Episode 329: Test Your Offer – Discover The Ideal Number of Customers You Need

Today I want to get super tactical and address a question that I get a lot. One that I’ve seen a lot out there in the various groups that are out there.

How many people should you have when you’re testing your offer?

Before we answer this question, let’s lay the groundwork for why we test our offer instead of waiting until we have created a final product.  

Why Test an Offer? 

We always recommend that people start with a beta test.

And the beta test allows you to practice getting your ideal customer results through your signature methodology.

You know exactly what your process is to take somebody from point A to point B.

You have your steps, you have your signature methodology, you have your IP, you’re ready to go. You’ve created a signature offer, you know exactly how you want to deliver, your signature methodology, and how you want to show up and deliver the experience. 

Now it’s time to test your offer.

Why test? Think of a physical product like a pen. Like, this is a fancy pants new pen that you are going to put out into the market.  You wouldn’t just go and produce 10,000 units of this pen, right? No, you would put it in front of your ideal customers and ask them if they would buy it at the particular price point.

You wouldn’t think about just producing a ton of units because it’s so expensive to produce something. And to ship them to get all of that inventory without even knowing whether or not they’re going to sell.

It’s the same concept when you’re building a new program or product. Or the experience that you’re putting out there for people is that you need to test your offer to find out if it is something that is needed in the marketplace.

#1 Test the SALE of the Offer

Testing answers a few immediate questions for you: 

• Is there a need for my new offer?
• Are there people who want to solve the problem that my offer solves? 
• Can people find the offer? (are people aware that you have the offer)? 
• Are they willing to buy the offer at the price point that you want to sell it? 

If you put an offer out there to test and you get these answers (even if no one buys) congratulations, you have some answers that you can use to adjust your offer, etc. 

#2 Test the DELIVERY of the Offer

And then once you have people who are interested, once you’ve pre-sold your offer, then can you deliver it; you can test the online experience to help them get the result that you’ve promised.

Because the very first rule is that you don’t actually go out and create all of your things, all your videos, all your assets, all your things and then sell it, you actually are co-creating it with your beta group.

This is a super important piece of the puzzle which is why starting with a beta test gives you the ability to practice with actual customers. You create a prototype that you can test.  

So How Many Customers Do You Need to Test The SALES and DELIVERY of the Offer? 

The good news is that this is not the time to try and amass a large customer base for the beta offer. This is not the time to do ads, or find tons of new people that we don’t know yet.

I know you have heard about people who have done large launches:  $50,000 launches, $100,000 launches, $250,000 launches.

For more people, when you are testing a new offer or a new business, you aren’t going to have launches this large. And that is great news. 

When you’re doing your beta, it’s not a money play. That is not your objective. If you already have a group of hungry buyers, that is amazing but it isn’t required. In fact, I recommend that you don’t open it to the masses. 

But if you have a huge audience who are asking for something new, I recommend that you still think of it as a beta or test offer. 

For those of you who don’t have a huge following already, you need to be realistic in terms of what your beta is for. Your beta is to test your offer and to test your ability to get your ideal customer a result.

The number of people that you need to have in your beta is the number of people who are going to give you really good feedback.

This could be 5 or this could be 10. And it could be a lot more or it could be a lot less. But usually you just need five people who are going to give you awesome feedback so that you can iterate and do the next version.

Once you get enough seed money to make it worth the effort,  it will give you the ability to deliver that without wasting a ton of time up front. So that your time is being taken care of. And it also gives you super great feedback and testimonials.

b>To start building the momentum for your next launch, and your launch after that, and your launch after that.

And so when people ask that question, I always say, not as many people as you think, so don’t stress out about how many people you put in there, you can find five people right now, probably people who are interested in what you have to offer.

And that is your testing all the way through with those five people. If you have more than that, that’s awesome.

But with five people, if you’re charging, when we usually recommend about $2000- $3,000 per program, because you’re actually delivering results, right, which is a whole different conversation. But in general, when we’re talking about price points, usually about $2000-$3000.

So if you have five people, then you’re talking about $10,000 to $15,000, for your seed launch. Would that be a reasonable amount of investment for you to get started in your business? Probably. You don’t really need more than that at this moment in time.

The goal is to test your offer,  to test your framework to test your ability to help people get results.

If this helps you, I really want to encourage you to not stress out about how many people you have in your beta, you can have less than five, usually you want to have more than one, right?

Because we’re going from one to one to one to many. And so three to five is totally fine, if that’s all you can find.

The Challenge

But I would challenge you to think about what are the things that need to happen for you to get at least five people, maybe you’re not visible, and nobody knows that this is something that you do, maybe your price point is off, maybe your messaging needs to be honed in a little bit.

So this beta is not just about teaching your methodology, or getting people into your program, however you want to think about it, it’s also like, is the whole process, something that is going to work.

Likely if people aren’t buying, there’s something wrong with the offer. Or the messaging or you know, whatever else that’s going on the front end, before they actually purchase, once they purchase that it’s your opportunity to get them a result. And so you’re testing the entire process.

I think that’s the other thing that people don’t newer people don’t really necessarily understand is that you very rarely, if you’re starting for the very first time, or you’re doing something brand new, can you just like lob it over the fence and be like, “Okay, everybody – try my thing”, and get the masses to come in and buy whatever it is that you have to offer. Without doing that front-end work.

Like I said, if you have a big audience, and they’re just waiting for you to put out an offer, that is an amazing place to be.

But if you don’t have that, you have to build a little bit of that at the beginning, so that people are ready to go. And again, like there are tons of different strategies for that we talk a lot about that and Learn Academy. But that is a key component. So the answer to the question, just to reiterate, is you only need the amount of people who are going to give you super solid feedback on the entire process. And so this is not a money play at this point. This is not like how big could the launch be? This is literally to get you in the game and get you some practice and some market feedback, right?

For example, if I’m producing a pen, I would ask a test group a series of questions.  

• How do you feel about this pen? 

• What if there were 50 pens in the aisle, would you buy this pen? 

• Why would you buy this pen? 

• Why would you not buy this pen? 

• What about the price point? 

• What about this? 

Of course you would ask questions before you produced 10,000 units of this pen? Very same concept.

You may have to reiterate or, or redo your offer a number of different times, or your landing page or your sales page or your offer page. Like, you may have to play around with that for a while before you get five people in your beta. And so keep going, don’t give up.

But just know that you don’t have to have a $500,000 launch on day one.

In fact, you don’t want that, right?

Stay out of overwhelm…

Because what happens is, if you have all of those people, and you are just testing your offer, you will be overwhelmed.

You are going to have tons of people who are either not paying attention, or who are super needy, who need all the things and you don’t have it ready and done yet.

And so, it’s more manageable to have a smaller group. They are more forgiving in terms of you being able to just keep testing and iterating as you go.

Until next time, test out that beta.