Taking forever to create your course, program or membership? Try this instead

I see so many business owners spending weeks and months (or longer!) building out their online course, group program or membership—and then wonder why it doesn't sell. In today's episode, I'm sharing 3 reasons why *now* is a good time to launch your offer, wherever you're at.

- The 2 common mistakes to avoid when building your online digital product.
- How launching your offer *before* you've even created it can save you so much time and energy.
- Why building your course, program or membership is easier when you're getting *paid* to build it for your students.
- How giving your students what they actually need, rather than trying to guess what they need, will make your offer so much more effective and efficient.
- The benefits of generating consistent income by creating an offer suite that sets you up for success.



SHOW LINKS:
- DM me “OLSM” on Instagram (@stephtaylor.co) to find out more about “Offer Less, Sell More” or visit https://stephtaylor.co/offer-less-sell-more
- Get my Daily Biz Booster emails: https://stephtaylor.co/DBB
- 5 Simple Tweaks to Boost Your Launch Profits: https://stephtaylor.co/tweaks
- Want me to spend a day working on your next launch? Book a VIP intensive: https://stephtaylor.co/vip
- Get The A-Z Podcast Launch Plan: https://stephtaylor.co/plp-ig
- Get a 30-day free trial of Kajabi: https://stephtaylor.co/kajabi

Let's be Instagram friends: https://instagram.com/stephtay...

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
If you can't afford to say no to one on
one client work because you need the income, but then
you don't have the time to go and create a
new offer. Launching it before you created creates a cash
injection that means you can say no to clients for
a while. And also, if you've been procrastinating about creating
a course or membership or a program for a very
long time, selling it first creates a deadline for you.

(00:25):
Welcome to Imperfect Action. I'm Steph Taylor. For years, I
read all the books, downloaded all the freebies, and did
all the courses, but it wasn't until I started taking
imperfect action that my business had its first million dollar year.
Imperfect action is about doing things before you're ready, prioritizing
consistent action over perfect action, and moving forward even when

(00:49):
you're not sure you're doing it right. On this show,
you can expect mindset advice, actionable marketing tips and strategies
to build a business that brings you more profit, more freedom,
even more joy. Are you on the list to get
my daily businesses? Every day, I'll send you a bite
sized prompt designed to help you grow your business in

(01:09):
a more intentional way. Sign up at Steph Taylor dot Co,
forward slash DBB, or at the link in your show notes. Hey,
welcome back to In Perfect Action. This is episode eight
hundred and forty. Today. I'm talking about something that I've
noticed happens a lot with business owners are coming up

(01:33):
with a new idea for an offer, or they've got
an idea for an offer, and for whatever reason, they've
been sitting on this idea for a while. Maybe it's
an online course and they've started outlining it, maybe they've
even started creating lessons for it, and they've just never
quite got to the finish line. And then what happens
is they end up with this half formulated or half

(01:55):
billt offer and months go by and they're still like, oh,
I can't do that. I haven't got it out there
into the world. And the reason why this happened is
usually because they are making one of two mistakes, and
maybe you're doing one of these. So if you can
see yourself in either of these two mistakes, this episode
is a must listen for you. Mistake number one is

(02:18):
creating an offer and then trying to fill it with
so much content and value that it becomes this massive,
overwhelming thing I see this happening the most with online courses,
but as well with group programs and memberships, actually memberships
quite a bit as well. But what happens is they
conflate content with value, so they think that the thing

(02:41):
that's going to make their online course the most valuable
is if it has the most content, the longest lessons,
the most lessons, the most modules, the most bonuses, the
most things, that's going to make it more valuable. But
it's not. Here's the thing, because the value that somebody
gets out of your offer is how quick it gets
them from having the problem that they have to solving

(03:03):
the problem to experiencing that transformation that they want to have.
And if you're adding more content, it's going to take
them longer to get from problem to transformation, and that
actually makes it less valuable. Right. Think about when somebody's
buying a car, for example, a car that goes really

(03:23):
slowly and gets them from point A to point B,
even if it's beautiful, even if it's got all of
the shiny things, that's going to be less valuable than
a car that gets them from A to B twice
as fast without breaking the speed limit. Of course, Okay,
so we want to get them from where they are
point A to point B having solved that problem as
quickly as possible, and that is what makes it the

(03:44):
most valuable offer, not filling it with all of the
possible lessons for all of the possible scenarios that they
might experience. The second big mistake that holds people back
and keeps them sitting on their idea or their half
built offer for a really long long time is that
they want it to be perfect. They want it to
be just right before they put it out into the world.

