The final step in the Blueprint is to formalise our audience, newsletter and service work into a digital product.

This is the good stuff.

What online business is all about.

It’s the waking up to this sort of thing:

Once you have a digital product in place you get as close to the dream of “passive income” as possible.

There’s been a lot of ground work (we covered this in the last four Parts) but that now pays off when you develop and launch digital products.

We’ll look at how in this Part.

Our products need to solve customer problems.

How do we know what our customers’ problems are?

That’s precisely why we started with running a 1:1 service offer in the last Part!

By spending time talking to and working with clients you’ll start to see patterns.

Clients in the space will all have similar problems. The more you work with clients the more apparent the patterns will become.

You can supplement this with polls. With both you audience (for example on X) and tribe (in newsletter) you can run polls asking what their biggest problems are.

This feedback is not as valuable as listening to service clients but it’s a great supplement.

Over time you need to collate and write down the top problems that your customers deal with. Ideally you can narrow it down to a single problem - but having a handful of problems is also fine!

Once you’ve got the customer’s core problem on lock we can formalise a product. Here’s a prompt:

Act as a product designer

My business is [copy/paste business niche]

I offer the following service: [copy/paste service description]

I have identified my customers primary problems as:
[list out customer problems]

First delve one layer deeper on these problems to suggest the root core problem linking these problems.

Next suggest 5 product ideas that I can offer to customers to solve this problem

The products should be digital, hands-off once completed, require no/low capital to develop, require no specialised team or skills to develop.

I’ve run this prompt along with the previous business niche and service offer from the last Part.

For the customer problems I’ve used:

• not knowing if AI is a fad

• technical inexperience

• worried other companies are deploying AI and they are not

First the prompt analyses the problem areas I provided and suggests a root cause:

In this case ChatGPT has identified the core problem as FOMO.

This is a genuine concern for middle managers, which was the target avatar from previous Parts.

They don’t want to look like idiots for missing the boat when competitors and colleagues are suddenly deploying AI and they are not. They want to cover their arses basically by keeping up to date!

ChatGPT will also generate a handful of product ideas for us:

All solid ideas.

How do we know which to go with?

You know the answer to this by now! We ask them.

Run polls to your audience and newsletter subscribers. Ask your current customers. Find what they want and run with that.

The product creation process will depend on which idea you run with - the production of a webinar series is very different to a set of guidebooks.

Publishing will also depend on what the product is. For example a video course is published on an LMS (learning management platform) whereas a guidebook might be published on Amazon.

I’ve covered most of these various ideas elsewhere in Prompt Playbooks. Right now you just need to work out what the product will be.

I’ll talk more about building out digital products (in any format) in the Accelerator as it’s a big topic! Waitlist here.

Multi-format

A more advanced tactic is to build in multiple formats.

Once you’ve identified the customer’s main problems you hit them from multiple angles.

You create a whitepaper, guidebook, video course, email course, community, mastermind, webinar series etc. all about the same problem.

Why?

First up everyone has different preferences. You might like audio whilst I prefer to learn from text. We are all different.

Second, we can escalate the same customers through different variants. They may start with the eBook but then buy the (more expensive, more hands-on) video course.

Here’s a prompt to hit the same problem from multiple angles. Use this below the previous output:

Expand this to 10 product ideas

Then sequence them into a funnel from lowest cost/time investment to highest

Provide indicative pricing for each

This will expand the product idea range and then sequence them into an escalation funnel for you:

As always confirm these with customer discussions before deploying.

Then deploy from front to back, continually adding new offers and escalating customers.

Pulling it together

Over this week I’ve given you the Blueprint for a successful business in 2024.

Business niche → Lead Magnet → Newsletter → 1:1 Service → Digital Product

This basic flow is my focus for 2024 - helping people deploy this basic model, launch their first business and escape the 9 to 5.

Want to join us on the 6 weeks of live Accelerators starting soon? Free waitlist here.

Here’s what we covered this week:

Part 1: Discover your profitable business niche

Part 2: Captivate the market with your lead magnet

Part 3: Effortless email list growth

Part 4: Deep dive into customer needs

Part 5: Save the world with your creations