Your equation for irresistible products + services.

Yeah, thanks for being here. We're just gonna give people time to trickle in over all the platforms again. So just give us a minute as we get connected. But while we're waiting on people, can you believe, Amanda, that half of the year is over?

Nope.

It just feels, it feels a little insane. I'm like, oh my gosh, how are we already in July? And like, we're starting July. It's not like July is starting. It's like, no, July is here and we're in it. My mind is like a little bit blown just thinking through like, okay, we have Q3, we need a plan, and then it's gonna be Q4 before we know it. And then the holidays. And then it's all over. So I'm just like, oh my gosh, this is, it feels a little crazy. Okay, cool. Before we get started, I wanna give a quick shout out to Level Up Creators. Our community is dedicated to creators and thought leaders in helping them build successful businesses with recurring revenue. So whether you're looking to improve your sales skills, develop business strategy, or support your fellow creators, Level Up Creators is here to help you every step of the way. So today we're gonna dive into what we talked about in our last week's newsletter. And that is something that we think is very crucial for every creator out there. And it's how to create an irresistible product Or service, or and service that your audience can't wait to get their hands on. So Amanda, do you want to tell us why it's like really crucial to have a product or service that solves a pain point for your audience?

Yes. Think about what it's like on your end when you're making the decision to purchase something and like what level of pain, and you can put pain over pretty much anything, like Irritation, annoyance. I want this to be better in my life. Something like that. You've been putting off and putting off. But what is that trigger in your brain that makes you say, okay, I'm ready to start the remodel. I am ready to buy the new car. We are going to switch to private school. Like whatever the case may be, we have to be— there has to be a trigger in our brain that motivates us. To a point, like from inaction over the hump to taking action. And just the way that our human brains are built, we are not motivated to move out of the status quo unless we are feeling a need to do so. And pain is a pretty motivator, like pretty, pretty strong motivator for humans. And so if you as a creator are providing solutions to pervasive painful problems that are unique to your audience and that you are uniquely equipped to solve, you are going to sell whatever it is that you're selling as long as you are effectively communicating that value, like that value outcomes and transformation to your audience. They need to very, very quickly and on a deep level understand that you as a creator and the purveyor of a product and service that is a solution Um, are equipped to provide that solution. And just because they follow you and their affinity for you already exists— we've talked about that a lot over the past couple of weeks— they're so much more likely to buy from you than a competitor that they don't know or follow, even if that competitor is providing similar information. Obviously, we're never wanting to copy other creators or companies or anything like that, but you have a massive leg up with your followers because of this whole affinity equation. So I won't get back into that, but go watch our last couple weeks of lives if you want to kind of get schooled up on that. We've been talking about it a lot in the newsletter and in Level Up Creator School as well, of course. But important thing to remember in product development is that the best products and services in the world are just well-packaged solutions to those problems. And as a creator, you have so many options available to you in how you want to package solutions and to what degree you want to provide a solution for. Like, You can do a lot more in a one-on-one setting or a small group setting than you can a completely evergreen asynchronous digital course that someone can take any time because there's a feedback and a group support mechanism if you're in like a small group setting, a membership community or something like that. So there's 18 different ways that we teach that you can like package up solutions in your business, but it always starts with a problem. So make a list of problems that you are uniquely positioned to solve. And that's where you start in product development.

Yeah, that makes so much sense. I remember several years ago, well, it's probably been 6 years ago, I guess now, when I had just had my second kid. So I had a 13-month-old and I had a newborn. And I was like, I cannot do my laundry. Like, this is too much for any one human to like try to do. So I got online and I was like, laundry services. And I found this service that was like, you can literally take your dirty laundry, like put it in a basket or a bag on your porch. They will pick it up, they will wash and fold it, and they will put it back on your porch. And I was like, I am going to commit to this service for the next little, like half year of my life. I think I did that. But it's just like such a unique need and filling that for people. So like that makes sense of pinpointing their, like your audience's pain points. So As a creator, how do you pinpoint what your community really needs and would buy?

