Melissa Anzman (00:00): This is a launch yourself podcast with Melissa Anzman episode number 22, featuring Danny Iny

Melissa Anzman (00:07): Hello, Hello, hello, and welcome to the launch yourself podcast, career, business, and brand advice to help you be seen, make an impact and deliver at your maximum potential. And now here's your host, Melissa Anzman.

Melissa Anzman (00:26): Danny also known as the Freddy Kruger of blogging is a founder of Firepole marketing, the author of the Amazon bestselling book engagement from scratch and the creator of the audience business masterclass training program. Danny started his entrepreneurial path pretty early. He likes to joke that he's been an entrepreneur for longer than his entire adult life. Since he quit school, when he was 15 to start his first business and has been doing it ever since the road, hasn't always been easy, but despite the failures and discouraging setbacks, he wouldn't have had it any other way. He started Firepole marketing as a one man show with help from one woman, his wife, and first started getting noticed in the online marketing world for his prolific guest posting. He did 80 plus gas posts in 2011, which eventually became the inspiration of his critically acclaimed guest posting training program called like write like Freddy towards the end of that same year.

Melissa Anzman (01:22): Danny published his book engagement from scratch, which he co-authored with 30 of the world's leading authorities on engagement and audience building later that year, he then coauthored how to build a blog. In 2012, Danny released the naked marketing manifesto. The manifesto quickly went viral and became the foundation for a crowdfunded book project in early 2013, Danny and the Firepole marketing team, which had grown in size launched the audience business masterclass. And today they work with hundreds of eager and hardworking audience business builders throughout Danny has maintained a passionate commitment to learning and transparency, freely sharing lessons learned from his greatest successes, major challenges, and even his personal life. Please welcome Danny to the show. Well, I'm so excited to have Danny here at the show. Welcome to the show, Danny.

Danny Iny (02:16): Thank you so much for having me I'm so, so excited to be here and to share some stuff with our listeners.

Melissa Anzman (02:22): Well, you know, I'm excited to have you here. I was just joking with Danny before our call and during our first conversation, I may have done a little bit of fan girling on him, which I'm incredibly embarrassed about, but I am a big fan of your work. And it's such a pleasure to have you here to talk about your launches.

Danny Iny (02:39): Well, I'm, I'm excited to be here.

Melissa Anzman (02:42): I'm with that. Why don't you give us the background of the launch or launches that you'd like to share with us today?

Danny Iny (02:48): Sure. So this is actually going to be a little bit meta. I'll talk about an upcoming product launch, but th the upcoming product that we're launching is very much about among other things, it launched methodology that we have applied to this product, and two other launches that we've done in the past and are in the process of doing so at a high level. What we're in the process of building is a product on how to build and launch and deploy training courses, because it's something that we do very well, but I think most of the industry just frankly, doesn't do very well at all. Mostly because most of the people out there to teach marketing are marketers. They're not teachers. And so they don't really know how to do education. And a lot of people have been asking us about this and when I kind of turned my attention just in words, to get a sense of, okay, so what, you know, what is the secret sauce here?

Danny Iny (03:38): I realized that as much of it as has to do with kind of curriculum design and the clean cut education stuff, it actually is a launch methodology of how we develop and deploy these courses. What people usually do is they see a launch very much as an event, right? It's a single sale. It's like, you know, this point in time and like boom, lunch, that's what they, that's what they do. And then once you're done, it's like, it's launched, it's done. And the way we've come to look at it is much more of a cycle that involves repeating steps and escalating kind of inertia as you go. So you go again and again and again, through the cycle of each, each phase feeds the next I'm very, very related to my friend. Jeff Walker has this concept called the circle of awesomeness where one launch leads you to be able to do even more with the next one and so forth. So actually break down kind of what the what's the methodology looks like and illustrate a little bit.

Melissa Anzman (04:39): Yeah, absolutely. And I love the fact that you're starting with the conversation as it's not a one time event. I don't just launch in the dark and then move on and forget about it because I think you're right. Most people do launch that way and there's been almost the extreme as well, which maybe you can get into later on of launching the same product, one product over and over and over again. And so that there's this great in between space of being repeatable, but also repeatable. So you can build more. So I love that and yes, please do share more.

