Test and Validate Your Business Idea or Product

1. Intro : Taking the first steps to actually launch your business and get it off the ground can sometimes feel like a daunting and terrifying task. However, I am here to tell you that there are several strategies and tactics that you can use to not only increase your chances of success, but also reduce your stress along the way. Hello, everybody. My name is Zach Hartley, and I'm an entrepreneur and investor from Calgary Alberta, Canada, and I've been through this process several times. So I'm here to share with you all of my lessons learned and the mistakes that I have made along the way so that this process is smoother and easier for you to get that business off the ground. Currently, I am running two separate businesses. The first one is a three D printing farm that I'm happy to say is about to cross over $1,000,000 in annual revenue this year. And then I also run a social media business that is primarily focused on my personal brand, and is currently bringing in several hundred thousand dollar per year. My past businesses have primarily been focused around manufacturing. I purchased wine barrels from vineyards in California and whiskey barrels directly from Jack Daniels, and then I converted them into furniture and decor at my shop with about 13 employees. And we sold those products both online as well as to stores across Canada and the United States. I also started a rental business where we rented out those barrels primarily for weddings and parties around our area. And so I have been through this several times. I've done it in several industries, and I'm here to show you the quick and easy path so that you can skip all the heartache that I have been through. Now, in this course, my goal and my plan is to teach you the strategies for testing your business idea and product. The goal here is to help you find product market fit. That is what is going to help you start and scale this business and bring in the right sales that are going to help you grow over time. I'm also going to finish off this course by telling you when to officially launch that business. This is going to depend for each and every person, but the goal of this course is so that we can test and validate your business idea and concept. To the point that we have reduced the risk so that you feel confident and assured of yourself and your business model, and you're ready to go to officially launch and start. Now, what to expect in this course. The first thing you're going to notice is that I'm giving you an inside look at the strategies I have used to build my business, as well as the other entrepreneurs that I know in my own personal network, that I have watched build their business. I'm going to share with you some of their tactics and strategies that I've seen work for them. I'm going to give you real life examples the entire way through about how real businesses have used the principles. I am going to teach in this course to turn into billion dollar companies, and I'm going to give you actionable first steps to actually test and validate your business, your service, or your product. Now, in this course, I have put together a course project, and it is a series very serious questions that are designed to make you think about how to test and validate your business idea. It is not very long. It is just one pager. If you know the answers, it's going to take you very short amount of time to fill it out, but it is something that you should be thinking about, especially as you go through the course. I'm also going to ask you to submit something for this course project. You can submit a photo or a scan of the actual questions if you feel comfortable with it. Or what I would love for you to do is give us a link to your product or service or social media pages so that we can see what you've done. We can support you, we can follow you, and we can build a community of entrepreneurs that want to help each other. The goal here is to connect with the people that have already gone through the course and the people that are going to go through the course in the future. Now, if you get a chance and you like what you are seeing here, please consider leaving a review or some feedback to help me improve the course. I'm continuously making content and continuously adjusting and tweaking the course, so everything that you say will have a serious impact on what happens moving forward and the lessons that I decide to create and add to the course over time. Sincerely do read every single review, and I take all of your content and feedback very seriously. So please consider leaving a review. Either once you've decided what you think of the course or at the very end, I would really appreciate it. And if you want to follow me on social media anywhere, you can find me on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X, and Linked in. If you want to see what my businesses actually look like and how I kind of run things, everything is very transparent on all of those platforms. So please consider following a log, and without any further ado, let's jump into the course. 2. Testing and Validation: Alright, everybody. Welcome to the first video of this course, I am very, very excited because we are going to start things off with a super important topic that I love to talk about, it applies to every single entrepreneur out there, and it is a major, major topic that is not only going to give us the framework for the rest of the course, but it is going to set the tone for how we think about our business moving forward. What we're going to talk about today is testing and validating our business model. Now, the reason that we want to do this is because the more that we can validate our business model and prove that it's going to work and actually find traction, less risk we have in the business. By risk, I mean, wasting your time, wasting your energy, wasting your resources, and wasting your money or doing any of that to somebody else. The less risk that we have, the more likely we are to achieve success. Now, we are going to be testing and validating our business model. There is a chance that our business model doesn't work. There's a chance that the business doesn't work. And this is super super important because failure is a part of business. I have had some successful businesses. I have also had some absolute dumpster fires that have crashed and burned, and I have had businesses that have failed. And what's really interesting is I have learned ten times more from the businesses that have failed than the businesses that are successful in. So failure is a part of the game. But what we want to do is fail fast. If we are going to fail, we want to fail right away before we spend a bunch of time and money and energy and resources into a business that just isn't going to work out. And so the reason that we are testing and validating is because if this business isn't going to work, I want to find out right away so that I can put my time, energy and resources into something that's actually going to work, or I can go and get a job or do whatever I need to do, but I'm not going to be wasting my time on a business that just isn't going to work in the long run. I could have figured that out in week one, but instead, I didn't figure it out until Month three. That's a problem that we're trying to avoid. So if you're going to fail, you want to fail fast. That is why we are testing and validating our business through basically this course, and I'm going to walk you through how to do that. Now, when I say testing and validating, what do I actually mean here? Well, what we're trying to do here is we're trying to make sure that customers actually want what we are selling. That is what we're trying to figure out. I, are they willing to buy it? Are they willing to buy it at a price that makes sense to actually operate and run a business? What does the market look like, and is this something that I want to devote the next few years of my life to? That's what we're trying to figure out, and can we turn it into a profitable business? Altogether, summarized what I mean by what I just in one word, would be traction. We are looking for traction. We are looking for signs and clues and evidence that this business could be successful in the future and that we can grow it into something that we can be proud of. If we are not seeing those signs and those evidence and those clues, that means that we either need to pivot and change what we are doing, or we need to move on to the next idea concept or put our time, energy and resources into something that is more useful. Now, how do we do this? How do we actually test and validate our business and our concepts and what we're trying to achieve here? Well, It's very simple. And it's actually more simple than you think it is. But number one, we want to come up with a hypothesis. Number two, we want to build an MVP to test that hypothesis. And then number three, we want to gather feedback from that test, and we want to take that feedback and iterate and improve and then basically cycle through