You do not need a “good idea” and, “follow your passion” is terrible advice.
Your aim is to match a product or service with an audience who want it. This might seem like an obvious thing to say and you might know it already, but when you step back and think about what I am going to tell you in the rest of this book, it should become clearer as to what I am saying.
To illustrate why I want this at the front of your mind – when most people meet someone who they hear is a business person, they ask – what is the person selling? How did they make their money?
What they really should be asking is: “what audience did they match to a specific product and how did they reach them cost effectivly”.
The thing is, even if you are taking the “good idea approach”, you still need to find the customers at some point, and you will have to pay to get in front of them, one way or another.
If you can simply get a list of products that are already for sale with the process of attracting the audience clearly visible, this will tell you a huge amount of what you will have to work out at some point. Jumping straight to it will save you a huge amount of time and effort.
For example, you might sit at home trying to come up with a new concept for working out, this means you will then have to find out who wants to try your concept, you will have to educate them to the value of your concept and you will have to try and convince them to test your concept now.
Alternatively, if you can see the guy on the beach selling ice cream from a truck with a huge queue lining up to buy the ice cream, you will have found demand, product and a solution for getting it to them.
This doesn’t mean you are out of the woods, I have seen many business running but actually losing money on a daily basis, either savings or venture capital.
The Customer Education Problem
From a Funnel Persective
With customer education and outreach
- Cold email or ads
- educational content
- get them to come back
- they research multiple options
- they decide on the option (might not be you)
- Then they buy
Problem already being searched for with intent based keywords
- They google search
- Your add is at the top
- they sign up