Determining the Need for an Online Business or Product

Friends!

How to Determine if There‘s a Need for My Online Business or Product? And How to Price it? Let’s talk about validation of your business idea today. How to know if your thing is going to land, and what the best price would be.

If you have a business idea on your heart – this one is a must listen!

I pray this blesses you!

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:

(00:07)
Oh, my gosh, this is so crazy. Lady, friends. We have officially passed 100,000 downloads together on this podcast. I mean, my heart is exploding. I am beyond belief that this has grown into something that we can learn from and we can grow together. And God has blessed this show by bringing me each and every one of you. And I’m just sitting here in immense gratitude. Thank you for being part of this sisterhood with me, for being one of my Lolas. I love you so much. Okay girl, I will meet you inside this 10 by 10. Get ready. These are gold.

(03:30)
Hey Lola, in this 10 by 10, I’m sitting with my friend, Chris Banderweide and she’s a blogger over chrisbanderweide.net. Her passion is building Christian community through intentional friendships and mentoring, which we love. Right? If you guys wanna connect with her after this Q and A head over to IG, her handle is at Chris Banderweide. Hey Chris, Hey, how are you? I’m good, my first question is how can I identify if there is a need for the product or service that I want to offer?

(04:06)
This is a great question, because there’s such a difference between what we want to offer, what we think we should offer and then what we actually need to offer. So the number one step is you have to get ride of the I mentality and you have to transition your vision onto the they mentality, which is your community. And if you guys have a community of 10 people today, that is community enough to start doing that research, start asking them, what do you guys wanna see more of start paying attention to the analytics on your blog.

(04:43)
Chris, especially for you with your blog, what posts are getting the most visibility? What comments are you getting the most, what type of feedback are you getting and really start that open dialogue with your audience to see what do you guys need and also pay attention. What are the questions that you are getting over and over and over again? And this doesn’t just happen overnight. This comes with the effort of building an audience over time. That’s when you start to see the questions come through over and over and over again.

(05:21)
Then that bring me to a great way to start doing market research. When you have an audience that’s really small is to start offering some coaching. Like start being like, Hey guys, I do 30 minute strategy sessions with you or I do 30 minute coaching sessions with you on friendship building or whatever your like niche is and start just having this dialogue. Let them come to the session with their questions. You’ll start to hear the repeat stuff, come up over and over again and you’ll go, okay, I see a system here. So your audience is actually going to bring you what they need, but you have to be patient and you have to be really interactive with them to get it out of them.

(06:09)
That’s awesome. How do I determine if what I’m creating should be a freebie or if I should charge for it? What type of product are you creating? Well, I have a couple in mind. One is just about how to build deeper relationships, deeper friendships and more that are more intentional and it feels like a freebie, but I have different levels and I’m trying to decide if I should charge for it. But it still feels like a low budget product. So I feel like I want to offer it as a freebie. So I’m having a hard time thinking of those next step things.

(06:49)
So here’s how you kind of discern that. Your freebie is the what. So for example, you know how to cultivate Christian friendship. It’s a what, it’s a how to do blank, it’s tips to do this. It’s a checklist it’s very light and fluffy, and it’s one page. The freebie you guys should take you less than a day to create it. Like I’m seeing these big audacious freebies and actually over complicating freebies hurts the opt-in. I don’t know if you heard my episode where I talked about that I created the most ridiculously simple checklist and that’s the one that’s blowing up my email list.

(07:26)
Now the second level, the second tier would be the how of that. What it’s the implementation? So potentially if we talked about, You know, three tips to create authentic friendships or authentic Christian friendships and they’re just tips, well, then they might go deeper and say how to cultivate meaning relationships through this communication system. And then you have a system that takes them through different methodology and emotions of communicating, of growing friendships that are meaningful of being a great listener. Like it’s the how.

