12 Months to $1 Million

Is the dream of a million-dollar business in a single year just that, a dream?

But Ryan Moran says it’s totally possible! In his book, “12 Months to $1 Million,” he shares his secret plan for building a super successful business.

I’m going to break down his tips and tricks here on this blog. Whether you’re just starting out or already running a business, there’s something for everyone. Let’s see if we can turn that million-dollar dream into a reality together!

#1 Focus on people, not products

Start thinking about people and create something that people actually want. If you communicate to the right audience strategically you can start building a real business. You might be someone constantly asking yourself, ‘what product should I sell?’.

First, you must understand that you are not selling a product but building a brand. A brand can be a product or even a service that serves a group of people. A brand can lead people to buy multiple products and tell their friends about them.

The first step is to identify that person and their pain points. Then it becomes easier to create three to five products to kick start your business. Therefore, If you want to hit a million dollars you must know which people buy your product.

#2 Develop your first product

Do market research and identify your gateway product. You need to identify what products from the series of the products that might target customers will buy more in the future.

Next, you need to find a contract manufacturer to find the product that you want to create. You can find tons of contract manufacturers if you do a quick Google search. Don’t forget to keep in mind the pain points that are going to be solved during the product development.

At first, the product might not look perfect. Try to get as much feedback as possible on your samples and refine the product. Don’t waste too much time trying to improve your brand design first, focus on selling your product. Refining a product is a never-ending process. Therefore, concentrate on getting the product right with proper research.

If your product is selling really well the chances are that you might run out of stock. But you shouldn’t be demotivated, just fix the mistakes as they come. You can then do tests with your audience to see what they prefer when comparing your product with the competitors. It is important to get feedback on the respondent’s preference.

You can analyze the data and see if the feedback is something you need to address and make changes. One of the crucial factors to improve your product sales is getting customer feedback. Before spending a lot of money unnecessarily ask the question ‘Is this product something that my audience really needs?’ Getting customer feedback is the key to answering this question.

#3 Funding your business

If your product sales are increasing and getting tons of reviews from customers you can’t risk going out of stock. You’ll have to secure more money to keep enough inventory. The money you need for this could come from anywhere, it can be through your own resources or through an investor. It’s up to you to find the right way to fund your business. The easiest way is to find an investor. If this person also provides advice to grow your business that’ll be a plus.

The things you need to keep in mind when pitching your idea to potential investors;

• Do you have a proper business plan?
• How will you use the money to grow your brand?
• If you have a strong product that’s selling, do you have any product ideas that can be targeted to the same customers?
• Is your product just another solution or will the investment be used to grow a company?
• How will the money be used to acquire new customers?

When pitching your idea to an investor don’t directly ask for money, instead, ask for advice. Give them a proper business plan and justify why you need funding to grow the business.

Another way to find money is through crowdfunding. This is a way you can collect money from a larger no.of people through online platforms to fund your business. If you are planning to borrow money make sure you have a proper plan and it produces a return on investment (ROI).

#4 Stack the deck

Now that you have developed the product, the next thing to focus on is building an audience to sell your product. How can you guarantee sales from day one?

You need to put your product in front of your target audience to get their attention and encourage them to follow you through the journey. This could be by using social media platforms or just about anything to find where your ideal customers are and then promote your product. You can create a series of content to build relationships with your target audience. You can reply to their messages and share your opinions about topics relating to your product.

Reach out to your personal contacts to try out your product and influence others. This can help to get the expected sales done on your launch day. You can also build a ‘hot list’ of people who are trying out your product first to give them additional reminders before your launch day.

#5 Launching your first product

Have you ever felt that excitement when the notification for the first sale pops up? In business, every single person matters. When building your brand every comment and every feedback you receive from the customers matters. After a few weeks from launching the product, there might be a slight drop in sales. Rather than following complex strategies focus on making sales, getting reviews, and building your audience.

With time you’ll start getting more and more reviews from actual customers when engaging with them. You’ll start realizing that sales are not just transactions but relationships. You should continue documenting your journey by sharing posts that your customers post on social media. Highlight them, and celebrate the reviews by taking screenshots, and sharing them with your community.

Now that you’ve started the journey, launched the product, and started making sales you are already halfway to your first million. This is the growth period where you should make more sales and repeatedly get customer reviews and referrals.

#6 Growing to twenty-five sales a day

Starting from the launch day to keep the initial momentum going you need to continuously get reviews, testimonials, and also good advertising. If you don’t have that initial customer base now is the time to start building one.

To make this successful you can engage with the customers by calling or emailing or contacting them anyway to get feedback about the product. Don’t forget to reward your customers who provide great feedback because in order to build a growing brand you need a following. Find out where your audience mostly hangs out and start running ads targeting them.

If nothing seems to work go back to the customer and ask them questions as to why need would buy the product and how it can be improved. Listen to them and focus on ways how you can improve the product.

If you are someone already making twenty-five sales a day, that’s great, congratulations! You can repeat the process and try focusing on your next product.

#7 Build a million-dollar brand

💡 Tip from Ryan: Release more products as quickly as you can, and comfortably handle them without getting distracted.

Continue sharing the positive reviews and the amazing emails that you receive from customers. Use them as ads for your social media campaigns. This will help to build the trust of the community and more people will start following your brand.

Now you can focus on developing your second product. You have to do proper research on what your existing customers would buy next. It’s like your customer is going on a journey and you add more products to it to make their life easier. This doesn’t mean you develop other add-ons that might go with the first product. You need to come up with a new concept for a product that’ll target the same audience.

To figure this out, you need to ask the question “What kind of business do you want to be?”

Another thing to keep in mind is not to sell too many products at the same time. Then your audience will be overwhelmed.

#8 Getting to $100k per month and beyond

💡 Tip from Ryan: “Make deposits into your relationship accounts”

An influencer should be someone who actually uses and believes in the product. You can have influencers talk about your product on their platform but after some time you might notice the sales fall back. So even if you use the best marketing tactics to promote your product, if they don’t want your product they won’t buy it. If an influencer said yes to promoting your brand use it to build a communication channel for your own.

So, how can to get the attention of someone you’ve never met? The easiest way is to do business with them. Give first, and watch how fast your network changes. Offer to share their content rather than asking for something.

What you actually need is a small group of people to discover your product, love it, and share it with their audience. Remember, you only need twenty-five sales a day!

At this point, you might have already made $1 million which is $100,00 x 12. This is the time that you can get rewarded for your efforts. Your revenue might differ from time to time but if you sustain an average of $100,000 or more for three months, you’re a million-dollar business.

#9 Putting it all together

The process to get to this point might not be easy, but it’s simple. You create a great product, find where your target audience is, treat them well, and use marketing to spread awareness about your brand to others. If you keep repeating this process, you are building your path toward a million-dollar business.

Months one to three: The focus in the first few months of business is to make a sale. Define your customer and research 5 to six products that you can target. Next is to develop your first product and find a place where you can share your journey. Take orders as fast as possible at this stage.

Months four to six: This is the time you need to ask for feedback from your audience. You should learn what customers actually think about your product. Focus on getting at least a single review and share your positive feedback on social media. You can also run ads to boost your sales during this time.

Months nine to twelve: You can now start launching other products targeting the same audience. Build relationships with people and if possible try to advertise via influencers. This is the time you can consider taking a salary from the company. Re-invest your profits in the business and take strategic risks.

Pro-tip to keep in mind:

According to Ryan Daniel Moran, the formula to get to $1 million: three to five products, at an average price point of $30, each getting twenty-five sales per day, equals a million-dollar business.