(04:07):
And this is a mistake because well, firstly, it's never
going to feel perfect to you, because nobody is going
to be as critical of your work as you are,
and you know all of the flaws you've created it,
so you're going to feel like, oh, this isn't perfect, okay.
But the other reason why it's a mistake is that
it cannot be perfect until you get it out into

(04:28):
the world. Like it physically cannot be perfect because you
have not tested it with any real life humans. You're
building it in a vacuum, and when you put it
out there to the world and to your ideal clients
and they go through it, that's when you realize, oh,
I didn't realize it was going to take them three
weeks to grasp this concept that I've only given them

(04:48):
one week to do, Or oh I thought it was
going to take them a whole week to figure this
thing out, but they've done it in a day. And
then you can refine it, but you cannot make it
perfect in a vacuum. The So what happens is I
see people sitting on their half built offers or half
formulated ideas, making these one of these two mistakes or

(05:08):
both of these mistakes, and then they eventually maybe will
get it out into the world. After like three years
of sitting on that idea, they'll be like, Okay, this
is enough, is enough, I'm going to do it. And
then they wonder why it doesn't sell. And it's usually
because they're focusing so much on how much value they've
put in it, so they're trying to sell the fact
that there's fifteen hours of lessons rather than the fact

(05:31):
that their course is going to be the quickest one
that gets their person from A to B. Or they've
been so busy building it that they've actually forgotten to
market it and sell it, and they put all this
time into creating something thinking that if they can just
make it valuable and perfect enough, then people are going
to want it. Forgetting that, people don't buy something just

(05:51):
because it's valuable or because it's perfect. They buy something
because they have a need for it. And if you
don't spend any time on the messaging and the content
that's going to move somebody to the point where they
realize they need your offer, then it's not going to sell.
So the best way that I have found through my
own business, through the clients and students i've worked with,

(06:12):
the best way to create something that is truly valuable
and to actually sell it is to launch it first.
And that feels really scary, launching the offer, so selling it,
getting people to sign up for it, and then creating
it or launching it while it is half built and
creating it as you go. Okay, So I'll give you
a couple of reasons why in this episode why I

(06:35):
think that launching it first before you've created it is
a really great way to get an offer out there
and sell it. First of all, it's a great way
to test your idea. So launching it before you have
created it allows you to test whether your idea that
you are in love with is something that other people want,
that your ideal clients will pay money for it. And

(06:57):
it allows you to test your messaging and figure out
if your way of communicating that problem that they're experiencing
that your offer solves, figure out if your way of
communicating that is aligned with how they understand it. And
now I love this because I've seen so many people
invest time, money, energy into creating an offer that nobody wants.

(07:22):
And if nobody wants it, then it's much better to
know this now before you've spent months creating something that
they're not interested in or that they're not going to
spend money on. Honestly, like, one of the biggest hesitations
or biggest fears that I've seen with people when they're
creating new offers is they think, what if I spend
all this time creating it and nobody buys it. So
if you test your idea first, that's a really effective

(07:44):
way around this fear. The second reason is you get
paid to build it. Okay, So the thing is that
I know for a lot of you, if you're really
busy working with clients, you can't necessarily let go of
a client to then fore your time to build a
course or a membership or a program, because you need

(08:04):
that income to keep your business running, to keep your
life afloat. I get that. The thing is that if
you can just create enough time to launch it, and
if your launch is successful, if enough people buy it
for it to be worth your while to create it
and deliver it, then you now have a bit of
income that you can use and you can maybe free
up your schedule a little bit to create that offer.

