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The most seductive trap in online business
Imagine this:
You decide to build a webinar, or a masterclass, or something of that nature.
And the pitch you make to yourself goes like this: "Any one of the people who show up could become a client. And I can record it once and make it evergreen, so it works for me forever. And I can put a ton of effort into building it the first time because everyone else who attends and I can both reap the rewards for months, or years to come.”
It's a beautiful idea.
It's also the reason a lot of good coaches get exhausted.
Because here's what actually happens.
You spend two weeks building the thing. You design the slides, write the script, plan the offer, set up the tech. You're making a hundred little decisions about what people want to hear, what'll land, what'll move them, what problem you're even solving.
And you're making every one of those decisions before a single person has even raised their hand to say their interested.
It's all a guess.
Then you run it once, to a smaller crowd than you hoped, and… not much happens. No clients. A few "thanks, this was great!" and that’s about it.
So you figure maybe the webinar was the problem. You think of some changes you can make, or you scrap the whole thing entirely and build a new one from scratch. Then you run the next one using the same amount of effort and enthusiasm, but again, it’s crickets. No results. Which honestly, is normal. You can’t expect everything to work great out of the gate.
But the major problem is, you put in all this effort, and when it doesn’t work, you don’t know why.
You’re not sure where you’re losing them. Is the title? The headline? The opt-in page? The content? You’re just standing in front of a slide deck you built on an assumption and the feedback loop is virtually nonexistent.
I’m not here to tell you that webinars, masterclasses, and group workshops are bad.
They’re not bad.
In fact, they’re good.
Hosting a group workshop was the first way I ever made money online.
But I got lucky on the first one because the next 5 or 6 ideas flopped. And each one took the same amount of time and effort. And each time it got harder and harder to bring myself to do it, because I was always worried whether or not people actually wanted the thing I was putting all this time and effort into creating.
It’s a ridiculous amount of work to build a workshop or masterclass.
And the only way it really pays off is if you commit to running the same one over and over again until it finally clicks and becomes profitable. Which most people never do, because they burn out on guessing first.
So here’s what I do instead.
Especially when I’m developing a new offer or trying to bring in new clients.
I offer up free or cheap themed calls to the people on my list. And the magic in them is in the order of operations. With a webinar, you build first and find out later. With a themed call, you find out first and you only have to build the thing if it’s actually worth building. For example, I can take an idea, pitch it to my audience in about fifteen or twenty minutes, and see in real time if anybody actually wants it.
And if nobody bites, that’s my answer.
I never had to waste two weeks of my life building it to find out if anybody wants it or not. But if they do bite, now I know it’s something people want. And there’s added benefits, which you cannot get from creating a slide deck. You’re getting on a call, one-on-one, with a real person and you get the chance to watch what happens in real time to them as you walk them through your process.
Do they light up with excitement when they see the results or the possibilities that lay before them?
Or do they say, “well… that was nice, thanks.”
You get to see all of that in real time.
Plus, you’ve now established a relationship with someone who can give you real, honest feedback on what worked and what didn’t, and how you can do it better next time. This is where most knowledge workers absolutely fail and it’s not their fault. It’s easy to forget about the curse of knowledge. And even if we are aware of it’s blinding effects, the only way to cast off it’s symptoms is to sit down with a real human being and ask their opinion instead of hiding behind a slide deck while making our own assumptions.
It’s the best market research I know of.
It’s the best relationship building I know of.
And it’s the best way to validate your offer, get testimonials, get word of mouth recommendations for it, and more.
So on the surface it looks lower-leverage than a big fancy evergreen webinar. But underneath it all it’s the highest leverage move you can make before you go ahead and invest your limited amount of time here on this earth into some big idea that might not work. And if you want to develop a new offer, or bring in new clients, or test a new idea for you sink real time into it, free or paid, where-ever you’re at in your journey, themed calls are the way to do it.
If you want to learn more about how they work, go here and click the announcement post beneath the video:
Talk soon,
Kevin Hood