As a creator, we find intrinsic joy from making things we love.
But if we aren't thinking about who we're making things for, we may never see results, growth, or income.
If we're trying to make a living creating, it's important for us to find an ideal market to tailor our creations to.
Here are some ways you can do that, as suggested by Alex Hormozi in $100 Million Offers, a book I'm reading right now.
Pain 🩹 Your ideal customers need to have a big enough problem they are willing to spend time and money to solve.
Luckily, life is full of different pains, so start by looking into markets you're familiar with and identifying them.
For myself, I noticed that many videos I'd watch weren't capturing the excitement of the event as they could be. That's why I chose to pick up FPV drones, and show how much more dynamic videos could be if we included footage from them.
"The pain is the pitch," as Alex says. The more specific you can speak on the pain your market is feeling, the more they will trust you as an expert to solve it.
Purchasing Power 💰
Once you've found pain in your prospective market, it's equally as important to check if they can actually afford what you are selling.
I learned this the hard way by creating a course teaching college-age dancers filmmaking skills to help them improve their portfolio. The problem with that, is a lot of dancers straight out of college did NOT have the money to invest in a $300 course.
This is why I began targeting bigger production companies, who would have a large enough budget to hire me at a higher-ticket price.
Money is the "oxygen" of your business, so being aware if your target market has the means to buy from you is paramount.
Ease of Targeting 🎯 Even if your market does exist, has pain and money to spend, it's going to be hard to find them if you don't have ways of finding them. Thankfully, we have lots of different tools to find communities. I first found my current target market of production companies through one contact on Instagram. Once I found one cinematographer to do FPV drone work for, I met many others on sets and my network has continued to web out form there.
Start thinking about where you can find your target audience. If you're selling stationary, watch YouTube videos of creators in those spaces and see if they have online communities. Start looking at who populates those communities, and get a better idea of what pains they're dealing with. How can the stuff you're making help them in their lives?
Growth 🪴 If a market isn't growing, it may not be a good idea to start business in it. Alex uses his friend as an example, who came up with a great offer to sell to newspaper companies.
The problem was no matter how good his offer was at solving their pain, the newspaper market is dying by 25% each year.
Most of us shouldn't have this problem, but it's definitely worth being aware of. Avoid picking markets you see are on the constant decline.
In summary, use these 4 factors to find a target market you can craft offers and successfully sell your services to:
Pain
Purchasing Power
Easy to Target
Growing
If you want to learn more about crafting offers that will make lots more money, I'd recommend taking a look at $100M Offers. Get your own Kindle or physical copy of the book here.
Thanks for reading friend,
Kai