Action Notes of How to Make Money in 6 Easy Steps

Today, my friend share me an outstanding article written by Jason Fried, How to Make Money in 6 Easy Steps. Initially the title of this post is "Reading Notes of How to Make Money in 6 Easy Steps", this post is to capture my thoughts after reading the article. If you really enjoy reading as I did, it is great! However, what matters most is what you do after you read. I change "Reading" to "Action", so it become "Action Notes of How to Make Money in 6 Easy Steps".

This is quite a long post, feel free to skip.

Why making money?
The question above seems no-brainer, right? Did you think of what money means to you? Take few minutes of your time and think deeply about it... At the end of this post, I will tell you what money means to most people.

6 steps from Jason Fried:

1. Understanding the buyer is the key to being a strong seller
2. In which I sell electronics, knives, and throwing stars—and learn that it's all about passion
3. How, and why, to charge real money for real products
4. There are different pathways to the same dollar
5. The true value of bootstrapping
6. A word about practicing

By reading the description, the 6 steps above doesn't sound like actionable, let's take one step at a time:
1. Understanding the buyer is the key to being a strong seller
Jason's lessons learned and discovery from working as tennis-shoe and tennis-racket salesman in his 14:

• People's reasons for buying things often don't match up with the company's reason for selling them
• When you describe things in terms people don't understand, they tend not to trust you as much
• When customers shop for shoes, they do three things. They consider the look and style. They try them on to see if they're comfortable. And they consider the price. Endorsements by famous athletes help a lot, too. But the technology, the features, the special-testing labs—I can't remember a single customer who cared.
• Understanding what people really want to know—and how that differs from what you want to tell them—is a fundamental tenet of sales.

My understanding:

• Understand what make people buy and what they look for in your product and your competitor products. Most likely it is not features. From the example above, it reminded me about the process of buying car, are they look similar?
• Speaking terms and language that customer understand
• Be a great salesman

2. In which I sell electronics, knives, and throwing stars—and learn that it's all about passion
Jason's lesson learned from working as reseller:

• Sell only things you'd want to buy for yourself.

My understanding:

• Do things that you passionate and believe.
  
• Build things that you will use it yourself, a.k.a prosumer. This lesson very similar to Scratch My Own Itch, build a product to solve your own problem and dogfood the product and sell it to people that have the same problem.

3. How, and why, to charge real money for real products
Jason's lesson learned from selling his Audiofile program:

• People are happy to pay for things that work well. Never be afraid to put a price on something. Even if there are free options.
• Charging for something makes you want to make it better

My understanding:

• Make a product that so much better than free options and aimed to charge from day 1 by using Free Trial model (Try first, buy later if you like it).

4. There are different pathways to the same dollar
Jason's lesson learned from 37express:

• Don't just charge. Try as many different pricing models as you can.
• Try to remove the fear and uncertainty, and people will be more willing to pay you.

My understanding:

• Be creative and flexible about pricing of your product or service
• A/B testing is good way to test for different pricing models for SaaS product.

5. The true value of bootstrapping
Jason's lesson learned from bootstrapping:

• Bootstrapping forces you to think about making money on Day One.

My understanding:

• Monetary constraints and pressure make you work hard and think hard seriously to create a profitable business. When you have a lot of easy money, you tend to spend it easily without giving a thought.
  

6. A word about practicing
How and where to start?
In this last step, Jason suggestion on practice making money: Buy and sell the same thing over and over on Craigslist or eBay.

Key takeaway about actions you (and I) can take:

• Be reseller or online seller to practice your selling skills
• Learn about what make customer buy (your product or service)
• Learn about pricing models by experiments (If you sell SaaS product, pick up A/B testing to test different pricing models)
• Get inspired? Act now!

That's all about it, thanks for reading. I'd love to hear comments from you as usual!

Oops! Almost forgot Why making money? With money, you have freedom and autonomy. Jason Fried make a good point in his article:

Making money is about freedom. When you owe people money, they own you—or, at least, they own your schedule. As long as you remain profitable, the timeline is yours to create.