← Young and Profiting with Hala Taha
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha
PassionToProfit: Create a Business Offer Your Customers Can’t Refuse | Entrepreneurship | Presented by Intuit
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- [00:00]
Hala Taha
This episode of Young and Profiting is brought to you by Intuit, the maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks. If you're looking for a flexible career opportunity that lets you help others while building your own path, Intuit is inviting Yap gang to join its world class network of tax and bookkeeping experts. Visit intuit.com expert to learn more or apply now. Hello young and profiters. Thanks for joining me in episode two of Passion to Profit. In this series, we're helping you go from big idea to an even bigger income by turning your passion into a thriving business. In the first episode, we talked about getting mentally ready to take that leap, building the confidence, clarity and purpose to finally get started on your dreams. But once you've made that leap, a new question then comes up. What exactly are you selling and why would somebody want it right now? Because passion without a clear offer is really just a hobby, folks. To build a sustainable business, you've got to create something that people truly need and are willing to pay their hard earned cash for. In this episode, we're breaking down the building blocks of a truly magnetic offer. From identifying pain points and pricing smartly to testing your ideas and knowing when it's time to change directions. You'll hear from business powerhouses like Alex Hormuzzi, Amy Porterfield, and Russell Brunson, entrepreneurs who've mastered the art of giving people exactly what they want. So let's dive right into it. When it comes to building an offer, everything starts with your audience. If you don't know them, you can't sell to them. This goes deeper than just the numbers or the demographics. It's about truly understanding your audience's pain points, their desires, and what they're willing to spend to fix their problems. Because even the best product won't land if it's targeting the wrong market. Now, Alex from Mosey knows this better than most. As the founder of acquisition.com, he's seen what works and what doesn't. Here's his famous $100 million offer, a framework for finding the right market for your offer.
- [01:56]
Alex Hormozi
The first thing is you want to make sure that the people actually want what you have. So typically I express that as pain. They're in some sort of pain, they're suffering some problem that they want to solve. And the bigger the problem that you solve, the more money you make for it. So number one is that they're in pain. Number two is you want the marketplace to be growing rather than shrinking. Because if you could have a tailwind, if you're going to do the same work, you might as well have something pushing behind you. Put the flip side of that. I can give examples in a second. The third one is you want them to have the spending power. Because the worst thing in the world is like you've got a market that's growing. There's a painful problem that you want to solve and that you have the ability to solve. But then they ain't got no money, right? A friend of mine had a resume business. He wanted to help coach people on their resumes and whatnot. And he called me up one day, he's like, this is brilliant. I'm going to make all this money. And it turned out he was like, dude, they're all broke. They're all on unemployment. Now you could make the argument that helping people with a resume inherently is not bad. But he had picked the wrong market to serve. If he had helped corporate executives get raises, he probably would have made a lot more money, right? But he was picking unemployed people to help them get a job rather than helping people get a better job. Right? Tiny difference. But the lever on how much money you can make serving different audiences is the name of the game. The reason many of the Fortune 500 companies are Enterprise, like Salesforce, like the their enterprise. Well, they've gone down market now, but like they built their value on the fact that they served very expensive customers. Million dollar two million, ten million dollar contracts. It's because you get to charge based on the value of their business, not yours. And that's one of the beautiful things about this.
- [03:32]
Hala Taha
After you've zeroed in on your potential market, your next move is to figure out what they're already buying and how you can serve them even better. That means diving into your niche, studying the competition, and getting crystal clear on the problem you are uniquely positioned to solve. Amy Porterfield is a top online marketing strategist who has helped thousands of entrepreneurs build winning offers. In this clip, she shares how to research, refine and position your offer for a real impact.
- [03:58]
Amy Porterfield
First thing is going back to that research. We gotta research what's out there. What are people paying for? Who are your competitors? What are they selling? What are their price point? What does their audience look like? We're gonna do some research. I'm not talking about six months of research, but some really quality time where I want you to document what you're learning and what's out. So that's one of the things we're going to do is we're going to create an offer. But once you Start to sit down and put together your offer. You need to really pinpoint the challenge you are solving or desire your meeting. But it's usually a challenge or a pain point. So I want you to have a statement at the top of a Google Doc where you're taking your notes. This is the challenge that I am solving. These are the results that I am promising. Now this is very clear because when you start to create whatever it is you're going to put together, it always comes back to, but is this true? Whatever I just put together, is it going to solve this problem? Whatever I just put together, is it going to meet that challenge where my students are at or clients or our customers right now?
