The Product

While living in New Zealand I often traveled to Australia, and while there I always picked up the latest real estate magazines. I enjoyed looking at all the different properties and businesses being offered (both in New Zealand and Australia), and dreamed of the possibilities (Opal mines in Coober Pedy anyone?)

I felt that other US dreamers might also enjoy these real estate magazines, especially those dreamers that read the Island Properties Report, Internation Living, and Islands Magazine.

As a product, the real estate magazines offered the following advantages:

• They were unique, and not readily available in the US
• They created a strong emotional pull to customers wanting to get closer to their dream
• They had no competition - you couldn't get these from any other source in the US, and no ads for similar products were running in the US.
• They were high quality (often hundreds of pages with color photos)
• It was easy to create a visually interesting 'out of the box' experience.
• They had a low acquisition cost (these products had zero cost to me - they were provided free by the real estate magazines)
• No support or training involved. (People already know how to use a magazine).
• Easy to ship - not fragile, no special wrapping required.
• Easy to reach target audience with low cost ads.

To me this looked like the ultimate product - considering where I was at the time.

I had no illusions of getting rich, but with the US to New Zealand currency conversion rate, for every 100 of these I sold, I'd clear about $5,000 NZ$. And as anyone living in New Zealand will tell you, earning an extra $5,000 NZ$ a month can make life there a lot more interesting.


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