Table of contents
Hey folks 👋
Two weeks ago, we looked at how to make money as a creator using an effective sales funnel for your own products. But what if you don’t know what you should sell?
This week, we're going to look at how to know what you could sell as a creator.
Coming Up...
- Lessons from The World of Business
- The Audience Interview
- Building the Product
📊 Lessons from The World of Business
Most of us know that if we were to start a business, we should do some kind of market research first and talk to our future customers to try to figure out what they really want.
We’d know that it’s hard to guess what people want, and we could save ourselves some time by just doing customer interviews. We’d also know that we have all sorts of biases and preconceptions that heavily influence what we think will be successful, so we should do some research to either validate or disprove our theories.
We know this.
Yet, when it comes to selling stuff as a creator, we don’t approach it in the same way for some reason. This is the whole point of being a Creatorpreneur. We want to take lessons from the world of business and apply them to our own creative side-hustles to make things easier for us in the short and long term. The thing we can steal in this case is the customer interview, or in our case the audience interview.
👥 The Audience Interview
One of the most effective ways to figure out what to sell is to ask your audience. This is called a dee-dive survey. You can ask what problems they have, what their goals are and what they might buy from you. But there is one question that trumps them all.
"When it comes to X, what is your biggest challenge?"
This question can give you pretty much everything you need to go out and make a compelling product that people want to buy. If you really want, there is one more useful question that can add some extra spice to the data you collect.
"How is this challenge affecting your life? In other words, how is it slowing you down (or holding you back) from reaching your goals?"
Armed with this information, you can go off and make something that solves your audience's problems, after all that is what people pay for. Things that solve their problems, usually problems relating to time or money.
You might think you need a massive audience to do this, but you’d be surprised how much information you can get from even 10 people. You can ask them what their challenges are in the area that you’re interested in, and they’ll give you ideas and information to make your product (or make some content as well).
The next stage to the audience interview is to actually interview your audience, by hopping on a zoom and asking them more questions about this challenge they're facing, and you can also test what they’d buy from you. It doesn’t have to feel scammy, it can be an honest conversation and your audience will most likely just be happy fill out a survey and/or chat to you because they enjoy and value your content (hopefully 😅).
🧱 Build the Product
Once you have the information you need, you can work on building the product. Here are some ideas for things you can actually sell.
- An online course where you teach something
- An e-book
- A Notion template
- Your time e.g. 1-1 consulting, freelance work.
- Exclusive content e.g. private content that doesn’t get released to the masses
- Access to your online community.
- Physical products e.g. clothing, notebooks etc
These are just a few examples, but with some information from your audience, you’re likely to be able to make one of those things and generate some revenue.
The beauty of digital products is that they are usually low cost to make and you can create them yourself, instead of relying on a manufacturer or a supply chain. It’s for that reason it might be worth only considering selling physical products until you have a big enough audience for it to be worth it or you can outsource a lot of the (boring) admin based tasks.
🤔 What’s next?
You’re now armed with a list of things you could sell and the knowledge of how to figure out what your audience wants. And you can revisit the article from two weeks ago about creating an effective sales funnels, so what are you waiting for? Here are some steps to action:
- Brainstorm the different topic areas that relate to your content e.g. cooking, tech, books, personal development, careers, gaming etc
- Ask your audience to fill out a 1 or 2 question survey saying “when it comes to X (e.g. cooking), what is your biggest challenge?”
- Ask those who filled out the survey if they want to hop on a call with you to talk more about the thing you’re thinking of selling.
It definitely sounds a lot simpler than it is, but it's also a lot simpler than you think it is…if that makes sense?
If you’re a creator and have a successful product that you sell, let us know by replying to this email, what you think it is that makes your product successful?
Anyway, that’s it for now.
Have a great rest of your week,
Tintin at Creatorpreneur
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