Questions & Answers
Q&A Recording
Help Topics
This section will grow so please make sure to check back if you have a question and haven’t been back in a while.
My favourite idea gets a low score. What do I do?
We all love our own ideas. Having a very specific unchangeable vision of what you want to do can lead to your downfall.
If it’s looking unlikely that enough people will be willing and able to pay for it I would honestly advise choosing another idea. If you want to test your favourite idea, you of course can. The market will tell you if it’s going to work.
The best way to tell in advance if it’s potentially profitable is to see if you can find someone MAKING MONEY in this field.
Make sure you are flexible enough to make building a business work for you.
Now I have one idea with a highest score I am freaking out about choosing – what should I do?
This is very common. It can feel very final. Like you have chosen this path and thrown away your other options. That is NOT the case. You are choosing one idea to try. You are going to test it quickly. If it turns out to be a good fit for you you’ll continue with it. If not you can always return to this point in the process.
The other reason you could be freaking out is fear. This is your mind’s natural defense mechanism trying to ‘protect’ you. If this is keeping you stuck I recommend reading The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks.
I’ve run my idea past my Dad/best friend etc and they said…
Is your Dad/best friend etc a successful online business owner? If yes take their advice on board. If not, decide for yourself if they have the expertise to be advising you. People who are not familiar with online business often find it difficult to understand what can be a profitable online business idea.
Why do you specifically say choose a service-based idea?
Providing a service is the quickest way of starting out in business with the lowest risk. Ignition is specifically designed to help you build a service-based business. I believe digital products are better suited to more experienced business owners.
I am having difficulty figuring out what the end result or outcome for my potential clients is
People will pay for a number of different outcomes or results. Does the outcome of your work fit into any of these categories?
- To have more. Meaning to make more money. If your work helps people get more clients, improve business results or improve their financials in any way your client outcome falls into this category.
- To have better relationships.
- To learn or improve performance.
- To have more time.
- To feel – either to feel better or to have experiences.
- To protect themselves.
- To improve their status.
Some business ideas clearly come under one outcome. Some business ideas hit several categories.
How important is it to narrow the target group down to very specific group? I struggle with defining my potential clients as they are: men, women, business and non-business people and they can have very different kind of backgrounds.
The answer is you can choose to target people more generally, to take an example – people who want to have more meaningful lives, but it will make doing business more challenging than if you do choose people with a specific struggle.
You have to be able to speak to your audience as a group and the more specific you can be the better – think about this in terms of blogging. Men often view issues completely differently than women. A 25 year old has a completely different worldview than a 50 year old. None of this may matter for your work, Life Coaches this is likely you, but it is hugely important in terms of your marketing. If you keep all your blogs generic it will make it really hard for people to resonate with them because they will, by nature, have to be non specific.
The more general you are the less enticing your website and content will be and the more expensive any kind of paid marketing you do will be. This makes it difficult to scale online.
I would encourage you to narrow it down a bit more. What kind of age do people hit this issue? Is it more men than women? Does it hit people who have done the career thing more strongly than those who have family?
One way of combating this is to start with who you think your favourite clients would be and once you have nailed that you can always branch out.