#66 5 Steps To Build The Right Thing
If you're in the US I hope you're having a fun, long holiday weekend celebrating Memorial Day. It always feels like the kickoff to summer!
I've been in grind mode in the business, but that was part of my grand plan to have a FUN summer so I'm excited to scale things back soon.
Don't forget to plan for lighter months to give yourself time to recharge.
There is one conversation happening in my client, creator, AND entrepreneur circles...
...the decline of on-demand (self-paced) course sales. For some, courses that did really well the last few years are coming to the edge of a cliff and falling in sales.
So is this the end of courses? Are they all doomed?
No. But why is this happening?
My opinion? It all comes down to building the right thing and continuously evolving your product to meet your customers where they're at. And right now we're seeing people crave real, personal connection.
Let's get into it –
This week on my Instagram I shared this sentiment:
Marketing is easy if you build the right thing
The amount of replies from other marketing & product consultants that said "louder for the people in the back" was wild.
It doesn't matter how well you know this stuff, it's so easy to build the WRONG thing. We do this because it's easy to get excited about an idea...
You have an incredible experience as a customer and want to duplicate it for your community / niche
You're taking a shower and a brilliant idea strikes ... next thing you know you're developing a sales page
Your trusted advisor told you exactly what to build and you see the potential revenue
But then it flops. You don't get the sales you hoped for or the customers don't get the results they expected.
There are a lot of gurus on the internet teaching you to come up with an offer out of thin air, develop it, launch it, and then build a funnel that sells it easy peasy on evergreen.
That's just not reality. But there is still a "simple" formula to build the right thing. Let's break it down.
01 Don't skip customer research
As someone who worked in tech consulting, I watched fortune 500 companies build software sinking 500k+ into a product that they hadn't validated. In the end, it flopped. They built the wrong thing... all because they didn't want to spend money or time on a research phase. They already knew what they "wanted to build".
If you take one thing away from this today make it this – don't waste your time and money on products that don't have the best chance at success.
Set a research goal
Why is this round of research happening?
What do you need to better understand about your customers to develop the right thing for them?
If you're not sure what you need to research try and list out all of the assumptions you're making in the business. This will always illuminate opportunities to learn more.
For your research effort you need both qualitative & quantitative data for the data to be valuable enough to make decisions.
Choose at least 1 of each:
Qualitative:
5 minimum 1:1 community interviews (highly recommended!)
DM / email with community
Deep dive community forums like reddit or Facebook groups
Quantitative:
Review website analytics
Review email analytics
Put polls up on my social stories/feed
Find existing reports (market research)
Survey to email list / social audiences
After you collect all of this data, spend time analyzing it and looking for the themes.
02 Identify the problem to be solved
Fill out this mad-lib based on the insights from your research:
[ Descriptive Customer / Persona ] needs [ what do they need?] so that/because [ the reason this is important ]
Here's a look at how something like this turns into great product ideas:
The busy parent needs a fast way to work out from home and help staying motivated so that she/he can be the best, healthiest version of her/himself. (Peloton)
The stressed out entrepreneur needs a way to quickly reduce stress and drop into their body so that they can make clearer business decisions and have more balance in their lives. (The Breath Channel)
The online entrepreneur building community needs a step by step playbook to determine how to build their membership product so that they can build a great membership experience. (Membership Workbook)
03 Develop many solution ideas
Looking at the problem statements above you can probably think of a lot of different ways to solve these problems. The solution I linked isn't the only way.
One of the biggest problems with our approach today is that we jump to the first idea. Your first idea is probably obvious and overplayed. You're unintentionally pulling from your memory bank.
Get creative and come up with at least 10 solid ideas to solve the problem you've identified.
Then evaluate these ideas by considering their customer value, business value, and level of effort. Plot them on a chart like this:
Identify the solution you want to test first.
04 Test it as simply as possible
This is your beta phase – don't spend a ton of time on marketing like graphics, sales pages, etc.
Write a sales page in a google doc
Build an easy checkout
You can gauge interest using waitlists before developing the curriculum or product.
When I launched my membership masterclass I launched the sign up page before I developed the class curriculum. I wanted to make sure people would sign up (and pay for it) before I wrote it.
Let's come back to on-demand courses... The first time you teach curriculum it's best to teach it live.
When you pre-record it you're not able to see where people get confused or stuck or what their questions are.
I wrote an essay in October to help you with getting that first idea out there – stop tinkering & just launch.
A few tips for a beta phase:
Slash the price (like 50%) and make it clear it's a beta so that your group will give you more feedback than usual along the way. They'll also be more forgiving.
Set up ways to get feedback – forms at the end of each call, forms at the end of each module, mid-way survey, end of program survey.
Track their progress so that you can make sure their problem is getting solved by this experience you've created. Consider 1:1s at the start and end of whatever beta you're offering.
05 Did it work?
If it worked and you reached your beta sales goal and got amazing feedback – awesome!
Now it's time to develop a full launch and marketing strategy. After your full launch you can start to think about your scale plan. Don't bother with these steps before you spend time testing the idea.
Did it flop?
That's ok. Everyone has products that flop. Go back to step 3 – reflect on why this one might have flopped and use that new knowledge to try one of your other ideas.
I have had so many products and services flop over the last year but I've also had a few winners ... I'm going to review that in my 1 year in business reflection next week. Stay tuned!
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