this process continuously until we have a product that is ready for the market. Now, what is a hypothesis? You've probably talked about this in school at some point? And the official definition a supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation. It's basically an idea that you have based on limited evidence, and you're going to investigate it further. Kind of like what we're doing with business here, but we're going to give it our own definition here. So for this course, our definition of the word hypothesis means an assumption about our product, business model, or strategy that needs to be tested. So when I say hypothesis at any point throughout this course, This is the definition that I'm referring to. We are going to come up with a hypothesis. We're going to test that hypothesis through building an MVP and I'm going to walk you through what that is. And then we are going to continuously iterate through that cycle until we find product market fit that we can grow a business on. Now, here is an example of a hypothesis. And are real applications here. You can probably think of the company behind it. I'll give you some hints here. But these are real hypothesis that real entrepreneurs used to build billion dollar businesses. So example number one, there were two guys standing in, I believe it was Paris outside of the Louv. They were trying to get a ride back to the hotel. They couldn't get a ride, and so they came up with this idea, and they needed to test it. The idea was, will people get in a stranger's car and pay for it through a mobile application? They couldn't find a taxi. And so they said there's lots of cars around here. I wonder if a stranger would drive us home. I wonder if other people would get in that stranger's car. I wonder if we could build a platform to connect those two people, and maybe we can build a business out of it. That hypothesis eventually turned into Uber. Now, that same company, though, had to test the other side of the hypothesis of Will strangers sign up to drive other strangers around like a taxi? So super interesting here. They had to test Will people get in strangers' cars? And Will strangers let other people get in their cars, and will they drive them around for a fee? Super super interesting here. But that's literally how Uber started was basically two entrepreneurs asking those questions and then testing it to try and figure it out. Very, very exciting. Next one here, will people let strangers stay in their house in return for a payment? You can probably imagine what company. This is. This is AirBNB. And on the other side of this hypothesis, you also have will people stay in a house rather than at a hotel? There are some benefits of staying at a hotel. Are some benefits of staying at a house as well. So will people be willing to pay for both? And can they set that up as a platform? This company, as you can imagine, turned into AirBNB, and again, is doing extremely well. Another one here, is will people pay more for a doorbell with a camera in it. That eventually became ring and now has turned into a variety of different companies that all offer doorbells with cameras in it with voice communication and notifications that are connected to the Internet. So really, really cool just examples of different hypotheses that entrepreneurs have tested over the years that have now turned into very large companies. Another example is will people buy electric vehicles, if they were well made, and they drove really fast, and they had great safety ratings, and they made a better car, but it was electric. Would people drive it and would they buy it? Well, it turns out, Tesla proved that, yes, they will buy it. They did it by starting with a high end vehicle and then working their way down, but it did seem to work. Now the last example of a hypothesis here for a lot of the businesses that might be going through this course is will people pay a monthly subscription for X Y Z? Will people pay X dollars for this bucket of ice cream? Will people pay X Y Z for this service or this unique product or whatever it might be, you need to test a hypothesis. You need to build it specific to your business. Then we're going to walk through how to test that hypothesis in the next few videos. But in summary here, you need to turn your business idea into a hypothesis and then test the hypothesis to prove the business model and actually start the company. That is the first step here. I'm going to walk you through how to do that in the next few videos. So let's jump right. 3. The MVP Concept: All right, everybody. Welcome to Lesson two. Now, hopefully, you just finished watching the first video cause it was super important. This one is going to build on that first video. So I just want to give you a quick summary. Number one, if your business is going to fail, we want it to fail fast. You don't want to waste a bunch of time, money, and resources into a business that's ultimately not going to work. Your business, if it fails, is going to fail because of risk. In order to eliminate and reduce that risk, we want to test and validate the business as early on as possible. The first step in testing and validating your business is coming up with a hypothesis. That hypothesis could be, Will people buy my product? Will people sign up for my newsletter? Will people get in a stranger's car and pay for it like a taxi. Will people stay at another person's house when they're traveling in town? You need to adapt the hypothesis to your business. And now in lesson two, we are going to talk about MVPs. You probably heard me talk about this a few times in the last video, and you're wondering, what the heck does MVP stand for? Well, in this video, I'm going to walk you through what it is, how we're gonna use it, and why it is so so important to this entire process. Let's jump right in. Okay, so in the first video, you needed to come up with a hypothesis for your business. Now we are going to be testing that hypothesis using the MVP. MVP stands for a minimum viable product. It's exactly what it sounds like, and it's exactly what it means. We are trying to put together a viable product, but we want it to be the absolute minimum, the most basic version of the product. That is what we are going for, and we want it to be just good enough to be able to show to customers, even if it's just a Beta test, and we let them know that this is just a prototype or whatever it might be, and we only wanted to have core features here. The idea here is that you want to take the absolute most important feature or benefit or core functionality of your product, and you want to build it out using the absolute minimum amount of resources. That means time, energy, money, whatever it might be to get that thing built. You want to use the absolute minimum. You want to get that core feature built, and then you want to take it to your customer, and you want to test it, and you want to see if it works. And again, we are looking for traction. That word that I used before, that evidence, those clues, or those signs that customers are willing to pay for it, and that there is product market fit. Now, the goal of this strategy. Number one is to test the hypothesis. You have come up with the hypothesis, like we talked about in video one. In Video two here, we are talking about how to test that hypothesis. Idea here is that we want to use the minimal resources possible, and we want to minimize our risk. If we have to put $100,000 into developing an app, we are risking $100,000. If we can do the exact same thing and build the same functionality, but maybe it's in a web browser, or maybe it's in a Facebook group, or maybe it's in some kind of low cost way that we can build that one core function, that is way better because now we're not risking $100,000. That's the idea here. The only thing that we are trying to do is get a product that is good enough that we can show to customers and gather feedback. We're trying to understand, does the core functionality work? Does it solve a problem? Is it actually something that users would be willing to pay for? We don't need to have all the bells and whistles. We don't need to have amazing design or colors or graphics or even logos. We just need to know, does the core functionality work and does it solve a problem for our users, or is it something they're willing to pay for? The idea here is that this will reduce the time to market, because if you're only building one core function, and that's all your testing, you can probably get that out to your customers faster than if you wanted to build all the bells and whistles and extra features and reporting and data and exports and all those different things around your business. Now, Obviously, this is going to be dependent if you have a software business or a product business or whatever it might be. But the idea here is you need to come up with a hypothesis. Let's say it's an ice cream shop. Will people buy pistachio flavored ice cream? You then need to go out and you need to find a kitchen or find somewhere that will allow you to make one bucket of pistachio