Hi, Solopreneur! 

Happy Wednesday, and welcome to issue #34 of Solopreneur Doorway, your weekly insight and inspiration to turn your skills into solutions people buy.

This issue is a 4.0-minute read.

Apply 3 Dynamic Steps and Convert Your Next Offer from a Solo Cricket to Beyonce at the Grammys

A common challenge I see with solopreneurs is that they introduce their new product in piggyback fashion with a popular business model.

For example:

• You’ve been writing a newsletter, and now you want to launch a community membership plan.
  

• You’ve been selling a digital course, and now you’re dying to launch a newsletter.

Simply put, you’re watching others launch their products, and you feel it’s time to launch your next great solution.

The problem with this ‘it’s time for your next offer’ approach is that everyone else is following the same path. Whether you’re starting your first, third, or 84th offer, it’s imperative that you combine the correct offer with a powerful problem-solution combination.

☕️ Otherwise, your offer sinks into commodity quicksand.

😕 I felt this pain with my first offer. Years ago, I climbed on the digital course train. I spent 34 hours crafting the PowerPoint slides, recording the audio tracks, building the financial models, and then developing a sample MBA business plan for a digital course I wanted to offer.

The bad news is that, despite all the time and money I invested, I never launched the offer. I looked around the market AFTER I built all the materials and realized I had created a meh, vanilla offer.

The good news is that through that experience, I developed a simple product/offer strategy framework that now helps me build, test, launch, and re-test offers before they go to market.

This week, I’ll show you how to put this 3-step framework in motion so that you can go from singing alone in your car to conducting a symphony of euphoric customers.

Step 1: Make Sure Your Offer Turns the Polite Golf Clap at the Country Club into the Thunderous Cheers at the Olympics

Let’s be honest.

Your friends, family, and significant others will always give you a polite clap when you share with them your idea for a new offer. It’s tough for those closest to us to critique our offers and share the tough love feedback we secretly want to receive.

If you readily absorb all those family ‘atta boys’ and launch your offer, it’s likely it will become invisible before month two.

Instead, try this:

• Conduct the research to be sure your offer has widespread appeal for a true pain in the ##$ problem that people want to fix.
  

• Ex: Another newsletter about SEO is boring. A newsletter that helps newbies who want to cook vegan recipes leverage AI, launch their first website, and get to slot 1 on Google for vegan desserts could be interesting.
  

• Ex: Another paid, monthly membership community for solopreneurs is not exciting. A monthly membership community that helps smart, free-lance writers with 10+ years of experience in finance get offers to write dynamite articles for the NY Times could be special.
  

• BIG audience + BIG Solution to BIG problem = BIG potential

   

Step 2: Create Your Strategy Flow Chart and Nurture Your ‘If-Then’ Logic Branches

We know strategy is messy. Yet, it’s imperative that we sketch out the logic of our offer and how it helps our audience.

If you do this upfront you save time, eliminate some guesswork and give yourself a shot at hitting the mark. Fail to create a hypothesis for your offer with logical assumptions, and you might as well put on a blindfold to walk the balance beam at the Paris Olympics this summer.

Try this, for example:

• If you launch a membership community, what are the initial IF - THEN statements you could create? Perhaps this?
  

• IF you limit the membership to solopreneurs with less than 1 year of experience who want to build a graphic design business, THEN you assume they will want to learn Canva, Figma, and Adobe Illustrator. You know all three, so you want to share all your knowledge with the community.
  

• IF you find that most graphic design newbies want to learn only Adobe Illustrator, THEN you should pivot your community to focus on Adobe, only. It’s better to be a laser and give an amazing experience with less content rather than more topics.

It sounds simple, yet I find most solopreneurs launch their offer without researching, building, fixing, and adjusting their IF-THEN logic branches. Build your tree, write in your assumptions, and then watch them grow (or die) as you complete your pre-launch research.

Step 3: Use Feedback to Narrow Your Offer and Expand Your Audience

How often do you receive invitations to participate in a beta launch for a new offer? It’s an honor when it happens. I receive these invites from time to time, and I’m often surprised when the solopreneur does not ask for feedback.

As I’m from New York, I’m not shy about sharing a recommendation or 35 when a solopreneur asks for a polite critique of a new offer.

When the founder then emails me back and takes a genuine interest in the idea exchange, I’m MORE committed to that project, the founder, and their success.

When you collect feedback, patterns emerge about what’s working and which assumptions you should change. Pay attention and incorporate the patterns to your logic branches.

☹️ If you ask for insight, ignore it, and then launch your offer, it’s a certainty that two consequences will occur.

First, your offer won’t be nearly as strong as it should be, and second, you’ll likely not get the folks you asked for assistance to purchase your offer.

As solopreneurs, we should thirst for honest critique, and cherish those who make insightful, thoughtful, and smart suggestions.

🙏 Ask for them and embrace them when they arrive, ok?

🔑 Your Takeaways to Launch a Sensational New Offer

• Make sure your offer turns the polite golf clap at the country club into thunderous cheers at the Olympics
  

• Create your strategy flow chart and nurture your IF THEN logic branches
  

• Use feedback to narrow your offer and expand your audience

📣 Business Article of the Week

Tesla is in a tailspin. Whatever your thoughts on 'him', he remains a prominent figure across social media, electric vehicles, energy, and countless other business topics.

Bloomberg published a terrific article this week on him (along with a podcast) that can bring you up to date on the current challenges.

Here’s where the article strikes a chord for solopreneurs.

Namely, can you separate your public persona from your business persona when you run a one-person business? Should you?

While I often think it’s best to keep a polite line between business ventures and personal lives, it’s hard to maintain one with social media around every corner.

Sure, you can always choose what and how to share information with your community. Yet, when you run a one person biz that needs social media to promote your offers and build your audience, it can be tough to draw the line at just enough information and TMI.

What are your thoughts? Is it best to share it all or keep it on the down low?

I believe in you. Keep up the excellent work.

Stay curious and keep opening doors.

-Erik

Whenever You’re Ready: 2 Ways I Can Help You

1. Your 1:1 Strategy Session: Let’s improve your business model and strategy. I’ll use my 14+ years of solopreneur and entrepreneur experience to listen, overhaul, and give you a new strategy you can apply.
   

2. A Free 30-Minute Exchange: Share the most pressing challenges in your business. I’ll provide you with immediate and actionable steps to improve your business model and strategy. In exchange, I would like to ask you a few questions about your solopreneur adventure so that I can improve my online offers. No sales.