| Before I get to it, I have a question for you. Over the last 12 months, what has been your most consistent problem? It only takes seconds to submit. Your answer is anonymous, though I might use it in a newsletter. Onward! A core component of my next phase is to build a new kind of business. In the past, my main goal was to make awesome stuff and then somehow money happens. This worked once, it hasn't worked since, I'm done. I talk more about this here. What will this new business do? Don't know! I want to discover this by having the market tell me what works. I plan to do this through small, cheap, preferably free experiments. I'm coming up with a bunch of experimental products, tools, and ploys which I'm calling candidates. The candidates that create a spark get built upon or expanded. The ones that don't work, I learn from and murder. Score is kept in dollars. Ideally, one candidate will take over and that'll be the business. But it's perfectly plausible that the business will remain a mixture of smaller sub-businesses. (Is this methodology good? Does it suck? If you know of a better way of testing and growing business ideas, please reply.) Candidate #1 was video production. It's good work, I like it, but there are issues with that work providing what I need. (I talked about this here.) Today I'll introduce Candidate #2! I've been thinking about three things a lot lately and they lead me to an idea. 1. Green shootsWhere is the growth in my recent history? What has generated some pop, some interest, some excitement? The original Everything is a Remix did this long ago. More recently, the Angry Kirby newsletter did this. In a small but significant way, the worksheets in my shop—The 4 Steps to Getting an Idea and Getting Unstuck—did this. Sales were small but they didn't take long to make and were well worth the time. And they continue selling. 2. What problems can I solve?A basic tenet of entrepreneurism is find a pain and cure it. I've been thinking about what problems can I solve. And even more importantly, what problems do I have that I need to solve? And can I solve this problem for others? 3. EducationI'm very interested in the broad category of education because I consider myself an educator and it's an industry with clear demand. This is also a good pivot at this stage of life (middleage) because it plays to my strengths and builds on what I already have, which is some prestige and a quality body of work. Plus, Everything is a Remix is very popular in schools. This was reaffirmed by my discovery that middle aged and older people are well-equipped to excel at teaching. We aren't necessarily as quick or as innovative as we once were, but we can be even better storytellers and this strength can persist deep into old age. All this lead to Candidate #2 which I will now explode your mind with. |
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