Teeny tiny fun product

What I learnt from Lyndsey Segal

There are lots of inspiring points from my talk with Lyndsey. I particularly loved:

• The way she talks about the idea popping into her head, and then focussing in so that it took only six weeks to get to market. That’s inspiring for those of us who risk failing by trying to develop a product that is just too complicated.
• Lyndsey’s use of outsourcing and investing in paying people to help her make her product. Including how she relied on their expertise to make it all happen.
• Having a clear idea of what the Productivity Prompts cards would look like, and how this helped her make them into a reality

Why have a teeny tiny product?

The Productivity Prompts fit into Lyndsey’s product ecosystem in a couple of ways.

She can use them as an upsell when she’s delivering her courses. Or they might be a tripwire product, an inexpensive, risk-free purchase that people make to try her out. And the cards can be a “leave behind” freebie when Lyndsey is talking to someone who wants to buy some of her training. When you’re selling training or consultancy and have face-to-face meetings, a classy leave behind like this can increase your conversion rate dramatically.

The other reason to do a teeny tiny product, in my opinion is to try out making products and see how you like it. By building something simple and getting it out into the world, you can become more confident. In fact, you might get addicted to making products, because it’s just so much fun. And every time you make some money from a tiny product, you’re a little bit further towards buying back your time and avoiding the billable hours trap.

If you’re thinking about getting going with a teeny tiny product like this, it can be very helpful to see this as one of the foundational elements of your modular product development technique. With this technique, you build small products which can then be combined into bigger versions, used in your marketing and made more complex if and when you want them to.

Modular Product Development Technique

About Lyndsey Segal

Lyndsey runs Heads Up Coaching and specialises in helping business owners with productivity. The Productivity Prompts were her first product, and since we made the video, she’s gone on to make her Planning for Productivity Pack.

Julia Chanteray and Lyndsey Segal talk tiny products – video transcript.

Julia Chanteray:

I’m Julia Chanteray, and I’m here with Lyndsey Segal who runs Heads-Up Coaching, and I’m going to talk to Lyndsey today because she’s done these beautiful little cards about productivity. So Lyndsey’s a productivity coach. I bought some of these as soon as I saw them just because I thought that they were particularly lovely, and they’ve each got a prompt so you can have a different one each day to remind you of the things that you probably already know about productivity, but to keep in your head. So this one is about prioritizing. If you are going on holiday tomorrow, which tasks would you complete today? So it’s kind of summing up an instant change in mindset for me about, yeah, what are the most important things that I would do if I was going on holiday tomorrow? What have I got to get done? And then gives you a little sense of urgency. And I love the cards. I think they’re just fabulous as a very niche little product that have their own beauty. So I was really interested, Lyndsey, about why you made them, what drew you to doing that format, and what was the idea behind it all?

Lyndsey Segal:

Yeah. Thank you, Julia. Thank you for your kind words about productivity prompts. So I had the idea in December, just before Christmas, just I was about to try and start winding down for holiday, and this idea just kind of popped into my head. And I think the reason why I chose to create productivity prompts is that we are living in an increasingly digital world where we’re spending more and more time on our laptops, on apps on our phone, and in a high source of distractions all around us, particularly digitally. And I really wanted to create a physical product, an analog product, that just sits on someone’s desk, that is there as a gentle, supportive reminder, a prompt, to help people focus and to get into that kind of productive mindset and to really help them optimize the way that they work or learn or study. So, yeah. That’s what kind of gave me the idea to create them, and yeah, it was a great, great, fun product to create.

Julia Chanteray:

And tell me about the process? It sounds like you got them together quite quickly.

Lyndsey Segal:

Really quickly.

Julia Chanteray:

You just started to sell them in April, and they’ve been on sale for a month or so.

Lyndsey Segal:

Yeah, so it was really, really quick. So the whole process took about six weeks from start to… from kind of invention to completion. And that was also during Christmas as well, sort of in the beginning of that. So yeah, I’m a bit of a woman on a mission once I get an idea into my head, but yeah. So the process was: I had the idea, I saw it really clearly in my mind, what I wanted it to be. I wanted it to be like nuggets of information that I take for my training and my coaching, and really to kind of distil those into sort of very palatable sort of bite-sized chunks.

Julia Chanteray:

I’m a big fan of either outsourcing and saying to somebody, “Go and do that for me,” or co-creation, getting help working with other people, just because it makes you go so much faster. So I’m really interested in how you did that.

Lyndsey Segal:

Yeah, sure. So as I said, the idea was pretty clear in my mind, but equally, I was really, as I am always, open to the expertise of the people that I was collaborating with to sort of say, “What do you think? And what would work well?” And it was actually a really, really seamless, easy, straightforward process. So the first person I collaborated with was my illustrator, Sandra Schtafer, who’s been responsible for the design of the cover.

Julia Chanteray:

Oh, okay.

