Craftsman Creative

All right. Welcome everybody. Got another episode for you today, which I'm very excited about, cuz this week we're talking about your products. So a lot of people. That I have surveyed have an issue with coming up with the right mix of products and services for their business. So I've done a lot of work on this and had have a lot of thoughts in this area.

We're gonna dive into three of 'em in this episode of the Craftsman Created Podcast. Now, if you want all five ideas, I'm writing these every single day in my community, so you can head over to Society of Independent creators.com and you can sign up and guess. I'll even have you, I'll give you a 30 day free trial, which is really fun because you can honestly like dive in and see all of the content and take the entire course, which is the recordings from the recent 10 K challenge.

You can do that within 30 days and O then only stick around if it's valuable. I don't. Wanna just get a bunch of people's money, for, for [00:01:00] no value. So stick around if it's valuable, and if it's not valuable, then leave. And that's okay. And it'll be a strong signal to me that I need to step up my game. But I feel like the society is one of the most valuable places on the internet for creative entrepreneurs like yourself.

So let's dive into this. First idea I have for you is that you need to make a mindset shift with your products. And that mindset shift is that they are interconnected, they are an e. And it's in connect, interconnected. They have relationships and they have interactions, and when you affect one or change one, it actually has reactions and relationships with the other products in that ecosystem.

So when you're optimizing and focusing on one that has an effect on the rest, often one of neglect. For example, I have a product ecosystem that includes film producing, high ticket consulting, and this community, I just. now, last year when I went to South Africa for two months to produce a movie, that project or [00:02:00] service required a hundred percent of my time and attention.

That is after all what they were paying for. So unfortunately, that led to some neglect of the community and the coaching and the consulting that I was offering at the time. And so for the growth of my business, That ecosystem was failing dramatically. So since coming home from that trip, I've spent a lot of time focusing on the ecosystem and how it can sustain itself if and when I need to devote more of my time to a specific project or client in the future.

What that looks like is building systems that keep things running in the background. I've created systems to generate new leads to generate revenue from the community, to keep the community active the next time away, which will happen. And by the way, and ensure that my crafting creative offers are all aligned with the same outcome for the customer, just with varying amounts of my time.

So, for example, if they want me to do it for them, that costs. [00:03:00] more than $10,000 If they wanna do it together, that costs anywhere from $495 a year to $250 an hour. And if they wanna do it themselves, that can be anywhere from $20 to $199. So I've got this ecosystem that ranges from do it for you, like done for You offers at the high end, which requires more of my time and focus.

all the way down to do-it-yourself offers, which are really high leverage for me, but I don't have enough sup. I, I don't have enough demand currently for those 20 to $200 offers to generate tens of thousands of dollars of revenue a month. So until that point, I need to make sure that I've got these mid ticket and high ticket offers, the the 495 to $15,000 offers that can fill in the gaps until the audience is big enough to where I'm selling multiple of those Do-it-yourself.

Offers per day. And then I can go relax on a beach and build a cabin in my backyard and ride every day , [00:04:00] which is the dream, right? So again, uh, an important part of a product ecosystem is that all of these offers are aligned with the same outcome in mind. For me, it's helping creators build and grow their business.

So I want you to take a look at your product offers and see how you can align them, how you can have them work together better, and how you can optimize the systems around that so that they're part, um, the system that they're a part of, excuse me, to get more of the outcome you want for yourself and your business.

So that's idea number one, your product ecosystem and making that mindset shift from just having a bunch of different products and services to having an e. Okay, so let's, I'm, I'm picking in real time. I think I want to do just 1, 2, 3, right there. Okay. So here's number two, one avatar. One offer. One channel.

Too many creators, my past self included default to creating more products in order to try and increase revenue. The [00:05:00] reality that has been taught to me multiple times over the years is this. Seven figure businesses can be built on one avatar, one offer, and one traffic. If that's true and I believe it is, then all of our time and attention in the early stages of our business should be devoted to getting that system working.

So let's talk about those three pieces. One avatar, one offer, and one traffic channel. So your avatar is just another term for your ideal customer. So you have an idea of what they look like, where they live, what age they are. Industry they're in, what their job titles are. But more important than demographics for me is what are their desires?

