11

HOW TO GET RICH BY COPYING YOUR COMPETITORS

(AND WHY INVENTING SOMETHING NEW IS A SURE WAY TO LOSE)

“People are going to copy your product if you build great stuff. Just because Yahoo has a search box doesn’t make it Google.”

—Evan Spiegel

When I show up to an entrepreneur meet-up and ask someone what their idea is, I often hear: “I can’t share my idea until you sign this NDA.”

This person thinks their idea is so good they’ll win over the whole market. Couldn’t be further from the truth. Brand-new ideas almost always lose and cost boatloads of money.

You already know what I think about copying other people’s ideas. Do it. You’re stupid if you don’t. (See chapter 2 if you need a reminder why.) In this chapter I’ll show you exactly how to copy, add your own twist, and then out-execute.

Winners don’t have new ideas. Rather, they copy the heck out of their competitors, then add their own flavor or unique angle to win. This way you’re just making a new move on the board, not inventing a brand-new board game. Every successful player does this.

Facebook released Marketplace, which is a better-designed version of Craigslist. Stripe is a payment processor with an easier-to-use API. Venmo, PayPal, Square Cash, and Google Pay all do the same thing with a twist. Rockefeller copied other people’s steel mills, then changed one procedure related to oil refining and sulfur to print money.

Have you seen those sections at the bottom of major blogs that showcase sponsored content, or “related posts”? Companies like Outbrain and Taboola have dominated this space for years, but it didn’t stop John Lemp at Revcontent from throwing his weight into the competition.

In 2017, Revcontent processed $184M of ad spend through its platform, collecting 25 percent of that as revenue. This is a prime example in which a big thinker ignored the conventional wisdom that “you must have a new idea!” Instead, he went right after business models already proven and is now chipping away at their lead.

Don’t let your ego be so big as to think your idea has never been done before. If no one else is doing it, there may be a reason. And even if you do have a brilliant new idea, you’ll make a profit much quicker by building on something that already exists. You’ll have plenty of time (and money) to launch your genius invention after you’ve made bank by copying.

FROM AFFILIATE TO COMPETITOR ($18M BIZNESS APPS VS. $2.4M BUILDFIRE)

Copying your competitors can make you rich even if you never scale to their size. Ian Blair proved this when he launched BuildFire while still in college. BuildFire is drag-and-drop software that lets people create mobile apps without any tech expertise. Think WordPress for apps. BuildFire is a lot like another company, Bizness Apps, which Ian previously used to build apps for small businesses. After about a year of creating one-off apps, Ian realized that the big money was not in client work, but in building a software competitor to Bizness Apps.

I love the story that the numbers here tell. Since launching BuildFire in 2012, Ian has raised $2.5M in investor funding and has thirty-one employees at age twenty-five. His annual revenue in 2017 was $2.4M and his current monthly recurring revenue is $300K. When we chatted on Skype, Ian called me from his $850K apartment with a full view of the San Diego skyline behind him.

While Ian built his empire by copying a competitor, Bizness Apps’ numbers show that they’re still killing it. Andrew Gazdecki launched the company in 2010 with $110K in investor funding. Today Andrew, at age twenty-eight, has ninety employees, with $18M in 2017 annual revenue. His current monthly recurring revenue is $1.5M.

BIZNESS APPS

BUILDFIRE

CEO/Founder

Andrew Gazdecki

Ian Blair

Year founded

2010

2012

$ Raised

$110K

$2.5M

# Employees

90

31

2017 Revenue

$18M

$2.4M

Monthly recurring revenue

$1.5M+

$200K–$400K

Revenue per employee

$80K

$77.4K

# Customers

3,000+

1,000–5,000

ARPU

(avg. revenue per user)

$500+

$400–$500

I’m a numbers geek so I can go on (if that’s you, too, you can see the full Bizness Apps versus BuildFire comparison above). The takeaway here is that even though Andrew’s business is more successful, Ian was still able to create a multimillion-dollar enterprise by directly copying Andrew’s idea. And Andrew’s idea wasn’t all that new, anyway. Other drag-and-drop app builders existed before Bizness Apps and the whole concept is a riff on drag-and-drop website software like Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly.

I’m going to show you how to do the same, and how I did it with my past two companies. Much of my advice in this chapter is related to the software space since that’s where I do most of my work, but you can apply these tactics to any industry, whether you’re running a restaurant, knitting company, professional services business, or software.

Whatever you do, your first step is to find an idea to copy. And ideas are lurking everywhere—you just need to know where to look.