Lyndsey Segal:

Yeah. So she’s been the lady who’s designed all the illustrations for my website and my branding, so she seemed like the obvious person to go to for the front cover of the productivity prompts. On the front cover of them, as you can see, the resemblance is striking, is a picture of me, because I wanted it be that kind of remembering of, “Oh, yeah. That was Lyndsey who helped us with this.” So I wanted it to be that kind of personal reminder.

Sandra helped with the illustration for the front cover and a bit about sort of colouring and branding and fonts. And then the second person who helped me was another illustrator in sketch notice, so Martin James, and he helped me kind of bring alive the idea I had of sort of the icon. So I wanted something kind of quite fun and accessible and a bit different. So those are just some examples of the icons that he created to match the wording, to match the bite-sized prompt. And then the third person I collaborated with was a graphic designer called Tim Hanney from Go Tiger. And yeah, he basically just helped with the layout of the cards and thinking about color and kind of layout and setting them off for printing. So yeah, so those are the three people that I collaborated with to get them off to press.

Julia Chanteray:

And how did you work out the size and the format and how you would get them printed? Is that a… Yeah. Tell me about that, because I know that can be a real stumbling block for people doing physical products.

Lyndsey Segal:

Yeah. Yeah. That’s a good question. So Tim was really helpful with that. I had an idea that I wanted them to be small. I wanted them to be almost like a mini, cute kind of mini product. I didn’t want to take up lots of space on someone’s desk. And I wanted them to be kind of big enough that you could read them easily and the messaging and the icon wasn’t going to get lost, it wasn’t going to get sort of squished, but that it would be something that you could handle because you turn them over, whether that’s every day or every week or when you’re ready to move on to another prompt. So I kind of had an idea, and also because I wanted them to be spiral bound so they could turn over, that also influenced the size. And also I wanted to have this kind of A-frame element to it so they could sort of perch, they could sit on someone’s desk. So Tim’s pretty helpful with that, but also collaborating for him to be collaborating with the printers just to find out what was possible.

Julia Chanteray:

Okay. Right, so you used Tim as a graphic designer.

The cards are lovely. I really like them, but they’re not going to make you a millionaire. You’ve got to pay for… You paid out for a print run of these. They’re not expensive. How much are they again?

Lyndsey Segal:

They’re £15, and then yeah, packaging and posting.

Julia Chanteray:

They’re not going to make you a millionaire. Where do they fit in your product ecosystem? How do they help you as a business to make money?

Lyndsey Segal:

So for me, I see it as kind of two ways. I see it as an additional add-on to a company or a group who would buy my time management and productivity training program. So that would be like an additional kind of resource coming in from that, as well as also kind of being promotional. So it’s almost just a little taster of who I am and what I do and how I help, that if somebody was to buy those and go, “Oh, actually these are really helpful, these are being really valuable to the way that I work, but I really feel like I need some more support, or I know somebody who could really benefit with this,” and that’s a really good kind of way of sort of spreading the word about who I am and what I do and how I help.

Julia Chanteray:

Would they work as a kind of leave-behind marketing tool as well, if you were having a face-to-face sales meeting with somebody you could give them one of these?

Lyndsey Segal:

Exactly, yeah. So another example, I was asked to run a workshop for a client, and then it was like, “Well, I can run the workshop, it would be this amount,” but if people wanted to leave with a takeaway, then there would be this additional [inaudible 00:08:17] resources. So it’s kind of another way of structuring my pricing and my offering.

Julia Chanteray:

Perfect. So I really like both of those and it sounded like you had a lot of fun putting them together as well.

Lyndsey Segal:

I really did, yeah. And it was really lovely just to see the product as well, because it’s one thing you kind have this idea in your head and then kind of the people I collaborated with helped bring that to life and that’s been really, really wonderful.

Julia Chanteray:

That’s a nice aspect of products, I think. And maybe something that you get more, say, from a physical product, just that satisfaction of seeing what was in your head, and you’ve made it and you can go, “Oh, I made that.” I would have liked to have seen your face when you got the box of them delivered.

Lyndsey Segal:

It was a really special moment.

Julia Chanteray:

So there’s a lot of thought that’s gone into them definitely. And congratulations on making it all happen, especially in such a short space of time.

Lyndsey Segal:

Thank you.

Julia Chanteray:

I’d say, knowing other people who have made products and particularly physical products, it’s kind of record time, so I’m impressed.

Lyndsey Segal:

Thank you. Well, I think it was about kind of practicing what I preach, and I was really able to use all my time management and productivity skills. So I was very clear what the objective was, I knew the timeframe. I had a long list of things that I needed to do and people that I needed to collaborate with. So I think anyone out there that’s thinking about creating a product, and I really thoroughly recommend that process that I went through of just having that brain dump and all the different ideas, then putting it in order, prioritizing it, having a date and sort of a time scale to be working towards really helped to kind of focus and keep things moving along. Being really transparent with the people that I was working with: “This is what I want you to do, but I need it by this time. Is that possible?” so that we never experienced any stumbling blocks along the way because we knew the timescale in which we were working towards.