Successful businesses solve problems for people.
That might seem obvious, but for 250 years a lot of businesses didn’t have to think about helping their customers. Their goal was to charge as much as they could while providing as little value as they could.
But since the internet went mainstream, things have been changing.
Research from Deloitte found that “Unilever’s ‘sustainable living’ brands (i.e., brands focused on reducing Unilever’s environmental footprint and increasing social impact)… grew 69 percent faster on average than the rest of its businesses in 2018”.¹
Customers are more aware than ever, and so their demands are more sophisticated.
For your one-person business to succeed, you must solve actual problems people are dealing with right now. And in this post, I’m going to tell you how.
How to Waste Your Time, Money & Energy
Most small businesses begin with an idea.
- “I’ve always wanted to run a cute little bakery with traditional decor and plenty of vegan options.”
- “I know I can make better supplements than the trash most people are selling online.”
- “I can design way better logos than all these agencies are using.”
It’s easy to fantasize about the businesses these ideas lead to.
There are probably thousands of people out there right now maxing out credit cards to secure premises, test recipes and buy top-end Apple Macs to make these dreams a reality.
6 months later these people can hardly stop thinking about the debt they’ve racked up, but “it’s okay”, they tell themselves, “we’re about to open for business”.
So they open.
Then they wait for their customers to show up.
And they keep waiting.
And waiting…
And waiting…
All the while their stomachs feel like they’re sinking closer and closer to the floor.
The 1 Thing Every Business Owner Should Know
…is that if you want to succeed, acquiring customers must come first, not last.
But how can that work?
How can you get people into your bakery before you have a bakery?
How can you have people taking your supplements before you have supplements?
How can you have people using your logo before you’ve made a logo?
Well, you need a total shift in how you think about business.
You need a principle which seemed impossible to me the first time I encountered it…
Sell Before You Build
"You must validate your idea before you invest your life into it. If you can't sell the dream, what makes you think you can sell the product?"
— MJ DeMarco, The Millionaire Fastlane
Problem-solving requires a lot of resources. If not money, then at least time and energy.
All 3 of these resources are limited. If you’re an ordinary person, you maybe have enough of them to take a proper shot at one business idea before you have to go crawling back to employment.
So wouldn’t it be great if you could guarantee your business would make a profit before you went all-in on it?
Imagine if you could do this at the casino. You’d take out your life savings and put them all on the roulette table.
So if it’s possible in business, why isn’t everyone doing it?
Two reasons:
- It requires knowledge and skill
- Almost no-one knows it’s possible
…But it is.
I’ve done it.
My friends have done it.
And now you’re gonna do it.
Give The People What They Need
In my previous post, I taught you how to establish the foundation of your personal brand.
It’s within the scope of that brand that you’ll be selling and building. So don’t worry—if your expertise and interests are around fitness and competitive dodgeball you’re not going to be selling a course on how to homebrew whiskey.
And here’s my opportunity to make you aware of one of the most powerful aspects of your personal brand: you’re never going to interact with the people who want to homebrew whiskey.
If you followed that post, you set up your X profile to reflect your areas of interest, and started writing content within them.
So, naturally, people who follow you will be those who share your interests. And they’re highly likely to be less knowledgeable than you regarding those interests—because they’re the ones who are going to get most value from what you’re writing.
In other words, your personal brand preselects potential clients and customers for you.
The first offer I made on social media generated over $10,000 in profit. I made that offer when I had a following of just 3000 people.
That offer was successful because I looked for feedback from my audience about what they needed help with, planned and promoted a course around that, and only did the full build-out of the course once I’d sold tickets.
💡 The first time I considered doing this, it felt unethical to me. “How can I take people’s money,” I questioned, “for something that doesn’t exist?” Here’s the thing: it does exist. Because people don’t care how you package up the solution they need. They’re not buying the format. They’re buying the solution itself.
So you’re going to sell a solution you’re confident in—and you’re going to trust yourself to figure out the packaging once you’ve confirmed people are interested enough to put some skin in the game. (Alternatively, you can spend 6 months building something no-one needs. How many times are you even going to be able to do that before you die?)
The Problems to Profits Framework
You may not have much of an audience to test at the time you’re first reading this. In that case, consider this post as a resource you can return to later.
But if you have 1000 or more followers you can get stuck in right away.
