I love the moment an offer starts to take shape. You can explain who it’s for, what you’ll help them solve, and what working with you would look like. You might even be ready to build the page. That’s when I like to ask a question that sounds premature: how will the first person who could use this hear about it?
I don’t mean where we’ll announce the launch. I want to picture that person on an ordinary Tuesday, before they know we exist. What would they look for? Who would they talk to? How would they explain the problem to someone they trust?
That question helps me design the offer, not just promote it.
People don’t always search for what you sell
Imagine a program that helps business owners delegate. After speaking with you, they might recognize that’s exactly what they need. But on that ordinary Tuesday, they probably don’t search for “program to learn how to delegate.” Maybe they just hired someone and want to know how to hand over a task without doing it themselves. Or they’ve just told a friend, “I took two days off and they called me about everything.”
You might recognize both situations as delegation. To the person living them, they’re more specific. If all I talk about is delegation, I’m asking them to make the connection to my offer on their own, before they have much reason to.
That would also send me back to the program. If the first problem that keeps coming up is handing off a task and reviewing it without taking it back, maybe we should start there. Not just use it as an ad hook, but have participants work on a real task in week one. The situation that helps someone recognize the offer can also help make it more useful.
Not everyone arrives knowing the same things
A referral from a former client and a video someone found while searching for an answer can lead to the same offer. I wouldn’t assume both people need the same explanation.
The referral may already trust that you can do the work and want to know what it would look like for them. The person who just found you is still deciding whether you understand their problem. A good explanation may be enough for now. If they want to continue, they should be able to see the next step without piecing together the whole business themselves.
That changes where I’d invest first. If people already ask about working with you after seeing you on YouTube, I’d check what they find when they look for details. If most work comes through referrals, I’d ask whether the people who refer you can explain in one sentence whom you help and when an introduction makes sense. I wouldn’t open three new channels before looking at the one that already starts conversations.
Before launching, it helps to tell a modest story: this person is trying to solve this problem, will probably find us here, and can make this decision when they arrive. It doesn’t need to be true for everyone. It needs to be concrete enough to test, and clear enough that I’ll know if I was wrong.
If I can’t imagine how someone might come across the offer in the middle of their day, I may still be missing something important: not how to sell it, but when it would be useful to find it.
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