When I was 6 years old I wanted to make lemonade stand money.

But it wasn’t summer. And I lived in Seattle.

Rain. Clouds. Dark. Not really the time for a lemonade stand.

Besides, even my 6 year old brain knew lemonade was a commodity.

I would innovate.

But where to start?

Lemonade was out—and I didn’t want to be unoriginal with cookies—the girl scouts already conquered that market. Boy scouts took popcorn…

I needed something new, original, fun, and great tasting. Something no one had ever thought of before.

And with that burning determination I got to work in the kitchen.

Days later, and after some close calls with sharp objects and boiling water, I had created…

Noodlefruit!

What is Noodlefruit you ask? 

A combination of noodles and fruit. Naturally!

Sure, maybe this wasn’t the best thought out plan. But hey, Noodlefruit tasted great, and taught me a lot in the process.

Here’s 4 things I learned from creating, producing, and selling Noodlefruit. 

1.) Your market’s product, problem, and solution awareness should determine your sales approach.

If I had been selling lemonade I could have sat by the road. I could have put a pitcher of lemonade on a card table. I could have displayed a sign that said, “Lemonade, 25 Cents.” Or maybe I could have gotten a little more clever with the wording.

My prospects would have remembered other lemonade stands in their own neighborhood. They might have even set up a lemonade stand of their own in the past.

The point being, prospects in this market would have already known about lemonade stands.
With a lemonade stand there would be very little confusion or skepticism, and I wouldn’t need to educate my prospects on the wonderful taste and refreshing qualities of lemonade.

They also understood their problem and the solution to that problem. 

The problem wasn’t that they were thirsty and needed a drink. The problem was that there was a kid, with puppy-dog-eyes, right in front of them, asking for only a small amount of money to make that kid’s dreams come true.The solution to that problem was for the prospect to simply give 25 cents to the kid. Drink their lemonade and smile.

To recap: The lemonade stand market is very product, problem and solution aware. 

However, the Noodlefruit market was a whole different story.

I knew that if I set up a “Noodlefruit stand” on the side of the road, cars would be driving by with their heads rubbernecking in confusion. But I doubted I’d get anyone to actually stop.

“Hey honey, did you see that little kid? What the heck was he selling? Noodles?”

They were completely product unaware. And they didn’t currently have a problem that they associated Noodlefruit to as the answer.

The Noodlefruit market was product unaware, problem unaware, and solution unaware.

So, I had to make them aware. But not through some costly advertising channel.

I was a kid! I didn’t have that kind of money! I needed to “bootstrap” my way to success.

I’d have to go beat the street and walk door to door. 

My prospects may have been problem unaware, but I was going to make myself their problem. I was going to show up at their front door with a little red wagon full of Noodlefruit, pre-packaged in little dixie cups.

As soon as they opened their door… I was their problem.

But, good news, I had the solution. 

Just buy my Noodlefruit and everything will be awesome. I promise.

2.) Selling something feels very vulnerable.

Everyone knows rejection hurts, and most people avoid it however they can.

Studies have shown that our brains see rejection as the same thing as physical pain. Pain killers even work to help ease the pain of rejection.

When you’re selling something, you are essentially standing in front of someone and saying “Hey, please don’t punch me in the face.”

But you know full well, most people will need to say “I’m sorry, but I have to punch you right now.”

And they should. 

No one can possibly say yes to every sales pitch they encounter. That would be crazy.

But every time they say no to a salesperson, that salesperson feels physical and mental pain.

The good news is that salespeople build up resistance to being punched in the face over time, and they feel the pain less intensely. But the fact remains, they are experiencing some level of real pain with every rejection.

People know that on some deep level, and that’s a big part of what makes sales scary. Standing in front of someone who has the power to deliver a punch to your face with just one word.

“No.”

Anyone who says rejection doesn’t hurt is lying.

Beyond the inevitable pain, selling makes you visible. 

