📄 Why Terrific Offers that People Truly Need Often Fail Completely

Ever came up with a terrific offer, a really truly helpful service or product that you just know people need, and then when you launch it or offer it… no takers?

Been there, done that, got the crickets.

But now that I'm building my own little coaching & education app, I'm beginning to see why that used to happen to me.

See, in the maker community, there’s this notion of product-first vs audience-first.

Where the thinking goes: if you build your audience first, they will inform you as to what kind of product they want, and need, and what it is that they will be willing to buy.

Which is just another form way of saying: market research.

And that, of course, is where all marketing and business success starts.

But each time I built a new offer - whether training, or coaching, or a course or paid newsletter, I always skipped over that step of researching audience needs and painpoints.

I always figured that I knew my audience and market so well, simply creating a thing and putting it out there would be enough.

Oh, the folly of my ways, right?

Because I never properly researched, I never knew with precision who needed the thing, and for which reasons, or with what kind of messaging.

Which is why most of the things I built never really took off.

The lesson here is that whatever you can do for people, however well you can do it, how big or costly or urgent the problems that you solve, you’re doing yourself - and the people that you want to serve - a big disservice if you don’t first study people’s needs and wants and fears and frustrations.

If you do what I did - just build something and put it out there - you skip over the diagnose phase of marketing and business building.

If a doctor skips diagnosis I'm pretty sure he'll get sued for malpractice, which should give you food for thought...

So if you’ve ever wondered why people didn’t buy that awesome thing that you know they need, this might be exactly the reason why.

Maybe you didn’t research and study your audience enough.

Maybe you didn’t take the time and trouble to ‘learn your people’, as I call it.

All you need to do is have conversations: learn from the horse’s mouth who will buy, for which reasons, and with what messaging, offer, and price.

Whether you do product-market fit interviews, market research or customer interviews:

Talk to your people and figure out what they want to solve, for which reasons, and what messaging to use. And then you build and go to market.