Previously, on Side Bet…

• 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’m still steadfast in not wanting to sell pictures of my feet. But they ARE beautiful

Oh, the weather outside is frightful

So there I am, wrapping up the year as a VP of Sales at a tech company, simultaneously writing a course on how to grow an engaged audience of 25,000 followers on LinkedIn. It’s the holidays. My wife has overscheduled us. The kids are bingeing new videogames and Netflix and not sleeping enough. I’ve had terrible sleeps and one good work out in the last seven days.

And each night, I’m worrying about the notion of bringing this thing to market and no one buying it because I haven’t shipped enough value. I start building the course out more and more to justify why in the world anyone in their right mind would buy it - it’s getting beefy and unruly. It’s getting daunting. I’m starting to feel allergic to sitting down to work on it.

…I’m in the trough.

And one day I wake up, and a voice reminds me that the whole point of my Side Bet experiments is to test things. Fast. If there is any traction, great, pour some gasoline on. If there is no traction, great, move on.

Another insight hit me, too (I’m full of ‘em lately): I should treat every Side Bet pursuit like writing. The first draft is without judgment - I write to get content on the page. Initially, I don’t write to publish, and I don’t think about my audience or readers yet. I just write. Then, I edit.

For my Side Bets, launching my Minimum Viable Product = the first draft.

Iterating and improving the MVP = editing.

💡 For those that haven’t heard the term, a minimum viable product is “a product with just enough features to be used by early customers to provide feedback for future development.” 

And, as I’m writing this, yet ANOTHER insight strikes me square in the chest: for me to be successful moving quickly and shipping stuff for Side Bets, I must completely eliminate my ego thoughts around my projects. There is always fear of failing publicly…but that’s the entire point. Fail until you don’t. And fail fast.

Failing Fast Is Failing Well

Btw if you haven’t heard of the ‘fail fast’ philosophy, it’s the notion that you should build things cheaply, test them, cut the fat, and invest in the meat. We did a lot of failing fast in the early days of Jane when eCommerce was brand new to the cannabis space. Positioning doesn’t resonate? Eliminate it. Demo flow a little clunky? Rip out the selling and just ask questions. It worked extraordinarily well and allowed us to scale quickly.

One of my favorite pieces of the failing fast framework is that you are encouraged to celebrate failures. Failures mean you learned something important. Throw a party.

Writing the script

After all of these insights absorbed, I sat down and just started writing the script to my course. It’s pretty good, but that’s not the point - the point is to wrap up my MVP and ship it to fail fast.

I do need a haircut before I start filming, though…

More to come. Stay tuned, and thanks for reading.

Place your bets…

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