160: Growing Your Hardware Product Through Paid Ads

Daniel Bischoff to the show. Daniel Bischoff is the former Head of Growth at Purple  Mattresses. He took Purple from startup to over two hundred million dollars in sales in just its first two years on the market.  He then spun out as co-founder of his own direct-to-consumer marketing agency called StoicYeti which works with both hardware startups and Fortune500 product brands.  Today Daniel is going to share some valuable knowledge for inventors, startups, and small manufacturers on what direct-to-consumer advertising is, what you can learn from the Purple Mattress story about scaling a hardware brand, and how to create inexpensive yet powerful video ads to sell your new invention to the market. Today you will hear us talk about: Direct-to-consumer selling for a new hardware product in paid advertising Telling a story is key in digital marketing The Purple Story, inventors that wanted to create a mattress Copied another company’s model, just with a better product Sometimes all you need to sell a product is to be different, let alone better. Demonstrate, in video form, the value of your product, so that you can sell it online. Kickstarter was used to validate sales of Purple, and the way they wanted to sell it. You want to hook people in the first 3 seconds of the video. Try a number of hooks to see which one attracted the most people. Then make people problem-aware and then solution-aware. After someone saw their ad, they also reinforced those ads by having good reviews on Google. Get as many users as possible, in the beginning, talk to all of your customers to find out who are raving fans, and get those fans to review your product. Ask customers to send in reviews from their own cell phones using the product. List down all of the objections to buying your product, and have those responses on your website. Problem, solution, reasons to believe in the product, reduction of objections You can get videos done for cheap, but use those to test your messaging.  Sometimes those videos go further. User-generated content is the most powerful advertising right now. It is cheaper today to advertise a new product, and that is contradictory to what a lot of people think. EPISODE LINKS: Daniel Bischoff Links: LinkedIn | Website The Product Startup Podcast Links: https://www.ProductStartup.com/ Instagram | LinkedIn | Facebook Page | Facebook Group | Pinterest | Twitter | YouTube PTC Links: https://www.ptc.com/ OnShape | Creo Mako Design Links: https://www.makodesign.com/ YouTube | Instagram | LinkedIn | Facebook | Pinterest | Twitter Kevin Mako Links: Instagram | LinkedIn | Quora | Facebook | Twitter Partner: PTC’s best-in-class software solutions Onshape: The only cloud-native product development platform that delivers full-featured computer-aided design (CAD), integrated product data management (PDM) and enterprise analytics in a single system, and Creo: 3D CAD solution that provides designers with the most innovative tools to build better products faster, such as generative design, additive manufacturing, real-time simulation, IIoT, and augmented reality. Producer: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop-shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, prototyping, and manufacturing services. To assist our startup and inventor clients, in addition to above, we help with business strategy, product strategy, marketing, and sales/distribution for all consumer product categories.