If you did nothing else in the next 30 days to launch your next product, or improve a current product, other than follow the product creation secrets that I’m about to show you, you’d grow your online store’s sales Faster than 90% of all businesses.

In this video below, I’ll give you tons of product creation examples from real e-commerce brands, breaking down winners. You’ll learn what’s important for winning sales in e-commerce with a simple formula so that you can do it too.

Whether you sell private label, do dropshipping, or develop your products from scratch, this is how you smash competitors, even Amazon. I will also give you an insider trick of someone doing this as I travel to Turkey to spy on a multi-million dollar Shopify client who makes winning products within 2 days.

The Science of Creating Winning Products that Customers Love and Competitors Fear

This recent story that happened to me will change how you think about anything you make or sell.

A while back I filled in a form online to get solar installed on my new home. The solar company was quick to reply, showed me where the panels would go on our home, and gave a low-priced quote that blew my mind.

Most solar jobs are made of panels that push power to the inverter. I shared with the company that I wanted the inverter for a future battery at a different location to where they would normally put it. When the electrician came to do the job, the company never shared this requirement with the installer. This meant the installer had to get extra cabling that he didn’t have and would spend more time installing it by climbing through the roof.

The installer also didn’t want to continue because he said I didn’t get enough panels for my power consumption. He said I would have warranty issues with the quality of equipment, and I’d spend dozens of hours myself chasing future warranties because the company was just salesmen. My secret installer saved me. He wanted me to cancel the job so I did.

Then I got another local solar company to quote and do the job. They looked at my power bills, they knew I wanted a battery in the future, and they came out on-site before the job to see for themselves where everything was to be placed. What I brought was not cheaper, it was not faster, but it was better in every way. I paid them three times as much. Now when the apocalypse comes, I still have electricity to make my coffee.

This story shows you there’s only three ways to make a winning product or service. You can play the price game, the speed game, or the superiority game. The solar company I went with won the superiority game. Whether you dropship, tweak a private label product, or develop your own products, I will show you how to win these business games and give you loads of real examples so your next product doesn’t launch to an audience of crickets.

The Price Game: Racing to the Bottom

Proctor and Gamble are masters of the cheaper game. Proctor and Gamble’s products such as Gillette, Crest, Oral-B, Pantene, Olay, and Vicks are in major supermarkets around the world. If P&G can source coconut oil used in a moisturizer for 1 cent cheaper, it’s worth it for them because they have economies of scale. The cheaper they can make a product, they either get more profit or they can sell for less to get more distribution in low-cost retail outlets.

You’re an entrepreneur without millions of dollars, supplier relationships, and manufacturing assets. You don’t have a chance in making a winning product by getting people the product for cheaper. There are some ideas where you could get lucky, but this is an arbitrage strategy that would last only a few months until someone in “China” beats you out.

Even if you’re winning the price game in a niche, it’ll always be short-term. Your profit will suck because you won’t have distribution like Proctor and Gamble. There’s no economies of scale. Marketer Seth Godin said:

It’s tempting to race to the bottom. The problem is that you might win, and then you’ll have to stay there.

The Speed Game: How to Use Product Creation to Get Superior Results for Customers in Less Time

If you don’t make a winning product by having it cheaper, a second option is you can give someone results faster.

Chilisleep lets people go to sleep faster by getting a person’s body temperature to the right level for sleep. Most doctors say people sleep best between 60 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 15.6 to 20 degrees Celsius. Their direct and indirect competition is anything for sleep, from blue lights, masks, and ear plugs to doonas, white noise machines, and supplementation.

Here’s another example of giving someone results faster, but beyond the product. Our client Blue Bungalow has same day delivery so women can shop online for clothing that morning, then be wearing their new outfit that night at dinner. This gives people a reason to buy from them over their competition.

Delivering results faster, works for services as well. I run a Shopify marketing agency and one of our goals is to get clients a win from day one. Sometimes we’re able to take over the Google Ads or Facebook Ads for a Shopify store that’s been running campaigns for years, then get instant results because we ask deep questions about the business, research the market, look at the data, and then do what works on the paid ads channel. This happened to our Turkish client Galen Leather.

A good exercise you can work through is asking yourself, how can you deliver faster results in your product and business? List many ideas down. You will always have a better business by delivering results faster because you’re increasing value.

The Superiority Game: How to Create Products That Sell Like Crazy and Multiply Your Profit

You’ve learned about making products cheaper and getting people results faster. The big secret to success in products or services is the third option: making it better.

There’s three ways in the product creation process to make better products. This is the game where most entrepreneurs succeed.

Alex Hormozi’s value equation lays out 4 factors of superiority in value, one being the speed to get results, which we’ve already covered:

Value = (Dream Outcome x Perceived Likelihood of Achievement) / (Time Delay x Effort and Sacrifice)

Looking at maximizing the Dream Outcome. Chilisleep not only gets people to sleep faster, but by controlling body temperature throughout the night, they deliver on a bigger dream of a better night’s sleep—and literally, more dreams.

Schoolyard Snacks is another e-commerce brand that delivers on a bigger dream. They help people eat keto while giving them delicious options. You’ve been on a diet so you know how hard it is to eat well. If the food tastes great, the dopamine hit helps you stay the course of your eating plan.

Better doesn’t have to be a totally better product. It’s about getting the result. I have a whetstone used to sharpen my chef’s knife. To get a sharp edge, you need to sharpen at a consistent angle. I ordered a whetstone from a particular company because they sold a cheap plastic insert, which probably cost less than a dollar, that helps me maintain the same angle every time for a sharp edge.

