Revenue, that refines your audience.

Today I want to show you how my product development process goes. 

Right now, I’m developing a coaching offer that helps freelancers speed up the growth of their business and save 2+ years of wasted time. 

This process answers core questions to help us get better outcomes. By having clear and specific answers for who we are, what we do, and what our clients are really about, we then know what clients, offerings, and roles to exclude from our purview.

It should go without saying, but every service provider should be adopting and adding products. Products are the core of growing any business. I’ve talked about this at length, and suggest you check out those pieces. 

Here’s how I’m going to turn billable hours into scaleable revenue through product creation. It’s a copyable process and one I highly recommend.  

The Best Products Are Based On Tons of Context

This coaching offer I’m developing will start off as a service (a one-on-one call with me), and eventually be refined into a product that is divorced from my time. 

Each of the 30+ people I’ve spoken with so far have been “beta tests” as I develop and hone this system. The goal of this product is to reveal blind spots. And so far, it’s working. I haven’t had a single customer leave the call without a major insight that could change the path of their business.

The act of building a structured product is more complex than it looks. It takes a while to capture insights that are worth selling on their own. Because in a world where information is cheap, context is king. 

Context is all the participatory information that you gather through experience. The un-Googleable. A.I. might soon compress the value of facts down to zero, but data based on experience will forever remain valuable. 

I expect everyone that goes through this coaching process to realize one blind spot or mistake they’re making in their business. That’s the power of being pushed to look inward by someone with an outside point-of-view. 

And as they figure out their blindspots, I capture that information and factor it into my product so it can be more useful for the next customer. This is the gold that is most valuable. And it quickly compounds to create a highly effective tool. 

Focus on Products That Serve Your Ideal Customer (and Only Your Ideal Customer)

Conceptualize your audience as the group who can go from follower to buyer to client to advocate. 

One common mistake is to sell to multiple groups at once without even realizing it. There will be moments where people who don’t fit into that ideal customer avatar want to give you money, and it will sound great (people giving you money always does), but there’s a catch:

It’s not as valuable as you think because these customers are unlikely to turn into higher-end clients in the same way your ideal customer would. 

Look at the diagram below: 

This is from the product I’m working on, and it speaks a lot to the audience-product axis we’re going through. While it may seem intuitive, it forces freelancers to accept that a target has to be able to go through the whole funnel, not just part of it. 

If a company is a good fit for a coaching call, but that type of company never converts into clients due to them being cheap or not having the appropriate skills, then they shouldn’t be part of that funnel. 

Factor this into your product design and you’ll get higher ROI on every product you design, because of the continuity of the customer path. With that decision made, it is much easier to build a completely enclosed funnel. 

Build with the End in Mind

After you make each product, you should have multiple ideas for the next product. This could be an add-on, an upsell, a form of preparation… anything. But as you know, the process of transforming your client and their business takes lots of interactions. It’s never over. 

By planning these things out as you go, you will remain inspired *and* have a clear plan to create a long-term profit-machine. 

I also recommend looking for ways to “fatten” your offer. What can you do that will feel highly valuable to your customer, but not take much work for you?

This could be a workbook, a followup sequence, or a small interaction. In this case, I realized that I needed to make sure customers were actually filling out the workbooks I send them afterward. Because if they don’t, they are going to blame their lack of results on me. 

So I came up with a plan to better engage them. After each session, I set a deadline and then send them a voicenote with feedback after they submit. 

The outcomes and experience immediately improve. 

The Best Offers Keep Evolving

Although the product will start as a presentation, I plan on developing it further into workbooks, a group call, and eventually a peer-led offer. But it’s important to nail Step #1 before any of that. 

The steps above are how I make that possible. 

The goal is always to remove myself from this, but that doesn’t mean it has to start off that way. By collecting contextual information in one-on-one sessions, suddenly this has the power to feel personalized *and* templatized. 

I’m transferring insights and experience not just from my own career, but from all the people I’ve previously worked with. That compounds into something valuable. 

As an added bonus, anyone who consumes this product is going to be better prepared for when they do get on the phone with me. It’s the perfect nurturing tool. 

I showed you this so you’d understand how these offers evolve. The plan for this product is to find a title that instantly explains what the goal of the call is and then start marketing it and charging people. I’ve already had a few paid sessions, and I want to get social proof next. 

By offering and creating these different products to stack across your business, by taking the things that you're doing for yourself, you're creating a nurture funnel for your clients. 

This is what it means to build your solo empire.