Danny Iny (05:11): Cool. So the core idea here, it's a, there's a bill Gates quote. I don't remember it. Exactly. So I'm going to mess it up, but it's something to the effect of, if you take a process that's inefficient and you automated or scale it up, then you're just multiplying the inefficiencies. And that's what people do with a lot of their launches. They have an idea for a product, right? You can't launch something without having something to launch. So they go to their back cave and spend six months working on this, like Magnum Opus of a product when they come out into the light and do this launch and discover that, Hey, nobody wants to,

Melissa Anzman (05:50): How many times have we all seen that?

Danny Iny (05:53): People don't realize they think there's something wrong with their marketing. Yeah. And I guess they're right in the sense that marketing is really about your strategy of creating a message market fit and all that, that, you know, in the, in the narrow sense of marketing where it's like, you know, Oh, the copy wasn't good or stuff like that. That's not what it's about. That was not the problem with the marketing. It's just, you didn't have the right thing for the audience. You tried to make this big, permanent elaborate product before you got really clear on exactly what people need and wants and will respond to and so forth. So our process is about launching these small iterative pilots and learning from the experience. And I'll illustrate this with some history and then with like what we're actually doing right now. Cause like literally there are three or four different launches I could share that we've done this with.

Danny Iny (06:44): So the very first time that I did something like this was with write like Freddy, right? Like Freddy is a blog writing training program that I launched in 2012. It was my first blockbuster success product. And it was very different from other stuff I built in the past, in that it wasn't based on what I thought people should want or need. It was based on what people told me. They wanted, tons of people were asking me, they'd seen me do all this, like guest posting all over the internet. And you know, that's how I became called the Freddy Kruger of blogging because people would see me on all these sites and they say, wow, Danny, it's like your Freddy Kruger or wherever I turned you're there. And they were asking me, how do you do this? And so I finally said, okay, I'll, I'll teach a cost and I'll, I'll do this if everyone wants, but I didn't go crazy building a collaborate course.

Danny Iny (07:30): I, first of all, I explained it to a lot of people in conversation and consultation. So I had validated to a certain extent to myself, to people wanted this and that. I knew how to explain it. So I reached out to my audience, said, okay, I'm going to do this. I'm taking on a pilot class, my first class students. And I'm going to deliver this, basically releasing a lesson every week. As I complete them and you guys will give me feedback and you know, that'll be my input to make the final product that much better. And we sold, I don't know, 50, 70, I don't remember what the number is, but you know, a decent number of spots in this program, which was not a program yet the product did not exist as finishing up the lessons as we deployed it.

Melissa Anzman (08:15): Wow. That's amazing. Not putting in sort of so much back end to make sure it works for the people who actually want to take the class.

Danny Iny (08:23): And the thing is, this is really like, it can come off as you know, Oh, you just want to be lazy and not do the work, but that's not the case. What you want to do is give yourself, cause it's not about not doing work. You're going to do a lot either way. You eat yourself, the freedom and receptivity to learn from people what they need and be able to course correct as you deliver this content because you can know your stuff. That doesn't mean that you know exactly how to teach it. Right? So we did this prelaunch brought in all these people, deliver the course, got their feedback, made tweaks, then launched again to our audience. So, okay, it's done now, I'm releasing it. This is the price for this launch. Then it'll go up to full price, another hundred, 150, whatever the number was, people joined him did really, really well.

Danny Iny (09:08): And at that point I had basically launched it twice, both with very successful results. Now the key to getting joint venture partners, cause all their really big launches. They're going to involve partners who are going to help you promote is that it's much easier to do it. If you've already done it before. Right? Right. Today, I've done probably a couple of hundred joint venture promotions over the last couple of years. It's very easy for me to reach out to my partners who know me, who trust me, who recognize that I have experienced delivering and say, Hey, I want to do this promotion. Does the timing workout? And we worked something out and we do it. But when you're just getting started, when nobody knows who you are reaching out and saying, Hey, you've never heard of me, but can you take a huge risk and promote this thing I've created that I've never even sold before.

Melissa Anzman (09:59): So you're a large audience and put your credibility on the line.

