A mad scientist
Imagine you are a scientist who is working on a medicine to cure a deadly disease.
One fine day, you come up with a prototype medicine which you think might do the job and cure the disease.
You get excited… you administer that drug to 10 people who are suffering from that disease.
And then you wait.
Only to find out that the medicine doesn’t work.
How would a sensible scientist react to this failure?
A sensible scientist would put his head down and work on making the medicine work.
Now imagine that the scientist says – “yes, the medicine didn’t work for 10 people. But that’s okay. Let us administer this drug to 10000 people and then let’s see if it works on them”
Pretty silly, right?
Why is this silly?
Well, because if the drug has not worked on 10 people, what makes the scientist think that the drug will work on 10000 people?
We might look at this example and judge the scientist. But trust me, Marketers are no different.
We love numbers.
We, Marketers, love quantity.
But just like the mad scientist, what makes the Marketer think that if his Marketing does not resonate with 10 people, it is still a good strategy to send out the same solution to a 1000 people?
Makes no sense right?
But still, Marketers are trying hard. They are trying to reach everyone. Hoping that someone would love their product. Hoping that someone would like their course.
This, right here, is the shift that we Marketers need to make while selling Digital Products.
Calmness within the chaos
Amidst all this chaos… what is a better way to do things?
The better thing to do is harder, of course. Hard, not in terms of the ‘hustle’, but in terms of the mindset.
It’s like we are battling the demons inside our head.
But this way of doing things is much better in the long-run.
It’s the same way that Marketers like Seth Godin, Bernadette Jiwa, and Andre Chaperon have chosen.
The path of focus.
The long-game.
The path where we do not focus on shiny object syndrome.
The path of not trying to do everything.
But instead, focussing on doing the long, uncomfortable work. The work of focussing small. The work of getting so good at one medium and using it for your Marketing than using all the tools at your disposal.
Expand on Seth Godin and the smallest viable audience.
Seth Godin, my hero, (and in my opinion, the best Marketer the world has ever seen), teaches us to focus on the smallest viable audience.
Seth believes, that Marketers love to hide in infinity. They focus on irrelevant numbers, and not on adding value.
After all, if you can’t help the first 10 people, what makes you think you could help thousands of them?
The path of focussing on the smallest viable audience is scary. It opens us up for failure. If it doesn’t work… it puts us on the spot.
How do we apply this principle though?
What does it look like to focus on the smallest viable audience?
Let’s look at an actionable prompt.
Talk to 10 people
I have learned this strategy from Seth Godin and then combined that learning with these 3 powerful questions that I have stolen from Perry Marshall.
It’s easy to find 10 people, no?
Identify the 10 people, who you want to help with your online course. Ask them these 3 questions –
Q1: What is your current challenge related to X?
Q2: What have you done so far to solve this problem?
Q3: How would your life look like if this problem is solved?
The first question gives your target market an opportunity to share their challenges with you.
The second question is my favorite. The second question is the one which separates “the doers” from “the complainers”. Let me expand on that.
We like to complain about a lot of things. We love complaining about the weather. We love to complain about pollution. We love to complain about the mismanagement that takes place in government offices. However, how many times do we get our hands dirty and actually work towards making things better?
Honestly, there are only a few things that we actually work towards making better.
And for your online course, you need to attract ‘doers’ not ‘complainers’.
Not that we are here to judge complainers.
It’s just that it is much easier to convince a “doer” to take your online course because he already knows the problem. He has already suffered a lot and wants to get out of this problem.
Based on the answer to the 2nd question, you can figure out if the audience that you seek to serve, is willing to pay you money to solve that problem.
The third question gives you further insight into the life of their target market.
Here are the 3 questions again –
Q1 : What is your current challenge related to X?
Q2: What have you done so far to solve this problem?
Q3: How would your life look like if this problem is solved?