One Simple Change to Make Your New Product Offer More Successful

Would you like a quick, sure-fire recipe for maximizing the chances that your new product offer will be a commercial success?

A technique that you can start using right away?

Then let me share the technique of Julian Crosson-Hill, a successful online course creator.

(Julian offers some spiritually enlightening stuff. - I don't know or care too much about the content, to be honest. But I care A LOT about a successful technique.)

Julian had some quite unpleasant experiences with newly created offers.

Here's how things went...

He built his offers THINKING about what would help his target audience.

Only to go live with his offer after weeks and weeks of work to realize that the audience sees things differently!

I've been there myself.

Only that I had invested months, not weeks... FOR NOTING.

Being there brings frustration and makes it quite likely to quit.

So finding an approach to nail the demand of our target audience will not only save us a ton of time.

It can be the main driver to make our endeavor a roaring success instead of a miserable failure.

Here's how it goes...

Co-create your product with small cohorts of your audience!

That's it.

Don't create and then present.

Create and present at the same time.

Let me put it in Julian's words:

"What I’ve come to realize instead is that no matter how well it’s marketed, a product that is a poor fit for the ideal customer will never sell. Now I pilot new courses and programs through a process in which I co-create the program with a small cohort of people. This allows me to get better feedback earlier and prevents me from wasting a lot of time building a program no one wants."

So by co-creating a pilot version with a small cohort, you and I will get:

Better feedback: Because it's hands-on and fully practical instead of theoretical.

Earlier feedback: Because we don't develop on the dry dock first, but get direct feedback as we go. So we can adjust right then and there.

Saved time and money: No need to further explain.

Product-market fit: Because we ensure the fit while developing the offer. If we do this right, there's no other option than having the fit at the end.

I know, I know.

If you are with me and see how valuable the idea of co-creation is, your next question might be...

HOW EXACTLY do I do this?

But that's another chapter.

Our first step is to realize the value of choosing this approach.

So please let me know if you have taken that step and let me know.

Let me learn what you think and what your questions are.

THEN we can take it from there together.

You see. I try to take my own (or in this case, Julian's) medicine.

Why drive down this road in theory before getting any hands-on feedback?

Thanks for the moment... and let me know what you think of this whole co-creation thing.

What principles do we find here?

Feedback: The key ingredient here is to get actionable feedback from my target audience as early as possible.

Ship: We don't start with the hefty big-bang that we have created in weeks or months secluded in our dry dock. NO! We ship early with our prototype!

Iterate: After shipping fast and early, we DON'T keep our product in its MVP status. NO, we iterate and improve it.