What are the things they all share? Because what's interesting, if you look at my community, for example, there's about 50 people in that community now, and it's about a year in, and we've got coaches and we have musicians, and we have writers, and we have [00:06:00] consultants and coaches and brand personalities.

how would you ever put them into the same demographic? Because they range from 25 years old all the way up to probably 60 years old. We've got people that are about to retire, so it's not an age thing, it's not a location thing. We have people from all over the world, from Germany and UK and Malaysia and Brazil, so it's not a demographic by location.

But the, the common desire is that they all want to have a business like the one that I have created for myself. So they want to come learn from me. How did you do this? How do you build a solopreneur creative business north of $10,000 a month in revenue? Now I've done that three times since the pandemic.

So I obviously am someone that they wanna learn from and they see value in, um, getting more access to me. So that's why they joined the community. So desires more than demographics is super. I. . So if you identify this first, it helps a ton because the audience [00:07:00] will inform the offer. So that's your avatar.

Now you need one offer. When you match your offer to the quote unquote jobs to be done, the pains and the gains of your audience, that's how you create a no-brainer offer. When you can align your offers so specifically to your ideal customer's needs and desires, it makes it easier to. So ideally you're doing this first with your mid or your high ticket offer, the ones that are $2,500 price point offers and above.

This way you can give more time and attention to your early customers and clients, and then you can productize and systematize the same service into a DIY offer like a course or a book. These lower ticket offers work at scale. So when you're early on and you don't have the asset of a huge email list or a social media following, that can generate multiple sales a day of those low ticket items, you focus on getting a few of the high ticket clients each month.

So I did [00:08:00] this in reverse and I, I wish I had known this previously to launching the, the second version of Craftsman Creative. When I decided to do that, I launched my book. I started with a book instead of a high ticket consulting offer, and I wish I'd done it in reverse because I think I could have gone out and started with a 10 or $15,000 consulting offer.

And landed one or two of those a month and within a, you know, very short order, been at 15 to $30,000 a month. Whereas I spent the entire first year going from zero to 200 to 500 to 700, and really 2022 averaged about $1,500 a month. It wasn't until I incorporated this. Product ecosystem that I talked about just before where I added a high ticket offer, I actually added two, but the second one's still in the trial phase.

Um, and immediately went from 1500 a month to $15,000 to the next month, 10 x from one offer and one client. So that's how important this [00:09:00] idea is. Principle is. So you wanna be building these assets in the background, like the low ticket offers, your book, your courses, those kind of things can be building in the background.

And then over time you transition from your high ticket and low to your low ticket, you're, you're inverting the amount of leverage, right? Because when you're doing high ticket stuff, you have really low leverage. It requires a hundred percent of your time and attention. But when you're selling courses and books and things like that, it's very high leverage cuz you don't have to show up in order to sell those things or deliver on 'em.

So this is why we talk about outcomes in session one of the Build Your Bespoke Creative Business or the 10 K Challenge, because you gotta know your outcomes first. Those outcomes inform how many clients you need each month. So you might need four, you might need two, you might need one, you might need 20, but you don't know until you.

Decide and determine for your business, what is the ultimate outcome? Are you trying to get to $3,500 a month, 5,000, 7,000, 10,000, 30,000, a hundred thousand? Like [00:10:00] those are very different outcomes from 3,500 to 30,000. And so that informs how you're gonna structure your offer, what price point, how many you're gonna be able to do a month, et cetera.

Okay. Let's talk about the last 0.1. So you have your avatar, you have your offer, and now you have your channel. I'm still learning this lesson, so I'm daily getting pulled into social media apps like Twitter and LinkedIn because they've conditioned me to think that there could be some golden opportunity there.

I'm actually going, like, I'm doing a digital detox this month from those apps, from this very reason. As far as I can tell. I got no new clients from Twitter last. The best clients came through the same exact way they started by hearing me on a podcast. So they became a prospect through that point. Then they joined my email list cause I put a call to action at in that podcast.

So they became a lead, and then they were on my email list where they were getting a sales sequence and a promotional sequence. And my weekly [00:11:00] newsletter. On average about three months. And at that point they decided I really wanna work with Darren. They reached out, we set up a call and they became a client.

So podcast, email list, sales sequence, client. So understanding how customers happen in your business is essential to identifying the one channel that you will use to generate leads. Most of us can handle more than one channel at a time, but my suggestion would be to experiment with maybe two at a time and see what works.