If you walk around door to door in your neighborhood, you are no longer anonymous. You have now made an impression on the people you interacted with.

And it’s usually a very strong impression.

It’s not like you are just saying “Hey! How are ya?” Or having a conversation about the weather.

If you’re selling something, even in the lowest pressure of sales situations, you’re still asking for something. You’re creating an uncomfortable situation for the majority of people.

On the other hand, they might delighted that you added some fun and excitement to their day. You have something new and exciting to show them.

“Hey! Honey! Come see what this kid is selling!”

In either situation, it is not a neutral interaction. You have made an impression. You either made people like you more, or like you less than the average random person.

Now they remember you. 

If they make a purchase, you are now responsible for their product experience. If they have a good experience, then that reflects positively on you. If they have a bad experience, then you are associated with the negative experience.

In any situation, more people are now exposed to you, more people know you, more people have an opinion of you, and it is much harder to hide in the shadows.

You are now visible, accountable, and responsible for a part of people’s lives.

That’s tough at any age.

3.) How to execute on an idea.

It’s one thing to come up with an idea. And it’s a completely different thing to bring that idea into the world.

I was lucky to have a supportive and loving family. They helped me implement along every step of the way. They bought me the noodles, the fruit, the pots and pans, the red wagon and the dixie cups.

My mom and dad even helped me prepare and package Noodlefruit.

I’m very grateful that they didn’t immediately knock down my Noodlefruit idea as being too silly or crazy. They could have easily said things like, “That would never work”, or “Why don’t you just set up a lemonade stand?”

Instead, all they did was enable my crazy idea, and help me along the way.

If it weren’t for them, Noodlefruit would have never happened.

This is similar to having a great team to help execute an idea. Your team must support the big idea, and work together to make it happen.

I got to experience the product creation process from idea, to creation, to sales.

That simple process is the engine behind any successful business.

And it takes a supportive team to run that engine.

4.) Unless your product is awesome, no one will buy again.

You don’t see many kids behind lemonade stands handing out business cards along with their glasses of lemonade. And that’s because they know they’re only in business for as long as they’re standing on that corner.

They know no one will be beating down their door for more of their lemonade when they’re thirsty tomorrow.

That’s because most lemonade at lemonade stands is just average. Most people could easily buy the same thing at a store for less money. And therefore, they are going to go to the store when they want lemonade.They won’t be calling those kids on the corner.

In order for people to come back for more, you need a superior product, and the lemonade at lemonade stands just don’t cut it.

I don’t think Noodlefruit did either. Sure, it was new, interesting, and I believe it tasted pretty good. But was it mind blowingly good? No.

Could I have sold more if I kept doing rounds to the same people over and over again? Probably. But it would have been a harder sale every time around.

In order for a business to have repeat customers coming back willingly, without much push on your end, you need to have a truly great product that people find themselves wanting to buy. Even when the lemonade stand is shut down, or the Noodlefruit salesman is not at your door.

About 9 years ago I created a software program called OK-Cal. It was a nutrition tracking software.

At the time, here’s what set OK-Cal apart from the competition:

1. You could tell OK-Cal your body weight goals, and OK-Cal would help you reach them. OK-Cal would give you feedback on your food choices, it would show you if your foods were helping or hurting your progress towards your goals.
2. You could tell OK-Cal what foods you wanted to eat, hit the “Go” button, and OK-Call would tell you how much you could eat of each food and still hit your goals. There are videos somewhere online showing how to hit your goals with potato chips, ice cream and protein powder or some other horrific combination. I forget, and I don’t want to look it up, because thinking about it hurts my heart.

You see I sunk over $15,000 cash into developing and promoting OK-Cal.

And I totally blew it.

Although it still hurts to think about, I believe this failure helped me in a lot of ways. It pushed me to learn much more about nutrition, and about creating and promoting products. I’ll share some of those insights with you.

I’ll also share with you one of my insights to what makes a project successful or totally blow up.