Danny Iny (10:02): So you do need to have a bit of a foot in the door, but it's so much easier if instead of reaching out and saying, I've built this new product, I really, really hope it'll sell. Can we please test drive it with your audience if instead of that you say, yeah, I built this new product and it already sold out in two prelaunch is that I did the response has been phenomenal. And that's why I think your audience is going to love it.

Melissa Anzman (10:22): Okay. So there's so many good meaty things there. I hope you don't mind me sort of pausing here and asking you a few questions that I have along the way. So one of the things that I think you mentioned that just is amazing is that this product, right, like Freddy wasn't about the product that you wanted to make. It wasn't necessarily that burning desire that you thought people needed. It was taking a different approach and listening to what people were saying they needed. How hard was that for you to do?

Danny Iny (10:55): That's a really great question. And that's a question. People don't usually ask me, but it was actually very difficult. I resisted for several months. And then when I did it, I kept it very separate from my main brand. Like for, for a year, you go to Firepole Mar you're longer than that a year and a half. If you had gone to Firepole marketing.com, you would not have even found a link to this product. I tried to keep it completely separate and it took literally like I did that then the next product that probably we'll get to, and I'll tell you about is the audience business master class, which I'm very known for at this point was further in this. Like what felt to me like a distraction from my brand. And it wasn't until the middle of maybe 2013 that I kind of realized that, okay, you know what? My brand is, what everyone who appreciates my work wants it to be

Melissa Anzman (11:44): Right. The people who are actually buying things for me,

Danny Iny (11:47): Exactly. It's like, okay, you know what if these people have just given me basically like what a million dollars I should listen to them and I should respect what it is that they want from me. And that's when I kind of pivoted the brand to become back in alignment with my book engagement, from scratch and write like Freddy and the audience business masterclass, all of which felt to me when I was first doing them as being a bit of a sidestep from what I had originally wanted to do. So it's like, what I'm describing now is like, you know, I kind of stumbled into this to a certain extent with write like Freddy and I've made it a lot more conscious since then, but it's not about pulling a stunt to get people invested in a product before you launch it. Although it does that, it's about really being open and receptive to starting with the audience and saying, what is the product that you want and building that for them. And that takes a lot of humility, which is, you know, I, I have a lot of strengths. Humility really is not one of them. If you ask my wife, she'll corroborate that it takes a willingness to be vulnerable because you've got to start with, you know what, I do not have all the answers and I'm not sure exactly what you need, but I will listen and try to help as best I can

Melissa Anzman (13:00): When you're in that moment, doing that. I mean, I personally have had this, a similar experience. My business has pivoted in a way that I never expected it to, like from the beginning and looking back, I would never imagine, but that's what people were hiring me for. So it was like one of those things. But what I had originally was was sort of some questioning of am I, you know, this isn't aligning with my vision. Should I be doing it? Did you have any of that when you were going through that of people should want this, but they're wanting this, where am I missing the Mark?

Danny Iny (13:33): I didn't have that experience exactly. But I really felt like, you know, at first I resisted it, cause this is not like my main, not the main focus of what I wanted to do. And as people kept asking me and kind of the smart business person, marketer in me was like, okay, look, there's a, there's a clear need. There's a clear demand. People have a problem that you can solve. There is a revenue opportunity. So it was like, you know, even if this is not the longterm thing, like do this on the side, help a bunch of people make some money to fund the other stuff that you're doing. So I didn't, it took me a while to kind of come around to just doing it, but it didn't call into question for me, you know, should I be doing this or am I too far off track, but I did keep it very separate and segregated. Like I really saw it as a side project.

Melissa Anzman (14:17): Gotcha. That's amazing. So my next question for you that was super interesting to me, if you do joint ventures probably better than anybody else. I know. So just having been on the side and watching them get promoted and watching your products be shared with so many different people and different audiences you do a fabulous job at that. And so most people don't right. We've all seen those not go so well. How would I liked your advice for somebody who's just starting off, who's really new to the game. If you could, can you share with us maybe, you know, the importance of those joint ventures for you and your business, as well as you know who to aim for. If you have a hundred people on your list, 200 people on your list, very small audience, you know, what level or what type of JV makes the most sense for somebody who's watching a tested to their audience product?

Danny Iny (15:15): Ah, okay, well, so there were like seven questions in there.

