You’ve secured interest in your offer and have a waiting list excited to buy from you.

Most businesses would now go offline and build a product or service. Go stealth and reappear in 6 months with a big reveal. Only to find out no-one cares.

We ain’t most businesses. Let’s do it sensibly.

Let’s get started:

What do we build?

I purposely left what we’re building vague - you may have noticed!

I do not recommend building a full product, service or course. Because they take too long to launch.

Instead you want to launch something fast, taking advantage of the upswell of interest you are receiving. We want to ride the momentum and not lose it by spending 3+ months building out a product.

For this reason we’ll launch a cohort. A cohort is basically a live hands-on course.

Couple of reasons why we’ll use a cohort:

• cohorts are developed “live” with customers meaning we don’t need it all ready upfront

• cohorts have higher per person cost, meaning we need less customers

• less customers means automatic scarcity

A cohort is usually $500-3,000. Get 10 or so people on board and it’s immediately a good pay day.

If you instead built a product or a course you’d:

• have to spend months prepping it, risking losing interest

• you can probably only charge a few hundred per customer meaning you need a much thicker lead pipeline

The real secret sauce here though is that you are going to co-author the cohort with the lucky sign ups.

Reactive building

We don’t have a product yet. But we’re going to sell.

We’ll take the original idea we had. And we’ll use this to build a rough outline. Just rough.

Here’s a prompt to get started:

Act as a cohort designer
I'm running a 4 week programme to teach people [topic]
By the end of the programme they should be able to [goal]
My audience main problems are: [list 4-5 problems]
Give me a 4 week outline of the cohort

This will give you a very basic outline:

As a subject matter expert it’s your job to adjust this. Mix in the feedback from potential customers as much as possible. Match their language.

Don’t worry about having a perfect outline though.

You need to know roughly where you are going. And build the first session.

But that’s it.

Because we’re going to build as we go along.

We’ll talk about how exactly we do this in the next Part.

All you need to know right now is that you need an outline and the first session to start selling. Nothing more.

By releasing this as a cohort you get to launch immediately, get people enrolled and revenue in. But you’ll be building the rest as you go along with your customers.

This is actually amazing for your first cohort because they get white glove service! They get your full attention and customised assistance. You’ll be shaping and forming the curriculum around them and their needs.

You’ll also be working extra hard to make sure they get the results you’ve promised. Because (as we’ll discuss in a later Part) we’ll be using their successes as case studies and testimonials.

Later (when we scale) we’ll solidify the cohort into a static course or product. Based on what you’ve co-built with your first customers. Later customers won’t get the same level of hands-on care but that’s fine! Focus on nailing it for your first cohort as top priority!

Sell before building

The big bonus here is that we don’t waste time to building something that people won’t want.

We sell before we build. This means we build the cohort knowing there’s interest locked in - people have already paid!

This is the basic traffic light system we’ve been using in the previous Parts:

• does this idea sound stupid?

• do you want to join the waitlist?

• do you want to buy at this price?

Most businesses do this backwards and build everything first. Then hope for the best when they launch. Oops.

Instead we are (at each stage) testing the waters, seeing how people react and only moving ahead when our customers are eager. It’s hard to overestimate how much time this saves.

What if no-one wants to buy? Great - that’s told us we need to adjust the offer for the cohort.

What if some people buy but not enough for you to justify running the cohort. Refund the cash. No harm done.

Technical logistics

A quick note on the technicals of it all. It’s easy to get bogged down here. So, in the spirit of keeping everything lean and not requiring time/money to get started I’d recommend:

• Notion to build a basic “landing page” explaining your cohort

• Stripe or Lemonsqueezy link for direct payment

• Google Meets or Zoom for running the sessions

I personally run cohorts through Circle but I wouldn’t recommend it for your first pass. Keep it simple first time - focus on the quality of the information you’ll be delivering and worry less about the technicalities.

In the next Part we’ll look at session #1 and where we go from there.