I want to share with you why I think I failed, in hopes that my mistakes may help you.

Since the year 2000 I have been borderline obsessed with nutrition and fitness and in 2007

OK-Cal was my first big venture, and I saved up a good chunk of change for a 24 year old, and invested it into trying to help out the nutrition world, and help to help myself by creating and selling a cool product.

I had big dreams about OK-Cal selling tens of thousands of copies and I poured my heart and soul into creating it.

I graduated college with an MIS degree (Management Information Systems.) And yes, I learned to code, in multiple languages. But none of the knowledge I learned in college directly applied to the real world. So I needed help with developing the software.

I had saved up about $15,000 cash. And I needed to develop a piece of software, a website, and all the marketing.

I didn’t know how to get started with the development, so I started hunting around online for website companies who also could create “cloud hosted” web apps.

I had some long conversations with a couple of companies, and it shocked me to hear both of them quote me at about $150,000. And that obviously didn’t include any marketing materials or advertising. That was already 10x over my budget.

That killed my buzz fast.

Briefly I thought of ways to finance the deal. I started coming up with a business plan, wrote one up, and quickly realized how useless that was going to be. Bottom line, I didn’t want to risk $150,000 on this project, and I didn’t even know how I’d get that money anyhow.

So, for a few months the project went on hold, until I found out about an interesting website called Elance. On Elance you could put up a project description and people would bid on the project from all around the world.

That sounded awesome, and I’d heard of people having success on Elance. So I put up my project and got about 20 bids. Most of them seemed pretty weird, broken English, some sounded like they were cut and paste responses. But almost everyone was bidding closer to the $8,000 range. Which simultaneously made me super happy, and suspicious. Especially because I was thinking, how could someone charge $150,000 and another only $8,000?

Eventually through talking with some bidders on Elance, I settled on a small company of a few people in Ukraine who agreed to develop the software for what I thought was a reasonable price.

These guys wanted to develop it as a downloadable desktop software. And thinking back on it…

I don’t think that was the best idea.

I didn’t know, but at the time phone apps were about to start exploding, and I was taking a big step back into the past with a desktop download that didn’t work on a phone. But I digress…

It was really tough to make the software, because while these guys could code the software, they needed very specific plans on the design.

If they were construction workers, and I was the architect, I still needed to create a very specific blueprint for them to follow. That wasn’t easy.

That included showing them what the user interface should look and behave like. The color scheme, the logo, all the graphics. Little icons, buttons, displays. Everything.

And that’s not all, I needed to get a database of foods, how many calories they had per ounce, gram, or approximate size (like “one medium banana”).

I also spent long nights trying to figure out an algorithm for reverse engineering how to make your chosen foods for the day hit your calorie, protein, carbohydrate and fat goals. I am not a math whiz so that took a ton of trial and error.

I also thought that it would help people even more if I wrote a book about nutrition and weight loss. So I got to work writing a book. For some reason I thought it would be pretty easy write.

But boy was I wrong.

I wanted to explain how to lose weight while eating your favorite foods, and came up with a system called “Wing It Weight Loss”. It wasn’t a huge book, but it ended up being just about 100 pages.

While the software was being created, and while I was writing the book, and creating technical documents for the software team, I was also getting a website and marketing plan built.

I hired a website designer to build out a custom website. Working with the website designer wasn’t easy, but it was super simple compared to the real work.

Because once I got my fancy looking website I realized it didn’t look fancy at all with no content on the screen. A web designer does not create content for you, just the overall look, feel, and infrastructure. And that looks extremely empty, and is totally useless without content written. The website needed words, and lots of them. Helpful content, something that told visitors what the website was about, what they could get from visiting, and how they can get it.

Creating a cohesive content strategy is extremely difficult. Because a large percent of your content needs to be geared towards telling what the value of the website is. Your content shouldn’t just be all over the place.

