what I learned from my first product launch

Summary

the first product I ever launched was called the Ultimate Wadlock. a spreadsheet for CrossFit workouts, priced at $4.95. total revenue, maybe 50 bucks. it didn’t even cover the year’s website hosting. flop.

1. I remember sitting in a Starbucks with Emily, pregnant with our first kid, telling her I didn’t see how this was ever going to make money. my mindset was wrecked. mindset is everything, and mine was telling me it wasn’t possible.

2. so I built a second product, One Man One Barbell, and I actually planned the launch. read a book on launching, bought the companion checklist, invested about $100 when $100 was a lot of money for us.

3. timing was insane. we had flown to New York for Christmas to visit Emily’s family. then I had to fly back to Florida alone, pack up, and I’d be gone with the military for four months. so the launch had to happen in three days. I slept in one and two hour catnaps. I followed the checklist page by page. I launched.

4. over $5,000 in three days. that’s not a viral story by anyone’s standard. for me, a junior military officer making a couple thousand a month, it more than doubled my pay in one month. but the money wasn’t the life change. the mindset was.

5. I walked into a grocery store after the launch and felt unplugged from the matrix. I knew it was possible now. that one belief shift, that I could actually control my financial future, is the only reason I’m here today.

two takeaways. one, mindset is everything. work on it like a habit. two, invest in yourself. that $100 book and checklist was the best return on investment of my life. courses, coaches, mentors, masterminds, books, that’s the real scale lever. everything else is tactics. try harder.

Transcript

the ultimate wadlock

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. Welcome to the Better Human Business Podcast. I’m Jerred Moon. Today, I have a short story for you with my first product launch ever and how that went. So the first product I ever launched, I’m going to dive right into it here, was called the Ultimate Wadlock.

So I was into CrossFit at that time. There was a short window that I was super into CrossFit. I’m slightly embarrassed about it, but yeah, I was into CrossFit and I created a product called the Ultimate Wadlock. You can download this for free. Just Google it and you’ll find it. We don’t sell it anymore.

It’s somewhere in the archives, but I’m sure if you Google it, you will find it because no one else ever sold it. So go check it out if you want to. But it was just a sophisticated spreadsheet that kept as a place for me to log workouts, keep benchmarks, do conversions, all these kind of things. Something that’s completely useless today with how many different apps and other things there are on the market.

But these things didn’t exist back then. So that was my first product. My dad helped me create it because there was a lot of fancy stuff on the Excel side and he’s a whiz at all those kind of things. I put that on the website, sold it for $4.95 and just a huge flop. I think we made maybe 50 bucks. It was bad.

Didn’t even cover the hosting for my website for the year. So in the hole as an entrepreneur, huge failure. But I didn’t follow a plan. I just created a product, thought people would love it, put it out there, and it did not work. I remember talking to Emily at a Starbucks and this was like the turning point for me because I was investing a lot of time into the side hustle and the side hustle was making no money.

the starbucks conversation

Emily was pregnant at this time so once the baby came, no one was saying this out loud but in my mind it was like, if this isn’t making money, I can’t justify doing this on nights and weekends. If it’s just a hobby, I can’t do this on nights and weekends and keep saying, yeah, one day we’ll make it big.

I had to turn this hobby into some cash or it wouldn’t be justifiable. And I remember we were sitting there talking about the product and how it wasn’t doing well and I was just like, I don’t see how this is possible. I don’t see how I could ever sell enough of these to make enough money to support us.

I don’t see how I could ever make enough money as an entrepreneur to hire an employee. I don’t see how other people do that. It’s just crazy. Now getting outside of the fact that the product is only $4.95 which is hard to make a living on as is but it just hanged to my mindset and mindset is everything.

If you don’t think that you can, you’re right. You can’t. And if you think you can, then you can and my mindset was in a really bad spot and so I worked on a second product. I wasn’t going to give up. I worked on a second product and my second product was One Man One Barbell and I really consider it my first true product because I actually put a lot of time and effort into the creation of the product, testing of the product with a program let’s say, testing of it and I put a lot of effort into One Man One Barbell.

And another thing that I did was I invested in the launch of this product. I had read this book to help me launch an online product. I read the book. I also bought the checklist that came with the book and so I invested some money into learning how to launch an online product. And I’ll never forget I launched that product and we made 5,000, over $5,000 within three days when I launched that product and that is not a massive launch for a lot of people online.

There are people who have these $100,000 stories and that’s not my story, $5,000 and it changed my life forever. I was only making a couple thousand dollars a month as a military officer and so for me to more than double my pay in one month, that was life changing. But the real life changing thing was the mindset shift.

one man one barbell

I now knew it was possible. The mindset shift was everything. And I’ll never forget I went to the grocery store after I had launched this product and I felt like I had been unplugged from the matrix. I don’t know how else to describe it other than that. I felt like I had been unplugged from the matrix and everyone else was still in the matrix.

