Which of These Should You Do First in Your Business?

Alright, so the other day, I am sitting in a coaching call with two of my students, and they ask an amazing question. It’s a question that we all have to answer for ourselves and we all kind of struggle with. It’s a bit of a chicken and the egg. It’s. They’re building an information product off the back of their other businesses that is service based. So they’re servicing, let’s say, accountants, right? And they want to create an information product with group coaching that helps those accountants do XYZ thing. But this is a new. This is a new thing that they’re going to be offering in conjunction with their previous businesses.

It’s a little bit different, right. So their question is, should we start marketing it now? Should we start creating the podcast and the videos and all that stuff? Should we do that first, gain some traction and then worry about building the product? Or should we build the product and then the podcast? Because the podcast is their technique to add value to their current clientele. They can put it in front of them, say, hey, listen, we did XYZ episodes on this topic, which I think you’d find very valuable, and then from there lead them to the product. So that’s just like the very basic outlines of the funnel. And so the question is, do you build the podcast, the outreach, the distribution? Do you build that first or do you build the product first? And it’s a bit of a trick question, actually, because they came into it thinking it’s a either or. The truth is, it’s a both. And you have to do both simultaneously because it does you no good to just focus on the distribution, building out the podcast if you actually don’t have anything to direct the people towards, right. That.

That’s not what a business is. A business is to exchange a value. Right. To take money, in this case, in exchange for a product or value, right. And if you don’t have the product, then you don’t really have a business. You have a media empire and you have, you know, distribution and visibility. But it’s very hard to convert likes into dollars if you don’t have a product. So the question isn’t, should you do this and then that? It’s actually you do both simultaneously.
And here’s how you do it. First you go and you start pre launching the podcast, because the podcast, you’re going to want to launch with six to eight episodes already in the can. That way, when you go to your friends, your family, your current employees, or your current, I’m sorry, your current client list and you say, hey, we have this new podcast. You should check it out. You want to make sure that when they go to check it out that they have something worth binging on. Because you only get one opportunity to grand open a business, right? So you’re not going to be sending them a link every single time you do a podcast episode, but you will probably go and let everybody know, hey, I just launched this new podcast. You might find it valuable. So that’s your big opportunity to get people into that funnel and to really hook them.
So you want to create six to eight core episodes that are going to solve majority of the issues or objections that your client or customer is likely to have that your product can help them solve, right? So we’re doing that. We’re creating the infrastructure, creating those podcasts on the left hand side here, while simultaneously starting to build out the product. But the way that we build the product isn’t to just go start building it. It’s actually to start selling it before you’ve built it. You go to your current customers and you start letting them know about this thing. You start pre selling it. That does a number of things. Number one is it proves the concept.
If you can’t pre sell a product, you’re probably going to have a hard time actually selling the product. A great product. People are willing to pay for it weeks before receiving it. So pre selling is a great way to vet whether or not there’s actually interest in this thing. Second is that revenue solves a lot of problems in the beginning, if you’re trying to launch this empire, this business, the problem is you don’t have any money coming in the door, and so you’re burning your cash reserves. That can be very stressful unless you have a lot of money, and it can make you make bad decisions that you’re making judgments based off of how much money you have in the bank because you’re trying to be super stringent and frugal, and that might not be the best decision in the moment for your business. But the moment you have revenue coming in the door, it changes everything. Truly, cash flow is the lifeblood of a healthy business, and it changes the way that you approach problem solving.

And so I love pre selling programs or products or whatever it is to vet that there is actually a demand for it to get revenue coming in the door, which then you can turn around and use for creating the product. Right. So we’re building these things simultaneously and with entrepreneurship, that’s often the case. It’s not just do this one thing until complete. And then do this one thing. Do both, because both are flywheels that take a while to get going. One is the product flywheel, the other is the distribution flywheel, and you really need to be pushing both of those simultaneously. Now, once you have the demand from the customers and you have money coming in the door, then I would focus on building out that product during a concerted period of time and then go back to the podcast and like building awareness and whatnot.

But I’m a big fan of the both end approach here, so hopefully this brings you guys a little bit of value. If it does, awesome, let me know. Leave me a review, leave a comment, whatever it is that you want to leave behind. Hopefully it’s something nice. If it’s not, that’s okay. I still appreciate you taking the time to tune in and give me a little bit of your fun focus and your attention, which I know are very valuable assets. So I appreciate it and we’ll catch you guys in the next episode. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.