(08:26):
So if you can't afford to say no to one
on one client work because you need the income, but
then you don't have the time to go and create
a new offer, Launching it before you create it creates
a cash injection that means you can say no to
clients for a while. And also, if you've been procrastinating
about creating a course or a membership or a program
for a very long time, selling it first creates a

(08:49):
deadline for you. The thing is, if you're procrastinating it,
it's because it's not really a priority. And it might
not be a priority because you have all of these
other urgent priorities, like clients in your inbox who you
need answers and who want things done from you right.
But then when you have that deadline to get the
cost done, suddenly that's also a priority. And somehow magically

(09:10):
we manage to find the time for the things that
are a priority, so that will bump it up the
priorities list and you'll actually get it done, whereas if
it's sitting there on your to do list as a
maybe someday thing, you won't get it done. It will
take a lot longer. The third reason, and this is
my favorite reason for why I love launching offers before
I've created them, is you get to co create your

(09:32):
offer with your buyers. When you create that offer. As
you go week by week, lessen by lesson along with
your students, you are giving them what they actually need.
You're not just guessing what they need. The thing is,
if you are the expert in what you do, it's
probably been a while since you were in your student's shoes,
or maybe you've never been in their shoes, and you're

(09:52):
an expert because you've gone and studied it. Like I
work with a lot of nutritionist clients who they haven't
necessarily experienced. It's the same problems that their clients are experiencing,
and it's really hard when you are in that expert
position to go and put yourself back in somebody who
doesn't know what you knows shoes. So then you kind
of have to guess. And this is where I say

(10:14):
you can't make it perfect until you've actually put it
out there and got that real life feedback, because everything
else is just based on a guess of what you
think that they need. And it's only when you're working
with them side by side that you get to see
what you don't see, right, You get to see the
things that they don't know, and it might be different
to what you think. Right. You might think that they

(10:38):
don't know, they don't know X, but actually no, they
do know that, and it's this other random thing that
you hadn't even thought about that they don't know. You
don't know what those knowledge gaps are until you put
it out there. And it's much easier to pivot and
tweak your content or your structure the way that you're
giving them support because you haven't now gone and put

(11:00):
all this blood and sweat and tears into recording all
of these lessons right. Recording lessons for a course is
one of my least favorite tasks to do. Even though
I love creating the lessons, I love knowing that people
are gonna get a lot of value out of them.
I don't like sitting down and recording and talking to
a screen. I would much rather teach something live, and
once something is recorded, I don't want to have to

(11:20):
rerecord it for years if I can help it. Okay,
and maybe you're different, maybe you do enjoy talking to
a screen and you do enjoy recording it, But for me,
it just feels really draining. So I know that when
I'm creating a course, I want it to be perfect.
By the time I get around to actually recording it.
It's like that's my set in store and version. I
don't want to rerecord it. So that's one of the
big reasons why I recommend teaching it live the first time,

(11:44):
and then you can always just go and change your slides,
teach it live again, and then by the time that
you've taught it two or three times, then you're ready
to go and record it and sell that recorded version.
The other thing I would say is when you're teaching
it live, make sure you encourage feedback. You ask your
students to ask you as many questions as possible, because
then you can work out where the knowledge gaps are
and the gaps are in your content, and you can

(12:06):
add extra slides to preempt the questions that they might have.
This is a much easier and much more efficient way
to create course content, membership content, group program content, because
you are only creating what is actually important and what
they need, and you're not wasting time creating stuff that
they don't need to get that transformation. Okay, So if

(12:27):
you have been sitting on an idea for a while,
or you're maybe you're trying to find a little bit
more clarity on your offer before you launch it, My
short three hour course offer Less Sell More is exactly
what you need to figure out what you are selling,
so what all of your offers look like in your business,
and to set up your entire office suite in your
business to make a consistent income without having to launch

(12:47):
all the time, without having to set up all sorts
of evergreen funnels and things and be really complicated. It's
a very simple short course. Head on over to Stephtaylor
dot co, slash olsm or send me a DM on Instagram.
I'm there at Steph Taylor dot co send me O
LSM just one word and I will send you the
link to go and find that. All right, that is

(13:08):
it for today's episode. If you have enjoyed the show,
please take thirty seconds to leave a quick rating and
a review. I really do appreciate them. I read them
all and that is it for me. Thanks so much,
catch you next time.