A few years ago I started a project called List Genius. At the time I was promoting my mentor John Thornhill’s coaching program as an affiliate, I had had a couple of successful product launches and was working on replacing my income online so that I could give up my regular day job. List Genius was going to be my next big product launch.
It was around the time that Google was putting a big focus on Mobiles/Smart Phones/Cells and web pages had to be “responsive” to whichever device it was being viewed on. In other words everything had to look as good on an iphone as it did on a desktop PC.
I noticed that there was no way that I could create responsive popups to capture email addresses without spending a fortune on some specialized software or plugin. You had to either have a nice big graphic that looked great on a desktop but awful on a smart phone or the opposite: a nice graphic that looked great on a smart phone but not so good on a desktop! You couldn’t do both.
So I racked my brain for a solution and eventually came up with a way to have both. I developed a plugin that could display a completely different graphic and optin form depending on the device it was being viewed on. It didn’t just resize the graphic, it displayed a completely different one that suited the device. Cutting edge stuff at the time!
John thought it was great so after some coaching calls to plan it out I ordered some graphics from Steve at GFX-1, developed a web page, recorded some training videos and was well on the way to developing the whole package when I picked up a long term contract which enabled me to give up my day job and work online from home. Yay for me! Bad for List Genius!!
I put List Genius and the rest of my online activities on the backburner with the intention of getting back to it and finishing it “someday”. Fast forward a few years, I had finished the contract, then started and failed an offline business (a mobile coffee business) that left me in debt and pretty broke. So I got a part time job at a music store and became an Uber driver to make ends meet. I also tried my hand at doing some virtual assistant work but boy it’s hard trying to charge $25 an hour when someone in another country will do it for $5. Oh well, move on to something else!
So this year (2020) I finally found the time and the inspiration to revisit List Genius as part of my renewed push to get back to working online and avoid going back to a dreaded full time day job. I reconnected with John Thornhill and the coaching program and booked a strategy Skype call to work out my next steps for moving forward with my product launch.
Lets just say that the call didn’t go as planned!
To be continued in Part 2………
1 Response to "Not Such A Genius Part 1"
Hey Rob,
That’s an interesting story. Bit like mine. I had a well paid job, when the work came in, and I think that has blocked me from success. So whenever things got hard, I’d end up falling back on the well paid gig. Which over time frustrated me. I’ve also had many failures up until now. Had a couple of successes over all too, but nothing that stuck. Other than the fact that you learned not to give up, what else did you get out of the process of developing your list genius product? After putting a pause on the project, did you learn anything from that? What got you back into it?
Very curious what part 2 well bring. Maybe you will answer all these questions…
Cheers,
Martin Platt.
https://martin-platt.com