When you're choosing which ideas to pursue in your business, or when you're choosing
between new ideas for a business. Just because you think that an idea is
exciting and unique and you think people are going to get so excited about it
and it's going to sell, that doesn't mean that it's actually viable from the
business model perspective or from a market fit perspective. Welcome to Imperfect Action.
I'm Steph Taylor. For years, I read all the books, downloaded all
the freebies, and did all the courses, but it wasn't until I started
taking imperfect action that my business had its first million dollar year. Imperfect action
is about doing things before you're ready, prioritizing consistent action over perfect action,
and moving forward even when you're not sure you're doing it right. On this
show, you can expect mindset advice, actionable marketing tips and strategies to build
a business that brings you more profit, more freedom, and even more joy.
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DBB or at the link and your shoes. Hey, welcome back to the
Perfect Action. This is episode eight hundred and thirty five. Today is another
episode of Ask Steph, where I answer listeners questions that have been submitted.
Now, if you have a question for me, you have a situation you
want to know what I would do if I were in your shoes, head
over to Steph Taylor dot Co slash ask Steph. You'll find a form there
where you can submit your question with or without a name. It can be
completely anonymous if you like, Like today's question comes from somebody who chose not
to submit their name, and the question is a really nice short one.
I have multiple ideas for businesses to start, but I don't know which one
to pursue. How would you make this decision? So I'm gonna answer this
question with the process that I go through to decide between any ideas, not
just ideas for new businesses to start, because the process is roughly the same.
And before you can really understand why I go through this process, I
want to tell you a little bit about a time a few months after I
quit my corporate job. And picture this, You're in a pretty small two
bedroom apartment and wall to wall in the living room, there are about one
hundred small shipping boxes stacked there in a few rows. This was my reality.
A few months after I quit my corporate job, I had spent two
days packing orders to ship that month. My back was so sore, and
all I wanted was to grow this business out of my apartment. I had
twenty thousand Instagram followers, but I was struggling to sell more than one hundred
products a month, and I was making about five dollars profit for each of
these. I had invested in Facebook, cards, website design, all of
the things that I thought would make more sales, but somehow I just couldn't
get past about one hundred orders a month. Now, this was a physical
product, and with physical products, you know you've got to pack the orders,
You've got to ship the orders, you've got to deal with customer support.
Because I was only making about five dollars profit per order, some months
it would be less. Because I was making such a small profit margin,
I couldn't afford to outsource the packing and the shipping and the customer support.
I'd started this business for freedom. I had quit my corporate job because I
thought I would have freedom, and yet here I was with less freedom and
less money than I was earning in my corporate job. I really wanted to
travel, but I couldn't afford it, and even if I could afford it,
I couldn't leave the country because I needed to ship these orders. And
I just really all I wanted was to make this business profitable and prove to
everybody who had doubted me when I said I'm going to quit my corporate job
and start a business. I really just wanted to prove to these people that
I had it in me. But I just couldn't get more people to buy
my product. And eventually, about a year or so after I started the
business, nearly a full year after I quit my corporate job, I decided
to close the business. I tried for months, and I realized that this
just wasn't a sustainable business. I was burning out and I was going to
run out of money before it took off. And it wasn't until a few
years later when my next business, the business that I'm in now, took
off and I sold a few thousand copies of an online course, that I
realized just how easy it can be to sell something when people do want it.
And I had this realization around why my first business didn't work, and
there were two main reasons. Firstly, the business model was broken. The
pricing was wrong. The expenses that I incurred for each additional unit that I
sold were way too high, and because of that, it wasn't ever going
to be profitable until we hit a really huge scale. But unfortunately, because
it was a physical product, because there was food involved, I couldn't ship
it overseas and there just wasn't a big enough market for the level of scale
that we needed in Australia. Right, So there wasn't a big enough market
in Australia for that level of scale to make it profitable and viable for me
to run this particular business. And then the other big breakthrough I had from
this was I realized it doesn't matter how unique or great your idea is.
Because I thought that this was a great idea for a product. And I'm
not going to tell you what it was because that's not relevant to the story,
but it's I thought it was such a great, unique idea nobody else
had done it before. I thought everybody would get excited about it, and
they didn't. And that was why I really struggle to grow it. So
I realized it's not about having a unique idea, but rather it's about solving
a problem for a specific group of people, and that particular business didn't do
it. My current business does it really well, and that's why it's been
so much easier to grow this business. So when you're choosing which ideas to
pursue in your business, or when you're choosing between new ideas for a business,
just because you think that an idea is exciting and unique and you think
people are going to get so excited about it and it's going to sell,
that doesn't mean that it's actually viable from the business model perspective or from a
market fit perspective. So how would I go about deciding which ideas to pursue?