FIND AN IDEA YOU LIKE IN A HOT INDUSTRY

If you win the game but there’s no pot of money to win, you picked the wrong game.

The first step the New Rich take when thinking about new businesses is to make sure the winnings make the work worth doing. Start by looking at trends. What spaces are hot? It’s always a good bet to go where a tide is already rising. Try these resources to find up-and-coming markets and industries.

Use These Four Websites to Find Best-Selling Physical Products

The quickest way to build capital if you’re launching a physical product is to presell it. Crowdfunding is perfect for this because it’s essentially a way to presell your product and get press for it at the same time. In general, it’s a great option if you:

You get two chances at copying with physical products. You can swipe ideas from existing items and from their crowdfunding campaign if they had one.

So get copying. Go to Kickstarter or any crowdfunding site and sort by “Most raised” to “Least raised.” Study the “Most raised” campaigns and try to figure out why they were so successful. Was it the storytelling on the crowdfunding page? Is the product a genius idea? Why did these Vue glasses raise more than $1M from 5,500+ people?

Vue: Your Everyday Smart Glasses

by Vue

Vue is the world’s first pair of smart glasses that are designed for everyday use. Offered in prescription, piano, and sunglasses.

San Francisco, CA    Product Design

2472% funded

$1,236,409 pledged

5,860 backers

11 days to go

Why did this neck pillow do so well? What about the ladle?

OSTRICH PILLOW GO – Maximum comfort sleep for all necks

StudioBananaThings

The ultimate travel pillow providing unparalleled comfort and total neck support thanks to its ergonomic design and viscoelastic core.

London, UK

311% funded

$155,553 pledged

17 days to go

GIR Ladle & Spoonula | Flexible, squishable, indestructible

GIR: Get It Right

The ladle and spoonula you’ve been waiting for. Precision-pouring edge, perfect flexibility. Delivered in time for holiday gift-giving.

New York, NY

1090% funded

$109,072 pledged

3 days to go

Each of these products, despite being drastically different, succeeded by leveraging the strategies you can copy:

Set goals you can hit and then seed your campaign. These products all hit their fund-raising goals early by setting low targets and building momentum fast. You do this by seeding your campaign—get people you know to commit to making a contribution before launch. Then tell them the moment you go live so they can jump in and pledge. So if your goal is $5K aim to get fifty to one hundred people to commit to $50 to $100 so you can hit that in the first couple days.

Once you crush your goal it’s easier to get free press, which begets more money and more press. Business Insider featured Vue Smart Glasses mid-campaign, when they’d raised $780K on a goal of $50K. They were also featured in Forbes, TechCrunch, Computerworld, Digital Trends, The Verge, and Wareable. Ostrichpillow Go was plugged in USA Today mid-campaign.

Tell great stories. People want to connect with you emotionally when they invest in your product and the best way to do that is through great stories. Use video to show potential backers that you have character. Inject humor. Vue’s promo video showed how awkward other smart glasses look by having a guy wear a big VR set while answering the door for the pizza guy. The Spoonula folks connected with cooks by showing how perfectly it scoops up every drop of beef stew. Ostrichpillow Go commiserates with us on the ridiculous ways we try to get comfortable sleeping on airplanes.

Geek out on specs and design. Backers love to see how you got to the end product. Break down how it works, why it works, and how you arrived at the design. Show pictures of early prototypes and whiteboard idea sessions. Vue shows people using the glasses while explaining how they use bone conduction audio technology to transfer stereo sound to your inner ear. Ostrichpillow Go shows us their whiteboard design ideas. Spoonula gets obsessive on geometry, dimensions, and the wonders of pharmaceutical-grade platinum silicone.

Use value + scarcity to create urgency. People love to be the first to get something, especially if it’s at a discount with limited supplies. Use your rewards to appeal to those tendencies in all of us. Vue fueled momentum for early orders with an early bird reward: 41 percent off a pair of prescription smart glasses with only 350 spots available. When that sold out, 6,833 people paid $179 for the same reward—their most popular tier. Each of these campaigns leveraged scarcity to drive action. They also set up stretch goals to keep momentum up. So if they hit $200K in funding, $500K, $1.2M, they would add additional features to their products. And they don’t have to be expensive. The $1.2M stretch goal for Vue was adding attachable nose pads to the glasses. Not crazy.

Product Hunt is another great resource for scouting physical products. It’s a place where folks can post new products and get up votes from the community. Assume there is large demand for products that get lots of up votes. You can’t use Product Hunt to fund-raise, but it’s still a great leading indicator to what’s hot.