In last week's post, you learned how to create the top and middle levels of your stealth marketing funnel. Now comes the bottom—and final—level: your minimum viable offer.
If you consider any problem you’ve solved in your life, it's almost guaranteed that other people are suffering that same problem right now. And if that problem is one worth solving, people will pay for the solution.
When you talk about that problem online, you make it easy for those people to find you.
In a way of thinking, solutions are all people ever pay for:
- They buy cars to solve the problem of transportation
- They buy groceries to solve the problem of hunger
- They buy gym memberships to solve the problem of preventable death
Of course, people pay for more niche solutions too.
The first problem I solved online was for intermediate meditators, who were struggling to take the benefits of their sitting practice into their daily lives.
First I solved that problem for myself, then I solved it for family and friends, then I solved it for strangers for free, then I solved it for strangers for a fee.
You can do this too.
Here's how:
How to Turn a Problem Into A Profit
- Start a fresh journal entry.
- Note a problem you solved in your past in simple terms (e.g. "trouble sleeping", "messy garden", “I was a hoarder”, "mother didn't understand me". It really can be anything).
- Reflect on how you solved the problem. What was the ultimate solution you found that eradicated it from your life?
- Write down, in baby steps, how you went from A to B—from having the problem to implementing the solution.
- Arrange these steps as best you can, such that they’d be at least somewhat understandable for another person.
- Find someone else—online or offline—who's struggling with your original problem. This can be a friend, family member, acquaintance or even a total stranger. If you don’t know where to find them, search on social media for keywords related to the problem and scan the comments section of posts that talk about it. Don’t be afraid to cold DM 100 people to find someone who’s open to talking. Social media is meant to be social.
- Note anything specific to how they are experiencing the problem.
- Tell them you’re looking to get experience guiding people through your solution and offer to take them through it for free. Don’t be disheartened if they say “no”. Lamborghinis are awesome but that doesn’t mean everyone wants to own one. Your solution can be awesome without everyone in the world wanting it.
- Once you get a “yes”, guide your new student through your solution as clearly as you can on a series of video calls. Keep up with them via text in-between. Expect the process to be messy as hell to begin with. (They shouldn’t mind because it's free. If they do they’re being unreasonable.)
- Document your process here. Note the steps you take your student through, what works, what doesn’t, and anything else that seems significant.
- Once you get the solution for your student, ask them how they’d feel about sending you a quick video talking about what it was like to work with you. Tell them this will help you to reach other people who need the transformation they just went through. Offer them these 3 questions as a guide:
- What was life like for you before we met, relative to the problem you were facing?
- How did you experience the process we went through?
- What is your life like now, after applying the solution?
- Help 4 more people for free, refining your system as you go.
- Ask ChatGPT what the going rate is for the kind of coaching you’re providing.
- Now when you talk to people about your solution, pitch them at that rate (or a little lower if you still feel unsteady). This doesn’t have to feel “salesy”. Just have lots of conversations and only pitch your service when there’s a genuine need.
- Send one or more relevant video testimonials if and when you feel someone would benefit from hearing about the process from someone else’s perspective.
- Expect more people to turn you down once you start charging. This is expected and it doesn’t mean you or your service is somehow “bad”. I paid $3250 for a call with one of the top self-improvement coaches on Instagram and he told me he receives as many as 200 “no’s” per day. (If you do hit that many without a single signup, drop your price.)
Congratulations, you now have a minimum viable offer!
Of course, at some point you’re going to want to progress beyond “minimum viable” level. You’re going to want to develop your offer—in terms of both provision and promotion. I’ll be covering how to do this in my upcoming cohort course, Freetirement Frameworks.
See what I did there?
There’s enough value in the newsletters I put out each week that I could easily package the knowledge up as products, promote the same lead magnet every day on social media and call that my marketing funnel.
But I chose a different business model.
I chose to give first, then tell you about the next level of my service here, at the end of a long series of posts—once you already have a sense of the kind of value I provide.
This is why I don’t have to use sales tactics on anyone (and why you won’t either if you follow this model).
If you can't wait till Freetirement Frameworks drops, hit me up for coaching right here.
Win/win for the win,
dg 💙
~
SOURCES:
¹https://www.deloitte.com/global/en/our-thinking/insights/topics/marketing-sales/global-marketing-trends/2020/purpose-driven-companies.html
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