Starting a business is hard.

The digital age has brought in amazing opportunity for us to have our businesses be entirely online, which is amazing! But just because we start selling merch, it doesn’t mean people will buy. Or a patreon. Or dropping affiliate links in the description.

You get the point.

There is still a TON of work that goes into starting a business and maybe you’re not sure where to start.

I want to help you work SMARTER, not harder. So, here are some of the first steps I’d take if I was starting all over again, to grow a business around my YouTube channel.

  1. Understand who your audience is and what they want. Chances are if you started a YouTube Channel, your target audience may be you… just a few years ago. You might think you know exactly what your audience wants, but having all the knowledge or experience that you do now may actually make it hard to remember exactly how you felt years ago. My favorite way to find out what my audience wants is get it straight from the horse’s mouth and run a survey.

But… what in the world do you even ask during your survey!? We walk you through what we ask , but here some ways you can adapt it to your channel/niche.

  1. Where are you at in your journey? In our survey, we ask creators how many subscribers they have. This gives us a good idea of where they’re at in their creative journey. We notice that creators with less than 10K subscribers are trying to accomplish different things than those with 10K+. This gives us a better idea of how to create content and products that serve our target audience.
  2. What’s the biggest obstacle you’re trying to overcome? THIS answer is gold for you. This is when your audience literally will tell you what problem they have. Are there common answers/struggles that keep coming up over and over again? Listen to the language your audience is using to describe their problem.
  3. What does a win look like for you? Essentially, you’re asking your audience… “what’s the thing you REALLY want?” Why do they really want it? We want to understand this on a deeper level because it will help you know how to package/present your solution later on.
  4. How does your audience think about solving their problem? As experts, or people with more experience in your field (even if you’re a lifestyle channel who focuses on productivity, healthy living, mindfulness, etc.) we get so used to solving our “problem” a certain way that we forget our audience is thinking another way. This question will help you learn how your audience is thinking, so you know what language to use when you’re talking about how to solve their problem.
  5. What are you missing out on by _________? What’s at stake for your audience if they don’t get what they want? This is where the deeper emotional level of why they want to solve their problem comes out. You can speak to these things when you’re trying to tell your audience about how your think can help them get what they want and not miss out on anything. Not in a manipulative way, but you can appeal to them earnestly because you have a way to solve their problem (and now you’ll know how to create an even BETTER product for them).
  6. What is holding you back from __________? This question is similar to asking your audience what challenges they face, but forces them to prioritize everything to say “THIS is the biggest thing.”
  7. If we could follow up with you, learn about your situation, and chat with you for a few minutes (WITHOUT selling anything!), is that something you’d want? Everytime we do a survey like this, 87% of our audience not only says yes, but begs us to contact them. They WANT you to help them overcome the problem they are trying to solve. The responses from this can give you a good idea of how much your audience trusts you too and wants you to engage with them.

Once you have all your survey answers, you can review which answers come up again and again and what themes are reoccuring.

This is how you can figure out what your audience wants, what’s at stake for them, and how YOU can create something that is the solution to their problem (or how you can sell it to them if you already have the perfect product for them).

Now, you probably either have TONS of ideas and aren’t sure where to start… or you might have no idea where to start. Either way, I created this with this process: how to get started, different product ideas, the sales script I use for my videos and our clients, selling tips/strategies, etc.

to download From Product to Profit for FREE.

Hope this helps!

Keep changing lives,

Tim

P.S. To grow your business, you need to know who your audience is and what they want. But that’s just the first step. Next, you need to know how to sell to them in a non-sleazy way. If you want to make more money doing what you love, and we’ll help you create a product and turn it into profit.