Now, Now, this is the process that I go through. Whenever
I'm like, well, we need to add a new offer to our office
suite, or I think about we need to I want to sell something new,
I go through roughly this process. So step one, I start with
the market that I intend to sell it to. Rather than having an idea
and then looking for people who are the right audience for it. I start
the other way around. I think these people are the ones that I have
in my audience, or these are the people that I want to help.
How can I help them? What do they need? And then I brainstorm
all of the problems that need solving, all of the problems they're dealing with,
all of the struggles that are showing up in their life, all of
the things that are frustrating them, all of the things that they need help
with. I brain dump all of these on paper. I don't think about
how I'm going to solve these problems. I don't even think about whether I
have the skills to solve these problems. I don't think, oh, I'm
going to solve that with one on one coaching, or I'm going to solve
that by creating a course. I don't. I purely just think what are
the problems, and I list them out. Then I conduct a little bit
of research. I would typically find a few people who are in this intended
audience, and I'd try to range a few zoom calls to chat with them
one on one. Okay, I know it's very tempting to skip the step.
It's really scary to jump on a zoom call and ask people these kinds
of questions. But even if you think that you know your audience really well,
you often don't know what's going on inside their minds. And I don't
think you can replace this step with a survey. A survey is great to
help you understand at a really high level, you know what they're struggling with
and where they might think that they need help before you sit down and brainstorm
all of those problems before you do step one, but it doesn't give you
much insight into what is really pressing for them right now, in other words,
what they would pay money to solve right now. So I would jump
on those zoom calls. I would ask them a few questions, find out
what else they are struggling with, what's most painful for them, what problems
they would pay to solve, and go really deep. With a survey,
you can't ask follow up questions, but with a one on one call you
can. So when they say something like, oh, I'm feeling really overwhelmed,
you can now follow up with a specific question asking them, Hey,
well, what specifically is making you feel overwhelmed right now and get a much
deeper insight so that you can create something that actually solves their overwhelm rather than
attempts to end fails. Then the next step I would take is I would
brainstorm some potential solutions for their most pressing problems. So, based on what
they told me in that call, I would think, Okay, let's look
at let's narrow it down to maybe five or ten of the most pressing problems.
And then this is the point where I would ask, can I actually
solve this? And how can I solve this? And it doesn't always have
to be something that I can personally solve. So if it's a problem that
is not in my zone of genius to solve, maybe I can bring somebody
else in to do it. For example, in my twelve month program Freedom
fast Track, I brought in guest experts every second month. My good friend
Anita Siek, who's a brand strategist. She ran a hot seat coaching session
for my students on brand strategy, which I know a little bit about,
but it's not my zone of genius like it is Anita's zone of genius.
So she's helping me to solve the problem that my students are really struggling to
stand out online and they're really struggling with the messaging and how they communicate their
offers. So she came in and they had the opportunity to ask her those
questions and have her workshop those challenges with them. So see how I'm helping
to solve a problem without me actually solving it with my skills. Then I
might also think about the ones where I can solve it. How am I
going to package that up? Is it best solved in a one on one
format? Is it best solved in a group format? Is it best solved
in a self paced format? How would I structure it? That is how
I would kind of narrow it down into actual offers. Then step four,
I would pick one idea. And I know this is easier said than done,
And I know this is the part that our listener who submitted the question
was really struggling with. And I know that I've taken a very roundabout way
of answering this one question of how to choose between multiple ideas. But I
also wonder if walking you through my process has helped you to cull some of
those ideas that were on your list. Now in choosing which idea I would
test first. So I'm going to explain to you what I mean by test
in a minute. But I would test an idea before before I go all
in on it. And the best way to test something is to find out
if people would actually pay money for it. So in choosing which idea to
test, I would consider which one is going to be easiest for me to
test. You know, it's going to be much easier for me to email
my list and say, hey, I'm putting together this one on one Vaday
offer click here to sign up, versus launching a twelve week course to them,
Because even if I launch the course before I've created it, before I've
created the course content, I'm probably still going to need to create a sales
page and a bunch of other assets around it. But a one on one
offer might be a really easy one for me to test. I'd also consider
which one solves the most urgent problem for my audience. Out of all of
those problems that they told me, which problem is the most pressing for them
to solve right now, and which of my ideas that I could test solves
the most urgent problem. I'd also consider which one do I most want to
deliver. If one of my ideas is an online coaching program and I don't
want to do one on one coaching, then why why bother part of building
a business is building something that you enjoy, not something that you're going to
resent, but you're doing because it's profitable or because it brings in the cash.
