In this instructional talk, the speaker argues that most entrepreneurs waste months building products before they know if the market wants them, following a "ready‑aim‑fire" sequence that leads to busy work, inconsistent revenue, and burnout. The core problem is a wrong order of activities: preparing (building curriculum, hiring, installing tech) before validating demand. The speaker proposes a "Ready, Fire, Aim" framework tailored for high‑ticket businesses. "Ready" means gaining clarity and conducting market validation through live discovery calls using an 11‑question script, without selling. "Fire" means selling the transformation—offering the promised outcome and enrolling the first paying clients—before the full product is built. "Aim" is the iterative adjustment phase, where the curriculum or service is refined based on feedback from those initial clients. The talk illustrates the pitfalls of the build‑first approach (the "18‑month mistake", over‑building funnels, hiring too early) and shares the speaker’s own experience at IconMaker, where they launched with no slides, iterated the curriculum over 2.5 years, and now operate on the fourth iteration. The message emphasizes that revenue is the true proof of concept; validation should precede investment of time, money, and energy. The speaker urges entrepreneurs to shift from busyness masquerading as progress to a validation‑first, revenue‑driven sequence.
Chapters
If you want to enroll more clients into your business, then you need the correct revenue sequence. This is the Ready, Fire, Aim approach. It is a revenue strategy for entrepreneurs, specifically going to speak about this today from the perspective of high-ticket businesses because that's what we focus on here at IconMaker. But truth is, I think you can apply this to any level of offer that you have in your business. So let's get started. Most smart entrepreneurs fail because they build in the wrong order. I see this all the time. Usually, it's not a talent problem. I see a lot of talented people. And it's certainly not a work ethic problem because people are working 60 and 80 hours a week. It is a sequence problem. The order in which you do things determines whether you generate revenue or if you just stay busy, right? I've talked to a lot of people every week actually. And it's like, how are you doing? Oh, I'm super, super busy. I'm busy, busy, busy. And then you come to discover the revenue is not in line with the busyness. So, what are we keeping ourselves busy with? Usually, it's tactics and it's usually in the wrong order. So, the problem is we have a wrong sequence. It has a name. You may have heard of the ready, aim, fire. Well, most entrepreneurs are following this pattern. And some are doing it without even realizing it. So, ready is the preparation, right? This could come in the form of, let's say, building a course, building out a coaching program, building out a coaching package, getting ready and preparing to launch that thing. Then, we target who that's to. And then, we fire. We execute it. What doesn't usually happen in the ready, aim, fire approach for most entrepreneurs They're usually missing market validation or market research validation. They are usually very romantic about their ideas here. So, I like to call it the 18-month mistake. Spending 18 months building out and getting ready to offer that to a target audience and then getting that execution going. But it takes way, way too long to do. So, the problem is the wrong sequence. Certainly, the timing of it is an issue as well. But more importantly, I think it is the sequence, right? If you are just, you know, you're getting ready, you are picking who that's for, and then you're executing it without there being really any foundation for knowing whether people even want this thing that you've created. People get romantic about their ideas. They're like, 'Oh, I have a gut feeling.' It's not enough. You have to have data. You have to have data to back up whether or not people want the thing that you are conceptually coming up as a— or conceptualizing as a solution to their problem. So what this looks like is, and I know you've seen this before, maybe you've even done this before. You spend 6 months building curriculum. All right, I'm building out the slide decks. I'm recording them. I'm recording myself on Zoom. And then I have to figure out how to edit all that stuff because I'm a solopreneur and I haven't— don't have a team who's helping me yet. And we're doing all of this before there's ever even a single client who's paid for what it is that you're putting together. So if you've done this before, it's okay. We're learning a new method today. So what it looks like is 6 months, 10 months. I like to call it 18-month mistake building curriculum, perfecting those slides, endlessly refining instead of actually selling. It's about overbuilding funnels, usually complex funnels. That takes a lot of knowledge and wisdom with zero proven demand. It comes in the form of hiring too early. So scaling infrastructure sometimes before there's even any revenue. I've seen this too a lot. People are hiring. There was recently an example of somebody who had 5 VAs. And I said, oh wow, you must be doing really well. What's your revenue? And she said, oh, I'm under $50,000. $50,000. I said, okay, so I'm not really following. You know, it doesn't match the level of the business. Another problem is installing technology before there's validation. So having tools for a problem that you haven't even confirmed, right? So if you've done this, just know you're not alone. But here's a better way. The result of doing all those things out of order is that you get inconsistent revenue, no doubt about that. And you also get crickets. You build