I’ve seen and even purchased my fair share of products that are aimed at entrepreneurs trying to “make it”. Typically they’re all about how to break through, how to get noticed, how to play the social media game, how to do everything except one critically important thing.
You need to make excellent product. (I’ll use “product” here, but it can be an idea, content, courses, a call to action, physical product … whatever the goal of the entrepreneurship might be.)
The books, and courses typically start out with a very thin “have/make a product”. Then they move on to the details of whatever it is they’re selling. At best some will take some time to help you define what product you might want to do, and pay some lip service to the fact that whatever it is should be good in order for their methods to succeed.
They then go on to assume that excellence as they tell you how to package, market, promote, or do whatever with that product.
Here’s the deal: they’re telling you about the “easy” 20%. The real work, the real effort, the real key to success is the other 80%. The 80% where you do the work and really, truly, create an excellent product.
Hell, if you make something that’s that good it almost sells itself, as they say. The marketers of all these books and courses rely on two things:
- Having a truly excellent product does all the heavy lifting, almost ensuring that whatever it is they’re selling to market it will succeed.
- Everyone believes that their own product is excellent when more often it’s not.
Entrepreneurs, especially new entrepreneurs, think that the “hard part” is the marketting and sales and promotion and social media and whatever else it is they don’t understand. Thus they’re more than willing to shell out a ton of money for a quick fix with that. The problem, of course, is that they’re shelling out money to improve the 20%. when in reality it’s the 80% that they should be investing in.
If your product is crap you’re not setting yourself up for success.
I wish there were more effort and resources that emphasized that creating good product is the most important thing, and that it’s hard; very hard. And you have to do the work to make that 80% happen.
All that other stuff is important, but not nearly as important as having excellent product.