Melissa Anzman (15:21): Talk about it as great. So

Danny Iny (15:23): If you've got one or 200 subscribers on your list the first thing I would say is that I don't know how well tested a product can be internally because the list is very small. So it's okay. Like, you know, there are situations where you can legitimately test something with an audience that's small, but in many cases, what you'll want to do is just grow the audience and the tactic I've historically recommended since the days of write like Freddy, our guest posting, not because it's the most high yield tactic to get your name out there. It's not right. You're going to spend a whole bunch of time writing a post. And even if you publish it on a major blog, you might not pull in more than 50 or a hundred subscribers from it. So you're going to have to do a lot of this writing for relatively small return.

Danny Iny (16:08): It's not like, can I do a joint venture and I can get a thousand subscribers at a time. Sometimes it's not on that scale. The beauty of guest posting is that you can do it even when you're starting from scratch, right? You don't need to have existing relationships. You're not asking in the grand scheme of things for people to have to take a huge chance on you just by looking at a draft that you've written. And by writing that content, getting it published, showing them that you're responsible and professional as they work with you and then getting good results because their audience likes what you've written. You demonstrate to them that, Hey, you're a professional and their audience likes your work. And that's a really important foot in the door. So like I would usually recommend try to grow your audience beyond just a couple hundred subscribers.

Danny Iny (16:49): Now there is a little like Ninja trick that I figured out slash learn slash deduce. I don't even know how I like how it came to me at this point. But if you've only got one or 200 subscribers and you want to get your first major joint venture part. So first of all, I mean, do aim kind of, you know, don't try to go for like, you know, the Steve forests of the world, like, you know, that box relatively speaking within your own wave class. So, you know, it's only got 1,005 thousand, 10,000 subscribers. I wouldn't go too far higher than that, but, and of course make absolutely sure that you have a product. You validated people want it, you know how to sell it because the worst thing that can happen is not that you try to get a partner and they are not interested it's that you get the partner and then the promotion bombs, and then forever, they remember you as the person who was basically full of it.

Danny Iny (17:41): So that's the worst case scenario. So make sure that it's a good offer that, you know, you know how to sell, but if you've done that then apply that same strategy, write a guest post for them. And what you do is in your bones, all the links that go back to your site has some as affiliate links for that person. And don't tell them you're doing that, right. Don't discuss it with them as a promotion, just tag them as tag it as an affiliate link and do a bunch of guest posting for them. And people come back to your list and do a little mini launch just for them. And assuming that you've got everything dialed in, a bunch of people will buy and then email this person who all you've done is right for them. You've provided good content for them taking good care of their audience and say, Hey, I owe you some money.

Danny Iny (18:26): What's your PayPal address out of the pill? And you say, look, I just, you know, I, I, I know we didn't agree to do any kind of promotion, but these people came through you and a whole bunch of them bought this thing that I created. So first of all, I want to give you your commission, which is this much. And obviously don't do this. If it adds up to like $4 and 11 cents, like it's a worthwhile amount, but that allows you to lead into saying, you know, we didn't even try here, imagine how well we do, if we actually did a promotion, given how much your audience likes my stuff, how about if we get on the phone or Skype and talk about how that could work and you know, it's not a guaranteed thing. It's not always gonna work, but that's probably the most powerful way to get your foot in the door from starting to hear that I can think of.

Melissa Anzman (19:12): Yeah. I think that's one of the best nuggets of advice we've ever had on the show. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah. Score. That's great advice. And, and I love the fact that for you and your business and your approach, it is about guest posting is about building your audience and your list and, and doing that. And I think, you know, why I like that is it's genuine, right? It's not a fly by the seat. What does that fly by your pants type of thing, or a scheme it's really build an engaged audience, built people who want to buy what you're selling. And then you can partner up with the right people that make the most sense and add value to them first through guest posting and through other types of ventures that way. So I think that's great advice.

Danny Iny (19:59): Awesome. So should we like route back to the story?