Basically, you need to define your marketing message and hammer that home. It is not easy to define the value of your product, and communicate that clearly, and effectively to your audience. Especially an audience who has never heard of you before. And especially in a highly skeptical market like weight loss, nutrition, or fitness in general.

I got to work on that and quickly realized I was in over my head. I knew I could do a decent job, but with all the time and money I had invested, I didn’t want to risk it. I knew that if you are super close to your own project, that can also skew your ability to see your product like a customer, and it can be best to hire an outside person to help you generate some marketing materials and ideas. Plus I was already overwhelmed. Did I mention I was also working a 9-5 job at the time?

So I hired a copywriter to create a sales page for the OK-Cal product. If you’re not familiar with the term “copywriter” it might sound like a legal term, like you are copywriting a book, or a piece of intellectual property. But in marketing, a “copywriter” is someone who writes “copy” and “copy” is basically slang for “sales in print.”

Essentially a copywriter is someone who writes sales material for products or services. They come up with a compelling angle around your product then tell the story, describe the benefits and features, and explain the offer.

That process is much more difficult than it sounds to get it right. If you get copywriting wrong, it can make a great product look bad and therefore get no sales. But if done right, it can be the thing that makes your business profitable.

I knew this, and also knew it can literally take hundreds of hours if you are not experienced. And even the most experienced copywriters can easily take months writing an effective sales message. Why? Because most of the work is done in researching the market and the product, and discovering what the market really wants, how to speak with them, what your product does differently than all the others, and how to position that to stand out in an obvious and compelling way.

And they need to do it in an interesting way that gets people’s emotions going as well. And you have to do all of this while being totally truthful about the product or service.

It’s a daunting task.

Some of the best copywriters will charge $50,000 or more for one letter, and they will usually want a percent of the total sales of your product as well. And truthfully, these people are usually worth the money.

But I didn’t have that money, and I didn’t have the time to write my own. So I went to a copywriting coach, who had students. Those students took on projects for a discount and charged about $1,500 for a letter. I decided that was my best option and I let them write my sales letter.

In the meantime, OK-Cal was finally finished, the book was done, and I was happy with the results. It wasn’t perfect, I knew it, but what product is? It worked well enough to get people the results they wanted, I felt confident in that, so it was close to time to launch this product.

Now I needed to get all the back end payment processing and product delivery in place. So I researched and hooked all that up.

Now I needed traffic.

I already burned through a bunch of cash developing this product and the supporting website, and sales materials. So I didn’t feel like I had a ton left for paid ads. Especially before I saw if it was really working or not.

So I decided to go the “free” traffic generation route. I signed up on a bunch of forums, and started posting there, with a link to my website in the bottom of my posts. And I also wrote articles to put on article directories, and other people’s blogs.

Honestly, the forum posting strategy worked, but I ended up feeling like a fraud, I didn’t like the feeling that I was posting just to get people to come back to my website. I probably shouldn’t have felt that way, but it felt forced, and not authentic, and it made me feel uncomfortable.

The article posting strategy also worked. And happily, I started to get sales. That was pretty cool! I would just sit around and another sale would come into my account without me directly doing anything. I was totally living the dream.

The sales were slowly trickling in, not anything life changing. But it inspired me enough to play with paid ads on Google. I learned all I could about Google AdWords and created some ads. Set my budget and let them run.

Shortly after, I realized that I was burning through cash with very little to show for it. If I kept this up I’d be bankrupt, and fast. So I stopped the ads and researched more about what I needed to do to make them work.

Eventually I decided to be more targeted in my ads, show to a smaller audience, and also give away a free gift in exchange for their email address. Then I would follow up with them with free and helpful information that also reminded them I have a product for sale.

That worked much better, and I was starting to get the hang of it. But it was around that time that a rash of fake blogs popped up that were all selling some magical “Acai Berry” diet.

The Acai Berry diet ads were a scam, and Google was unable to stop them. So Google eventually shut down all ads related to weight loss in their system. That meant I could no longer advertise for my product the way I wanted to.