(08:07)
Then the other piece of it is like how deep does that implementation go? And then also maybe coming up with, why are people not getting results in this area? That’s another really big question you can ask yourself. Like if you’re trying to help people build community and you’re teaching friendships and you know, mentoring in this realm, you can ask yourself, why is this hard for that person, this avatar, why are they not able to do what I’m able to do? What are the roadblocks that she’s facing? What are the breakthroughs she will have when I give her this toolkit to get there. And that will help you niche down.

(08:59)
Then ask yourself now, if I was to create a roadmap for a brand new person that came to me and wanted to get through these roadblocks, what would that look like in a systematic way? Step one, step two, step three, that gets them a tangible result. Your course must give her a solution that she can implement. So it can’t be fluffy. And this is hard with something that you’re teaching, right? It’s hard to say, well, how do I gauge if I’m a successful friend, if I’ve built Christian community.

(09:35)
So you really wanna dig deeper into that and ask how can having Christian community and intentional friendships better this woman? Why does she need it? How does it impact her life? And those questions will give you more of something concrete to hold onto as you’re creating the content for her. That makes sense. How do I determine how much to charge for my product or service? Hold on. Let’s rewind for two seconds also on the freebie. I wanna say this.

(10:09)
You’re gonna create a freebie and you’re gonna create another freebie and you’re gonna create another one. So don’t get stuck on why. Create whatever comes into your heart? Create it, throw it up in Canva. Canva is free. Put it out and test it for a while. And if it’s a flop, create a new one, I have probably like created 20 freebies and one is really sticky. So you have to test that. And you guys just because you have one freebie, your work is not done. And also because you guys have one course, your work is not done. There are so many times you’re gonna pivot and shift and because you created something, it will help you actually get more clear on what people actually need.

(10:49)
Can I ask a question about that? Because I feel like there’s kind of three different sections to kind of what I’m going for. There’s the Christian community, which is like your friendships, your deep quality friendships. And then there’s the mentoring, you know, but then to have those and to have them work first, you have to have such a solid foundation of your faith. And so building that, am I confusing people by having three different things I’m shooting at and maybe like a freebie for each of the three things and maybe a course for each of these three? Is that too much? Absolutely.

(11:29)
You need to take all of these things, which are also really big things. And you’ve gotta find one core common denominator between the three, which we might wanna do a strategy session outside of this. Where you’re like, look, it’s one woman. She has one set of problems. What does she look like? Feel like, what does she eat? What does she sleep? What are her kids like? Where does she work? Why is she struggling in this area? What are her pain points? What are her triggers?

(11:55)
You know her so infinitely well that you can come up with one promise for her. One thing, one promise. And then every solution that you create, Chris, it touches that one sentence. And so it’s so micro niche. That is how you gain traction. That’s good. How do I determine how much to charge for product or service? You wanna look at what is the end result worth to someone? And that’s where again, we get back to what’s the tangible results she walks away with. It’s really hard to price things like friendship and community and mindset because how does someone gauge their success?

(12:39)
Versus it’s really easy to gauge. Was I able to start a podcast or not? So when you’re looking at your course, even if it’s in a, I’m using the word fluffy, but I just wanna say, it’s not like a tactical arena. You still have to find an end result, promise for her. And then you have to ask your community. You have to ask yourself, you have to do market research and say, what is that end result worth in a dollar under, like, if you were to think in dollars and say, if I was to pay for that end result, what would I pay? What would my community pay, you start there. Always start less than you think you should to get some market research.

(13:20)
To get that social proof, to get testimonies, always give, you know, a couple people access to give you that social proof. Give me testimonies, give me video testimonies. And remember you can always go up, but you can’t go down. So that’s that. And personally, and honestly the sweet spot for a beginner is always gonna be under $500. Okay. Even potentially under $200 as a brand new person, that’s growing a brand new audience so that you can gain traction quicker. I hope you loved that quick 10 by 10, and that you took away some value to help you in your own life and business. Sending you off with love and light. I will see you again tomorrow. XO XO, Stef.