Melissa Anzman (20:02): Yeah, yeah. Please do. Please do. Sorry. I didn't want to, I didn't want to forget those great nuggets

Danny Iny (20:10): And where we are in the story. I just, you know, write like Freddy had gone from an idea that had been validated by all this like consulting and stuff that I had done to this prelaunch kind of seed offer for my early adopters to a launch, to my audience, to a launch with joint venture partners. And in this context, it was kind of a rolling JV launch. I didn't do the whole, you know, having everyone mailing to a video or something like that. I just, I would do a webinar for a partner then another webinar for another partner, so on an ongoing basis. And I always did my best to make it super valuable as an experience for everyone, do my best to take good care of everyone. And at the very end of it said, Oh, by the way, if you were happy with this experience, can you introduce me to anyone else?

Danny Iny (20:49): And over the course of that year, you know, I started out with maybe a handful five or 10 tops, people who were willing to do stuff with me, I think we had done about 40 promotions by the end of that year. Now that actually marked the end of the promotion of right, like Friday, December, 2012 is when I basically retired the product it's still available. You know, you can still find it online. People still buy it. Although I have no idea how they find it. We haven't promoted it since the end of 2012, because wow. Way earlier in that year, towards the beginning of that year, actually, as people had bought, right, like Freddy and started applying what I had taught them, a lot of them were finding that they were able to get posts on major blogs and write really good content to put there. And I was starting to get a lot of questions back from people that there were a lot of different variations, but between the lines, they were all basically asking me now that I know how to write a great blog post and put it on a major blog. Do I know everything I need to know to build a successful online business? And I'm thinking, I'm thinking like, well, no, of course not.

Melissa Anzman (21:51): Why would you even think that we haven't gone there yet,

Danny Iny (21:54): But in answering a ton of these questions, I found that, okay, you know, if people really wanted a whole picture of how does it all fit together, what do they need to do? And I didn't want to just rush ahead and build a massive cause this would be a much larger and scale training than write like Freddy, right? Like Freddy is a four week program. It's pretty simple. Guest posting is one of those things that like, you've got to know how to do it. Right. But it's not actually that complicated. So this would have been a much larger training. Didn't want to just rush ahead into it. So first, you know, I, I did the same, you know, I've got a whole bunch of emails and I made sure that like I was answering questions and this is really what people wanted. So then I did a webinar in April of 2014 and I walk people through my whole framework, as I had kind of figured it out at the time.

Danny Iny (22:39): And this was like, yeah, this was 2012. This was more than two years ago. It was not nearly as dialed in or focused or sloppy. Like even in my high level framework, there are now four steps. There were five then would I, you know, I've since collapsed two of them. Cause I found that it was unnecessary and so forth. So this was not like the final version, but it was like, here's my thinking as it is now, here's my understanding the best of my ability to share it. And I'm going to take on a small group of people and work with them privately in a, in a small group, like a high level coaching kind of situation to follow this process and launch their business, following what I'm teaching. If you're interested, you can apply people put down a deposit. I interviewed them, I turned down people who weren't a good fit.

Danny Iny (23:21): I've never been comfortable taking people's money. If I don't think I can help them brought on a small group of people who all paid about six or $8,000 each to work with me. And we worked on this kind of, I had an outline of what I thought the curriculum would be, but I delivered it. Really from the outline, just talking on kind of these private group webinars and a lot of private calls with them to their hands and find out where they were having trouble and challenge and all that. I did another round of that in September, brought on a few more people. And in September something interesting happened. I noticed that, you know, there were a lot of people who are on these different webinars and trainings who would come back to me and say, you know, I'd really love to learn this stuff, but I don't, I don't have six or $8,000 to spend, which makes sense.

Danny Iny (24:07): Like, that's understandable, right? Like, do you have a product to sell? And I was like, I really don't, I'm sorry. Like I don't have a product, but I'll tell you what, since there's so much demand I will take on and I am planning on turning this into a product anyway, I'll take on a group of, I think it was 40 or so people and do it in like a classroom version. So I'll do a webinar every week or two weeks Everett was delivering a lesson, basically the same stuff I was doing to the live group, to the, to the high level group, without all the one on one stuff. And I was comfortable doing it at that point because I'd already been through around with the high level groups. I knew what the questions were, I'd revised my curriculum. So I took on this kind of classroom group and delivered it live like, you know, one lesson per week for whatever the duration was.