In addition to Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Product Hunt, check out these crowdfunding sites to get ideas of other hot markets: Pozible.com, Ulule.com, and Fundable.com.

Eight Places to Find Digital and Software Products Selling Fast

If you’re thinking about launching a software business, try looking in these places for industries that are hot.

  1. Siftery.com allows you to see what companies are actually getting new customers. The site then ranks tools (mostly software) that have landed the most new customers over the most recent time period. Money doesn’t lie. If people are becoming customers of a new product in droves, you know it’s a hot space.

    Siftery covers several software categories, including Marketing, Sales and Business Development, Customer Support, Product and Design, Analytics and Data Science, HR, Finance and Accounting, and Productivity.

  2. GetLatka.com allows you to see the customer counts, revenue figures, pricing metrics, and other data points on private software companies. If you’re thinking about launching a piece of software, check this site out to see how others with similar sorts of software are doing.

  3. BuiltWith.com is a site that will tell you what technologies other websites use. In other words, it lets you see what pickaxes the gold miners are using. If you were interested in the e-commerce space, it’d be valuable to know who currently has how much market share. You can then reverse engineer why the winners are winning and losers are losing to increase your chances of success in the same space. Go to BuiltWith.com and click TOOLS in the dropdown to start exploring trends.

    I got to the screenshot below by clicking on WEB TECHNOLOGY TRENDS in the main menu and then ECOMMERCE from the column on the left. The following chart pops up, which shows me that WooCommerce has 10 percent, Magento 11 percent, Shopify 9 percent, and other platforms 44 percent of the e-commerce market. Understanding who has what percentages of e-commerce technology allows you to decide whom to go after. Why does WooCommerce have 10 percent? Why does Shopify have 9 percent? Is there a company in that 44 percent that you can buy to jump-start your entry into this space? These are the kinds of things you can learn using BuiltWith.com.

  4. TechCrunch.com is a blog focused on the technology sector. Across the bottom you can view all recent rounds of funding. If you see a large amount of money going into a particular company, you can assume that space is hot. Venture capitalists don’t invest unless they see $1B+ opportunity. Hijack their research by looking at what they are investing in.

    You can also use TechCrunch’s side navigation to look at funding sorted by the investors, the funding size, and the industry. A closer look at Babbler reveals the following:

    After you understand that Babbler is in the PR space, you might use the product to figure out if they have some special twist that other companies in the PR space don’t have. Remember, VCs invest only where they think they get can 10x or higher returns. You’re hunting for the reason investors see 10x opportunity in the business so you can copy the best parts and then invent your own twists to make it better.

  5. Listen to podcasts that feature entrepreneurs. In my fifteen-minute daily podcast, I ask every CEO what their favorite online tool is. This helps me find great new tools and markets to research. If I like a space I’ll decide if I want to buy a company in the space, build one myself, or invest in one that already exists. (To listen to the podcast, go here: http://NathanLatka.com/thetopitunes.) Other podcasts great for discovering new tools and markets are Art of Charm, The Tim Ferriss Show, and The $100 MBA.

  6. Search large LinkedIn groups. If there are a bunch of members in a LinkedIn group around “Amazon analytics” you can assume there is interest in the space. If you choose to build a tool for the space, congrats, you already have your first distribution channel.

    Let’s say you’re selling a digital product. You’d search LinkedIn for groups related to digital marketing and see that one of the biggest is Digital Doughnut, with more than 1.5 million members. From there, find the admins and message the group owner. Your goal is to build a relationship with them so that eventually they’ll feel comfortable and excited to email their group about a product you might be working on. It’s a huge distribution channel opportunity. This is my message exchange with the owner of Digital Doughnut:

John

• Active now

— 4/29/2104 —

John • 5:17 AM

Nathan,

I believe we did, you also got in touch with Graham and Mike.

Feel free to call me on +44 794 905 0711

John

On 04/28/14 7:18 PM, Nathan Latka wrote:

Hey John – Daniel communicated to me that you believed we already had a time set up to chat.

I want to make sure I’m not missing something. What time works best for you to chat? Did we already confirm a date?

Thanks,

On 04/15/14 4:56 PM, Nathan Latka wrote:

Hey John – friendly follow up here.

Are you open to connect for 30 minutes and discuss? If so what is the best email to reach you at?

On 03/31/14 6:41 PM, Nathan Latka wrote:

John – we just raised $2m from a Forbes Billionaire for a digital marketing idea that we believe embodies the future . . .