flavored ice cream. You don't need to go out and buy an entire manufacturing line for ice cream. That's the idea here is how can we build the absolute minimum viable product to go out and test in the marketplace with the minimum amount of time, resources, and energy. Now, the steps to getting this done, very, very simple. Number one, write out your hypothesis. You should probably have that in your head from the last video, but now it's time to put it out on paper. Number two, you need to identify the core features that are required to test that hypothesis. If your idea is you want a weekly milk delivery service, just like in the old school days, you're going to bring it back retrotyle and deliver glass bottles and milk to people's doorstep. Then you should go out and you should buy a couple bottles. You should fill it up with milk from the grocery store, and you should go around and try and sell it and see if people want to buy it. You should not go out and get an entire filling assembly line and a bunch of trucks and vehicles and delivery guys and set it up as a service that can go across your entire city. Maybe you should just try it and do it yourself first and test your neighborhood or your community or whatever it might be. Idea here is that we're trying to identify the core features and build the minimal viable product. That is step number three here. You actually have to go out and you have to build it. You have to find some way to test it, and I'm going to give you a bunch of examples here. And then number four, you have to execute the MDP. Once you've built it, you have to get it out there. You have to talk to customers. You have to launch that product, and you have to test it in the marketplace to see what your customers think about that one single core feature. You're not trying to test everything. You're not trying to test a line of different types of nut ice creams? You're trying to test one ice cream or you're trying to test one feature? That's it. That's what we're trying to do. If that feature works, then we move on to the next one. First, though, you got to collect the feedback, and you have to iterate, this is a cycle. This isn't, like, a one step process. It's not a checklist where you go one, two, three, four, five, and then you're done. You go one, two, three, four, five, and then you start back at one with a new hypothesis, and you keep going and you keep cycling. Uber was first, will people get in a stranger's car? Then what they did is they bought a few cars, a few small cars, or they rented them or leased them, whatever it might have been. And they actually drove around themselves. And they tested Will people get in our car? And then they eventually allowed drivers onto the platform to see if will strangers want to drive other strangers around. They did it in phases. They did it one hypothesis test, and then the next one. That's the idea here. Now, as an example here, I want to use my business as much as we can in this course. And so here is my hypothesis test and the product that came out of it. Number one, I run a three D printing business. Most of my products are based around tool accessories and holders and organizers. And so will people buy my three D printed tool accessories? That was my test. That was the idea that I wanted to try and figure out is if I three D print some accessories, will people buy them? So what I did is I developed a liner to keep my wrenches organized. So show you what it looks like. It comes in this tool box right here, and you kind of open the edges. The lid pops open. And now, you've got all of your wrenches nice and neatly organized in this toolbox that is made by Milwaukee. So they make this toolbox. You can put any wrenches you want in here, and now you can keep your set nice and organized. And so this is a product that I developed for myself because I wanted it, and then I figured, um, I wonder if other people would like this as well, and can I make this out of three D printing and can I sell it? And will people want to buy it? And so that's what I decided to test in. So instead of going out and buying 103 D printers, I bought 13d printer to test the design and the product and print it myself. Then I printed 50 units over a couple of days and I launched them on Amazon. And so my total upfront cost was 13d printer, a couple days of printing, so a couple dollar in electricity and maybe 50 bucks in filament and a little bit of my time. I literally could have done this several times a month without any issue. And so it doesn't take a lot of time. It doesn't take a lot of resources. I wanted a three D printer anyway, and so this was a very easy way for me to test a product. And so what I did is I launched 50 units, I sent them down to Amazon so that Amazon would distribute them, and they'd be available online. Then I waited for reviews and feedback, and I improved the product. And I did consistent iterations and improvements to the point that now it sells 20, 30, 40 units a day, and it does extremely well for me, and so my hypothesis was, Will people buy my tool organizers? My MVP test was, I bought a three D printer. I printed 50 units. I sent them down to Amazon. My total cost was probably $2,000, maybe with three quarters of it being the printer that I wanted to buy anyways. And then I gathered feedback, I got reviews. I got people to tell me what they liked and what they didn't like. And then I improved the design. I iterated the design, I retested it. I got more feedback, more iterations, and I kept going, and now I have a product that has product market fit that is selling every single day. So this is my personal example. Other example of this, like we've talked about before is AirBNB. Two guys saw that hotels in the area were fully booked during a conference, so they made a website called Air bed and breakfast, and that showed their own apartment and offered an air bed in the living room with an included breakfast. So instead of these guys going out and buying a house or an apartment building or anything like that, they used their own apartment and offered it as a bed and breakfast with an inflatable bed. It sounds like in their living room. And so they booked three guests, and they gathered feedback to eventually launch AirBNB. Another cool story of this was They eventually realized that the people that were listing on their platform weren't very good at taking product photos. And so the founders of AirBNB actually went out and took free product or free free photos of the properties so that people could list on AirBNB and get more insights or get more bookings. And while they were doing that, the co founders that were taking the photos got more insights from the people that were actually listing their properties on the platforms so they could ask them what they think, what they liked, what they didn't like, and they used that as a way to get feedback, and so This is a process. This is not a checklist. This is a cycle that just continuously repeats over and over and over again as you continuously improve your business. That is something that is super important to realize here is that business is not about a step by step process that gives you success on the other side. Business is about building a cycle of consistent improvement that keeps you ahead of your competitors and gives you a strategic advantage in the marketplace. Now, another example here is Amazon Go. I don't know if you've ever seen any of these stores, but Amazon launched a store with no checkout. They did this a little while ago. But instead of actually building out the technology to actually track every single product and movement, they basically said that they had cameras and wait sensors that would track everything, and so you wouldn't have to go to the checkout line. But instead of building out that technology, because it would be very expensive and costly, what they actually did is they just set up a ton of cameras, and they paid people to manually review the footage and process transactions. So instead of AI and weight sensors and tracking actually going through and measuring what you put in your bag, it was literally just somebody overseas that was looking at the cameras and doing it manually as they watched a recording of you going through the store. Super super interesting. It allowed them to save a lot of money, and they didn't have to build out all this tech, and they could get started right away. They could launch the stores almost immediately. And there was no huge install process. They just had to set up a lot of cameras, and so super super interesting way to test out an MVP. Now you've seen it from a small company like mine all the way up to a massive massive massive trillion dollar company like Amazon. And so this is a very common process that everybody uses. Another example here, I had a buddy in University who started a men's body care line of products. He called it Bare knuckle Body care. And his problem was that he was a university student, so he didn't have a ton of money to do an initial production run of a couple thousand units. And so the