Build once and sell twice using Airtable to productize your content

What is it:

Stack$ - Stock Market Strategy Database

What did I learn:

1. What advantage do you have using this stack? Today's key learning is a little different than most but is a great lesson. Said best by Jake Butcher: "Build once, sell twice." - https://twitter.com/jackbutcher/status/1275747570833412096?lang=en

What I learned from watching Michael Gill was reusing the tech stack to create another product offering.

Why do I say this? Earlier, Michael Gill launched another product using the same exact stack. MG is destroying conventional wisdom. 5 years ago Pieter Levels pioneered the craze of 12 startups in 12 months. With nocode, you can reduce the amount of time it takes to ship and now enables anyone to create web applications.

Sure these types of stacks are informational products. However, using other tools like Glide shows that you can create more robust service and user log in required offerings and still ship fast.

Once you gain a competency level in one stack, you'll be able to use that for future products and ship even faster.

2. Product Strategy: Shipping rapid products - My recommendation would be to execute differently. If you already have an audience you will have more freedom to launch products that don't relate to each other. This product and Michael's previous product don't build off one another. There is no direct compounding interest gained because the core value prop of each is different. For Michael it may be worth doing this because his audience is large enough that chances are he can find customers within it.

But if you are just starting out and do not have an audience, you much be much more lazer focused on having each product you ship be related and build off of each other and like compounding interest you gain momentum and your brand will rise above the noise.

I call this segmentizing your product. It is a pillar in The Lean Side Project. What it means is taking your core product and feature set, then segmenting it into bitesize chunks. Your goal is to have many small launches that add up to one big launch. Instead of 3 main features and 1 big launch. Your goal is to have 3 small launches for each feature and then 1 big launch.

This will allow you to ship faster, grow your audience, get momentum, focus on one thing at a time, because you ship faster your feedback loop will be tighter and you will get better feedback. Imagine you shipped three things and asked for feedback on all three. Now compare that to shipping one thing and asking to get feedback on that one thing. Which one will you have better feedback on?

Getting feedback is an underestimated skill in product making. It is also a differentiating mechanism because the tighter your feedback loops the better your product the more you can iterate and the faster you can create something that will be successful. It increases your chances of success.

3. Product Strategy: Pricing - How do you know what to give away for free vs charge money for in your product? Great question and the short answer is you have to figure that out. You have to earn the chance to understand where is the value inflection point. At what point will the user say this value is worth me paying money for.

My recommendation is to always start out lower than you think. then start out half of that. You can always always raise your prices. Your goal is to let the market decide on where the price point is to match your goal of conversion. For examples pricing something low will drive a lot more initial users. Getting these users will be your initial marketing arm. The more that you have in the beginning the wider the base that you will have to get word of mouth spread for your product.

When I used to train for triathlon the thing that was the most important part of our training is establishing a good base of fitness before the season started. This meant going long miles and a slower pace. When selling a digital product what I have learned is to reach a milestone in the long term, better to reduce your price in the short term so that you can grow your initial base and also grow your word of mouth marketing arm from having more first time initial users.

Two examples that Michale Gill teaches us through his product for pricing as a starting point:
1. Give away 80% for free then the last 20% that is difficult to find or more specialized you can charge money for.

An example is for The Lean Side Project a variable that is very hard to get but helpful is the estimated amount of time it takes to create a no-code product. This is not available anywhere in the market. So I put this behind the pay wall because it allows me to incentivize customers to pay for the product and service that I am offering. They cannot get that anywhere else.

2. What value and logic or details can you offer on top of what is available for free? For example Michael Gill offers in the FAQ that sure you can find stock trade information for free on the internet, but any advanced data available is very hard to source without doing a bit of work like writing code or using a complex API.

Use the amount of work to do a service as a guide for determining pricing.