale to double your business, we’d love to talk. We’ve done this for our clients before and have also created our own digital product.
Get in touch so we can discuss your vision over a coffee.
