Why You Should Sell Your Product Before You Create It
This might not be a popular opinion, but creating your course, membership, or other digital product and then trying to sell it is sabotaging your online business.
Wait, what? Aren’t you supposed to create a product and then try to sell it? Isn’t that what marketing’s about?
If you follow that common path, you’ll end up like so many other entrepreneurs who have built an amazing product but nobody’s buying. That’s the reality. So let’s dive in and talk about what should you do instead.
Creating Demand Is A Fool’s Errand
Creating a product without knowing if there’s a market for it and then trying to create demand for it is a concept that professional marketers gave up in the 1960s.
That’s because the whole notion of creating demand is a fool’s errand. Trying to get people to buy a product that they don’t actually want is never the way to go.
The marketing concept that came after the selling concept was called the marketing concept (I know, very original). This concept said that we should sense what the market wants. That requires us to listen and do the in-depth work of studying our market and then creating a product to meet that existing demand.
You might say, yeah, doing market research is a given. I’m gonna go and tell people about my idea and ask them what they think.
That’s not validating a product. But that’s what a lot of people taught for a long time. They would call people and talk about the product. But here’s the problem, if you do that with a preconceived idea of what you’re going to create and tell people, guess what, they aren’t going to want to hurt your feelings. So whether it’s a good or bad idea, they’re gonna tell you, “I think that’s a good idea.”