Feeling Defeated (And Overcoming It With A Plan)

This weekend I felt defeated.

It felt like every path I’ve chased that I wanted to work for the past 2 years hasn’t yielded any of the fruit I’ve been needing:

1. Coaching - the only person who I found through my online efforts refunded (he said it wasn’t my fault so I’m happy there)

2. Books - still working on this. My book has over 120 downloads so far! I am happy for this.

3. Social media - consistent posting for the past 2 years and almost no growth. My follower count on X continues to decrease actually xD

4. AI training - Not sure how to find people who need it.

I felt at my wit’s end trying to figure out how to make money as an entrepreneur in a way that was fun, and “evergreen”.

Not quite sure what I needed to learn, I felt defeated this weekend.

I’ve tried so hard to build this “evergreen” funnel of content but MAN can I not get a single person into that funnel. 😆 Nor does it feel like my content is “evergreen” or “timeless.”

Either way, I’m not one to give up. I know I’m inevitable if I don’t stop, and continue to empirically learn from progress.

My conclusions:

1. I must determine my niche

2. I must speak more clearly to them

However, I have tried to niche down on multiple occasions. There are two things that have prevented me from doing so:

1. Not necessarily knowing how to niche down. The advice I’ve gotten:

   1. “When you see someone sit down to take your course, what do they look like?” → This helped for a bit, but didn’t necessarily help

   2. “How would you call them out in a crowd?” → This is hard for me to imagine, and doesn’t actually help me out.

   3. Insert additional advices here

2. Fear that it will actually work. I would decide on a niche and then:

   1. The people in my niche didn’t care about my solution (which means it wasn’t a problem, or a “pain”) or

   2. Immediately collide with people who I was targeting and realize my services couldn’t help them or

   3. I would find multiple people who lived outside my niche that I could help (and I needed the money)

For example: I wanted to target programmers with my coaching, but I found exactly one programmer friend who actually cared to receive coaching.

It was difficult to find the programmers who cared about personal development, so I abandoned that niche.

So many attempted niches. So much fear. Quite the lack of progress.

Having read Alex Hormozi’s $100M Offers I know my audience must:

1. Have a massive pain (I know I felt like I had a massive pain as a developer)

2. Purchasing Power (my programmer friends did, but all of them were very stingy with their money xD)

3. Easy to target (Thought they would be easier to find, maybe if I had hit up reddit instead of X)

4. Growing (Lots of new devs every day)

As you can see I thought my programming target was a good one. And maybe I just needed to niche down further (“lost” or “burnt out” or “not prideful” developers for example).

It’s all learning. A lot of progress has been made as I get rid of my pride (I was and still am a prideful developer).

This Monday however, I learned a few things about targeting an audience that seems to solve both of my problems (and helps with sales):

I feel like this is a missing piece of all of the advice I have been given (because none of the advice is bad, it has just felt incomplete).

Trusting that your product can actually serve people requires a clear audience. Without that, you’ve got a sandy foundation (trust me, I’ve felt the “sandy” foundation hundreds of times over the past 2 years). And you’ll be afraid that it won’t work for this person.

Being able to qualify a customer is a keystone to knowing your audience (and selling them).

Taking my 30 day AI Accelerator for Professionals as an example. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s for beginners: People who have 1) never used ChatGPT (total use count is 0) or 2) have used it once or twice (total use count is like 5) and never gotten the result they wanted from it. Which means I should rename it to 30 Day AI Accelerator for Beginners.

This helps me trust my product will actually deliver results (and eliminate my fear of the sale: I know my product works, I know the money is worth it because I’ve done the maths, etc).

Now that I have questions I can ask to qualify, selling gets a whole lot easier. I ask my questions. If they answer positively, it’s easy to recommend my service.

This is a skill, and something that I intend to get better at over time.