It goes without saying that first and foremost your offer need to be amazing.

But me just telling you that isn’t enough. What is an amazing offer? How do we make sure we’re not just kidding ourselves? Is there a right way to build the offer?

Let’s look at how we ensure our offer is killer.

Let’s get started:

First we start with value creation.

Most of my Playbooks and teaching work starts at this level - creating a valuable offer first and foremost.

The BATON teaching framework I use is:

• Business

• Audience

• Tribe

• Offer

• Network

The offer and value to the market is the first thing to be locked down - in the Business step.

Here’s the skinny:

1. A business exists to provide value to its customers
2. Value comes from solving their 
problems
3. Your products and services are 
solutions. The more valuable your solution to customers the higher the price you can command.

The key is thus knowing what your customers’ problems are and then building amazing solutions (packaged as your products and services).

As Zig Ziglar says: “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want."

We start with helping them out. The rest deals with itself.

Important exclusion

Notice I’ve made no reference to your business ideas.

Your ideas have very little to do with the value you end up providing.

Because ultimately what you think your customers’ problems are doesn’t matter.

Only your customers can tell you their problems. But so many entrepreneurs and business owners believe they know best.

We tend to over inflate the importance of our ideas and how much they’ll change our customers’ lives…

…and then we get annoyed when our customers don’t “get it”.

…when they don’t understand how amazing what we’ve built is. They must be stupid right?

No. Generally when this happens it’s because we didn’t actually build our product with any reference to what our customers actually want.

Basically: what we think doesn’t matter. We know nothing.

Only how our customers—the market—reacts is important.

How to work this out then?

Here are a few techniques, in order, to ensure we start building based on what our customers actually want.

• Produce content about our topic area. What content resonates most with your audience? If people aren’t interested in your free content they sure as heck aren’t going to be interested in paid versions. When you find content that resonates follow that thread. Create more along the same theme and then…

• …create a lead magnet based on your top content. Use this to test whether people will give you their contact information based on the value of the information you provide. This is the next step up from consuming your free content but still doesn’t require a monetary exchange.

• Based on the most successful content and lead magnets build a shortlist of related problems that you could solve for your audiences. Then poll your audience about which is the most of interest to them - get them to actively vote and collect as much information as possible.

• Create a basic offer that addresses their top problem.

Offer format

For your first offer I strongly recommend against building a product right off the bat.

Yes, products are amazing for scaling. You build them once and can basically set and forget. The dream!

But they are terrible for learning. And that’s what we need to do right now. We’re in learning mode remember. We’re not assuming we know what our customers need.

For this reason I’d recommend the following formats in order of preference:

• cohort, group coaching or some similar “build alongside customers” format

• a service

• finally, a product

Running some sort of group live coaching session or cohort gives you the best opportunity to listen and learn. I’ve written a Playbook about the exact method here: Cohort launch.

Providing a service also gives you this opportunity just at lower scale than a group. You’ll be working closer with customers and so will get more in-depth information but you’ll be able to work alongside less people which will limit the scope. Ideally you want to be talking to lots of individuals.

Your goal at this point is to solve the customers problems. Do whatever it takes. For however long it takes. This is the learning phase and you need to master providing value to your customers.

Worry less about your bottom line and more about learning at this point. In fact if you are new to the niche and don’t yet have a track record you could even offer this first group cohort for free or a nominal cost. This is an amazing way to start to build up a name in a niche.

Here’s a prompt to pull all this together:

Act as a business strategist. 

Your goal is to develop a lead magnet and a potential cohort-based program or service offer that directly addresses a problem your audience is facing. Follow these steps:

1. Ask me for details about my audience and specific problem or pain point that my target audience is struggling with.
2. Suggest related lead magnets that could be used to collect contact information of potential customers.
3. Brainstorm potential cohort-based programs or service offers that could directly solve the problem.


Outline the key components, structure, and potential pricing for your cohort or service offer, keeping in mind the value you'll provide by solving my audience's problem

When I plug in “freelancers struggling to manage time” as my audience and their core problem I get a list of lead magnet and first offer results, all aligned along the stated problem.

For example a 7 day Time Management email course as a lead magnet:

Which rolls into a 6 week cohort including:

Use the prompt to start thinking about how you too can build to validate your customer problems.

Just keep swimming

Often your first idea will be rubbish. Nothing against you personally! That’s just the way these things shake out.

This means not getting attached to ONE idea and trying fruitlessly to make it work for years. I see far too many people fall int this trap.

If it’s not working you need to pivot the idea or scrap it and start fresh. Don’t be afraid to kill your darlings.

Here’s the good news - each time you go back to the market with your new idea or iteration you know a little bit more than last time. Chances are you also have a bigger audience to talk to as well.

Yes it can feel a bit like Groundhog Day…but remember that after enough repetitions Bill Murray basically became godlike.

Each loop means learning and growth. Your job is to i) have as many loops as possible and ii) make sure you learn each time!

Your “failures” will do better each and every time. Your personal criteria for what a success is will increase.

Importantly you’ll get better and better at solving customer problems. Because you’ve been practicing! You’ll be honing in on what exactly you bring to the market that customers will bite your hand off for.