— Eric Davis, Founder Little Stream Software
Challenges
- Difficulty taking a product to launch and finding success
- No process for developing a product concept that fit his audience & their needs
- Too many “gurus” offering too much conflicting advice
Solution
30x500 Academy, where Eric learned how to:
- Understand and empathize with his audience (Sales Safari)
- Repurpose marketing assets into even more marketing content
- Develop dozens of product ideas that he can take to market right now
Results
- A product business that can provide enough to be the sole income source for Eric & his family
- More time to focus on the important things instead of fretting over money
- A resource Eric can revisit any time he needs help growing his business
Background
Eric Davis, Founder of Little Stream Software, is a long-time student of the 30x500 principles.
When 30x500 was still in its infancy in 2009, Amy Hoy ran a paid-access conference call to teach people what she’d learned during her first year making a living from products. There were fewer than 10 people on that call.
Eric Davis was one of them.
The big challenge: Finding a product offering that fit his audience
When Eric launched Little Stream Software in 2007, he was a software consultant who helped various software companies and ecommerce stores build customer software using Ruby code.
But Eric didn’t want to just help others build products; he wanted to create something of his own, and build a business around it
“I had always wanted to build and sell my own software products. It just took a while to find an offering that fit; I had about a dozen false starts.
Building the first version of each product was easy but when it was time to market them, they’d either not sell or they’d take a massive amount of effort to get any attention.”
Eric didn’t know it at the time, but part of his problem was that he was trying to follow tips from many different people with incompatible (and sometimes impractical) approaches.
“Many of my false starts were caused by following typical industry best practices about scratching your own itch, keeping your startup lean, etc. I even learned a bit from Amy, but I cherry-picked her advice and only used what fit with what others were saying.”
Eric wanted to land on a product he could build his business on, allowing him to move away from hourly consultancy work. But after a few years and a lot of money spent, Eric still had very little show for his time and effort.
“I spent way too much on a grab bag of ‘trainings’ from ‘gurus’ in the startup space that didn’t work for me—not to mention the amount of time wasted going down false paths from their advice.”
The 30x500 difference: Step-by-step instructions, and an audience-first approach
Everything changed when Eric stopped trying to follow in a thousand different footsteps and started focusing on the audience-first approach in 30x500.
“Around 2010, I decided to just follow Amy and Alex’s advice. That led to my first ebook launch, which—while not earth-shattering sales-wise—was my best product launch ever.
That early version of 30x500 wasn’t as comprehensive as what they teach today but it still gave me a system to do 80% of what I needed.”
Eric went on to create three more ebooks, with similar modest success.
But with that foundation, Eric realized he could build something bigger. He decided to revisit the latest lessons in the 30x500 Academy.
Here’s what he learned:
“Following 30x500’s steps helped me land on my focus audience: Shopify stores owners.
Most other courses preach having a great idea and finding a way to spin it so people care. 30x500 lessons help you put your audience first: Find an audience that is already there, find out what their actual problems are, and try to solve their problems for them.
This approach also accelerates people’s trust in me. Instead of my audience seeing me as a salesperson, they see me as someone trying to help them— which I am.”
The way Eric tells it, there were three specific “aha!” epiphanies that helped him take his products to launch and achieve sustainable success:
1 Sales Safari
Sales Safari is the core process of 30x500. Students learn how to observe their audience online in their natural habitat—a kind of “net ethnography”—and how to empathize with customers to REALLY understand them.
“One ‘aha!’ moment was learning that a big reason my early products didn’t take off was because I half-assed or no-assed Sales Safari in my previous attempts.
Sales Safari might sound like boring busywork or something unimportant but, six months later, the effort of doing ‘good’ Safari pays off in spades.
Within the Shopify audience, I did a proper Safari and I continue to do one every few months to stay on the leading edge. My notes are approaching 90k words—roughly the size of a novel.”
2 Repurposing marketing content
Another key element of 30x500 is learning Amy and Alex’s system for coming up with endless concepts for marketing content that connects with people and builds trust with your audience.
And when they say endless, that’s not hyperbole:
“A smaller ‘aha!’ through the current 30x500 system was learning how to turn one piece of marketing into dozens. It’s like magic, and it is so powerful.
I had so many marketing ideas that they started to crash Trello—their JavaScript couldn’t handle several hundred cards. Now, I’m using an industrial-strength system and I have over 1,300 marketing and article ideas.”
3 Developing best-fit product concepts
And with the the 30x500 approach, you never need to wonder if your idea is any good…for your audience, or for you.
“Another ‘aha!’ was learning that you can do something similar with audience research—creating dozens of potential product concepts and then distilling them down to the concept that is the best fit for me, today, using what I have now. And you can do that again for the next product, and the next.”
30x500 lessons help you put your audience first: Find an audience that is already there, find out what their actual problems are, and try to solve their problems for them.
The results? Predictable, repeatable sales—and long-term growth.
Eric was one of the first students enrolled in Amy and Alex’s programs, long before 30x500 even existed.
Many years later, he continues to put the lessons into practice in his business. He also recommends it to colleagues who want to grow their business with products.
“Just enroll! You can DIY your business, but that’s like playing on hard mode. 30x500 lowers the difficulty so much that it’s like a cheat code. If you really want to build a product business, this is the best system I’ve found.”
Eric, as a 30x500 alumni, is able to review and reference lessons anytime and he always has access to the latest material. Each time, he discovers something new that he can use to grow his product business—and he loves the way Amy and Alex continue improving the class’s content.
“30x500 is a learning environment, not an info dump. Every time I retake it, the content gets tighter and easier to understand. Amy and Alex deliberately drop in small things to get students used to new ideas before those ideas are actually presented. They’ve given a lot of thought to how humans learn and applied it to 30x500.”
Now, Eric’s business is heading the direction he had always wanted—away from consulting and toward product sales.
“Following lessons in the latest version of 30x500 has helped me ‘retire’ from consulting and focus exclusively on my products. I’m making as much as I did consulting but it’s much more stable and I have more control over what I work on.”
For Eric, it’s tough to overstate the impact the course has had on his business and his financial well-being—and what that’s meant for his family.
“My product business that was built on 30x500 lessons is at the stage where it can be the sole source of income for my family, without having to downgrade our lifestyle or move to some growth hacker island.
Last August, my kid (age 6) was home from summer camp due to mis- scheduling. I was able to look after her all month and still keep my business afloat with just 1–2 hours of support and just 10–30 minutes of writing each day.”