- [05:02]
Hala Taha
It's one thing to do your homework and spot a need, but it's another to truly understand how your audience wants that need solved. And that clarity. It only comes when you start asking the right questions and paying attention to what your audience is telling you. And I learned this firsthand. Early on in my journey, I noticed that listeners and my social media followers were connecting with my show in ways I hadn't expected. They kept asking me for advice to grow on LinkedIn, for example. And so I put out a LinkedIn masterclass. I adapted, I pivoted, and that's how the Yap Academy was born, which has generated over a million dollars in course revenue. So whether it's through one on one conversations or deep audience research, it's this kind of feedback that's gold. And nobody understands the power of a well asked question better than Cal Fussman, legendary interviewer and host of Big Questions. He explained to me why asking your customers the right questions can unlock game changing insights.
- [05:54]
Cal Fussman
Let's say I'm an entrepreneur selling something. What's the most important thing to me knowing what my customer or would be customer is thinking? I mean, there's nothing more important. Like you can have the greatest idea in the world if there are no customers that want it. It's not going to fly. So just asking your customer or potential customer or anybody that you're talking to about the thing that you are trying to create or that you're selling to get a gauge on whether they would be interested in purchasing it or whether they know somebody who'd be interested in purchasing it. I mean, that's the bedrock right there. And so many times I run into entrepreneurs and they don't ask those questions. And, and when I'm talking about asking those questions is different. This gets to your question. It's very different from putting out a survey that Says on a scale of 1 to 10, what do you think of this?
- [07:19]
Hala Taha
Yeah.
- [07:20]
Cal Fussman
Is it a six? Is it a seven? Is it and who's who? Six is another person's nine. We don't know that. It's very different from, like, looking somebody in the eye and saying, what do you think about this? Do you like this? Does it bother you in any way? And I think you find that people will be happy to tell you how they feel or think.
- [07:48]
Hala Taha
Once you start listening closely to your audience, patterns begin to emerge and so do the problems that nobody else is fixing. Sometimes the biggest breakthrough isn't about inventing something brand new. It's about identifying what's missing and being bold enough to fill that gap. Kelly Roach, a top tier business coach, told me about how spotting an industry blind spot helped her scale a business that delivered real results.
- [08:11]
Kelly Roach
I have to really identify the gap, right? This is something that I have been teaching for years. And I will tell you that the business owners that really understand how to identify the gap in their industry, they become multimillion dollar successes very, very quickly. In every industry, there is a wide open gap, right? The best example that I can give that everyone can identify is the taxi industry, right? The taxi industry was like off the rails with so many issues for decades. No one did anything about it, right? It was inconvenient. You could never get a taxi when you needed it, right? We could go on and on and on. So in came Uber. They filled the gap and it was just like spontaneous combustion, right? And now look at that industry. And people are even starting their own private car fleets where they have their own, you know, two or three cars that they're running out. Almost similar to like the Airbnb VRBO industry, where they're literally like running out their own cars, right? Because there's, there's a gap. And now, especially in like, the luxury space, like, people want to, you know, they're going on vacation, right? You go to the normal car dealership, you're like, I don't really want a Jeep Liberty on my vacation. I want like a Ferrari. Right? Right. So that's like an obvious thing. But the thing that's so interesting is that there is a gap in every industry. There are big issues that no one has taken the time, no one has taken the concern, no one has taken the money to innovate and create a solution.
- [09:42]
Hala Taha
Now, finding the gap in your industry is half the battle. The next step is learning how to frame your offer so it captures attention and sets you apart. And that's exactly where a lot of new founders get tripped up. Russell Brunson, the legendary marketer and founder of ClickFunnels, says the key isn't to tweak the current landscape, it's to totally reshape it. Let's hear how Russell thinks about crafting a new opportunity instead of simply offering a better version of what's already out there.