And then I would also consider which of the ideas makes the most sense
in terms of vision fit, market fit and skills fit? So vision fit
does this give me the freedom, fulfillment and income that I desire? Right?
Is this creating time freedom? Is it fulfilling me? Like? Do
I enjoy doing it? And is it creating the income that I desire?
Whatever level that is? For you? Skills fit, do I have the
skills to deliver the solution and help them achieve the outcome? Or do I
have somebody I can bring in to do that on my behalf? Or market
fit is the last one? Is the market willing to pay money for it?
How am I gonna package it up? How am I going to sell
it? And will the market pay money for it when it's packaged like this
and sold like this? Right? Vision fit, skills fit, market fit?
Which one of your ideas makes the most sense in terms of that?
So in summary, which one's easiest for you? To test which one solves
the most urgent problems, which one do you most want to deliver, and
which one makes the most sense in terms of vision fit, market fit,
and skills fit. And you might find that the one that's easiest for you
to test is maybe the one you don't want to deliver. That's fine.
Find a balance of those fours, so assess it based on those four questions,
and then pick one that feels right. And then step five the last
step I would test or actually second to last step, I would test the
minimum viable version of that idea. So when I say test it, for
example, if my idea is for a really short, self paced online course,
the minimum viable way I could test that was to launch it as a
live workshop. First, I would sell it to my audience. I'd send
an email to my list, I'd talk about it on social media. Actually,
i'd send more than one email to my list, and then if they
buy it, that's when I then create the workshop and teach it live.
Then I can based on the questions they ask in the workshop. Then I
would find that and maybe record it and turn it into an online course because
now I know people want it and it gets results. Too many people do
this the wrong way around. Rather than creating the minimum viable version, they
create the perfect version. They'll spend months creating the final version of this online
course. They'll record everything. I see people hiring videographers before they've even sold,
like the first copy of it, before they've even enrolled the very first
student, And then they launch it right, and then maybe nobody buys and
they're like, oh, I've just wasted ten thousand dollars on a videographer yet,
because you did it the wrong way around. The right way around is
to actually see if anybody wants it, if anybody will spend money for it,
before you create it. Now we're only a few weeks into this round
of Launch Magic, and I'm already starting to see a lot of my students
pivoting parts of their ideas, pivoting their messaging, some of them completely pivoting
their ideas because of what they have learned in the course so far and from
the feedback that they've had from their audience by following the process, and they're
realizing, oh, I was going about this the completely wrong idea. So
this is why it's so important to test it before you go and spend a
lot of time and potentially money creating it, and then the final step step
six. If it works. If your test works, people buy it amazing.
Now we look at how can we improve it, refine it, and
scale it. How can we take that minimum viable version and make it incredibly
awesome and start to scale it up, start to sell more of it.
Now, if it doesn't work, then we need to investigate. Is it
the messaging that is off? Is it the sales process that is off.
Is it that they simply don't value solving this problem enough to pay for it.
And maybe if they don't value solving this problem enough to pay for it,
then we need to go back to the drawing board, back to that
list of ideas, test the next one. This is such a process of
experimenting. It's not a process of I'm going to have a unique idea.
I'm going to put it out there. People are gonna get excited about it,
They're going to buy. That's what we see from the outside. That's
what we see in the media headlines. When we hear about somebody who became
an overnight success and they sold a million dollars of their product in a week.
We see that in the headlines, but we don't see the experimenting that
they've gone through to get to that product that sells really easily. Okay,
And there's a beautiful quote I think it's from Einstein when he talked about creating
a light bulb and he tried like ten thousand ways before he finally got the
right way to get a light bulb to work. And his quote was,
I didn't fail ten thousand times. I just found ten thousand ways that a
light bulb wouldn't work. Something along those lines. I may have completely butchered
that, but this is exactly what it is. You're finding what's not gonna
work, and it's like this process of elimination to decide what does work.
So hopefully that has helped you, the listener who wrote in with multiple ideas
for businesses to start, and hopefully even if you're somebody who's already got a
business and maybe you're just deciding between offer ideas in your business, hopefully this
has been really helpful for you as well. If you've ever learned anything from
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