But before everyone’s ads got shut down I did build up a decent sized email list of just over 1,000 people. My sales started going up exponentially. Nothing life changing but I had a decent amount of customers by that time.

As customers started using OK-Cal and reading the book, they became excited. And hopeful.

And this is what I didn’t anticipate…

They pinned those hopes on *me*.

I started to get emails that would pour out their heart and souls to me, exposing their struggles, their emotional battles, and their hopes and dreams for the future. They would ask “What should I do? Can you help me? ”

And I kind of freaked out.

OK… I really freaked out.

I didn’t sign up for this. I created a book and a piece of software specifically so I could solve people’s problems without ever talking to them in person, or over email. I didn’t want to interact with people, I wanted a set-it-and-forget-it passive-income model.

Instead I had people emailing me desperate for help. Some of these people seemed very emotional, and broken, and I felt really bad for them. But here I was, a 26 year old kid, burnt out from launching this product, not really thinking I’d need to interact with people. And truthfully I didn’t think I had what it took to really help them. And now I felt like I was not only NOT helping them, but I was letting them down.

I stopped responding to emails. But I still read them.

And it just sent me into a spiral of questioning myself, questioning if I should even be doing this. Questioning this product.

I thought that if the product actually worked, then people shouldn’t be asking questions, they shouldn’t be having problems, it should just do its thing and people should get results.

I felt like a fraud, I felt insecure with my product, I felt like I needed to go run and hide.

What I *now* realize is that no matter how good your product is, people will often want more. And that is exactly why many people offer coaching services, and one-on-one consultations. They offer seminars, and other things to help people expand their knowledge base. I didn’t understand that.

These people probably would have benefited from coaching, and that was a perfect opportunity to offer it to them. But… I was confused, insecure, and burnt out.

I got so freaked out that I pulled the product. I took it off the market. I stopped promoting it.

Man… that was so dumb. Now that I’m writing this out, I realize even more how dumb that was. But I did it. I pulled the product. It was gone. And I was defeated.

Classical self-sabotage. Scared of success.

I let myself-defeat sink in for a few months, and eventually put the product back up, but I made it free. And I didn’t promote it anymore. Just left it for the graveyard of failed products on the internet.

I put up an email capture in front of the product so if people wanted it they would end up on my email list, so at least I could contact them later if I ever wanted to. But… without promotion, hardly anyone came to the site anymore.  And truthfully, that’s what I wanted.

I also felt better somehow having it be free, because that meant that I didn’t need to respond to anyone’s pleas for help. It somehow absolved me of guilt and let me hide from responsibility.

All this self-doubt ended up translating to other areas of my life, I started questioning my entire approach to nutrition and started looking elsewhere.

That search caused me to go down many dysfunctional nutritional paths. Low carb, high fat, gluten-free, sugar-free, and more.

It was a long detour in my nutritional history, but now I’m glad I did it, because I found out ten times more about nutrition than I even did at the time I created OK-Cal.

What’s really strange though, is that the ideas in the book, and in OK-Cal I think are still very nutritionally sound, and I still agree with almost everything I said back then. I just have a much better understanding of why, and I also understand more details that can make an even better impact on health.

I also started studying voraciously about marketing and sales. I don’t know if I would have kept studying if OK-Cal were more of a success. Maybe I would have, but somehow the process of creating OK-Cal showed me the big picture of marketing and sales and how all the pieces have fit together.

I’ve been able to leverage this failure into a learning opportunity and have a few more actually successful online business since. Although I have had many more failures along the way.

One thing that I have finally come to terms with though, is this: OK-Cal failed because of my own insecurities. Not because of the product.

I’m starting to think more and more that success and failure is largely determined by your mindset, your emotional health, and being able to face the hidden vampires that are eating parts of your soul. Maybe the only way to vanquish those vampires is to uncover them, look them in the eye, and expose them to the light so they can dissolve into dust. And set you free.