it, you've launched it, but nothing happens. Or worse, something happened but you can't repeat it. So months of work goes by, or you put in months of work and you've invested with nothing to show for it. You have to forgive me, I have a bit of a cold. You've invested with nothing to show for it. You have depleted energy. It takes a lot of energy to do things out of order, and there's confusion about what actually went wrong. And you have stalled momentum. So hesitation to try again, a little bit of a, a little bit of cold feet on that one because it's like, well, I gotta try again without a new strategy. So the result is terrible. The, the result is deflating and it's just a— it just sends your confidence in the toilet. That's the result. So let's think about building first It feels productive. Like, it feels like, okay, I'm building first, right? So I'm actually getting stuff done. I'm really super productive because I'm building, I'm building, I'm building. But the building— now, I'm not suggesting that there isn't any building going on. You do have to come up with an offer, you know, you have to build an offer, but it needs to be done in a way that gets you to what we ultimately want, which is the ready, fire, aim approach so that we do not delay revenue. Busyness masquerades as progress. The act of building creates a false sense of momentum. And especially if it drags on and on, right? Because now if it's lasting 8 months, 10 months, 18 months, that's 18 months of feeling busy while the market remains untested and unconfirmed because we have no idea If people want this thing, productivity without validation is just expensive preparation. So building first is, is good, like you want to have an offer, but we need to move forward with the process of ready, fire, aim, because this is the correct order. So we need to flip that sequence around, change it. In our world, ready means clarity and it does mean validation. It does mean market research and validation that people actually want this. We have a process to validate offers where we read a script and ask 11 questions in a real live scenario with a real Right Fit client. And then we just— and we don't sell anything on that call. We cannot sell on that call. It's strictly for market research. And then we note what those results were. FIRE means sell the transformation. This does not mean build out the entire program. It means put together the offer of transformation and actually sell the transformation before you build the entire thing out. And then AIM. Adjust from there. Get your, what we call the Founder's Circle, filled. Get your first 3 clients in your program. Through your high-ticket offer, sell the transformation, and actually start working with people. Because now you're actually working with people who are paying you for the— for what you have put together in terms of the transformational plan. And then you get to adjust. You know, in Icon Maker, we are on our, I think, third iteration right now of our curriculum. But it's taken 2.5 years to get there. We didn't start with all the slides created. In fact, we launched without any slides. We had no— we knew what the plan for the curriculum was going to be. Well, we didn't actually build out the curriculum until we had paying clients. And then we've adjusted from there over the last 2.5 years. I think I'm on my third and now moving into my fourth iteration of the curriculum. So this is not a shortcut. It's the correct sequence for building a sustainable revenue proven system and build it. And this is not a shortcut. It is the correct sequence for building a sustainable revenue-proven business. This is the correct order. It's the opposite of the ready, aim, fire. We want to do ready, fire, aim. So ready is that again, that clarity. What is— who is the right fit client? What problem am I solving? What offer am I putting together? And then validating that actual transformation. So confirming that the market wants the outcome first before before you deliver, right? Before you build a single module or a worksheet or anything, other kind of collateral or assets, confirm that people want it first. Then sell the transformation, offer it, enroll people, collect revenue before the product is fully built, and then aim, adjust from there, adjust from there. So you do not necessarily build the entire thing first. You validate first. Every high-ticket business that generates consistent revenue started with a validated offer, not a finished product. Too many entrepreneurs that I see are aiming to have the entire finished product as if 5 years had already, had already passed. They're trying to jump the line and have the product that will come after 3 years or 5 years of iteration. But you have to start somewhere, and we believe that the ready, fire, aim approach is the place to start. So in the build-first world, it's months and months and months of work with no confirmed demand and high risk of zero return. In the validated world, the revenue confirms the demand and you build what people have already paid for. The market tells you what to build, and your job is to listen before you create. So our entire methodology is built on this philosophy. Ready, fire, aim is not just a concept. It is the operating principle behind every framework, every strategy, every result that we help entrepreneurs to create. So validate before you invest time, energy, money, bandwidth, sanity. Time, money, and energy follow confirmed demand. Sell before you build. Revenue is proof of concept, the only proof that really, really matters. And build what the market has already bought. Deliver with precision, not with assumption. And now, if you want to know why the market has changed, watch this next video on the trust recession.