But we’re not sure.

I’d like your feedback on how we plan to spend the $2 million and on the secret project we’re developing that ultimately drove the billionaire to invest.

More details here:

http://www.roanoke.come/business/blacksburg-startup-heyo-wins-million-investment/article_bfbaeedc-ae3a-11e3-97a4-0017a43b2370.html

Are you open to connect for 30 minutes and discuss? If so what is the best email to reach you at?

Thanks,

  1. Search Facebook groups. Use Facebook search to find clusters of groups around a certain industry. Let’s say you create a journal and decide that entrepreneurs are among your target audience. You’d search for entrepreneur-related groups and reach out to the group owners to try building a relationship. Eventually you’d try figuring out how to cross-promote your product into their group. That’s obviously a delicate art, but these are clusters of people you can go after, distribution channels you can monopolize once you decide what market your product fits into.

  2. Join Slack groups. I’m part of a Slack group called Sales Hackers, where more than seven hundred account executives, C-suite executives, and other sales tool users talk about their favorite tools and why they use them. It’s a great way to get a soft read on what products are hot or not. Use www.SlackList.info to find Slack lists in any industry.

The first software company I built was called Heyo.com, which helped companies drag and drop together Facebook applications. My sense that the space was hot came from the fact that many others were getting funding.

In October 2010, Buddy Media raised an additional $27M from top-tier investors. Wildfire (another competitor) raised $10M. Involver raised $8M in October 2010. It was very clear that the space would produce many winners—and it did, to the tune of $1B+ in exits in late 2012.

Many people would look at the space and conclude that they shouldn’t compete because they don’t have funding, or that the other guys were years ahead. Totally false. Think about it this way. If investors are sinking all that money into one industry, they’re growing the industry and making it easier for you to find future customers. You turn their resources into yours when you join the space they’re pouring money into.

Following this sort of playbook will help you consistently create business wins. Once you identify an industry that you think is hot, plot out who is leading and reverse engineer their growth.

Reverse Engineer: The Easy Way to See Your Competitors’ Systems

Companies use all sorts of methods to drive growth, ranging from free content marketing to $1M+/month paid marketing campaigns. In order to beat a competitor, you have to understand where they get their food from. Then slowly siphon their food supply. If you can’t figure out where they eat, don’t attack. Here’s how I figure out why companies are growing and how they are getting customers.

SimilarWeb is a tool that tells you where websites get most of their traffic from. If I wanted to build a competitor to Todoist.com, I’d go to SimilarWeb, type in “Todoist.com,” and this report would generate:

I immediately learn that the majority of Todoist.com traffic comes from LifeHacker.com and Ifttt.com. Go make friends with the CEOs/authors of those blogs/websites. It’s a double whammy to persuade those people to write about your new tool while at the same time hurting your competitors’ traffic. Later in this chapter, I’ll show you how I did and got more than fourteen new customers to pay $360 each in under twenty-four hours.

Ahrefs is a tool that tells you which Google searches make your competitors pop up. Going to https://Ahrefs.com and typing in “Todoist.com” generates this report:

Fifty-three thousand organic keywords means there are fifty-three thousand words people type into Google that Todoist ranks for—meaning Todoist.com will appear in the organic search results for those terms. You can quickly look at what those terms are by clicking “Organic keywords”:

Todoist.com gets 4,600 unique views per month from the keyword “to do list.” Now you’ve quantified your potential gains and their potential losses if you outrank them for the words “to do list.” This book is not about content marketing or SEO, but those are the tactics you’d Google and use to outrank Todoist for any keyword.

Use App Annie if you’re trying to study a market in the mobile app space. For example, if I were analyzing the document signing space, I might explore how HelloSign ranks so well in the App Store. Going to App Annie and searching “HelloSign” creates this word cloud that tells me what people search in the App Store to find HelloSign:

Keyword optimization in the App Store is a fine art. Nobody quite knows how Apple ranks apps, but it’s certainly a combination of the title of your app, the subhead, the description, and the number of reviews you have. So you’d want to make sure your subhead and your description contain the same keywords that drive people to HelloSign.

At the end of this chapter, I’ll show you how I built Heyo.com to $5M in cumulative revenue, ten thousand customers, and $2.5M raised using these tactics.

First let’s talk about how you get your product built. Again, I’m going to focus on the tech space in this example, but many industries could follow this same process.

