Sell Before You Build

There are an infinite number of ways to do things online.  Platforms, tools, frameworks, methodologies, communities, all promise to make it easier for you to create, market, and grow your brand.  But are they really doing a good job or are they marking it harder on us to actually create?

I had an interesting experience last week with launching my Epic Podcasting course.  To avoid the same mistake I’ve seen way too many people make about building something before proving a market of it, I kicked off an email campaign to sell “Early Access” to the course.  Now the rub here is very little of the actual course content had been created already.  Instead I built a landing page (which is no simple act itself, but our friends at Thrive Themes make it as easy as possible), wrote a 6 email series leading up to the big launch email, and wired up everything in my course software so let people actually buy the course.

All of this done ahead of time before actually recording most of the videos, creating the slides, and publishing everything.

So what happened?  What was the result of this?

Well it’s a bit too early to tell because we’re only through email 2 of the 6 part series, but the early results are amazing.  2 pre-sales of the course (at a discounted $249/each) even before the actual sales email is going out.

So now what?

Well I learned a pretty important lesson from this:  Sell before you Build.

Were people a bit miffed when they signed up for the course and there was nothing in their dashboards?  Nope, in fact they were both grateful for me putting forth the knowledge we’ve acquired at PodcastMotor into one place they can come to condense years worth of learning into one place.  Sounds reasonable to me.  I know there are loads of things I’d spend $250 on to become an expert in a matter of hours.  That’s really the key with courses:  give people the fast track to success, not just knowledge.

And so this weekend I’ve built out most of the actual modules of the course, recorded, edited, and published a few of the videos, and am putting together quizzes and worksheets for it.  I feel very confident in putting together this work now, and spending the time to get all of it just right, because I know with dollars in my bank account that the product is validated, and have spoken with actual customers to know that this is something that they actually want.

What more do you want?

Well for me this is a paradigm changing activity.  No more will I launch a single thing without first pre-selling and validating the concept.  It’s almost like a Kickstarter for your project, but without the trouble of putting together a kickstarter.

So what’s next?  Well I’m going to continue putting together the Epic Podcasting course, which I can see may very well be my first priority every day, and from there am going to start focusing on some software solutions.  Online entrepreneurs have lots of solutions available out there already but there’s always room for improvements in so many of them.  Smells like opportunity to me!