Danny Iny (24:51): And I had the other high level group I was working with at the same time. And all of that informed the outlines of the curriculum, informed what I was actually putting together that allowed me to do my big launch for the audience business masterclass the very first time in January of 2013. That was the first time we sold the product we had, I think about 30 something partners promoting us. We did a ton of webinars that month. It was like, it was insane. We did almost $300,000 in sales that month. Wow. Like crazy.

Melissa Anzman (25:25): Yeah.

Danny Iny (25:27): And that was the first time we ever sold the product. And then at that time, the product didn't even exist. It's a 14 week product. And we had built the first like four lessons and we were like right racing against the clock to finish the lessons before they were released to new students as we built it. But the really cool thing is that I knew that this is something people wanted and I knew exactly how to deliver it because I'd already sold and delivered about $80,000 worth of this product before we actually built it. And you already knew what absolutely like that's our, and that's basically our whole methodology. And that's what we're recreating now in building this course builders product. So we launched in the context of Marisa Murgatroyd superhero summits, where I was Obi wan Kenobi. That was like one of my highlights of the year.

Danny Iny (26:13): Although it was very hot in those Jedi robes, but we launched a course builders bootcamp. And I said, look, this is the process. And I outlined a lot of what I just shared with you on this call today. I explain the process. I said, I'm taking on a group of people to do a live bootcamp training one lesson per week for five weeks in total. And the response was insane. We had like 250 people sign up for this bootcamp. Wow. And now I'm recording. I'm not sure when this is going to air, we're recording this towards the end of August. At the end of September, we're doing course builders live. We're doing a live event here in Montreal app. Firepole marketing headquarters. A whole bunch of people are going to come and work with us for four days to basically take what we did in the bootcamp that was delivered through these like remote webinars, me delivering a lesson, we're going to do the same stuff with a ton more detail in person in my offices where I and my team can work closely with people to actually get it done.

Danny Iny (27:11): Like, and we've got, you know, I've got a copywriter on staff, we've got our video and audio editing equipment. The idea is that people come in for four days. They leave at the end, they've got a product rate, a launch. Wow. And that's amazing. Thank you. I'm, I'm super excited about it. This is like a brand new thing that we've never done. And I'm taking a lot of my own income on the results. People are going to get, it's a $15,000 event, but I'm basically requiring people to that. People pay $3,000 dollars out of pocket to attend. And then the balance of $12,000, they're going to write me a check when they hit $120,000 in revenue from the product we're going to build together. So they don't have those results. I don't get paid.

Melissa Anzman (27:51): I love it. I love it. And that also just in my opinion, from a sales perspective or a marketing perspective, perhaps really gives me trust in what you're doing, because you've put yourself on the line a lot. And I think that's an amazing thing to do. And to me speaks so highly of the system you've created and the program you're doing with them.

Danny Iny (28:12): Well, thank you. And it aligns incentives. I mean, there are so many events where really your goal is just to get people, to pay, show up, give them a good time, but then they're on their own. And I don't want that to be how things are set up. So we're doing this and I'm super excited about it. But the cool thing is that all of this together, the bootcamp, the, the mastermind group that was set up from members of the bootcamp for want more support and stuff, the course builders live, all of that, which in aggregate is going to probably be worth. We haven't finished selling stuff yet, but I imagine it will be worth at least, you know, $120,000 in upfront revenue and probably a quarter million dollars more in revenue. Once people are done getting the results and paying me all of that is just my learning process about how to build this amazing product that we're actually going to launch in January of 2015.

Melissa Anzman (29:04): Yeah. So I want to, I want to take a second and comment on that because it's similar to one of our previous guests Tanya Geisler actually talked about doing a similar type of launch, but maybe doing it you know, a lost revenue or not as much income or so on. And I'd love to just point out that in your examples, you've earned income for each one of your sort of beta testing, for lack of a better term, you're still earning money and valuing the results you're delivering and valuing your input and your knowledge that people are getting even while you're beta testing something. So I love that differentiation.

Danny Iny (29:43): It's really important to do that. Now you're not charging anywhere near full price, obviously. I mean, a big part of why I'm charging 3000 instead of $15,000 is because, you know, we're still validating this and I want the onus to be on me to work hard, to make sure I deliver the bootcamp cost $200. Whereas the product will launch in January. It's probably going to be closer to 2000 and we gave the bootcamp participants an opportunity to like upgrade, to get all future iterations of this course, you know, included. And it was like an extra 300 bucks. So it's definitely a reduced price. And your primary goal here is not to make a ton of money, but you do want to pay for your time and efforts. You don't want it to be like, this is a cause if you're not getting paid, there are a few things that happen.

