Hey 🖖🏻
Enrico here,
I'm tired but proud because yesterday I finally launched Storybehind, my first product tied to my YouTube channel.
Here's this guy telling you more about it:
And in this email I will share the 3 most important things I learned in these months I spent building Storybehind. These are principles you can steal for any kind of project or product you are building.
Storybehind Launch Sale (Next 24 hours) ❤️🔥
Before we start I want to let you know that I'm running a Launch Sale for Storybehind and you Email Club subscribers will be able to get it at the lowest price it will ever be.
Launch Sale expires in 24 hours from when you got this email.
Check out the Storybehind Launch Sale here →
1. Need + Value + Unique Twist
This is the formula I used to build Storybehind, but it's also the formula behind the most successful products in the world.
Need
It all started from something simple: as my channel grew many people wanted to learn how I make my videos.
It's clear there is a Need: there are hundreds of thousands of people that create content and they all want to succeed, get views, get attention and also make money from their content (you may be one of these people).
The Need is the easiest one to spot.
Value
But then, comes Value. What is it the value 🫵 YOU 🫵 can provide to solve that need? If you cannot solve the need by providing value, or you can build a product that does it for you, you don't have anything.
For example: there is surely a Need for supersonic air travel. Can I, Enrico, provide any value in solving this need? Probably not.
However, I knew I had some value. I was able to create videos that did get millions of views, that did get attention, that did get me $$$ as well, and I did that multiple times. I knew I have Value to bring.
But then comes the interesting part. The Unique Twist.
Unique Twist
The most obvious thing would now be to follow what everyone did and just make another YouTube course. It's what everyone in my position has done. Other creators like Ali Abdaal made millions from their YouTube course. It just works.
But at this point there's a very important question you need to ask yourself:
Why would anyone buy MY PRODUCT and not the ones that are already so successful?
There are already thousands of courses out there. Probably made by creators with more subscribers, with entire teams working on it.
So, why would anyone buy my product over the other, already successful ones?
This is where you need to find the Unique Twist. And if you do it right, you make your product un-comparable with everyone else.
As Peter Thiel said:
"Competition is for Losers"
And I found my Unique Twist when I met a fellow creator friend at a cafe here in London ☕️
We were looking at a successful video of mine and I was breaking down for him the storytelling, all the decisions I took, showing him the edit ...
And that's when I realized this was my Unique Twist!
I realized that all the courses out there were basically the same:
- A "step by step formula for success on YouTube"
- Slides and bullet points to explain the above
But when I'm with other creator friends I would never talk about "my secret formula for success": we would talk about all the little tricks, practical decisions in the storytelling, the edit, the packaging.
So I decided to build something different than anything else on the market. No slides, no theory, no "secret formula" (it doesn't exist BTW) or "magic framework" to follow.
I would just ..well.. show EXACTLY how I made my videos, in practice. Just like I would do with a creator friend when we're sitting in a cafe.
And by finding this Unique Twist, my product is now distant from all the other courses, it's something different. It's not in competition with them anymore, it lives in a category of its own that (for now) is empty.
Storybehind solves a Need, by providing Value, but with a Unique Twist.
2. Always Validate First
Before building what today you see as the final version of Storybehind I built an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to test how people reacted to my unique twist of practical video breakdowns.
The MVP of Storybehind was
- Just one video breakdown of one video (2.5 hours long)
- A custom page to consume this with chapters and a nice UI
This is the design I made in Figma for the MVP of Storybehind:
I then sent this out to some fellow creator friends with audiences from 10k to 800k subscribers to get their thoughts.
Here's what I learned:
- They loved it and learned new things even if they were already successful
- 2.5 hours for a single video breakdown is too long
- The most valuable part for them was the video breakdown, and packaging, not the ideation chapters I had in there
- They were not willing to spend more than $100 for a single breakdown
And thanks to this round of validation I made some critical changes:
- Shorter breakdowns (1-1.5hrs) but more packed
- Focus everything inside the video breakdown and reduce other chapters
- Put a focus on packaging
- Change the pricing to be <100$ for a breakdown, but introducing a way to get lifetime access to all breakdowns
If I didn't do this I would have launched with a product that was far off what people would like and spending the extra month to do this validation was well worth it.
The one mistake you want to avoid in this phase, though, is asking these 2 questions:
"Did you like it?" → Of course the people you know are going to say yes to this one to not offend you. Instead I asked this:
"How much would you pay for this?" → This is very hypothetical. If you want to understand the real willingness to pay, make it real just like I did here when validating Storybehind, with real money on the line:
A great book to learn how to get proper feedback is The Mom Test.
3. Make it so that even if your product fails, you still win.
When I was building Storybehind I had a choice:
- Upload the content to Gumroad, add a description and I'm done. Would have taken probably 1-2 hours
- Create a custom website and visual identity from scratch, upload videos to a 3rd party provider (I used Vimeo) and create a custom course-watching experience by using embeds and build a modular system that allows to buy individual pieces or the whole thing by using custom JavaScript to change how Webflow eCommerce works.
Guess what I chose.
I chose to build everything basically from scratch for 2 reasons:
First, I'm a nerd 🤓. I like to tinker with tech and build things. I simply enjoy the process, even if it takes longer.
Second, by doing all of this I:
- Spent 10hrs designing in Figma and learning about the little nuances of UI design. So I gained valuable skills
- Spent 20hrs in Webflow so now I know Webflow
- Built Storybehind not as a random course anyone can make, but as a platform that can now grow into something unique (imagine having breakdowns not only from me, but from other creators as well) by creating the infrastructure around it
- Dusted off my JavaScript
And by doing all this, regardless of how many people decide to invest in purchasing Storybehind, I still win 🏆.
When you have a goal and a vision for what you want to build, you learn things 2x faster because you actually need them to make your vision a reality.
And the things I learned by taking the hard path are what allows me to win anyway, regardless of how Storybehind goes.
If you came all the way here, thank you for listening to the Story Behind of ..well, Storybehind. I hope you'll love it just as much as I loved building it 💜
As a reminder, the Storybehind Launch Sale is on for the next 24 hours and you Email Club subscribers will be able to get it at the lowest price it will ever be ..ever.
Check out the Storybehind Launch Sale here →
Launch Sale expires in 24 hours from when you got this email.
Seeya, 🖖🏻
Enrico
🔗 Links
See you in the next one!
- Enrico
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