So double down on the one that's working and experiment with another in the background. I'm experimenting with doing more podcast episodes, both my own and being a guest on at least one per week this year, and using workshops as a way to generate deeper interactions with people. Now I know that I only need about 10 leads a week.

That's people who are like signing up, taking the scorecard. That's how I generate a lead right now for these high ticket offers. So I know I only need 10 of those a week to generate one call per week [00:12:00] and two clients per. So all of my focus is going into identifying the best channel to deliver those 10 leads month in and month out.

Now, my assumption is that by identifying the one channel for my one high ticket offer, that'll deliver two of my ideal clients every month and double my business into the 25 to 30 K range. Cause I, as I mentioned, it was at 15 between December and January. Now I want to get it to 30 and 50 and even a hundred this year.

That's a big goal of mine for this. mainly cuz it'll create a lot more leverage that I can then use to benefit the lives of other creators. So it'll be so much harder to sell 1500 books or 50 community memberships at these mid and low ticket prices. So I'm letting those offers happen in the background by putting all of my focus into finding this one system and getting it operational as quickly as possible.

So I invite you to do the same. Now, one last quick idea for. wanna talk about the running experiments? I just kind of mentioned what I'm doing, [00:13:00] but let me run you through in a little more detail what I'm planning on doing here. This is literally what I'm setting up this week. So in keeping with the behind the scenes nature of this podcast, I'm sharing exactly what I'm testing this week for my new high ticket offer that I launched in December.

So before you settle on your one channel, it helps to experiment with a few options to, that you think would be a good fit for the offer and the audience you're presenting. My offer, like I mentioned, is a $15,000 done for you service where I, and later my team will come into the business and build out the systems for that business.

The same systems that we built together in the 10 K Challenge that speaks to that product ecosystem, right? My audience is creative business owners. I'm starting with video production companies since I have over a decade of experience there who are doing 500 K to 2 million in a annual revenue and have about two to 10 employee.

Now I'm testing three channels. So these are the experiments that I'm running right now. Number one is email outreach. [00:14:00] I've set up an email system where I spend about an hour a day using, um, an app called seamless.ai, and I put a link in the show notes there to research 30 companies, which is basically one page of search results per day.

My initial search came back with 3000 companies, so that'll keep me busy for a hundred days or 20 weeks. So that's pretty good. And then I can always expand to another industry or another. Um, , right. Um, yesterday for example, I spent an hour researching and came out with 11 solid companies that I think would be a good fit for this offer.

I then put those leads into my automated email campaign that sends out emails every day. The call to action is take the free scorecard, and then I will. Look at your results and give you some feedback. So that leads to my SCORE app scorecard. So I'll put a link there as well. So you can check out Score app from Daniel Presley and his team.

Now, as leads come in, I can email every time someone finishes the scorecard. I can dive into their results and then quickly send a personalized email with an. Offer to get on a discovery [00:15:00] call and walk through some strategies that will help them grow their business. Now, these strategy calls, I normally charge $500 for a 90 minute call, but I'm offering 'em for free because I'm fairly confident that at least with these initial, you know, 10, 20, 30 leads that I will get on a call, I'm probably gonna be able to close about 10 of 'em.

And honestly, I only need about, I don't know, 15 clients this year. Maybe, maybe 10 is fine, like I don't need a ton. Um, I'd be totally okay with 15 or 20 at the high end and maybe a 10 because I'm planning on doing one or two more movies this year and I won't have time to do 10 clients. So if they're not ready to become a client, then they'll still get my welcome sequence and my sales sequence.

And ultimately, if they want to try to do it together rather than me do it for them, they can always jump into the community. Take the 10 k challenge and see how this product ecosystem starts. . Okay, so that's number one. The second experiment I'm running is monthly workshops. I'm revamping the free monthly [00:16:00] workshops that I've been doing the last year or so to be more targeted to this audience of creative business owners, not just creative entrepreneurs.

So before it was targeting individual creators, but I'm shifting these to help creative. Business owners, that audience I mentioned earlier, or the avatar I mentioned earlier. So what I'll do is I'll promote the free workshop on social media, mainly LinkedIn and in my weekly newsletter. And I'm even considering running ads to the event to see if $250 leads to say a hundred signups, because the experiment will be to see if I can get 20 people to attend live, 10 people to watch the recording and get at least 10 scorecard leads from the.