- [10:06]
Russell Brunson
New opportunity is basically looking at something saying, look, I know you've tried this in the past and you failed and it's not your fault. It's because of the system you were using was broken. I have something that's a new opportunity that's different. That's not a better way to do that. It's a different way to do that. I think about, like some of the great inventions of all time, like Steve Jobs, when you know his prolific, you know him on, on stage, this is when music without the people at CDs and stuff. And he could have came out and said, hey guys, I figured out a better way to do CDs. Now you see, these don't hold 10 songs. It holds a hundred songs. But he didn't. That he stood there in front of, in front of the entire world, said, look, this is how you, you carried your music the past CDs. But we're getting rid of CDs. I'm throwing them out the door. This is a broken system and I have a new opportunity. And boom, he pulls out the ipod. A thousand songs in your pocket. It wasn' better way to CDs was a new opportunity, a new thing. And that's like, you know, boom, takes off. Same thing with the phone. When he came out with the, with the iPhone, wasn't like, here's a better way to do a phone. He's like, the phone is broken. Here's the new opportunity, right when we, when we launched Click Funnels, the same thing. Like, there were a lot of website building platforms at the time. There were platforms that did email marketing or platforms that did CRMs. If I ever came, say, hey, I have a better CRM, I have a better thing. Like now we're fighting on features and stuff instead, right? No, no, we have something that's completely different than you guys ever thought about. We have a platform that builds this new thing called funnels. And like, it's a new opportunity, which is why I think it took off 10 years ago as fast as it did because we introduced a new opportunity.
- [11:22]
Hala Taha
Now, I want to repeat what Russell said here. He said, standing out gets you noticed, but delivering value is what keeps people coming back? If you really want your offer to land, don't start out by asking for money. Start by proving out your value. And that's exactly what I did with Young and Profiting Podcast. I spent over two years just building my platform, creating consistent content and growing a loyal audience. Before I ever brought on a single sponsor, before I ever put out a single course or had a single agency offering, I just focused on connection over cash, trust over transactions. And that foundation became the reason why my audience was ready to buy from me when the time came. That's also the approach that Adam Schafer took when building Mind Pump Media into a multimillion dollar fitness brand. He had the product ready, but he didn't push for it until people were practically begging for it. Why? Because when you lead with value, your audience doesn't just want what you're selling, they need it. Let's hear how Adam pulled it off.
- [12:16]
Russell Brunson
But it really comes down to providing value and, and, and, and practicing that and then always looking back at yourself first. I mean, just like the other stuff that we talked about, people are so quick to point the finger at the other people, right? The victim, like, oh, well, they can't afford or oh, they're not the right customer. Oh, it's like, no, we, none of us ever look at that like that. Like, if something is not working in the business we, where we're not being successful, it's like, what are we doing? What are we not doing to give that customer enough value that they, they don't even hesitate to spend that? And that's how we, that's when we started the podcast. We actually had the, the product ready to sell. So Maps Fitness products is the foundation of what scaled and built this business. Originally, that's what brought us into the millions of dollars, was the digital programs that we sell online. And we had that before the podcast even started. But we agreed not to sell it until people were begging for something from us. We didn't want to go in and already try and monetize. It was like, let's go first. Since we're not media guys, let's go first, prove that we can provide so much value on this podcast that it organically grows. We didn't want to spend any money on advertising. We weren't trying to do all the Instagram social media hacks. It was like, lean into the value thing. Let's go put out something that is so valuable that people are willing to share it. And listen, if I can't prove that before I'm even trying to sell anything, I would be a fool to try and sell something first. This is what I give advice to coaches and trainers that are trying to duplicate what we've done. It's like you're already trying to think about the product or the thing you want to sell. You haven't even proven that people want to hear what you want to give them for free. Go prove to your audience first that you have something valuable enough that they'll listen or, and or share with other people. Go solve that equation before you figure out your price point of your product or your thing you want to sell and allow them to dictate what product or what service you come up with. But that's the first. That's the first problem in this equation that you need to solve is can I provide enough value to a specific audience that they're going to listen?