If you’re a competitor, you could still do better than this product because sharpening towards the body is dangerous, takes time to do, and gets messy. There’s a robotic machine that solves all of this.

High-end restaurants will pay over five figures for this machine to solve real problems because they get more value than a one dollar plastic product. I want one. I can’t get a robotic knife sharpener that will sharpen 50 knives per hour, but you can make me smile by subscribing to this channel, and turning on notifications, so you can hear when a new video comes out to grow your Shopify store.

Maximize the Dream Outcome

You don’t create a winning product with a magical innovation by hiding inside a workshop. To deliver something better, you need to understand your customer’s desires, needs, and pain points. You need “Genchi Genbutsu” as the Japanese would say, or “Go and see”. Genchi Genbutsu is about witnessing reality, not relying on second-hand information or assumptions.

If you watched a beginner with no help sharpen a knife on a whetstone, you would see them struggle to maintain the same angle. You have to “go and see” to discover this so you can make a superior product.

• A backpack designer can spend a day hiking with people, who have different bodies and walking techniques, to understand where straps might chafe or pockets become inaccessible.
• A kitchenware creator can attend cooking classes, or watch people cook inside their home, to see which utensils chefs reach for and which they avoid.
• A children’s toy creator would make superior products by sitting in on playgroups to observe how kids interact with different toys compared to someone who spent no time watching children play.

These show the principle of immersing yourself in real-world scenarios to shape and refine physical product ideas. Businesses make the mistake during the product development process of jumping straight from ideas to sourcing.

7-Step Product Development Process

The most common product development process has seven steps: generate ideas, research, plan, prototype, source, cost, and commercialize.

Our Turkish client Galen Leather, is able to understand customer desires, needs, and pain points to make a better product faster than anything I’ve ever seen. They’ve figured out how to identify problems, prototype, then deliver on them quickly for a competitive edge.

In my interview with Yusuf from Galen Leather, he said, “We must listen to customers for what they need… We produce the first prototype and take some videos and show this product to our customers on social media. This is done to get feedback about the products. We then make a second, third, and fourth prototype.” The feedback is used in the product creation process to make perfect products.

While this is short of truly “going and seeing” customers in action, the closer you get to Genchi Genbutsu, rather than thinking in your own head or reading things online about what people are doing, the more superior your products will be in the eyes of shoppers. It makes marketing ridiculously easier when you have a good product that fulfills a need, solving some pain point or problem.

Many incredible businesses have been built from founders who scratched their own itch. They solved a problem they had. This is another real example of Genchi Genbutsu because the problem is right in your face. Many founders have crafted superior solutions to problems they experienced.

When I went to Turkey to meet Galen Leather’s co-founder, I used a Trtl Pillow on the plane.

This pillow saved me from a mental breakdown as I was able to get a few hours sleep on a 14-hour flight. The founders Michael Corrigan and David Kellock made the product to scratch their own itch. They found a u-shaped travel pillow made for uncomfortable flights. When I arrived in Turkey, I found out Galen Leather did the same with their product development process.

Galen Leather’s co-founder, Zeynep, was asked by her husband for a leather case that holds three fountain plants. So Zeynep took workshops and studied YouTube videos to master her craft. She enjoyed the product creation process. In the act, she ended up making a superior product.

Maximize the Likelihood of Achieving The Dream Outcome

The second way you can make a better product is by increasing the chance of someone getting their dream outcome.

Chilisleep is able to help almost anyone sleep better by getting their body temperature to the right level. Since they have a pad for couples, they increase the likelihood of achieving the dream outcome of a better night’s sleep. If they had a pad that worked for one person, the dream outcome would be less likely for couples because people’s body temperatures vary so much.

The plastic angle attachment for my knife nearly guarantees someone can get their dream outcome of a sharp knife. The robotic machine is superior because it does guarantee a sharp knife. Ah man, that robot is impressive. Something that anyone should do for a product that is not dead-simple to use, is to provide a good video tutorial, a step-by-step article, and customer support. This way you increase the chance of a customer achieving that dream outcome.

Minimising The Effort Required From the Buyer

The third and last way you can win the superiority game is by minimizing the effort required from the buyer.

If I could transform your lawn from dead to a putting green by sprinkling some magic dust on it, that’d be worth so much more than any other option.

You can have kits or an entire store, dedicated to solving a problem, as long as you are reducing the effort required from the buyer compared to other options. Japanese Taste gathers the best items including groceries, makeup, and supplements from Japan in one place. This saves Japanophiles the effort of going to multiple places.

Another example is Soylent. Soylent’s founder was an engineer. And in the most engineering way possible, he scratched his own itch because food took too much time for him to prepare and consume. He purchased 35 chemical ingredients that he deemed necessary for survival, blended them with water, and consumed only this drink for the next 30 days.

Drinking Soylent requires so much less effort than the alternative of shopping, cooking, chewing your food, and washing. Chewing is for peasants. No dietitian will tell you to live off Soylent, but my point remains that you can make a better product by making it require less effort.

The key to successful product creation lies in deeply understanding customer needs, innovating beyond the basics. Skip the whole price war drama; it’s a dead-end street. Put your energy into making products that deliver results faster and way better than alternative options. Embrace Genchi Genbutsu to understand the real experiences of customers. This is your ticket to create products that are mind-blowingly awesome so they sell like crazy.