At the beginning of every year, I take a 3-month workcation in Thailand.
Because there’s just something about watching sunsets like this from our villa…
With a group of 10 other extremely driven entrepreneurs…
Going to the gym, sauna and ice bath every day…
And really taking the time to reflect, strategize and create…
That feels much better than the dark, cold winters in Slovenia.
So today, on an unusually rainy day, I wanted to share a new framework I’ve been developing for the past year, that can make or break your online business.
The framework is called Growth Hierarchy.
As you might know, back in 2020, I took a risk and started a digital marketing agency…
I called up a friend in Slovenia, he said he had this business opportunity…
To partner with experts and create an online business in Slovenia…
And little did I know at the time how much that single decision to say HELL YES would change my life…
One of the clients we partnered with was a parenting expert, and our business absolutely exploded over the past few years.
The timing was perfect – it was the beginning of covid, parents were stuck with their kids for 24 hours a day, and the parenting problems they experienced were amplified…
And, for the first time ever in Slovenia, people got used to using credit cards, zoom calls, etc…, so it was never a better time to start an online business.
The market was perfect as well – there was practically no competition…
Well, to be fair, there were “competitors”, but nobody ran any serious marketing… Perhaps they spent a few dollars on ads every day, or sent out a few e-mails a year if they had an e-mail list at all…
It was what I call a Virgin Market…
The best possible market you can enter with your business.
Even though the market was “small” (there are only 2 million people in Slovenia)…
Even though many Slovenian entrepreneurs told us “we can’t make money there”, and that we shouldn’t waste our time…
We ignored their advice, trusted our gut and were able to generate 1.4m in revenue over the past 2.5 years:
- 212k revenue in June-Dec 2020
- 567k revenue in 2021
- 711k revenue in 2022
While our profits year by year kept growing exponentially.
What was interesting about this business was that EVERYTHING we did worked…
The simple marketing strategies that worked well in the US market back in 2007 worked like crazy in 2020 in Slovenia:
- Our first launch to a 2k email list generated $15k…
- We created a free e-book, that got us 5k+ new e-mail subscribers ORGANICALLY through a single Facebook post and e-mail…
- We were able to get tens of thousands more e-mail subscribers through ads at a cost of $0.10 – $0.20 per lead, which is unheard of (typically, leads cost you $3-$5 per lead – or more)
- We saw ROAS of 10+ for the first few months when we started running Facebook ads – and were able to quickly build an e-mail list from 8k to 60k+ e-mail subscribers (and made a whole lot of money doing it)
- E-mail open rates remained at 40-50% even when our e-mail list was 50k+, even when we were launching multiple products every month…
That’s the power of a Virgin Market…
It’s one of the most important things you should be looking for if you want to grow your online business fast (and one of the reasons why many online businesses struggle and fail).
I call this principle the Growth Hierarchy:
Market > Offer > Copy >>> Other stuff (design, etc.)
Finding a great, starved market is everything…
Finding a problem that nobody is solving…
Finding something that “should exist”, but nobody took the time to create (or sell)…
It’s more important than the offer, and more important than the copy.
Because entering a great market (Vigrin Market), with bad offer, bad copy, still works incredibly well…
But of course, if you can find a great offer, and write great copy, you’ll be able to increase your profit margins by 5-10x and scale your business to the sky.
On the flip side, if you enter a horrible market, with a bad offer, it doesn’t matter how good your copy is…
You can do EVERYTHING right…
And you’ll still be losing money.
If you enter a bad / ultra-saturated market, you’ll need a great offer and great copy to make things work…
It will definitely feel harder than entering a Virgin Market… But with enough hard work and effort, you can still build a 7-8 figure online business.
Now, as you’re reading this, you might say “but I can’t enter a market like Slovenia” – which might (or might not) be true…
But don’t let that stop you from finding your own Virgin Market.
It’s true that there are way fewer Virgin Markets out there than back in 2007-2012, during the “boom of the online business”…
But there are still millions of Virgin Markets out there if you look closely…
For example, most European countries are Virgin Markets…
Where advertising is 5-10x cheaper than in US…
And conversion rates can be way higher…
Japan is a Virgin Market for many e-commerce sellers…
And you don’t have to stop there.
Parenting is still a relatively new and unexplored market, even in the US (which is why we’ve entered that market with our agency recently, and are well on track to have a multi-7-figure year this year).
But you can go even more specific than that.
Right now, there’s a brand new market of AI (copywriting, image generation, content writing, interior design, etc…) just waiting to be explored…
And there are many more ultra-niche markets (like copywriting for dog trainers) that you can enter with virtually zero competition…
And even though some of those markets might be small…
Remember, we were able to generate $1.4m in a market that’s less than 412k (the number of Slovenian parents – realistically, our target audience is somewhere between 100-200k, because grandparents aren’t our perfect audience)…
And you can do the same.
Keep this principle in mind every time you want to reposition your business…
Or grow it by expanding to a new market…
When you look for new clients as a freelancer…
Or when you develop a new product.
It will save you a lot of wasted time, money and frustration down the way.
Hustle hard, and I’ll speak with you soon…
-Primoz
Leave a Reply