Use Toptal or Upwork to Build a Version of Their Tool with Your Own Twist

The number one question I get is from business-minded founders who can’t get a developer to join them. The businessperson doesn’t want to give up a portion of their company—usually tough because if you’re building a tech company, you need deep technological expertise.

The way to keep most of your company’s equity and the fastest way to find developer talent is via Toptal.com. Another version of Toptal, with less developer talent, is UpWork.com. Use these sites to hire freelancers who work on a fee basis. You get the expertise you need on your project without having to give up equity.

Help your freelancer get an idea of what you’re looking for by pointing them to projects you want to copy. I recently interviewed Jim Fowler, who sold Jigsaw to Salesforce for $120M+. During our interview Jim shared his new venture with me, Owler.com. I had been looking for a way to present business data I had collected, and I liked how he did it. It’s much simpler for me to point to this example when communicating to my Toptal developers what I want versus wireframing my own new version for GetLatka.com.

GetLatka is my site where I help founders make the most money selling their companies, investors get the best deals, and business development teams at large companies find acquisition targets. The layout is very similar to Owler. The data source is very different.

HOW TO BUILD A COPYCAT FAST

Here’s how I used Toptal to launch GetLatka.com:

  1. Post a job and let Toptal recruiters go find you development talent. I used Balsamiq.com to wireframe different user flows for the new tool, which helps my developer better guess how much time (and money!) a project might take:

  1. Interview the talent via Skype and either hire them or turn them down. I had two interviews and hired a guy named Steven who lives in Ukraine because he asked me the best questions about the wireframe I sent him.

  2. Use Toptal to pay your developer and use something like Bitbucket, Asana, or Trello to manage tasks.

  3. Toptal makes money by paying developers $50/hour and selling that time to you for $65/hour (or some markup). They save you a ton of time from having to go find contractors yourself.

The reason I much prefer using a site like Toptal to build my initial prototype is twofold:

  1. You keep 100 percent equity in your company.

  2. You don’t increase your fixed monthly expenses as you would if you hired an employee. Also, you don’t have to worry about health coverage, birthdays, or office parties (which usually waste time).

Last note on building your prototype: set yourself a budget and stick to it.

There are plenty of resources on how to get a minimum viable product built so I won’t go into detail here. You should force yourself to spend no more than $5K before getting your first customer. Ideally less.

I brought in my first $5K with GetLatka by selling this initial, very ugly prototype of my database as a CSV file:

My first customer started paying $1K/month on June 12, 2017, for access to my database of company metrics and deal flow:

Include early customers in product discussions so they get emotionally invested in you and the product. You want them to be proud that they were first. If you do this right, they’ll brag to their friends about how they “discovered” you. When I pushed new updates on GetLatka.com I’d always ask my early customers what they thought:

Search feature

Nathan Latka <█████████>

to Alvin

Does the search feature I pushed last night work smoothly on your end?

http://159.203.160.129/

Figure this will be valuable as I put all 3000 companies in database.

Working on your other suggestion!

Alvin Ang <█████████>

to me

It works! Totally – search and filter is always crucial. Auto-suggestions would be cool too, but always a little tougher to implement.

Let me know how else I can help! :)

Alvin

Then sign up new customers and always be increasing your price. My second GetLatka.com customer paid $2K/month:

Today I’m charging $20K a month for this kind of data. And I increase my costs on the company only in tandem with revenue growth. For every dollar in revenue, I’ll spend $.10 on developers to improve the product. I’ve easily invested $50K into growing GetLatka.com without ever dipping into my personal cash.

Once you’re done using Toptal to build your minimum viable product, you want to start figuring out ways to attack your competitors.

  1. Read their support forum if they have one and see what their most requested features are that don’t exist yet. I call this the “support-driven business launch guide.” You can literally launch a business based on the intel you find here. If you wanted to create a competitor to Cratejoy, you could go to their feedback request page, www.cratejoy.ideas.aha.io [inactive], and develop a solution to something their customers are clearly asking for (fifty-six up votes for giving existing customers the ability to add something to their cart).

    If you build a tool that includes just this one added feature it allows you to slowly start chipping away at your competitors’ dominance in the marketplace.

  1. Go to comparison and rating sites like G2 Crowd to see what negative reviews your competitors get.

These will help you find features you could build that your competitors don’t offer, but remember, the best products rarely win. That’s where distribution comes in.