manufacturer had a large minimum order, which was that couple thousand units. And so my friend built the website, and when somebody placed an order, they then received an e mail that said they were sold out, and they will reach out when the product is back in stock. And so instead of ever even ordering the product, just to test and build an MVP and see if people would actually buy it and order it online, he built the website, did the product photos, did the marketing with the samples and small batches. And then He launched the website and pretended as if it was available to see if people would actually buy it. And when they did buy it, he sent him an e mail that said, I'm so sorry. We're sold out. I will let you know when we get back, and obviously, he didn't charge any of their cards. And so super super interesting way to test out a product for literally just the cost of a website and a little bit of time getting some photos and building that website. Another example is a friends company called Tick Ticks. This was a ticketing platform for buying and selling event tickets. But instead of building an app on day one to test the actual traction, they opened a Facebook group, and they did everything manually to find their first users and gather feedback. This is kind of an example I talked about before. You do not need to build the entire product. You just need to find a way to test the core feature as cheaply as possible to see if there's actual need for that solution. That's the idea here, and these guys eventually went on to build a fairly successful company, and they did very well. Now, In the end here, this comes down to your strategy. You need to find a way to test your hypothesis with the least financial and human resources possible. If you can test your hypothesis, and you see clues and evidence and traction, that things are going very well, such as revenue coming in, customers talking about your product positively, giving you good reviews, lineups for your product. Those are the kind of things that we would be looking for, and you need to test that and find that through an MVP. Now, other things that we are looking for is we want feedback. If a customer doesn't like our product, we want to know why. If customer loves our product, we also want to know why. What is the one thing that they liked best? What is the problem that we are solving for them? How do they define it? Or what would they change if they were in our position? We are actively looking for negative criticism. This is a big thing Elan Must talks about. Is a lot of people when they see a new product or they know you've worked hard on something, they're only going to give you positive feedback because they don't want to hurt your spirits. They don't want to make you feel bad about all the work that you just put in. But in reality, it's that negative feedback that is usually going to lead to the breakthroughs and help you out the most. And so you want to actively look for negative feedback from your customers as you're testing this MVP, that is super super important. Now, you also need to adapt this for your business. I've given you a couple of examples here. I've given you my own personal example. But number one, you need to come up with your own hypothesis. Number two, you need to build an MVP to test it out. In the next video, I'm going to give you some tools to do that. And number three, you need to figure out how are you going to measure a traction. For me, it is sales and reviews on Amazon. For Amazon Go, it is a number of people through the door and probably how much they are spending for your business, it could be jars of passachio, ice cream sold. It could be number of weekly milk orders that you now have to deliver. It could be anything, but you need to adapt it to your business, and you need to figure out how you're going to measure the traction and figure out if your hypothesis was correct or incorrect. So in summary, I know this was a bit of a longer video, but it's a super, super important topic. Number one, define and write down your hypothesis. Number two, build an MVP to test your hypothesis. When you're doing that, though, you need to use as little resources as possible to build out the core feature. Once you have that, you need to test that VP and gather feedback, and you need to look for traction while you're testing it. If you're not seeing any traction, your hypothesis is probably a failure. People don't want to buy your pistachio ice cream. And so you need to pivot, you need to change, you need to go back to the drawing board, and you need to retest what you're trying to do or what you're trying to achieve, or you need to move on to something else. Like, That is a possibility here is that what you're doing is not going to work. And so if that's the case and you're not seeing traction, you either need to change what you're doing, or you need to move on to something else. I hate to be the guy to tell you that, but let's get realistic here. Not every business is going to work. I have had failures. I know this. Some businesses are going to fail. You need to accept that those are the odds of the game that you were getting into. Now, in the next video, I'm going to walk you through a couple of tools that I have personally used to help build out some of my MVPs over the years. So let's jump right in. 4. Tools to Build an MVP: All right, everybody. Welcome back. In this video, we're going to talk about a couple of different ways and strategies that you can actually build and test your MVP. So let's jump right in. Okay, first things first, if you're interested in direct links to all of the websites and resources that I'm going to use and talk about throughout this course. I've put them all together in a PDF under the resources tab in this course. Okay, now, one of the best ways, and honestly, one of the most common ways to actually build an MVP and test it out is with a pre order campaign. The way that you do this is that you sell preorders of the finished product. You will need at least one or two finished products that you can take photos of and run marketing videos for. The idea here is that you let your customers know that this is not ready to go, but it's about to be ready to go, and we're going to put it into production. So we're going to ship it to you when it is done, but we need your money to put it into production, so you have to pay us up front, and we're going to deliver it in the future. And so you're collecting the money up front, and you need to be very transparent about the delivery expectations and when it is going to actually be delivered. You need to make sure that your customers are happy and they know what they're getting into. But this way, at least, you can eliminate your risk. You can collect the money up front for the first production run. You know that all your bills are going to be paid, and as long as things go smoothly, you can test this out, you can actually see whether or not people want to buy this product and how they feel about it once There's a few different ways to run a pre order campaign. You can either do this yourself through your own website and social media. If you're going to do it yourself, I recommend Shopify. That is going to be the best platform for you to actually build your website. And then if you're not going to do it yourself and you're going to use a third party, I would recommend Kickstarter or IndiGGo. These platforms are absolutely amazing because they have a lot of their own organic traffic can go in and see your campaign and actually fund it without you needing to send that traffic there. However, they do take a small little cut for that service, and there are other platforms that can help you market and advertise once your campaign is live on Kickstarter indi Gogo. So if you're new at this and you're not super tech focused, and you're not great at building websites, I would recommend going with Indy GoGo or Kickstarter, but altogether, pre order campaigns should be one of the first things that you consider, especially if you're launching a physical product. Now, the next strategy here is to order sample products. If you're outsourcing your production in any way, most of the manufacturers will be able to do sample batches and give you actual sample products. A lot of the time, they're only going to give you one or two units, but if you ask for five, ten or 15, most of the time, they're going to be able to do it, because if they're going to make one, it's not that difficult to make ten or 15 anyway. And so what I would recommend is if you want to test a product that has a large minimum order quantity that you need to order for your first production batch, ask them for samples and try and get as many as you possibly can and then sell those samples before you actually go into production. Because if you can't sell ten samples, there's no way you're ever going to be able to sell ten or 1,000 of them at the full price and go through all that production. And so what I recommend is if you're outsourcing production in any way try and sell the samples before you actually