In Part 1 of our case study, we looked at the process of taking a simple idea and testing it against a niche audience before committing time to creating the final product. In the case of Audio Mixologist, the market validation was enough to justify the next step… creating the product. You’ll see the pains and gains of creating an audio product, dealing with virtual assistants, creating materials and delivering digital content…
Some quick background
Let me detail what this product is, to give context to everything that will follow. Audio Mixologist enables rapid memorization of complex drink recipes through the use of mnemonic devices. As the site says…
A mnemonic (pronounced “nuh-monic”) is simply a word-association technique used to improve memory of complex information. Think back to grade-school where you likely learned quite a few mnemonics. Do you remember learning all the colors of the visible light spectrum? Does the name Roy G. Biv ring a bell? Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo Violet. How about Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge to remember the musical note scale of E-G-B-D-F? For centuries, people have used mnemonics and other memory techniques to recall complex information with ease.
Years back, deluded by one-too-many Cocktail viewings, I found myself going through bartending school. I was the single person in class that did not write-out – by hand – hundreds of recipes on a 3×5 notecard. It just seemed like too much work. I did it all at once one night, in Microsoft Word, printed directly to Avery label stickers, and then stuck them to 3×5 cards. I walked into class with these one night, while everyone else was nursing carpal tunnel from the previous nights study session. I proceeded to sell the Word document to nearly the entire class for $10/ea. In retrospect, this was my first successful information product. Years later, that Word document popped back into my head and brings us to where we are today…
Collecting the drinks
This phase was an outsourcing wet-dream.
Somewhere deep in my hard drive, I had a cluttered, unstructured Word document with all the valuable content I needed for this product. I sent this off to one of my $5/hr outsourcing firms and the next morning I had a beautifully-structured spreadsheet with all my content flawlessly migrated.
Total cost: $24 USD. A steal at twice the price.
All drinks and data is managed using Filemaker Bento on Mac OS X . Excel quickly became too cumbersome so I imported directly to Bento, which allowed me to quickly create a nice input-form for additional data. Bento exports to simple CSV for migration to Excel or other applications.
Getting the voice talent
The talent was found via Elance. Project bids for a 60-90 minute program ranged from $200 to $900. This was a case where I wasn’t just bargain-shopping. From the very first email, one particular firm (Wooly Bugger Productions) stood out and provided me free audio auditions with 6 of their female voices, free of charge. About a week after the first email exchange, the guy acting as project manager emailed to tell me he was literally hit by a truck and laid-up in bed recovering. The intention was to let me know everything would go on as-planned and he was simply set-back a day or two. Seriously, that is customer service. Contact details for this firm are available on the Muselife Resources page.
Turnaround from script being sent to final product: 3 days. Impressive, to say the least. The firm delivered over 200 audio files, each uniquely named according to my spreadsheet’s unique ID and drink name. This certainly took them extra time, but made my life far easier when it came to organizing the audio course.
Audio Samples
[audio:http://www.audiomixologist.net/Sample1.mp3]
[audio:http://www.audiomixologist.net/Sample2.mp3]
[audio:http://www.audiomixologist.net/Sample3.mp3]
[audio:http://www.audiomixologist.net/Sample4.mp3]
Lesson Learned
Don’t always go with the cheapest provider. Particularly with creative endeavors, you need to balance your budget with the competence of the freelancer/outsourcer and the expected quality of your final product.
Creating course materials
Interactive/Mobile Versions
The Interactive Version of the system was created using Apple Keynote (Apple’s elegant answer PowerPoint). I was able to create one version with clickable links and export as both an Interactive version using Flash as well as an iPod-friendly video version using Quicktime. The elegance of all this was that I could create one master file and use it to generate the majority of my assets. Unfortunately the firms I’d been working with were not equipped with Apple’s suite of applications so I chose to do this myself. It took about 5 hours of grunt work one evening and is something I would not choose to do myself again.
Interactive Sampler
I’ve uploaded a sample of the Interactive version, which is limited to the Introduction and After Dinner Drinks section. Other links will not work, but it will give you an idea how one aspect of the final product came together:
Lesson Learned
Make sure any offshore firm you hire can fit into your workflow and has the necessary tools and software.
Drink Guide
I had my virtual assistant migrate all my Excel spreadsheet data to a well-structured Word document in Outline format, making creation of the Drink Guide an absolute breeze. I simply added some introductory information, basic styling and a reference guide to common words. Otherwise, this was generated from the same base set of data that’s powered everything else.
Bonus Guides
Written in 1-2 hours simply using my existing knowledge of the industry as well as some research I did online.
Launch & Delivery
Final Package
Although I anticipated a large final package, the overall size of nearly 400mb was a whole other story. Hesitant to waste time optimizing/compressing and such, I’ve taken the simpler approach of logically splitting the entire system into separate files, all of which are available to the buyer instantly after payment.
Payment Processing
Quite simply handled through 1ShoppingCart.com paired with Paypal Business Services Merchant Account.
Digital Content Delivery
A common question when it comes to selling digital goods is how one delivers and protects the assets so only customers may access. I’ve found a solution with Payloadz . You create a product, assign assets to it (in my case, the relevant PDF/ZIP files), and it handles all the payment and delivery logistics. Each customer is assigned an access link which is good for 48 hours from purchase.
Conclusion
That’s that. Muse creation, from concept to launch. There’s much, much more to come in the form of posts that dive more deeply into the various topics discussed in this case study. For now, use this as a rough outline of a rather effective product creation process. Adapt it, alter it, optimize the workflow and do it better. This just the beginning.