If so, that's likely worth it, even if I'm spending $250 to get those leads. So notice that with experiments, you want to have a very clear outcome that you're testing. You don't want to just see did it work well, you gotta define it what works means, right? So for me, I have, I'm probably testing too many things.

You really want one thing that you're testing. Does running a workshop and spending [00:17:00] $250 to get people into like to sign up, does that lead to 10 scorecard leads? That's the one metric that I'm gonna measure. Okay. That's it. Does a workshop lead to 10 scorecard leads? And if I get. Then I can say, well, okay, how many people showed up?

Could I increase that number and would it be the same conversion rate so I could run it again in two weeks or a month from now? And then I could think about, well maybe if I did a partner workshop maybe, and I invite someone else and they bring their audience and I bring mine and we share the leads, maybe that works.

Okay. So I wanna see if I can get 10 leads from one event. That's really the experiment there. Now the third one, and I'll do it quickly cuz we're getting a little bit long-winded today. I apologize. . The third one is podcasts, and like I mentioned, my best coaching and consulting clients from last year came from podcasts.

So I'm doubling down to get on one podcast per week with shows that have my target audience as their listeners. So [00:18:00] if you're listening to this and you know of any shows that you think would be a good fit, let me know. Please. , I would happily hop on other people's, uh, podcasts. Again, I don't even care if they have 10 or 50 or a hundred listeners.

that's valuable, right? So getting on one a week, you never know. Uh, perfect example. I was on a Twitter space l two weeks ago with this gal that I met. She lives in Ukraine or Russia. Um, her name's Elsa and we probably had six people live on the, on the, uh, Twitter spaces that we did together. And it was awesome.

She had really great questions and it was a good conversation. And one of those people that was, listen, Reached out and said, Hey, I heard you on this space. I was in the the room, and I would love to see if you want to come on a new podcast that he's doing with Sufi Selfie. Sufi, I think it's Sufi, s e l l f Y.

I've used Sufi in the past, not as a seller, but as a buyer. I've [00:19:00] purchased, um, I think it. Look up tables, , LUTs for video, uh, cameras, uh, years ago when I was doing a lot of editing and stuff. Anyway, they're launching a podcast to like, Many, many, many, many people, they have an email list of hundreds of thousands of people that are launching this to, I hope I'm not spoiling, um, a big announcement of theirs, but not that many people listen to this podcast yet.

So maybe I'm safe, but they're launching this to tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people. They might get thousands of people listening to this podcast. And I'm one of their very first episodes, all because I did a podcast or a conversation on Twitter, uh, for six. So that's pretty cool.

That's why I want to get on a podcast a week, cuz you never know. The serendipity of podcasts and Twitter spaces is pretty incredible. So the goal with all of these is to track results for the month of February and then assess them what it, what which experiments worked, which channels are providing the most high quality leads?

How much effort did [00:20:00] it cost, or, or sorry, how much effort or cost did it take to get those leads? That decision will then shift this from a project to a background task in March or April where I'll keep doing the things that work and drop the ones that don't. So that's how to run experiments for your products?

Right. Okay. Amazing. . That's how it all works. Folks, thank you for listening today if I've got this new thing. That's really cool. So if you are listening to this, first of all, thank you. And second of all, if you have a question you would like to ask me, well guess what? Go over to podcast dot craftsman creative.co.

And there's a new link that says, leave a voicemail or ask a question. I forget what I title titled it, but it's a little green link that says you can leave a voicemail. It'll take you to this cool page. I found the same thing that like Cal Newport and Seth Golden are using for their podcast, and I, I really want to integrate.

Listener questions into the podcast. So maybe I'll drop to two ideas and one question a [00:21:00] week. We'll see, you know, with anything in this creative entrepreneur space, you, you, you evolve as you grow. And that's okay. Maybe this will be three ideas a week, maybe it'll shift to two a week, and one question, who knows?

So thank you again for listening. Head over, ask a question, and guess what? I've got a link for you in the show notes. Go. Uh, craftsman creative dot score app.com, and you can take a scorecard and you can get a three 30 day trial to my community, the Society of Independent Creators. It's gonna be awesome.

Hope you'll join us there and you can see the other two ideas that I posted this week about your product, uh, ecosystem in the community. All right. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.