Yeah, I mean, every piece of content that you put out is almost like a product test, whether you have ever looked at it that way, in that way or not. But if you are, which we're speaking mainly to knowledge-based creators who are creating digital products and services based on their experience and passion, right? That overlap between experience and passion, you are sharing that online. And have gathered a community around you based on that information. And so, just like everyone, some content of yours does better, like performs better and gets more engagement, shares, likes, follows, all those things than other content. And so, go back and look at your LinkedIn posts, your YouTube videos, your Instagram reels. What's performing best? What are people saying in the content? So the number of views, shares, likes, engagements. Those are all quantitative measures of success or lack thereof, right? They're absolute numbers. They are percentages. It's definitive. It's mathematical. That's a very important piece because sometimes people have a different, um, they act differently than what their words say, right? So they may tell you something on a survey on like a freeform response, um, but then act a little bit differently because they want to be perceived a certain way, or, you know, there's like all sorts of really interesting things. Uh, that go into like the psychology of surveying audiences, but just, that's an interesting takeaway. Really, really, really take a hard look at that quantitative data. What actions are people actually taking or not taking? And I would put like 70 to 80%, um, of weight on quantitative data and 20 to 30% qualitative data. So look at the comments. What questions are people asking you? What content have they asked for more? Which, um, of your pieces of content have like really struck a chord and there's lots of conversation going on in Maybe the comment section or your DMs that resulted from that post. And so, and what are your competitors talking about? What are your competitors selling? What are they giving away? What are their lead magnets? Like, those are probably somewhat well thought out, I hope, and that they are testing content for to the end of creating a product or service. So look at what's already happening, and then you can poll your audience and survey them and intentionally test content that you're thinking about creating a product around. I was just talking to one of our Level Up Creators consulting clients about this yesterday, actually. We're working on her, like, product suite as she takes her business forward and, like, doesn't have anything for sale yet. But we talked about running, like, half a dozen tests of different types of content to match our ideation, like, brainstorming list of the products that we are hypothesizing that were performing the best. So those are ways you can look retroactively and ways you can be proactive about testing to see if ideas are good or not.

Yeah. So in the newsletter, we kind of framed it as like creating irresistible products and services equal what your audience desperately needs and then what you're uniquely equipped to provide. I know that you have a framework for figuring out how you can find that. Can you just give us a quick breakdown of what that, I think it's your Venn diagram is?

Oh yeah, the 3-circle Venn diagram. So you're sharing your area of experience and passion online. So the middle of that 2-circle Venn diagram is where you started sharing content online. And when you want to make this whole creator thing into a business, you add a 3rd circle to, and now it's the 3-circle Venn diagram and it's what people will pay for. And so the middle of that 3-circle Venn diagram is a bit smaller, but it's what your area of experience is, passion is, and what people will pay for. So, so you have to understand what Erin just said. Um, what problems are you uniquely— what problems do your audience have? Like, you can have a full list if you want, but that list is going to shrink when you try and match it up with what am I uniquely positioned to solve. So that's the very middle of that. 3-circle Venn diagram.

Yeah. And do you have any real-life examples that you've experienced or you've seen somebody else in the creator space like use this, like really just getting very direct with getting their pain point of their audience figured out and then offering a product? Like, have you experienced that?

Oh, for sure. Yes. I'll give an internal example and a client example for sure. So, The internal example is Level Up Creators started as a consulting firm at the beginning of 2023, and we were solving the beginnings of a problem there, like the operator problem, marrying that area of knowledge, passion, and expertise with the business end of monetizing that knowledge, right? So that's what started our consultancy. But we quickly realized that one, consulting, our, our results match our price point, right? We are the white glove, high touch, excellent, like Ferrari-level consulting firm. Um, and there are not a ton of creators who are at the level that they can get that kind of help yet. And so we quickly pivoted, you know, as we were doing annual planning before 2024, and I was like, hey, we're not going to be able to achieve our mission of helping thousands of fee female creators and people from traditionally marginalized groups if we don't hurry up and launch Level Up Creator School, which was a little bit further down in our product roadmap. So we drastically accelerated our plans for that, and the community has been fantastic. We basically productized our knowledge from the consulting firm, put it into courses, resources, community, and 4 or 5 or 6 live events per week where people get access to me and every single one of our top consultants in the firm. And so it's like you have a go-to expert to get exactly what you need when you need it. And then we also have this tried and true path that we're taking everyone on to optimize their entire business, right? And so that's Level Up Creator School. So that's our internal example. And we are building this crazy global diverse community of creators that we are so, so, so, so very proud of. Everyone's having quite a great deal of success in it. So that's awesome. And then if anybody who's watching this doesn't know, we're doing this working in public behind the scenes situation with Amanda Goetz. G-O-E-T-Z. If you don't follow her, you absolutely should. She posts updates every week, as do we, of course, on what we're doing. But we are taking her from $10K MRR, monthly recurring revenue, to $50K MRR in public. Like, we are peeling back the curtain and showing you how we do what we do. And get really like exponential results. And so right now we're working on Amanda's product ladder. And so of course we started with creating her vision, mission, values, goals, strategy. We did this whole problem solution matching exercise. We talked about, okay, what have you learned so far in your creator business? What is the value outcomes and transformation that you are best equipped to provide. I mean, we literally like have these written out on tables, like on note in Notion. This is not a theoretical exercise or something I'm just paying lip service to. This is our like intellectual property methodology that we take to make people millionaires. And so in this stage for her, it's been very interesting because what she's learned over the last year in her creator business is that she— I mean, she is a productivity guru. She helps people live their lives with intention and and purchase purpose toward whatever goal they are going toward. Right. And so you can kind of overlay her framework, but who she wants to speak to and what the magic element is that actually helps people get value outcomes and transformation she's found is accountability. Right. And so we are designing her updated product ladder to solve for this, these painful, pervasive problems that people who are very ambitious have, like extraordinary time constraints. So think about ambitious parents who have a side hustle or are creators or are aspiring parents. And we're trying to understand how does Amanda fit into solving those problems for those people, right? And the problem is they have no time or pathway to achieve their goals. And so her product ladder will solve for this accountability piece. So every piece of product or service that she offers, once we kind of do a little bit of a relaunch this fall, there will be an accountability piece to it. And that is really, really, really cool and special. It's a very unique positioning point for a productivity expert. And she is really— I mean, this is like a rubber meets the road kind of a moment. She's planting her flag here. And it is incredible to watch a creator go through this process and take everything that they've learned. She knows her audience backwards, forwards, and 6 ways to Sunday. I mean, it is incredible the breadth of knowledge and care and intention that she gives to her audience. I feel like that's We could say that about all of our clients. We only work with people like that. So I think that's a really special thing. So I mean, we're doing this with live fire right now with Amanda is this problem set and then unique solutions and then overlaying those solutions in differently packaged and therefore priced products and services. Is that the kind of example you had in mind?

