The Hidden Business Within Your Business

Russell Brunson talking about the hidden business inside of everyone’s businesses…

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Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you back to the “Marketing in Your Car” podcast. I hope you liked our intro song [laughs]. If you listened to the first podcast yesterday, I told you I’d been talking about doing this for 4 years, and I was having my brother do my audio/video stuff. He was going and he was putting up the first podcast, getting it all installed on iTunes, making it all work, and he was like, “Hey, do you want to use that intro we had done about four years ago for the ‘Marketing in Your Car’ podcast?” and I was like, “Oh, yeah, I forgot. We hired this dude to make an intro,” so I listened to it. It was super corny, super cheesy, but it sounded like a cool radio show, and so we’re going to use it for a while. Congratulations. You guys get to hear our awesome intro.

Right now I’m actually not driving to the office. I’m actually driving to go to wrestling practice right now. One of my buddy’s kids is in town and wanted me to beat up on him a little bit, so I’m driving there, but I just had some ideas I wanted to let you guys have some fun with. It was the thought process I’m going through.

Yesterday I talked about the power of things being rare in your business, and so when I was sitting there that day when I got to the office, I was thinking about how I could use that on anything I’m working on right now. We recently launched a new supplement, and if anyone’s ever been in the settlement business, I’m learning all of the headaches that come with the inventory management and stuff [laughs] like that.

When we first launched, we had no idea if it was going to sell, so we ordered a thousand bottles, and it sold really well. When we went back, we ordered twenty-five hundred bottles, and it sold out, so then we went back and got another thing, but the thing that’s annoying is that we have a six-week delay before the next order comes in. If I put in an order today, six weeks later is when we’ll get the bottles back in, so it’s a huge timing issue.

I’m a good entrepreneur. I’m not so good with timing and all of that kind of stuff, so all sorts of headaches has been happening. We decided to test something in the last day or so, and I don’t have extensive results yet to show you guys, but so far the numbers look really good.

On our phone number, if you’ll call in to order, we have a voice message thing that we’re doing, and we are also tweaking the copy on the page, which basically just talks about the fact that the supplement is rare right now, which is true because we ordered our last batch of whatever it was, and they’re almost gone, so we spoke to that. We talked about that and basically said, “Hey, this is a trial run. We’re making sure that it sells well.”

I can’t remember exactly how the script went as I’m sitting here in my car, but we did a couple of tweaks with the script, talking about how it was rare. Eventually it will be something that we have full production runs of, and at that point, the price will be X, but right now, because this is a newer thing, we want more case-based success stories. Until we sell out, this is the new price point. So far, in less than a day now of results, that’s going really, really well, so I’m intrigued and excited to watch what’s going to happen over the next little while.

The other thing I want to talk about today, and hopefully this will give you guys some ideas, but one of my favorite books that I’ve read recently is a book called “Rework”, by Jason Fried and the team over at 37 Signals. They are the guys that invented Basecamp. They also brought Ruby on Rails, that language about, and anyway, they’re really neat guys, and I had a chance to interview Jason a little while ago.

One of the concepts he talked about was selling your byproduct. He talked about a coffee shop which sold coffee, and they made a bunch of money, but they had all of these coffee bags they were just throwing away, and so they started selling the empty coffee bags and started this whole new business just selling that. He was talking about his business, the fact that these books they’re writing are the byproduct of all of this stuff they’re learning.

I thought it was kind of interesting. For almost the last five and a half years now, we’ve been running the publishing and print newsletter “HeadDotComSeekers.com”, and we’ve had tens of thousands of subscribers from all around the world. Tons of success stories have come from it, but it’s just been that everyone in our office wrote an article about what they’re doing, and we published it.

Recently I came back and said, “Look that stuffs been good, and people like it, but how do I create a product that’s just phenomenal and exciting?” I kept wondering, “What are the things that people in our market really want? What are they interested in?” What was kind of cool is that in January, I was at an event. It was Ryan Deiss’s and Perry Belcher’s Traffic and Conversion event. Listening to this thing, and after, one of my friends came over to me. He’s from Israel, and he said, “Hey, why aren’t they sharing more of their split test results? That’s the main reason why I flew all the way from Israel to here, because I want to see the results from the testing.”

I thought, “Isn’t that interesting? That was his main driving point.” In our business, we test stuff all day long. We’ve got split tests on thousands of awesome, exciting, crazy, different things. I was trying to think of that could be the byproduct of our business, sharing in our split test results. I don’t know anyone that’s as much of an entrepreneurial ADD as me and has so much happening in all of these different markets. I think right now we’re in twelve different markets, I believe, unless you count the Thai company I’m trying to roll out. That would be number thirteen [laughs]. But we’re doing stuff in all of these different markets.

I think we have the unique perspective that most people don’t have, so we share stuff that’s happening in our supplement business and in our “keep running” business, and in our dating and our weight loss, in our Internet marketing, and all of these different businesses, and share the results. So that’s what we’re now rebranding our whole newsletter around, around testing results, and in about two months from now, we’re re-rolling out our newsletter under that new direction, new angle, and I think it’s going to be really cool.

Just for you guys to think about in your business – what are the byproducts? What are the things that you’re doing that just by the nature of your doing it, it’s creating something? That could be an information product. It could be creating waste. Whatever it’s creating, what other side businesses are there that you can do, that you can spin off of that? I thought it was kind of an interesting topic and something you guys could think about in your businesses as well.

That’s all I had for today. Again, I don’t want to make these long. I want to keep them small. My goal is I’m going to be recording these while I’m driving either to work or like right now [laughs], driving to the wrestling room. Hopefully these things will be something that you guys can plug in to your car while you’re driving. You can download them in the morning. I still don’t know how podcasts work. I’ve never really been a part of one before, but download them in the morning, and when you jump into your car, driving to work or when you’re driving around during the day, listen to them for ten or fifteen minutes.

My goal is that if I can give you one little idea or just get your mind thinking about something different each day, then I feel like I’ve succeeded and that’s what my goal is. I appreciate you guys listening in, and I will try to keep giving you some good ideas. If you want more information about me or our company, please go to DotComSecrets.com. That’s where we share most of our Internet marketing. Cool stuff that’s going down. I appreciate you guys, and we will talk to you again soon.