Startup – Selling to Radio Stations – Ask Evan

hi I’m Evan Carmichael welcome to
another edition of ask Evan in today’s
video I’m going to answer questions from
one my readers Ronald who wanted my
advice on his new startup idea so what
he is trying to do here is you want to
sell software to international radio
stations to help them broadcast a
greater audience online and reduce their
bandwidth costs and make it super easy
to set up and use and reach that wider
audience and he was asking you know this
is what I want to start with do you
think international radio stations will
buy this thanks Ronald so Ronald I know
not too familiar with international
radio stations but it doesn’t really
matter the best advice that I have for
you is go and start talking to them find
a potential customer see if they
actually have this problem that you
think they have and see if they’d be
willing to pay you to solve it right the
best way to start a business is around a
paying customer the worst way to set of
businesses think oh here’s a great idea
I think people want to do it and you
spend all this time and imagery creating
something that at the end of the day
nobody really wants now you’re in the
software business so the only investment
is going to be your time you know money
buying things but still you know your
time is valuable and hopefully you want
to spend it in ways that will generate
you know good return is something that
you’re excited about working on as well
so go talk to these guys go talk to
radio stations smaller ones to start
with people who will spend the time with
you and try to find out if this is a big
problem and build it around their
specifications some personal experience
I’ve had a software companies before and
one of the big mistakes that we made was
we had a software company and we created
what we thought was a really cool
feature and we spent months working on
this one feature it was the most
complicated feature in our software and
at the end of the day once we released
it we found out that our customers
didn’t care about it you know they
wanted a small portion of that at that
work to be okay but we spent all this
time creating this feature that we
thought people liked but they didn’t and
luckily we had enough other features
that we were still
able to sell our software and make some
money from doing it but how much better
would our top forbidden if we didn’t
build this feature when we build other
ones that our customers really wanted so
the lesson is talk to your customers
right before you start building
something go talk to your customers to
find out if they really want it or not
and they’ll help guide your first
generation and then your future
generations as well you want to build
everything around your customer base so
hopefully that helps I want to also
invite one of my friends Danny in e to
share his advice for you and give you
some extra feedback on what you can do
to grow your business
well Ronald it sounds to me like you’re
an engineer and you have some expertise
in the hardware and software
technologies that would be required to
develop this sort of Technology a sort
of solution you know it’s very common
for inventors for engineers for
entrepreneurs who are focused on the
product side to think about what is a
really cool really valuable product that
they could put together and then take it
and start shopping around for who is
someone who’d want to buy it what you
really need to do because that can work
but it leads to a lot of situations
we’ve got entrepreneurs with products
they put a lot of time and money into
building with nobody who wants to buy it
what I would suggest to you is start by
looking for a need before you look for a
product so look at the way that
international radio stations are
currently doing business how things are
working for them how they connect with
their audience and what is preventing
them from taking the next step what are
the next steps that they really want to
be doing are they trying to reach new
audiences are they trying to broadcast
online what are the things are trying to
go into and what’s missing for them to
be able to do that and then develop a
solution that is going to allow them to
do that to overcome whatever it is
they’re trying to overcome next it’s
possible that want to buy this I don’t
know I’m not an expert in international
radio station business models but I can
tell you that if you start with the
product and then look for the need often
you end up with a product and no sales
whereas we start with the need and then
build a product most of the time you’re
going to have someone who’s going to
want to buy it so I hope that was
helpful to you Ronald and to everyone
else was watching Russ Ronald if you
have any further questions or want to
explore this a little further you can
find me a fire pole marketing com and in
the meantime I wish everyone lots of
success and I’ll see you all in the next
video
so run of a hope that was useful for you
I hope my advice and danny’s from
fireball marketing was was useful and
you can go home and implement that into
your business if you guys liked the
video please give it a thumbs up and it
also love to hear your thoughts and
feedback if you want to leave a comment
under this video and stay tuned for the
next episode