Today's product idea applies SMS, a heavily underestimated channel, to a simple newsletter concept. Tons of tactical advice you can implement right away!
Each week I help founders & marketers spark their creativity by sharing a new product idea & how I'd launch it.
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Now, onto this week's product idea: DailyBest - a daily productivity tip via SMS.
The value proposition:
- DailyBest helps you be your most productive self by texting you a productivity tip at 8am each day. Let us help you get up, get motivated, & get to work. No spam, just 1 tip a day. Unsubscribe any time.
How I'd launch:
- I basically already wrote the copy for you in the value proposition above. The first sentence is all you'd really need, but promising no spam helps allay people's fear around giving out their phone number.
- For the actual texting, I recommend Community. It's used by one of my favorite marketers, Nik Sharma, who's a big advocate of SMS communication. Their website also says that Tony Hawk, Tim McGraw, & Nicholas Sparks use them, so they must be good, right?
- Don't wait to launch. Make tomorrow your launch day & spend today doing 2 things. First, write your first 10 tips just so you don't have to worry about them later. Second, create a new Twitter account just for DailyBest. Most people are too broad & non-committal on Twitter, which makes it harder to gain followers, but by promising something very specific - a daily productivity tip - you'll get followers more quickly & lots of sign-ups in the process. Besides, Twitter is an ideal medium for short, pithy productivity tips.
- Force your mom, or your college roommate, or your wife to be your first subscriber. You can post about it on Facebook to get more family & friends too, but whatever you do, launch tomorrow! Yes, Community costs money, & you'd probably feel better if you had 200 subscribers when you launched, but the cost of paying for Community for an extra 2 weeks will be negligible in the long-run. And most importantly, you'll validate the idea sooner.
- Launching right away also lets you leverage your actual product as marketing sooner, by sharing tips on other channels, like Reddit (more on this below), Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. I'll bet this is where most of your growth comes from.
How I'd scale:
- I really believe that cross-channel promotion will be the best strategy for scaling by far. Here's how it works: 1) provide value on a 3rd party platform consistently, 2) keep providing value & subtly start directing people to your own page too.
- It's simple, but it takes a lot of finesse to do it successfully on multiple platforms. The key is to provide value in a way that's natural to the particular platform, & link to your sign-up page in a way that doesn't violate the platform's guidelines. On Twitter, you can tweet each day's tip with just minimal tailoring to appear best on mobile. On relevant subreddits on Reddit, the right format might be a compilation of each week's tips (daily will probably be too much). Here's a great example of someone on Reddit doing this for their own newsletter.
- Finally, SEO. Most productivity-related keywords are competitive & almost impossible to rank for, but it's much easier to rank for new keywords. For example, if a new productivity app launches with some obscure name like PickleHorse, there won't be any existing content competing to rank for "What is PickleHorse". By being the first to write about it, you'll rank for PickleHorse-related keywords & be well-positioned as search volume increases. Key step: stay up-to-date on the productivity world, & constantly be on the look-out for new keyword opportunities.
- Scaling is great, but how about revenue? First, there's a ton of value in building an audience even if you're not currently monetizing it. You're building a personal brand & an audience of people who know & trust you. But, if & when you want to monetize, there are two options that creators like Nat Eliason & Josh Spector use: ads & communities.
- Sponsorships are usually easiest. If there's a productivity app or coffee subscription you genuinely love, why not get paid to recommend it to your audience? (Without spamming them, & assuming it's relevant.) For both Nat & Josh, ads are a simple revenue stream that also introduces cool products to their audience.
- Another great option is a paid community (i.e. on Patreon or Circle) with exclusive additional content or events. For example, Nat offers his community members access to all his book notes, & Josh's paid subscribers get extra-tactical posts about his own creating process. For DailyBest, paid subscribers could get deeper dives into specific productivity tips, or community office hours to ask questions & connect with other members. Communities are a lot of work to keep high-quality, but the revenue from 1000 members at $10 / month is unbeatable.
Why it would work:
- If you're like me, your email inbox is inundated with newsletters (thanks for reading, btw). By targeting SMS, you're competing in a less saturated channel, & one where open rates can be 5x those of email (98% vs. 20%). SMS is also the most intimate channel, & something people almost always get instant notifications for.
- Humans are addicted to productivity porn. Matt D'Avella, Ali Abdaal, & Thomas Frank are YouTubers with millions of subscribers who talk about productivity habits, productivity apps, & productivity meals. Why? Because we eat it up. Humans love procrastinating in the name of finding the one tip that will 10x our income, & that's not gonna go away.
- Building audience in a niche is powerful, & being able to own that audience is even better. Guy Fieri, Dave Ramsey, Gary Vee: each built an audience by putting out consistent content in a niche. Gary Vee might be the most powerful of them all though, because he's built it on platforms that let him instantly reach that audience. SMS is ultimate audience ownership, because as happened last week, even email is subject to Google outages.
Why it might not work:
- It's too intrusive. This will probably be the most common reason people don't sign up. For them, a daily text alert is too much. But you don't have to worry about them. There are millions of others people, who'll appreciate the consistency & intimacy of productivity tips via text.
- If you give up. That's the biggest reason. I seriously think DailyBest has a lot of potential, provided you give it your best shot. That means being patient, showing up every day, & trusting the process through the ups & downs.
- If you need monetization & it won't come. You could grow DailyBest without ever monetizing it, but what if this becomes your full-time job? Could you land enough sponsorships? Would enough people join the community? I think yes, but this is definitely the hardest part to execute on.
Question for you: how can I own & grow an audience for myself or my business?
That's all for this issue!
Cheers,
Luke
P.S. As always, respond with the biggest challenge you're facing & I'll try to help how I can!
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