Now I was in a haze because even more back story to the launch of One Man, One Barbell is I had been granted leave for about seven to ten days and Emily and I went to go visit her family. They had just moved to New York. We went up there to visit. William had been born so he wasn’t alive for the ultimate wild log.

He was alive for the One Man, One Barbell launch. So this was the piss or get off the pot situation. It was like we’re either going to make some money or everything’s going to get shut down because I don’t have time for this. On top of that as soon as Christmas was over, I was leaving Emily in New York.

I had to get back to Florida to pack my crap and then I was gone with the military for four months and I wasn’t going to be able to work on my side hustle on nights and weekends anymore. So this was like it’s going to work or it’s not going to work. This was it. This was everything on the line. So I flew back.

I flew back to Florida. I followed this checklist that I had purchased and went through the book page by page. I did everything it said. I had three days to do it. I had three days to go through everything. I slept one to two hours at a time. I was just catching naps where I could. There was no like solid sleep going on, but I went through and I launched in those three days and when I launched and made over $5,000 having a plan and following a process, it completely changed my life because of the mindset shift and the money I made.

The money was awesome, but you can always make money in other ways. Money is truly never life changing. It’s what you learn in the process. It’s the mindset shift you can get from having earned the money. What I learned was one, it’s possible and I can do this. If that didn’t work, I probably wouldn’t be here today.

$5,000 in three days

I don’t honestly know. I’ve had that entrepreneurial drive, but I may have been like, you know what, you got a family now, you have bills to pay, you’re a military officer making good money, you’ll only make more money from here, health insurance is covered, this is incredibly stable, quit complaining and whining and just have a job in the Air Force, do a good job, be the best you can be and continue to support your family.

That was in the back of my head always until the day I left the military, quit trying to do something else when you’re already here, you’re already supporting your family, just keep doing the thing. So it’s very hard for me to tear away and go be an entrepreneur, but when this worked, it changed everything for me.

I had more money that I could invest in the business. Emily believed it was a possibility. I believed it was a possibility and then we went from there and that was one of the most life-changing experiences. It unplugged me from the financial matrix, the W-2 employee mindset. I was like, I can control my financial future.

I can’t control all of my future, but I can control my financial future to some degree. What did I learn from that and what can you take away from it? I think two big things. The first, mindset is everything. If you haven’t realized that yet, it’s only a matter of time before you do. Mindset is everything.

I’ve heard that a thousand ways, but how are you actually working on your mindset? How do you talk to yourself? What do you believe is possible or is not possible for you? You need to work on your mindset on a daily basis. I still have to. I’ll go through periods of not working on my mindset and I have all these old feelings that start to come in with scarcity and not believing and limiting beliefs, all those kind of things.

They creep back up. There are seeds that slowly start to grow if you don’t cut them down. Actually focusing on your mindset, doing whatever you have to remain focused and know that it is possible to achieve your dreams and do what you want and make the amount you want and live the life that you want.

It’s all possible. You have to believe that. That’s the first thing. The second thing is invest in yourself. You have to invest in yourself. I invested very little. It was a book and a checklist that the author sold with the book. I think all in, maybe all in I’m at a hundred bucks, but for me at that time, a hundred bucks was a lot of money.

unplugged from the matrix

That was honestly a lot of money. We were super strapped for cash. I’m not going to get into all the details of our financials, but it was very difficult at that time to even spend that amount. So like proportionally between my income now and my income then, that was a massive percentage of the disposable income that I had and I put it towards that program.

I believe that I could do it. I believe that, okay, if I invest this money, it will work this time and it paid off. I invested and I’ve done those things. And because of those two things right there, I always am working on my mindset to make sure that I believe the next thing is possible and I have, I don’t have the self doubt or scarcity or negativity.

I try and stay away from all of those things. So our mindset is a huge thing for me. And the second thing is I’m always looking for what to invest in to grow my business and other people aren’t like that, but that is the ultimate scale lever you could pull. Buying a program, buying a book, buying a course, hiring a coach, getting a mentor.

That’s the real scale lever over any other tactic I’ll ever talk about on this podcast. Investing in yourself is the ultimate scale lever because guess what? I’m not immune to things going poorly in business. I could be bankrupt next year. Let’s just say that happens. That would suck, but I’ve invested so much in myself over the last 10 plus years.

I know so much about entrepreneurship. I know so much about lead generation, marketing, advertising, sales, fulfillment, how to run a business, operations, leadership. I’ve invested in all of those areas so much that if you take everything away from me tomorrow, next year, it doesn’t matter. It would absolutely suck, but I know how to get back on the horse.

I’m confident in myself and my abilities because of how much I’ve invested and how much I have invested is a lot of money and time. So those are the two things I think that you need to be looking at right now. It’s what’s worked for me. Maybe it will work for you as well, but it’s hard to argue with mindset and investing in yourself.

Those are your two biggest scale levers that you could possibly have. So focus on those things and if you’re like, ah, I don’t know about the mindset thing sounds a little woo or you know what? I don’t really want to invest in myself because I’ve already learned a lot in school or whatever.