do that first production run. It doesn't even matter if you make any money. The samples could be five times what the regular production run might cost. Just sell them at what you think the retail price is going to be, and make sure you can sell them. It doesn't matter if you're losing money on samples. You just need to know that people are actually going to buy that product at a reasonable price. Even if you're losing money on the samples, because when you go into production, that's when you'll make the money. You're trying to test out the product in the price point with these samples. That's the goal. That's the idea here. And you just want to see, is this product actually going to sell because if it's not, you don't want to get stuck with 100 units. Now the next option here is a landing page. This is probably one of the quickest and easiest ways to test out a product. You need is a simple landing page where your customers can interact with your product or service. They don't even need to buy it. They can just sign up for notifications. They could sign up for your e mail list. They could sign up for a $1 pre order. They could sign up for anything you want. All you are looking for is traction and some type of small commitment from a customer that says, yes, they're interested in it, and they want to know more or they want to buy it when it's available. Idally, you want as much commitment as possible, so a pre order. But if you can't get a pre order, you get like a $1 commitment or maybe get their e mail for a 10% discount or maybe get them to sign up for notifications, whatever it might be, you want to get as much commitment as you possibly can without getting to the point where you just can't deliver on the end result. The way that you can get traffic to this is to make social media videos or make social media ads that you're paying for reach for. There's lots of different ways, but if you're going to do the landing page, you not only need to build the landing page, but you need to get people to the landing page, which can sometimes be even harder than building the page itself. The other option here is the manual service. This is really going to depend on what your product or service is. But if you have something that is designed to maybe automate a manual task, what you can do is just do it manually at the beginning, kind of like the Amazon Go example that I used in one of the previous videos. They have an Amazon Go store. They told everybody that it was AI and weight sensors that was tracking everything. But in reality, it was just being done manually with video recordings to test the concept and see if customers would actually use the service that Amazon Go was providing. And so if there is a way to do it manually and just spend labor on I would recommend going with that because you can do it yourself in the beginning, then you can hire somebody, and then you can automate it once you've actually proven that there's demand and a business behind it. Now, the last one here is social media advertisements. This one is going to cost you money, but it could be a really, really quick way to figure out if something's going to work or not. The idea here is you create a Facebook or Instagram page, you make some ads for your product or service, and you just simply measure the sign ups and purchases. Are people interested in it or are they not interested in it, you definitely want to try a couple different advertisements and a couple of different angles for your marketing, but this can be one of the most effective and quick ways to figure out if you have any type of traction that you should pursue moving forward. And again, you do need to try a couple different advertisements. You do need to understand these platforms. You need to understand how to run these ads. But at the end of the day, if you could put $500 in and find out in three days if your business is going to work, that would probably be worth it just by saving you the time. Now, in summary here, you need to build an MVP that is specific to your hypothesis and your business. I've walked through a couple of examples and strategies of how other businesses have done it and how I've done it with my three D printing business. But you need to take what I've just told you, and you need to adapt and mold it to your business and your hypothesis and then figure out what is the core feature that you need to test? You need to build the MVP, and you need to get it out there in the marketplace, and you need to gather feedback and retest and compare it to the traction that you had before. We are building a cycle. This is not a linear line. Is a loop where you are just continuously getting better and better by testing hypothesis and building MVPs. That is the goal here, and that is what I'm trying to get across to you, and I'll see you in the next. 5. Feedback and Iteration: Alright, everybody. Welcome back to another video. In this one, we're going to talk about iteration and improvement and what to do once you have run your MVP test. Let's jump right in. Okay, so just to summarize our process here. Number one, we are defining our hypothesis. We talked about that at the beginning of this course. And then number two, we are building our MVP to test the hypothesis. That's what we talked about in the last two videos. Then we are gathering feedback, and we are iterating. That's what we are going to focus on right now. So when I say iterate, what I'm referring to here is, I want you to run your MVP. I want you to try and sell product. I want you to try and get pre orders. I want you to try and get signups. Whatever it is, I want you to try and execute it to prove that you have traction for your product. Once you have that, you want to gather all of that feedback and all of that data. How many people converted, what percentage of people added to their carts? What percentage of people bought two units versus one unit? What percentage of people didn't buy at all? How did people like it? What did they like best? What did they like least? Did they have feedback for you? Would you change this? Would you change that? That's the kind of information that we are looking for. Then what you want to do is you want to analyze that data. You want to see if you can identify any trends, and you want to see what makes sense to you, and you want to make changes based on that feedback. You want to try and improve the product. And then what you want to do is you want to go back into the marketplace and see if there is an improvement. Ideally, you want to retest the exact same MVP under the exact same conditions and scenario. The only difference being the changes and improvement that you made so that you can measure the result. Do you get better results with the changes and improvements that you just made, or did you get better results before? Obviously, there's going to be some variability in there, maybe seasonality, maybe environment, maybe weather, whatever it might be. There's going to be some things there that you just need to kind of analyze the data and look at for yourself. The goal here though is to try and measure that improvement. And then what we're doing we're literally doing it all over again. All we are trying to do is get feedback, improve the product, get feedback, improve the product until we get to the point that you have a lineup of people out the door, or you can fill an entire pre order campaign, or you've got people that are just hounding you to buy your product. That is the goal here. We are trying to make a product that is so damn good that people are lining up right, now, here's an example of how I am doing this exact thing. I walked you through my example of the wrench holder in the last few videos. I am also launching a couple of products to store batteries for your Milwaukee products. You can store them directly on the wall. I made and designed this product here that I plan to sell on Amazon, and it clips into the Milwaukee packout wall, which is basically just a tool holder, and allows you to store one battery. Started selling this, and the number one piece of feedback that I got is that people don't have one battery, they have multiple batteries, and so they want to store at least two batteries in the space that this takes up on the wall. And so what I did was I took that feedback, and I went from one battery now to two batteries. You can see it takes up the exact same space on the back. It clips into the wall in the exact same spot. But now instead of just holding one battery, it holds two batteries. Then I am going back into production. I'm printing 50 of these units. I'm sending them back to Amazon, and I'm measuring how fast these units sell compared to these units to try and determine ho I made an improvement here? Have I made the business better? Have I found something that was missing before? All I'm doing is iterating and trying to find consistent improvements to make my product better and better so that I can increase sales and increase profitability and turn this into a real business. Now, like I've said a couple of times, this is a cycle