How Chris Spags learned to spot valuable problems everywhere

I would be reading a landing page or a website or someone's blog, even watching TV commercials, and I would see it everywhere.

Problems you can solve, that people will pay for.
— Chris Spags, CEO Jetboost.io

Before and After

When I asked Chris Spags, the founder of Jetboost.io, about what changed for him when taking 30x500, he said:

“I describe it to people as like….before I was blind, and suddenly I could see.”

Dramatic? Maybe. But Chris also isn’t the first person to share the part he said next.

“I would be reading a landing page or a website or someone’s blog, even watching TV commercials, and I would see it everywhere. Problems you can solve, that people will pay for.”

But lets back up a minute.

Before Chris joined 30x500, he was a full time software developer working in a job that wasn’t very fulfilling. He knew he wanted to work for himself, but in spite of knowing he could build software, he was “totally clueless about marketing it.” His words not ours!

He tried a bunch of things, including:

• Partnering with people who “had ideas” and using his skills to build their MVP for free with hopes that they would then sell that product. ​ But – surprise! – those relationships fell apart when he realized they didn’t know how to sell, either.

• Doing customer interviews and talking to prospective business owners on the phone, exchanging emails. But he said it was a constant struggle to really get responses, let alone meaningful insights.

Looking back, Chris described himself as “probably naive” to think either of these approaches would work. But lets be honest. How many times have you seen this, or done it yourself?

Learning to spot problems, and then….

Fast forward again to his 30x500 experience, and Chris remembers one lesson especially vividly:

“You showed a video of an iPhone charging dock, and it just kind of pans around. Not really all that exciting. But then you play back the full clip, which shows all of these other docks, why they don’t work well with phones getting stuck, tangled cords, and all of the problems and pains that are caused by a phone dock.

And that was just like, wow. That clip has stuck in my mind because it’s so clear. Once you broke it down in the lessons, even though I knew nothing about copywriting or sales before that, I understood there was a formula I could actually use.

And then when I started noticing it everywhere, along with real pains and problems in the world that I could solve.”

So naturally, Chris was off to the races, right? Fast track to success-town.

Well…not exactly.

“I didn’t take the steps immediately. Instead, I joined a startup.”

Whoopsie. 😬

“Three years into that startup and it was basically going downhill. All three founders had quit. It was being run by investors, and just kinda falling apart. But I kept going back to the 30x500 material.”

One of the benefits of 30x500 is that you can access and revisit the material anytime, as many times as you want, for life!

Not just sales and marketing course

“Eventually I started putting the 30x500 teachings into practice. I went to the Webflow forums, other Webflow communities, and Twitter to try and get into their mind and understand how they think about things.

I expected to take 30x500 and learn sales and marketing, but it’s actually affected how I design and build products as much as it’s affected how I do sales and marketing.

Because when you truly understand their pain, and you truly understand them, you can build a solution for them.”

This is, in fact, one of the key differences with 30x500.

You can learn sales and marketing, but that only works if the product you created is something people want.

And you can learn product research and design, but that won’t help if you don’t know how to reach people who want the product (without spamming them with unwelcome forum posts, cold calls, or cold emails).

In 30x500, the entire process centers on the customer.

Because without a customer, there IS no business, because there is no sale.

Equipped with Sales Safari at the core, you will learn how to turn deep insights about your audience into:

• methods reaching them, and earning their trust, before you ask them to buy
• processes for figuring out exactly what you could create for them, and how to prioritize product concepts that utilize your built-in advantages
• repeatable systems for doing this whole process over and over and over, for the lifetime of your business, however big (or fast) you want to grow it. And more.

But back Chris, the star of our story.

Once he started really understanding his audience, he had a much clearer picture of products he could create that they’d actually buy.

His first sale wasn’t a ton of money - a single $108 purchase from a customer who purchased an annual license of his new Webflow tool. But he was shocked.

“It was absolutely mind blowing. I just started running around the room like crazy, it was so cool. My next goal was to get 5 customers. Then 10. Then 20. Then 50. It wasn’t a rocket ship, but it was slow steady progress.

My last big milestone was earning as much as my first consulting project after I’d quit my job, from my products. That’s when I was like, I can keep doing this and not go back to consulting.”

People always say you never forget your first sale, and it’s true.

But you also never forget the moment you realize:

You don’t need to go out and find my next client.

You don’t need to get another job.

Because you’ve learned how to create income through selling products instead of your time.

The Ultimate Reward

Chris had one last thing he asked us to share:

“Over time, it’s become less and less about making more money. It’s the satisfaction from building a product that people find useful enough to want to pay for it. That’s just, so fulfilling.”

This story - and stories like it - are why we do what we do.