- [14:22]
Hala Taha
Once you've proven your value, like Adam Schaefer did, the next step is to turn that value into meaningful impact. Because lasting success isn't just about products sold or downloads counted. It's about trust and building a reputation that lasts. And that only happens when your audience knows you're in it for them and not just for the payday. As Bob Berg, the bestselling author of the Go Giver explains, shifting your focus from getting to giving isn't just the right thing to do. It's the most profitable move that you can make.
- [14:50]
Cal Fussman
Basic premise of the Go Giver is simply this, that shifting your focus. And this is really where it all begins. Shifting your focus from getting to giving. Now, when we say giving in this context, we simply mean constantly and consistently providing immense value to others. Understanding that doing so is not only a more fulfilling way of conducting business, it's the most financially profitable way as well, and not for any way out there. Woo woo. Type of magical, mystical reasons. It makes very logical, very rational sense when you're that person.
- [15:24]
Bob Berg
Holla.
- [15:24]
Cal Fussman
Who can take your focus off yourself and place it on serving others, on discovering what they need, what they want, what they desire. Focusing on helping them solve their challenge and problems. Taking your focus off of yourself and making it about helping to bring them closer to happiness. People feel good about you. People want to get to know you. They like you, they trust you. They want to be part of your life, part of your business. They want to tell others about you. Now, we would say in terms of Go giver and go getter, it. It always depends on how you define terms. Okay, so what we like to say is we love go getters because go getters are people of action. You know, you're a go getter as well as a go giver. You're a person of action, right? And you started in radio. You went into, you, you had your, your blog that you had, you led a whole group of teams as that died down, now you went into something else. You're a go getter, but you're always providing value to others. You're a go giver. And so we like people to be both go getters, people of action and, and go givers, people who are absolutely focused on providing immense value to others. We would say the opposite of a go giver is a go taker. And that's that person who feels almost entitled, if you will, to take, take, take without having added value to, to the person, to the process, to the situation. And they tend to be frustrated because they, they rarely have the kind of sustainable success that they believe they have.
- [16:53]
Hala Taha
Okay, you've asked the right questions, you've shown up with value and you're building something rooted in real service. But now we come to the point where the real finesse comes in figuring out your price, your positioning and whether your offer actually delivers. After the break, we'll dive into how to test your idea in the real world and what to do when things don't go as planned. You already know we're all about leveling up your income, your mindset, your future. So if you're interested in tax or bookkeeping or looking for a new opportunity, then this one's for you. Intuit, the maker of Turkey, Robotax and QuickBooks, is looking for tax and bookkeeping experts to join their world class virtual expert network. Whether you want full time, part time or to make a career, Pivot Intuit offers the tools to help you grow their supportive team. Mission driven culture and Intuit Academy, a free self paced training platform means you're set up to succeed, even if you're just getting started. Are you ready to turn your skills into a serious opportunity? Visit intuit.comexpert to learn more or apply. That's intuit.comexpert. welcome back everybody. Before the break, we talk talked about how to build value before asking for the sale. Now it's time to talk numbers. Because a brilliant offer without the right price tag, well, that's a missed opportunity. Pricing can feel pretty intimidating, especially when you're starting out. But it doesn't have to be a guessing game. Amy Porterfield is back to break it down. She explains how your early pricing strategy can evolve and how clear expectations can turn Casual buyers into lifelong customers.
- [18:21]
Amy Porterfield
Another part of the offer is the price point point. So playing around with the price point is very normal. What I always suggest to my students is let's start a little bit lower and go higher over time. It's very awkward. I know this firsthand. Going high and then feeling like you need to bring it down. It's just an awkward thing with the people who paid the bigger amount of money. And I've been there before, sometimes mistakes are made, but I'd rather see you gradually increase your prices versus having to take them down. So we're going to come up with the price point. Another part of your offer is is there a payment plan? So I've had a lot of success over the years with my one on one consulting and with my digital courses to offer a payment plan to make it an easy yes for people to get involved, especially when I was a no name, when no one really knew who I was or what I could offer, making it easier for them to get into business with me with a payment plan always worked out well. So if that makes sense for your offer, I'm all about it. And another part of your offer is the guarantee. So for a digital course, it might be 30 days, 60 days. For consulting, you can kind of play around with what if you're, they're not a good fit, how do they get out of it? Whatever it is that you want it to be, you're the boss, you're the creator. Make sure it feels good to you. But then you've got to communicate it. The only thing that matters is expectations. They are very clear what they're paying for and what they get. So these are some elements that make a really beautiful offer.
