Cancel $2400/mo In CRM Costs…And Run Everything From Your Phone

The Purple Cow Marketing Philosophy

I started today’s session a bit slow – I was out late at the Blackhawks game (they lost, unfortunately), and I had a headache. But I wanted to focus on something that’s been on my mind: outcome-based marketing.

I’ve always been a fan of Seth Godin, especially his book “Purple Cow.” The idea is simple: if you’re driving along and see endless fields of green hills with black and white cows, and suddenly there’s a purple cow – that gets your attention. That’s how you stand out in a world of busy stuff.

But there’s another concept from Seth that’s even more powerful: “hanging your picture” marketing. Let’s say you’re selling a drill. You could talk about all the specifications – 50 pounds of torque, 18.8 volts of energy, all the technical details. But you know what’s better for selling? Talking about how fast and easy it is to use this drill to hang that picture on the wall of your family – that is why you’re in the office working your ass off so hard to make money for them. By talking about and focusing on the outcome, you end up with the benefit of somebody immediately resonating with what you’re selling.

The Cautionary Tale: Why You Must Own Your Platform

My journey started almost 20 years ago with social networking. I got into building tools on Ning (Marc Andreessen’s platform) that fixed our own itch, then started selling them. I ended up serving 12,500 customers who were told to put all their stuff in Ning because it was awesome.

Then one day, they realized they weren’t making the money they wanted, so they shut everybody down and took away all their stuff. I am a cautionary tale in real life of building a business on someone else’s platform.

But it’s not just Ning. I paid nothing to get started on Google Workspace. I have 12 Google Workspace accounts. I have the wording that says they specifically promise it will be free forever. I now have in my hands a postcard that says I am a member of a class action lawsuit against Google. Why? Because everyone who heard and did the same thing now has to pay $12-$16/month per seat for the very same thing that was promised in writing to be free forever.

They’re all lying to you because they don’t honor a personal promise. There’s a brain disease going around in the tech industry that lets them think that they can choose money over people and promises.

The Real-World Example: A Seven-Figure Business

Yesterday I had a call with someone who came in with a business that’s killing it – probably a seven-figure business. They sell something for $4,000-$7,000 a year and have about 30,000 customers.

He’s doing it with the classic WordPress flea market stack: Elementor, BuddyPress, LearnDash, and HubSpot as the CRM – $3,500/month. I asked him: “How much are you paying per month?” About $3,500 a month for HubSpot alone. You go down the rest of the list of that whole stack of classic stuff, and the costs add up fast.

The MinuteLaunch Solution: Simple Site Focus

When I show people the MinuteLaunch system now, I focus on the key components. I don’t talk about the endless “look what you can do with AI” features. Instead, I focus on the outcome: Really at the heart of things, you’re selling a product. You have customers you want to make sure don’t churn out. You have leads you want to offer interesting modern AI marketing content to. You want to build and continue the journey with tagging – they saw this, clicked this, bought this, did this. And do it in a way that requires less human skills and interaction, less moving parts, less buying a shovel and going to Home Depot.

Let me show you what I showed during the session. I went to a demo site on InstaWP to demonstrate how ridiculously simple things can be. Here’s the plugin stack: MinuteLaunch Plugin Manager (one plugin that does most of the heavy lifting), Fluent SMTP (connects email and marketing to outside mail carrier), FluentCRM (the CRM itself – free version), and optionally WooCommerce or FluentCart for sales and transactions. That’s it. From 125 plugins down to 2-3 plugins.

Creating Viral Content From Your Phone

One of the coolest demonstrations I did was creating a 1950s-style typewritten letter with a photo – all from the AI assistant built into the site. I took a black and white photo and asked the AI to create an HTML5 email that looked like it was typed on a real word processor in the old days. The result? A gorgeous, vintage-looking piece of content that people would actually want to share.

When I send this out to somebody via email, whether it’s the link or the actual output in FluentCRM, that’s going to get me instant understanding, instant marketing attention. That’s the purple cow. That’s what they immediately notice.

But it gets even better. I showed how you can take that same content and turn it into physical products using Printful: T-shirts, coffee mugs, hats, laptop cases, and more. Imagine meeting someone at an event, taking a fun photo, creating viral content with it, and then sending them a custom mug or t-shirt with that image. Every single day they use that mug, they’re thinking about you and your business. Every time they think of who to call, they’re going to call you.

The Front-End AI Component

Many of my customers have asked: “What about my customers on the front end? Can’t I give them interaction with the back-end AI or with the data?” Yes, you can! I showed a feature I’ve already built called the front-end AI component. This is for logged-in customers where they can ask and keep track of anything they want to know about: the site, the social network, the information you’re building, sharing, or selling, even other customers and community members.

All of those conversations are saved and available in your dashboard. You can see what your customers are asking, what they’re interested in, and how to serve them better.

The Skills Library

One of the most powerful features is the Skills Library. When you create a prompt that works well – like that 1950s typewritten letter – you can save it as a “skill.” Then you or your clients can reuse that skill over and over again with different content. It’s like training your AI assistant to have specific capabilities that you can call on whenever you need them.