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How do you actually make money from your idea?

More often than not, it’s not actually about your idea.

I’ve had much more success from “walking the dollar across”.

Here’s what I mean.

The Stepping Stones.

Picture a creek.

On one side, there is a stranger.

He has a bunch of money.

On the other side, there is you - calling out for them to come meet you.

You want the stranger to cross over to you.

This is what marketing feels like.

You want to make it as easy as possible for the stranger to cross over to you.

So, your job is now to walk the dollar across.

What this looks like in practice.

First, you need to get their attention.

So you make an ad, you cold call them, DM them, you do whatever you can to get them to notice you.

Then, you start building a bridge.

The problem is, you’ve never built a bridge before - so you just throw some stones in the water and call it a bridge.

Because your bridge sucks - the stranger falls off - gets mad, and you don’t get the dollar.

So, what do you do?

You fix that gap in the bridge.

And so, the stranger makes it further…

You get the point.

A lot of early entrepreneurship is just finding the points along the bridge where customers fall off - and patching the gaps.

To do this effectively, you need two things.

1. A way to measure traffic along the bridge

2. The desire to experiment and iterate

Without a way to see where people fall off, you will not know what to patch. This is where tools like Posthog & Amplitude come into play.

Without the desire to experiment and fact-find, you will never build a good enough bridge.

What am I doing?

My bridge was particularly weak along the final stage of the onboarding process - so I built a better plank across it.

Basically instead of waiting until after signup to show users tweets generated in their voice, I do it before. (Here’s a walkthrough video of what this looks like)

And what would you know - I got a customer from this video!

I’m looking forward to seeing it working.

Have a great week everyone.

Ben

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