🏃‍♀️ Just start

Previously, on Site Bet:

• I wrote down a bunch of side hustle options, then weighed them against my Golden Requirements:

  

• I opted to build a course on how to build an engaged, niche audience of 25k followers on LinkedIn and figure out how to sell it

• I decided to use Stan to build the course, and I named it The Road to 25k: Building Your Niche Audience on LinkedIn

• I’ve focused on making decisions as quickly as possible

• I made jokes about wanting to avoid selling pictures of my feet, which tbh may not be a bad option in the long-run (…kidding, for now)

The “doing” is always going to be the hard part

I’ve talked to a lot of entrepreneurs during the course of my career. Right out of college, I worked as a Research Associate for a commercial real estate company. I traveled 2 weeks out of every month performing ‘site checks’ in far-flung, often-podunk regions of our country. I met lots of people, including folks that invested in real estate as a side business - these were restauranteurs, gas station owners, service business owners (think landscaping, pool stuff), etc. They were often quite wealthy, but they wore polo shirts and jeans with loafers.

I realized one major, life-shattering thing during my travels as a 21-year-old professional: successful business people are often not the smartest people, nor are they the best planners. These were not financial gurus with $5,000 suits. These were normal women and men that pursued their ideas with action, relentlessly. They executed. They simply started and didn’t stop.

I’ve met countless brilliant people that are stuck in their careers. Their minds are wonderful, their planning best-in-class, their strategies beyond reproach. But they don’t execute. They never start.

Planning is important. Gotta have a North Star and passion. But planning (just like a great idea) is worthless without execution. Here are my thoughts on the topic from last week:

Building the course content

This planning vs. execution dynamic was clearly at play over the last couple of weeks in my first Side Bet adventure. I landed on an idea, I quickly researched the tools I’d need to execute the idea, then I was onto the hard part pretty quickly: actually building the course - aka doing the work.

I ignored all of the noise and put pen to paper.

How did I actually go from a virtually non-existent LinkedIn profile to amassing a niche following? I wrote it down in a notebook

• I recognized the power of LinkedIn’s policies - e.g. not punishing or shadow-banning cannabis content as much as other platforms - and I also guessed that a lot of corporate folks with existing LI profiles would flood into the industry after capital started pumping in (this turned out to be true)

• I wrote often (~3-4x/week)

• I wrote from my heart, outlining industry trends / commentary and my own personal journey

• I wrote for very specific people (namely, anyone that had anything to do with cannabis retail technology)

• I didn’t ask for anything

I took these pieces and opened a Google Slides template. I started organizing into sections, based on what I wish I had been taught at the beginning of my content journey on LI. It looks like this:

💡 btw...

I could obsess over the most beautiful designs and course material, but to honor my execution > planning mantra, I simply chose an existing template and started populating a Google Slide doc. For the course itself, I'm going to set up my office with a camera, then screen share as I narrate. The point is:  building the course content is actually relatively simple, because I already have access to the right tools. Most of them for free. 

It's all right there - you just have to use it. 

Identifying your niche is not specific to content

I’ll talk about the recording and narration component over the next week, but I have some commentary on the course content itself.

As I was building the “ID YOUR NICHE” chapter, I was struck by power and broad application of focusing on a specific person - a fictional one that represents a broader customer base.

• Targeting “everyone” doesn’t provide any direction to your product, marketing, sales, or strategy efforts. When you hear a new founder claim that their ICP is “everyone”, run the other way

• In my marketing days at AB InBev, brand teams would identify a single person that represented their target customer - with a name, history, job, usage occasion map, etc. It was the North Star on which every business effort was built. It was an easy way to get stakeholders aligned on their actions - we would ask ourselves: “would this Stella Artois campaign surprise and delight Christa, the 30-something new mom with a 9-5 on the Lower East Side?” It distilled brand values down to a single point, making it much easier to act

• It occurred to me that this relates directly to content, and I stole the framework for use in my course (this is not the first time I stole something from someone else, I plan on doing it constantly)

Course highlights

I’m in the midst of building out the course now, but here are some highlights to see where my head is at:

Next time on Site Bet

I plan on finishing up the course, building out my script, and recording in the next week or so. That should give us some solid fodder. Then I’ll start to market and sell the course, see if there is enough interest to continue to invest, and let y’all know how it went.

Place your bets…

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