I don’t think it is really as different as you made it to be.One of the worst mistakes I repeat over and over again as an entrepreneur is confusing interest with commitment.
The difference is simple (yet I still manage to F*ck it up—call me Einstein):
Generating interest: giving someone something for free (newsletter sign-up, free e-book, free sample, free consultation).
Generating commitment: getting someone to GIVE YOU MONEY for your product or service.
If you’re starting your business and you don’t know what to sell, you might be tempted to follow the trendy advice of “building your audience” first. It’s a nice and comfortable path that postpones getting to the moment of truth (that you have no idea what to sell).
If you don’t have clarity about what you can sell before you start your business, you won’t magically discover it while building your audience.
To make matters worse, it’s very likely that your audience’s interest won’t translate into true, backed-by-money commitment.
I’m a big fan of some newsletters and YouTube channels, yet I’ve never spent any money on products they offer and never will. From the perspective of the entrepreneurs who run them, I’m a waste of time and money.
Meanwhile, there’s an MMA store from which I regularly buy fitness gear. I don’t care about the store (no interest), yet I spent way more money with them (commitment) than with the newsletters/channels I’m a huge fan of. Why? Because they focus on selling products, not building an audience.
Would you rather have my interest or commitment?
Can you have both? Of course, with time you can. But you’re most effective when you focus only on one task: and that can be either building your audience or making sales.
Are there some business models that benefit from developing interest first? Of course. For example, you can’t build a podcast without building interest first. But I’d generally advise against such business model unless you have some rare specific skills that make you qualified to do this.
Now, I make a lot of mistakes as evidenced by this post so I welcome all thoughts and counterarguments.
You come up with a product or service. You pay marketers to sell it, be it google ads or facebook ads. It fails. You improvises or tries a different idea…..after n times until it works.
The second approach is that you take time and effort to build your audience. Once its done, you can test many products or services at low or zero cost. Or you get monetised selling other people’s products.
There is also hybrid model. Sell a product at break even margin, low margin or at loss, acquire customers to build your relationship and funnel and look to pitch higher margin products.
If you could sell a product or service and monetize it then do it. Don’t waste your time.
But the issue is many people are bleeding to pay third party marketers testing products and business ideas multiple times, and that is why they wanted to play the longer game and try a different approach.
In the MMA store you mentioned, they paid for a physical location to get the foot traffic.
The problem is not “not knowing what to sell”. The problem is actually “not knowing what will get sold” and testing that is never free.
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