Question:
How do you know when an online business has “grown up”?
Answer:
When their ideal customer lands on their website and says:
“Holy s*** — this was made for me!”
Like these emails that Uncle Olly receives regularly:
When you can get reactions like this, selling your stuff is easy and effortless.
But getting there ain’t easy.
And involves an existential crisis that hits after about 5 years.
See, when you first get started, you’re making everything up as you go along.
And that’s ok.
Scrappy is good.
It’s the only way to figure out what works.
You make a course.
It works.
So you make another. And another.
Then, one day, someone at a conference tells you that you don’t have a business unless you have recurring revenue (yawn), and you find yourself saying:
“Recurring revenue sounds nice!”
So you build a membership.
And so it goes.
If this is you — welcome to the club.
It takes 3-5 years to get all this out of your system.
And it feels like a massive W every step of the way.
Until…
One day…
You step back and say:
“This is one giant MESS!”
Don’t worry, we’ve all been there.
Turns out:
- Your course completion rates are rock bottom
- Churn in your membership is way too high
- Customers don’t know what order to take your products in
- The wrong people are buying and need tonnes of support
But, surprise! This is great news!
Because once you get here… now the real work can begin 🙂
Everything up until this point was riding with training wheels.
Drawing with crayons.
Practising French kissing with your pillow.
(Wait… you never…??)
Inside this huge, towering mess of products and clients, the 80/20 rule is at play…
- 80% of your revenue is coming from the 20% of customers who buy everything.
While…
- 80% of your time is taken up with 20% of customers who are confused and probably shouldn’t be there in the first place.
Your job is to reverse this.
Where all your revenue is coming from ideal customers.
And all your time is spent growing the business, instead of babysitting.
How to do this?
By learning to speak directly to your ideal customers:
- the problems they experience
- the specific language they use
- their exact context
- how you solve their particular problems
Figure this out, and something magical happens:
- You attract more of your ideal customers
- You repel the ones who are a bad fit
More money. Less time needed. Fewer problems.
It’s a beautiful thing.
Namaste,
Olly