Danny Iny (30:27): First of all, this becomes a side project that you can't devote much attention to because you've got to pay your bills first. That's just the reality of all of our lives. It doesn't have to be hugely profitable, but it should be revenue generating. The second thing is that you want feedback from real customers, real students who are invested in what you're doing and you know, your, your three friends who are doing your course for free as a favor to you either they're not invested the way real customers would be, but they're also not at all representative of the, of the audience that you're ultimately looking to serve. And so it's not really helpful for you to get to where you want to go.

Melissa Anzman (31:05): Yeah, absolutely. Oh, I love it. I love it. We are coming up on time here. I wanted to just sort of make sure that we finished the story as to your next, maybe two launches. You've briefly mentioned both, but if you could share with us some additional detailed timeline stuff and where people can reach you, that would be great.

Danny Iny (31:26): Sure. Well, the next I mean the next round of this launch really is, you know, we'll be announcing this course builders product. We don't even know what the final name is going to be yet to announce it in January. A lot of people are going to be excitedly spreading. The words you'll hear about in lots of places hopefully from Melissa as well. So there you go. And the cool thing, we've got lots of launches going on all the time. We didn't even get to talk about this, but we're actually in the process of launching a software product, literally as we speak, following the same process. So we can come back that can be a topic for a second conversation. Maybe some opening, a little loop there, but just to illustrate that this process is not only if you're selling like a training course, it works for a lot of different situations.

Danny Iny (32:11): You just have to tweak it a little bit. The basic idea is you sell iterative pilots, validate that you're on the right track and then move forward from there. In terms of, if people want to learn more about what we're doing or find out more from me with me, then obviously Firepole marketing.com. There is an enormous amount of content there. I think at last count it was six or 700 articles. We've got like dozens of eBooks and my bestselling book is available for free on the site. There's a ton of stuff there. I'm all for free. So please go ahead and enjoy. And if you have any questions for me, feel free to just email me directly. My private email address is Danny DANNY@firepolemarketing.com. And I'm happy to answer questions or, you know, help you out in any way that I can. And I answer all of my emails myself. I, I respond to my emails within 24 hours, unless it's really something that someone else on my team is better suited to help you, and then I'll make sure they get to it and respond to you within 24 hours. But either way you'll get an answer Pronto.

Melissa Anzman (33:12): Absolutely. And I'll be sure to share all of your information in the show notes as well, so that it can make an easy one, one click connection with you. So thank you for that. And my last question, before we go, usually what would you recommend someone who's starting where you are or wanting to do what you've done? What's the one piece of advice for them that you'd like to share?

Danny Iny (33:37): The one piece of advice I'd share for someone who's just getting started is that this really is a marathon. It's not a sprint. You know, I didn't get to do what I'm doing now overnight, and that's okay. You don't need to in order to be getting great results and having a good time you are going to stumble along the way. God knows I have stumbled plenty. But failure is really only failure. If you stop playing the game, otherwise failure is just the cool obstacle that taught you the lesson that you needed to have amazing success.

Melissa Anzman (34:09): Absolutely. Thank you so much, Danny, for being on the show today, it's been amazing. We have learned a lot of great nuggets, not just about your expertise in marketing, but also how to create and launch new products. We really appreciate you coming on.

Danny Iny (34:22): Totally. My pleasure. I'm grateful for the opportunity. I hope this has been valuable for our listeners and I look forward to doing it again soon.

Melissa Anzman (34:29): I hope you enjoyed today's episode with Danny Iny he shared so many great and amazing insights and nuggets and scripts and things that I know all of us can benefit from. I'm so honored that he came on the show. If you'd like to get the show notes for this episode, you can go to launchyourself.co/session22. Again, that's launchyourself.co/session22. And if you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to subscribe on stitchers and iTunes and leave us a great review until next time

Melissa Anzman (35:03): Thanks for listening to the launch yourself podcast join the conversation at www.launchyourself.co