of building, testing, and gathering feedback, and then starting over. The goal is to make a product or service that finds good traction. Once you have good traction, meaning that people are talking about it, they want to buy it, they're lining up for it. They're pre ordering it. They're signing up for your e mail list. Those are all signs of good traction. Once you have that, you have reduced your risk, and you can put some money into launching that product or buying your initial inventory or getting ready to go, because you have confidence that you're going to be able to sell that first ten, 20 or 100 units of whatever your product or service is. And so the idea here is that we are iterating, we're testing, we're building an MVP to test our hypothesis, all with the goal of reducing our risk and proving that our business actually works. One thing, and I've talked about this before is that you need to ask for negative feedback. When you're asking for feedback, and you're showing your MVP to people, and you're getting feedback on your product, You need to ask for negative feedback? Some people are just too nice. Some people have an amazingly great heart, and they will just absolutely refuse to tell you what they don't like cause they don't want to burden you. Those people are absolutely useless to you at this stage of your business because they're not going to tell you how to improve. What you need to do is ask those people specifically and ask everybody, what would you change about this? What do you not like about this? What is missing? What does this feature matter to you? Is this even important to you? Or what should we focus on improving? What would you change if you were me? You want to actively seek out negative feedback and negative criticism in a way that somebody is going to do it constructively, and they're not trying to hurt your feelings. They're just trying to give you their honest opinion of what they like or don't like so that you can improve the product and get more traction and reduce your risk and increase your sales. That is the goal here, and that's what we're trying to achieve. Now, in summary, this is a cycle of iteration and improvement. This is not a step by step process. I've said that several times throughout these videos. It is just so true. Even when you are three years into business, it is still not a system like this. It is a cycle where you're consistently trying to improve and stay ahead of your competition and improve your product and make your customers more happy. Let your customers and users create quantitative evidence to measure your traction. That is something that is super important. So if you go to a trade show and you're selling your product at the trade show, and you get a lot of people that are like, Hey, this is really, really cool, but they don't end up buying it. Now, lastly here, you need to let your customers and users create quantitative evidence to measure traction. What I mean by this is you need to actively measure your sales. You need to measure your e mail sign ups. You need to measure the people that come to your booth versus buy from your booth. You need to actively measure the people that add your product to their cart. These are the things that you are going to use to measure traction to determine in your mind Is this something that I should invest more time, energy, and resources into, or did I just fail quickly, which is a good thing because it allows me to move on to the next successful venture or at least get closer to it. So that's what you need to think about, and we'll see you in the next. 6. Traction vs product: All right, everybody. Welcome back. This lesson is going to be very, very exciting because now we are finally going to start talking about what do you do once you have found traction. Once you have run your MVP test, you've got some good traction. You've got some real customers. What do you do, and what do you look for? Once you have that traction? Let's jump right in. Okay, so just as a quick summary here, when I refer to traction, what I'm referring to is customers that are willing to buy your product or engage with your services, whether it signs up for your e mails, joining your community, preorders, whatever it might be. You are just looking for signs and clues that this is a viable business that you should continue to put energy resources, and money into. When it comes to traction, this should be the first goal of your company, proving that you have enough traction and potential to fully pursue this as a real business. That should be the only goal in the first few weeks and first few months of your business is to just prove that it's not a failure. That is all you're trying to do prove that you are on something here. And if you're not, you want to fail right away because then it'll get you closer to your actual success in that next venture, whatever it may be. Now, we get here, and we find our traction by testing our hypothesis with an MVP, and then improving the product or service with multiple iterations until we get to the point that the traction is so significant that we have confidence pursuing this real time. That is the idea here is that all we are trying to do is reduce the risk gaining traction and knowing that if I put $100 into inventory to build this product, I'm going to be able to sell it to my e mail list of 500 engaged people that want to buy my product. That's the idea here. And if you do it this way, you can't really fail. Now, a big thing when it comes to finding traction and building that MVP is that it does not have to be perfect. Again, you're only building that core functionality. You are not building all the bells and whistles and unique design features. It is much better to build fast and get customer feedback than to put out a perfect product on attempt number one. 'cause I am here to tell you that you are never going to put out a perfect product on attempt number one. I've been an entrepreneur almost all my life, and it has almost never happened. Do not plan for attempt number one to be absolutely perfect. If you can turn it into ten attempts that just continuously get better, you are going to be way better off as an entrepreneur. There is a saying about pottery. It is a class of potters. And they're teaching new people how to create. I want to say it was like vases or jars or pots, whatever it might have been. And they said, to half the group, I want you to make one pot every single day. And to the other half of the group, they said, you have 30 days to make one pot. At the end of 30 days, the people that were making one pot per day made exorbitantly better pots than the people that had 30 days to make just one. And it's because they were able to practice that techniques and get better at it over time and iterate and constantly improve and figure out what they were doing wrong, while the first person had to basically just figure out in one shot, and if it didn't work, they were just stuck, and they couldn't really do anything else. And they didn't get to practice and get better and better and better over time. They just had to get it perfect on the first go, and it almost never happens. And so, think about it that way. You'd rather take 30 shots at getting it right than have to do it right on the first shot. It's a way way better mentality, and it completely applies to business and what we're doing. Now, just to put this into perspective here and to show you that this is the mentality that real people use, James Dyson made over 5,000 prototypes before figuring out the Bagles vacuum. These are constant iterations and improvements that finally lead to a product that gets product market fit and gets growth and traction and actually works. If you ever look at the old videos of Apple when they were developing the iPhone, they had tables of, like, 40 different iPhones and all df sizes, shapes, and colors that they would hold in their hand and feel to figure out which one is the best design. And so it is all about iterating and prototypes. Edison tried to make the light bulb to over 1,000 different ways. Edison is the guy that actually invented the lightbulb, and it took him over 1,000 different ways until he figured out the right way to make the lightbulb. Apple so far. We're I'm making this video in mid 2020s. Apple has had over 38 different models of iPhone so far. Space X, Elon Musk rocket company. They crashed their first three rockets. They went through three iterations of rockets until it finally worked on attempt number four. The makers of Angry Birds. I don't know if you remember this back a few years ago when the iPhone was was just a few years old. There was a game called Angry Birds. I took the entire world by storm. I was basically, you put these birds in a slingshot and you to knock down a tower. That game went viral. It was the biggest game in the world. It was on almost every single cell phone. And the company that made that game. Made 51 games before it before they actually figured out what game do people really want to play and what's going to get traction, what's going to get