- Jared Seidel
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- Not MY Problem
Not MY Problem
How much longer am I going to reminisce on Plunge Party?
Not much longer. I promise.
I’m 30 days out from the final event and my masochistic brain is trying to already hustle into the “next thing.”
Unplugging and rest have a low usage rate in my vocabulary. For example: hiking 15 miles this past weekend was “rest” for me.
“Let’s do something chill” - My 7am text
Naturally as you expect, taking time off between Plunge Party and my “next thing” didn’t last more than 10 days.
If you’re new here, live under a rock, or a just perhaps forgetful, glucose monitors just went over the counter 11 months ago. Nice! I thought - “hey. There’s going to be a big appetite for knowledge how how to use these bad boys and who better to educate the masses than yours truly? Mr Type 1 Diabetes and Mr. Ex-Dexcom.”
People have already been creating content around CGMs in the space for a handful of years now. The two biggest creators: Jessie Inchauspe and Justin Richard. What’s great is that they’re doing a great job providing education and entertainment. I honestly look up to them in many ways for their consistency.
When I dug deeper in the the space I realized I wasn’t the only other person that though “why not me too?” This makes sense. Now, I’m not planning on stopping on creating content around glucose monitors and health. Because the only way I can build an audience and trust is through consistency. But my logic is flawed because there’s one small issue with how I wanted to do this and how the people ahead of me are doing this…
3 months ago I validated my product concept by convincing my friends to pay me $[redacted] to coach them through wearing a glucose monitor. That turned into 9 people and over half of them had raving reviews about the outcomes.
I was convinced I was on to something! I delivered a great product, outcome, and experience. But there was one problem. All these people knew me and trusted me, and were willing to pay me for my expertise and experience. I convinced them they had a problem. But that’s not how real business works. So I had to test this concept out.
On a sunny Sunday morning I went and talked to strangers at the Fort Mason farmers market in San Francisco to practice pitching my concept and seeing if I could get strangers to be interested in CGM coaching. I talked to 15 people. Over half of them never heard of a glucose monitor nor gave two shits that the cookie the size of their hand was going to make their glucose spike. Some thought it was a cool concept. But none of them were convinced they had a problem they needed help fixing.
Said farmers market. I see you, Karl. 💨
Alex Hormozi would be kicking and screaming at me right now saying I didn’t talk to enough people and i should have 10x-ed that to really know if people weren’t going to buy. But 15 was more than enough for me to realize one simple thing: no one knew they had a problem.
The steps required to convince someone they needed someone to put a CGM on them and coach them on how to bring their glucose levels down was too long, hard, and full of friction. Yes I could post my face all over the internet and convince people in the midwest that they needed to pay me to coach them on how to use a CGM. But I didnt want to be that guy selling the snake oil diabetes reversal protocol. I’ve leave that to the guys over at Unicity to do that. (Have fun going down that rabbit hole like I did)
My friend Martyn put i well “VC backed companies can spend time educating the market, bootstrapped businesses have to know who has the problem and is desperate to buy a solution to their problem… right now.” (said in a South African accent 🤤)
I’m going for the latter.
The point I’m trying to make? You can be a visionary about where the puck is heading and who will have a problem in the future. That’s great. But those aren’t people that know they have a problem today. If I want to start a bootstrapped business I need to find people with a big problem or a way to convince them fast that I have the solution.
So instead of writing a newsletter out waving my hands about “sales strategies” I’m going to follow the advice I was given. The best way to learn if someone has a problem bad enough they will pay to fix it, is to try to sell them a solution.
Time to run some experiments and get rejected. A lot.
Let’s yap.
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A few gems I found on the internet this week - no digging required
How to get anyone to engage in your content? You need to trigger an emotion. Moodboard did a good job breaking down how here. And how to get an AI tool to do it, right.
High performance lifestyle training just got acquired by lifetime fitness by selling suffering to wealthy people. This trend is gaining a lot of traction. Similar to what Plunge Party was, but more fitness focused. I want to do this.
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