- [19:47]
Hala Taha
After you've mapped out your beautiful offer and set a price you feel good about, the next challenge is understanding how that price lands with your audience. Because pricing is not just numbers. It's about psychology. The way your offer is positioned can either create friction or spark impulse. And if your offer feels off, it might not just be the product, it might be your product positioning. That's one reason that Rudy Moore, the investor and entrepreneur behind Moore Capital, suggests that starting small can be the smartest way to unlock bigger wins down the road.
- [20:17]
Rudy Moore
Most of our stuff, we actually start at under $100. Okay. And the psych, There's a big, important psychology lesson here. Under $100, psychologically, most people don't need multiple decision making processes. They don't need to review it multiple times. As soon as you go over $100 and especially over 500 or a thousand. There needs to be multiple touch points and multiple conscious decision making processes involved. Great way to I explain this is, you know, when you're lining up a CVS Walgreens grocery store to pay. Have you ever saw on the side of the aisle where you're in the line where they say you can buy a TV here for a thousand and then the other side, it's like you can buy a jet ski for 12,000 and then you can buy, you know, a new couch for 2000? No, you never see that. Why? Because it's too expensive to be spontaneous, right? But that's what a lot of people are doing in their ads when they sell to cold traffic. They're saying, hey, buy this twelve thousand dollar jet Ski. It's like I came here to, I'm bored at work looking at my, you know, friends photos. I'm not ready to buy a jet Ski. So you have to, I try and start them low, get them in the ecosystem. And another easy analogy is you're going to date before marriage, right? When they're a warm following, you can say, hey, you want to come on a week's vacation with me? If you went up to a stranger in the street or on a dating app and the first message was, hey, you want to come on a week's vacation? They're going to be like, who the hell is this? Right? So you got to date a little and then you can elevate that process as a relationship build. Same psychology with dating. Same psychology with the user journey.
- [21:50]
Hala Taha
Now that you've crafted your offer and priced it with purpose, here's your next big move. Don't treat it like it's set in stone. The most successful entrepreneurs are not stuck on version one. They test, tweak and level up based on what actually works. If you want real traction, you've got to get real feedback on your offer. Josh Kaufman, best selling author of the Personal mba, breaks this down with two simple strategies, shadow testing and feel testing.
- [22:14]
Josh Kaufman
So there are two primary methods that I really like to use for this. The first one is the fastest and the easiest, which is called shadow testing. And this is essentially. So it has many different forms. Sometimes it's called concept testing, sometimes there are prototypes involved, but it's always this. Testing an idea with potential customers before you, before you make anything, like just, you know, an idea on a sheet of paper, just presenting it to the people who are most likely to buy from you and asking the critical question, which is, is this something that you're willing to pay for. And the strongest version of this test is you actually take orders from them. Like, yeah, sign on the dotted line, you know, we won't charge you until it's ready. But you know, essentially think of what, what Kickstarter is, right? Like there's no product, there's a lot of development and sometimes manufacturing and long, expensive processes that need to happen before, before the, the product is ready. But the Kickstarter, it's just a page, it's just some images, it's, it's some, some text on the Internet. There's nothing there, but it's enough that potential customers can look at it and say, oh yeah, that sounds cool, that's for me, I would like to pre order one. And Kickstarter makes that very easy to do. And so for most forms of businesses, shadow testing is something that is very, very valuable and worth doing because it can help answer that critical question immediately. Are you making something that people are willing to pay for? The longer term form of testing that is just as, if not more valuable is field testing. And so it's making the thing. And then you as the business owner, you and your staff and the people who are involved in this particular market, the best situations where the company improves to the greatest extent most quickly are very often the companies that use the thing that they themselves make. Because think of it from a speed of learning or a feedback cycle sort of thing. Like if you're using the thing that you make and something goes wrong or something breaks or you know, something, you know right away, you can act on that information much more quickly than waiting for a bug report to come in from a customer with incomplete information and incomplete context. And so anytime there's an opportunity for you to use the thing that you make, you end up improving the quality of the product or the offer much, much faster than you otherwise would.