Yeah, totally. And our next newsletter that comes out this Saturday is a recap of all of the work we've done with Amanda Gets so far. And then next week, same time, same place in LinkedIn Live, we're going to do actionable steps of what you can take from our whole engagement and project with Amanda Gets so far and how that can apply to you. So we're going to be doing that next week. So don't miss that. And if you want actionable steps, For your business, make sure you sign up for the newsletter. I dropped the link in the chat so that you can follow along closely with what is happening there because it's, it's literally a goldmine on like how to level up your business and it's literally free. So you would be really wise to hit that. Um, so Amanda, before we wrap up and go, do you have any parting shot or anything you want to include?

Hmm. Um, I mean, I will say that this project we're doing with Amanda Goetz is like, we've seen, you know, people more than paying lip service to, I'm working in public, like my numbers are public and stuff like this. But it's like, what's the sausage making actually like? Like, what's actually going behind the scenes? What— how are you thinking about this? How are you going about this? And like, we've already massively kind of pivoted this engagement with Amanda. Like, the original thinking was We're going to optimize her existing products and services and just like pour rocket fuel on the, you know, small fire that was already burning. But when we started going through our onboarding process and going through those mission, vision, values, goals, strategy, like, what do you actually want to do for the next 10 years kind of a thing? Like, what's something you could put your full force and weight behind and get excited about? And that is what kind of set us back to, oh, we need to rethink the problem set, the solution set, the product ladder, marketing strategy, everything. And that is so cool. It was so cool to see this light bulb moment for Amanda in answering this. What do I want to be doing for 10 years? So I would encourage everyone to think long term in that way. And in your creator business, you make the freaking rules. You don't have to do what that person did or that person does or what that person suggested that you did or what you read in this book. Or what you saw on this live. Like, you need to go kind of deep within yourself and commit to breaking the mold so that you can be true to yourself and what you are being called to do, what you feel like your purpose, your professional purpose is in this one life that we get. And I think that's the coolest thing about the creator economy. You make your own rules. You can be so true to yourself and honoring to yourself in that regard, and then build a business around that. Put parameters in place. Don't break your parameters because there is a business to be made within whatever parameters you make. I think as long as it's not, I don't want to do anything, but I don't think anybody who's like, I don't want to do anything and people are just going to pay me gazillions of dollars. Like, no, obviously not. But I don't think that kind of person is watching this video. So, um, go, go back to the well and go through this mission, vision, values exercise. We have a course coming out actually. Um, later in Q3, and it's the Creator Business Blueprint course. It is our flagship course in Level Up Creator School where I take you through this exercise that I'm talking about. And so, um, be on the lookout for that. We also have this Creator Business Blueprint lead magnet that's kind of like an appetizer for the course. Maybe we can drop that into the comments after we're done or something like that. But take this away: start there. Don't just keep going because you feel like you have momentum and you're gonna lose time or effort that you already put in. Go back and make sure you're on the right train before it really fully leaves the station.

Yeah, that's really good. And if you are like, I don't want to wait till later in Q3, look into Level Up Creator School. We have so many courses and so many live sessions every week where you can literally sit with experts that will help you walk through all of these processes. Even Amanda, who is literally a wealth of knowledge, will sit on Q&A sessions and help you walk through your business. So if you are like burning and you're there, you're like, I'm ready to just go, check out Level Up Creator School. It's already there for you. So thank you for joining us. Join us next week, same time, same place. Thank you so much. Have a good, good week. Thank you.