ATTACK THEIR DISTRIBUTION CHANNELS: HOW I GOT #1 SPOT ON POPULAR INDUSTRY BLOG POST

In 2014, when I was researching how Heyo.com competitor ShortStack.com was getting so much traffic, I saw that a lot of inbound traffic (via Ahrefs.com lookup) was coming from a blog post on GuavaBox.com titled “Facebook Contest Apps: Top 5 Apps for Your Next Contest.” The list did not include my company, Heyo.com.

The following is the email back and forth between the GuavaBox cofounder and me where I ultimately persuade him to put a link to “Heyo Free Contest Builder” at the top of the article. My initial reach-out was through the GuavaBox.com website contact form:

Me:

Hey guys, I saw you wrote this article on the Facebook Contest space. I’m building a tool in the space and had 2 questions for you about a new design we’re about to roll out. Open to a call so I can show you the private stuff?

GuavaBox:

RE: GuavaBox Contact Form

Andrew Dymski █████████ via heyo.com

to Nathan

Hi Nathan,

Thanks for reaching out. Happy to take a look at Heyo and give any feedback I can. Looks like a cool tool.

Andrew J. Dymski

VP of Inbound GuavaBox, LLC

3580 Innovation Way, Suite 106

Hermitage, PA 16148

████████████

Twitter   Facebook   LinkedIn

Me:

Once I got them on Skype, I asked them loads of questions to get them emotionally committed to the product, such as:

What are you currently selling to your customers?

What tools are you currently using? What do you like about them? What do you dislike about them?

Are you using any of our [Heyo’s] competitors?

Then I started to get them connected to our product by asking things like:

What do you think about this feature on our toolset?

Do you think, if we gave you the ability to use this widget, you could upsell that to your customers?

Do you see how you can make more money from your customer by using our tool?

Having these kinds of conversations lets partners feel like they own the product because you let them in behind the scenes.

After the call, I followed up with Gray (Andrew’s cofounder):

Hey Gray,

On the call we discussed putting Heyo text above “Wildfire Promotion Builder” on this article to which you agreed. I’m thankful you’re willing to go back into your archives and make these updates and I look forward to working together more in the future!

Section header: Heyo Free Contest Builder

Heyo is a drag and drop Facebook contest platform that many businesses are using to drive engagement, capture emails, get likes, and convert sales.

Heyo also makes contest template recommendations that they know convert across all industries. For example, Squaw Valley ran a Facebook contest that captured over 4500 email addresses in under 10 days.

Another business, Nicolette Island Inn, captured 25% of all their fans’ email addresses using the Heyo Contest Template which asks users to enter their email, then click “like,” “share” and “tweet” for their chance to win.

One of our favorite aspects of Heyo is that with every contest you build, they automatically make it mobile optimized and even provide a smart URL for you to use in your marketing. Click here to start the free trial.

Gray—feel free to change this up as you see fit. You know your audience way better than I do!

Please note that this does not have your affiliate link embedded. You can log on at Lujure.Zferral.com (our program) and grab your link here:

OR

You can wait to update the links until we release our $100/signup program in about 4 weeks. Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,

Several days later, Gray updated the blog post to put Heyo right at the top:

In the first thirty days of this article being live it drove us fourteen new $30/month customers. I knew customers stayed with us for well over twelve months ($360+ lifetime value) so we had no problem paying Gray $100 per new customer. He makes $1,400 (14 new customers × $100), Heyo makes $5,040 (14 new customers × $360 lifetime value).

There are thousands of battles out there like this for you to win. By the way, these opportunities don’t exist if you’re trying to create some brand-new idea. This worked only because GuavaBox had posted a list of the top tools already created in my space. I just hijacked the list by incentivizing GuavaBox more heavily than others.

Actively reach out to the authors of old articles written about your competitors and try to build relationships with those authors. Many times they can go in and change old content, which can help you win over new monthly traffic. Icing on the cake is you’re stealing it from your competitors!

These sorts of investments grow more valuable over time. Once you set them up, they pay back in small pieces, like five to ten unique new website views per month. Think of this like stacking paper. Looks like nothing at the start, but if you add one sheet per day for 365 days, your pile starts to get tall! As you layer on these distribution techniques while having your product do the same thing, most consistently, over the longest period of time, you’ll start to emerge as the clear leader in your space.

It’s also a great investment to buy distribution channels—if you can—instead of paying to be put through them. So instead of paying, say, $5K for someone to mention you on their email list one time, try to buy the whole company so the list becomes yours. That’s exactly what I did with The Top Inbox. You can do this with anything—a curation website, a reviews website, a YouTube channel, or any other distribution channel you can think of.

SUMMARY