attention? It took them 51 games to get any type of actual validity and any type of traction. Another popular product is called WD 40. The reason it's called WD 40 is because the founders failed 39 times before creating a formula that actually worked. And so it's literally called WD 40 because this was their 40th attempt. And so it is all about iteration. It is all about constant product improvement and getting better and going through this cycle. And the process to do that define your hypothesis, test it with an MVP, gather feedback and iterate to increase your traction within that MVP. Now, once you have traction, what you want to look for is product market fit. That is kind of the next stage in the equation. And so after your first traction, you need to start looking for product market fit, product market fit is the point at which a product meets the needs and demands of a specific market segment so well that customers are willing to pay for it, use it frequently, and recommend it to others. Signifies a strong alignment between the products features, benefits, and the target audiences problems or desires, leading to sustainable growth and market traction. The idea here is that if you have product market fit, that product should basically sell itself, and it should travel, and it should increase in sales by word of mouth. Just decent to good advertising. Product market fit is about creating a product that is so good that the consumers are willing to reach out and seek it out because it addresses their problems and their needs in such a great way that they almost can't live without it. Now, that sounds like a lot of fluffy language, and it sounds like a very kind of broad definition. But what's nice about product market fit is that you can quite literally measure it on a graph. And here is what the graph looks like. It is called a retention curve. A retention curve talks about and basically shows us how many people continue to use your product over time. So let's say that you have a monthly subscription. If you have a monthly subscription, people are going to discontinue their monthly subscription up until the point that anybody that signed up in month one is no longer there in month ten or Month 11 or month 12, whatever it might be. You might lose 10% of those sign ups per month. And your retention curve would look like the green line right here, I would look like product B, and it would show that in month one, you had 100% sign up. So let's say you signed up ten people. Ten people are there in month one, and then by month 20 here, nobody is left, and so your retention curve looks like a straight line down. What we want to see is a retention curve that flattens out. You can see this blue line rate here goes almost horizontal by the time it gets to Month five or six. That is where your product market fit is. The higher up that you can get it to level out, the better your product market fit is, because what this is showing us is that all the customers that sign up in Month one, 50% of them are still there in Month five. And let's say 45% of them are still there in month 20. And so for every customer that you sign up, half of them are still going to be there with you a year and a half or two years from now. And so your retention curve looks like this where you have some drop offs, and then it goes flat. The other retention curve here, product B is it starts at 100% with the sign ups that you got that month Then eventually, all of those sign ups leave because you don't actually have product market fit, you're not providing value, and those customers aren't staying with you over the long term. So the goal here is to build a product that people continuously use because if they continuously use it, you will build a retention curve that flattens out over time, and then your job is to increase the height at which it flattens out so that instead of 50% of your customers staying with you over the long term. 60, 70, 80% of them stay with you over the long term, so that all those marketing dollars you're spending on the front end to get customers to your door. You're going to keep more of those customers long term, and your business is going to generate more profit. And so what we are looking for once we have traction, is then we are trying to figure out what our retention curve looks like and how we can improve that curve to make it flatten out so that we can keep customers over the long term, and then we can keep more customers that end up being long term customers once they sign up. That is the goal here, and that's what we are looking for after traction. Now, how do we get this? How do we improve it? How do we get a better retention curve? Well, it's the exact same process that we used before. Number one, we are going to define a hypothesis for how you can create more value for your customer. Your current customers are the ones that we are focused on now. And what we're trying to do is make them long term customers. And so we are going to test out, and we're going to build MVPs, and we're going to try and make improvements to our product. That they stay with us over the long term. We're going to test that MVP, then we're going to gather feedback from those customers, figure out if they liked the changes, if they didn't like the changes, and if it helps them stay with us over the long term. Now, the real question here about business and one thing that gets way over complicated here, and it gets just totally fluffed up here is how you create value for a customer. Are only three ways to create value for a customer, and it is very, very simple. And when I refer to value, what I'm referring to is what the customer gets versus what they buy. If what they get is more valuable than what they spent on it, the $20, but they get $40 in value, a customer is going to do that all day long, and they're going to think that they got great value for that purchase. That's what we're trying to get here is we're trying to deliver more value than what they paid for the product. Now, how do you provide more value to your customer? There's only three ways to do it. Number one, you do it better, meaning you create a better product. Two, you do it faster, meaning that you deliver it faster, or you get the job or service done faster, or the product helps you do something faster, or number three, you do it for a better price. You charge a lower amount, and you provide the same amount of value. Those are the only three ways to provide more value to your customers. And those are the three ways that you should be focused on improving your business. And so the idea here is that you want to make your product better, faster or cheaper so that you can increase this retention curve and create a better product market fit so that you can increase your profit, drive more customers, keep more customers, and generate more profit as a business. Now, The goal here. The overarching thing that we are trying to achieve is that we want to try and find a product market fit to reduce our risk in the business and feel more confident about success. With more confidence in the business, we can feel good investing money to scale larger and invest more resources into what we're doing. Again, all we're trying to do is build confidence and a surety and traction and product market fit that we know we can invest more time energy and resources of our own, or we can go out and raise investment, or we can borrow money from a bank and know that that money is safe. It's going to be put to good use. We're going to generate a profit and a return on that money, and our business is going to be successful. If it's not going to be successful, we want to figure that out right away and put our time energy and resources into the next successful venture. So in summary here, number one, we want to find traction. Then number two, we want to try and find product market fit. And then number three, we want to scale the business by improving the product market fit and providing more value by creating a product that is better, faster, or cheaper. Those are the only ways to improve your product. And we do this by constantly testing out our hypothesis about the business and the product and building MVPs to get feedback and test the result. That is the summary here. That is the process, that is what we are trying to do, and that is the life cycle of building an MVP, testing the hypothesis, getting feedback, repeating that cycle, and then trying to improve your product market fit and that retention curve. I hope this video helped, and we'll see you in the next one. 7. Starting the business: Alright, welcome back to another video. In this video, we're going to start talking about when is the right time to go all in and go full time and really start this business. Let's jump right in. Okay, so the first thing that you need to know is that this date or this kind of milestone is going to be different for everybody. It's going to be dependent on your own personal financial situation, on your own risk tolerance, on your own skill set, and how confident you are in your own traction and