- [25:04]
Hala Taha
But even after you've tested and refined your offer, the game isn't over. The best entrepreneurs don't just iterate what they've built. They start to alert to what the market is trying to tell them, even if it means heading in a totally new direction. Reid Hoffman, the co founder of LinkedIn and partner at Greylock, reminds us that true innovation often comes from letting go of the original plan.
- [25:24]
Bob Berg
Obviously, people are familiar with pivots because it's not working right. And there's different ways to get to the conclusion before it totally is a train wreck. Like you want to make the decision that's not working before the train wreck happens, you know, change tracks. But one of the things that people under describe is a pivot to a new opportunity. And this is like, in some sense, this is the PayPal story that we were talking about a little earlier because they said, well, we have this really great unique technology and now we're figuring out that it's not really going to work and we're pivoting away from it because too hard to get to market. And then what happened is you release this kind of Palm Pilot plus a synchronizing payment service. And what happened is ebay people started using it. And I remember the first week in the conversation at PayPal was, who are these ebay people? Should we stop them from using our product? And it was like, no, no, no, those are our customers. None of these people are our customers. Those are our customers. We're going to pivot entirely towards them. And so pivoting towards opportunities, seeing what happens. And sometimes, by the way, it's like, oh, you've been working on the software product and now AI is here and you're like, okay, I'm gonna do AI. Like, yeah, I know. I did this last 18 months of work, maybe three months of it's recoverable because that's the opportunity. And that pivoting towards big new opportunities is one of the things that really creates these successful businesses. And you know, because we want to tell this kind of heroic story where she or he had this original vision that came down from on a high and they came down with the two stone tablets and they said, I've got this vision that goes on forever and that's the reason I'm a genius. And it's like, well, actually, in fact, a lot of things happen based on, well, I was in the game, I was learning and I saw this new opportunity that emerged from the market. A technology, a set of things with competitors. And I moved towards that. Like for example, Google, its theory of when it launched site was we're going to sell enterprise search. That's our theory of the game. Then they saw and then, oh, it's not working. Oh, our backup plan is to put double click ads on top of it. Oh, shit. The whole ad market went, what do we do? Oh, now we invent AdWords. And they pivoted from enterprise to consumer and then consumer to using elements that they'd seen from the market. But inventing their own version of how to make a really powerful business. And it's one of the most powerful business models that's been invented in human history so far. And so that pivoting towards opportunity is one of the things that entrepreneurs really need to keep in mind.
- [28:03]
Hala Taha
Well, there you have it, YAP gang. The most successful entrepreneurs are not the ones who cling to their first draft. They're the ones who listen, adapt and evolve. They ask better questions. They respond to what's working and what's not. And whether you're adjusting price, pivoting your niche, or rebuilding from scratch, the willingness to stay flexible is what is going to keep you in the game. Because the market is always talking. The question is, are you listening? In our next episode, we'll help you take the next step, sharing your offer with the world. Because it doesn't matter how valuable your idea is if nobody gets to hear it. Get ready to dive into the art of messaging, marketing and building trust with your audience. This is your host, Ahala Taha, and I'll see you next time on Passion to Profit. I've got to give a huge thanks to Intuit for sponsoring today's episode. Intuit is inviting our YAP fam to join its world class network of tax and bookkeeping experts. If you've got experience in tax and bookkeeping or even if you're just getting started, this is an incredible opportunity. With flexible scheduling and the chance to to make a real impact in people's lives. It's the perfect side hustle or main hustle. So if you're ready to get started, visit intuit.comexpert to learn more or apply. That's intuitintuit.comexpert to get started.