product market fit. But realistically, what you really need to think about is, do you have the financial backing to actually explore this venture in the event that it does not work. So if you get three months in here and you realize we did something wrong, we didn't test right, and this business actually is inviable. Do you have the financial wherewithal to stay above water, take care of your family, take care of your responsibilities, and still be able to manage your life? If you can't do that, then you might want to wait a little bit longer, save up a little bit more money, or kind of maybe bring in some more sales for your business or whatever it might be, you just need to make sure that you have your bases covered because there is no right answer to this. Some people with a high risk tolerance and no responsibilities is going to be very, very different than somebody that has three kids, maybe a little bit older in life and has a mortgage at home, and so you need to be very careful, and you don't need to let anybody else kind of sway your decision on this topic because it's gonna be very, very important for you. One framework that you can use and that I've used in the past to figure this out. Is what you want to do is you want to say, k, here's my risk tolerance, and this is kind of where it's at for me. And then as soon as you get enough confidence and traction and product market fit from your business in the form of pre orders or actual revenue or e mail sign ups or customers e mailing you, waiting to pay you, those kind of things Once that grows to a certain amount, it can reduce your risk, and it can give you the sign and the confidence that you need in order to pursue this full time. So let's say that you are worried about not bringing in enough sales in Month one. Well, go out and start collecting pre orders, and once you hit 10,000 or $20,000 in pre sales, that's when you'll go full time on this. Set up some boundaries for yourself so that you protect yourself, and it's no longer an emotional decision, but it's more of a mathematical decision. That way, you can take your gut feeling and your heart and your emotions out of it. You can literally strictly look at it as a math decision, a lot of the time that's going to help you. Now, the things that you want to think about when you are about to start is what is building your confidence in this business and what is making you think that you can actually start this business and run it successfully. Is it sales that you're bringing in? Maybe you already have revenue? That would be amazing. Maybe you have positive reviews from those sales. And those customers are super happy, and they're spreading the word to their friends, that would be the best case scenario. Or you have a reorder rate where your first customers are starting to buy their second order, their third order, and it's at, like, 50% of customers. That would be really, really nice. That would be a great sign to start. Word of mouth where people are telling their friends or customer retention, where customers are just staying with you for a long time, and they're not canceling their subscription, where they come back week in and week out. Those are the things that you are looking for to show that you are onto something, and you've got what it takes to actually run this business and to start it and to grow it. Those are the points where you actually want to go all in and say, I'm going to commit to this, and I'm going to turn it into something, because at this point, you have reduced some of that risk. That is the key to it is that we are reducing risk the more traction that we get for our business. So in summary, the starting point will be different for everybody. You need to be very careful, and you need to make sure that you have the financial backing to make sure you can jump into it, and you can reduce the risk of failure by gaining as much traction as possible before officially starting the business. You do that by coming up with a hypothesis, building an MVP, testing the MVP, gathering feedback, and then iterating and repeating that cycle until you get to the point that the traction is so significant that you are giving up a massive opportunity by not pursuing this full time. That is when it is time to start your business, and we will see you in the next course to get that started. 8. Conclusion: Alright, everybody, welcome to the final video in this course. The first thing I want to do here is just give you a recap of some of the big points here. Number one, you need to define your hypothesis about the business product or service. Once you have a hypothesis, you then need to build an MVP to test it and then gather feedback and iterate. Once you have iterated, you need to go out and see if you have made an improvement or if you have made it better. Once you think you have made that aspect of your business product or service better, you need to come up with a new hypothesis, create another MVP and test it. Do this until you have reduced the risk in your business, and you have built up enough traction that you feel confident in actually committing to the business and launching and going full time. The goal here is to eventually find product market fit where you can then scale the business up and generate a large amount of profit in the end. The goal and the idea here is that if we are going to fail in our business, want to figure out that the business is going to fail as fast as possible before we use a bunch of resources and commit our time, energy, and money to it. If the business is going to be successful, we want to figure that out by a couple of small tests that validate what we think about the business based on real customer feedback, real purchases, real customer reviews, and tests that we can quantify and actually prove to ourselves and to another investor. Now, when it comes to reviews on this course, my goal is to constantly improve it and continuously go through that cycle, and it is your feedback that does that for me. So if there's something that you really liked, please let me know. If there's something that you didn't like, please let me know, and I will do my absolute best to make it better for the next students. If you're interested in completing that class project, please consider sharing it with other students so that we can learn something or share something related to your company so that we can follow, we can comment, we can like, we can subscribe, and we can support you and build out a community. I also highly recommend that you consider checking out my next course here around setting up your business for success. I'm going to walk you through the actual steps that you need to take to open and start your business, including incorporation, accounting, taxes, legal, intellectual property, trademarks, domains, finding an insurance broker, all of the different things that you need in order to actually set up and operate and run that business and get started on the right foot. It is going to give you a checklist of everything you need to get going. If you're interested in following along and seeing how I do with my business, my money, and my investments, please consider following me both here on Skillshare, as well as all of the other social media channels. I post most of my content on YouTube and TikTok, but you can find me pretty much everywhere. Now, the last thing that I want to say here is that if you build your company up to a point where you think you have found product market fit, and you need some money to scale up, and you are looking for investment and advice and maybe some help running the business, Please consider reaching out to me. I am actively making small investments in small companies in order to help them grow and scale. I devote a large chunk of my money. I devote a little bit of my time and my knowledge. I don't want to be an operator of the business. I want you to be the founder, the CEO and the main person in the business, but I do want to offer a little bit of advice and guidance based on my own knowledge, and I want to buy a piece of the business. If you're interested in something like that, please send me an e mail at info at zachhartley.com, but please don't do it until you think you have found product market fit or at least a significant amount of traction. Now, in summary, the starting point for everybody is going to be different. And when you actually go full time with your business is going to be different. But the idea here is that you want to reduce your risk of failure by gaining as much traction as possible before officially starting the business and incorporating and getting that bank account and going through everything that I'm going to talk through in the next course. And so I hope this course provided value. Please remember to leave a review. I sincerely appreciate it. I honestly read every review and every comment, and they mean a lot to me. Thank you so much. I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to watch this course, and I hope to see you in another one fairly soon. Bye for now, and we'll see you later.