This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Let's talk today about narrowing down your target market. A listener in Dallas wants to help teens and young adults learn personal finance. But the group she has in mind are quite different. It's wonderful that she knows this up front. A lot of times people get into these things and they don't realize it until they're a little bit further along.
They think, oh, I thought I was gonna be able to serve these two different groups with the same messaging and then they realize they can't. So on the front end, this listener is thinking, I need to make a choice basically. How should she do that? How should she choose her focus? We had a call recently with the Third Way Group.
It's people who have read The Money Tree, my new book, and are interested in having some accountability and talking through their ideas. So we had this call on Zoom recently and we heard from someone who is from Nepal and she's been putting together a website called All Things Nepali. And it's one part tourist information for people who are interested in going to Nepal. And then simultaneously, she is teaching Nepali and Nepali's culture to kids of Nepali's around the world. So both very interesting projects with a lot of potential, but also quite different because kids of Nepali's living around the world and tourists interested in visiting Nepal, those groups of people have very different needs.
So on the call, we were looking at pros and cons of each and how to adjust your messaging and such. So we'll do that a bit here in this question, focused on personal finance. How do you choose that personal finance target market? Let's dive in after the shout out to our sponsor. [Music]
Hi Chris, this is Libby from Dallas, Texas.
Thanks for the show and the daily motivation. It's definitely the push that I needed. My side hustle is personal finance classes for students to prepare them for all the big money decisions that await them in the real world. From the time students graduate high school to the time they graduate college, they're making some of the biggest financial decisions of their whole lives. Their education, loans, career choices, as well as the daily spending and saving decisions that they make and the patterns that they set.
I think there's a huge need for great personal finance education and I think I'm the person to do it. My question revolves around choosing a target market. I'm interested in serving high school students and college students and recent college grads. All of these groups have a need for personal finance education, but I'd have to market differently. For high schoolers, I'd have to market to their parents or schools, whereas college grads may see more of the need themselves.
I'd love your thoughts on how to narrow down a target market. While I don't want to close the door on possible customers, I think they'll have better success in narrowing the target audience first. Thanks so much. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. - Awesome, thank you, Libby.
Well, no doubt it's a huge need for sure. So I totally agree on that. I also agree that Libby will have better success in first narrowing down the target market. This is like one of the first principles of trying to decide on your idea. Don't try to serve everybody.
And fortunately, as I said, Libby knows that. So it's good she's thinking ahead. And this is because everything about your marketing depends on who you're trying to reach and how you speak to those people. You want to think as well about who makes the decisions. It's not just who you want to teach in this case, but who decides, who is the decision maker who says, yes, we'd love to have Libby come to our school.
That's going to be very different for high schoolers and college students. And I think Libby even mentioned that the college students might want the service themselves. So it might be a totally different funnel or means of engagement there. And then also, once you make that choice, the messaging and language and everything else you do is also going to be different. So I do see it as kind of a binary choice, at least in the beginning.
And how do you make that choice? A few factors. Number one, do you have a strong preference for one or the other? I mean, let's just start with that. If you want to serve both high school students and college students, if you could only serve one group, what would you choose?
That may be your answer right there. But I would also ask, is the revenue model clearer for one or the other? If you think about, you know, what is the easiest path to get to market? How can I have this up and running within a month? How can I have my first client or customer, my first group that's going to have me at their school, whatever it is.
If it seems that one idea has much more potential than the other, I would choose that. And maybe you could think of it just by answering the question, what is the most feasible approach? What is the simplest thing I could do now to have the results I'd like to see? So I tend to operate that way myself. I tend to choose the path of least resistance because there are a lot of different things I like to work on.
I like to work on a lot of different projects. So sometimes when I'm trying to decide, what do I do next? If I have a clear preference, I'll do that. It's not like I'm compromising, you know, or selling out or something. Like I do what I'm interested in, what I'm most passionate about, that I think is also going to connect with people and, you know, be of service to them.
But, you know, if I don't have a preference between three different things I want to do, I ask myself, what is the most intuitive and logical thing available right now? If one path is clear and the other is cloudy, my suggestion is choose the clear path. It's always better to move forward than to remain stuck. All right, that's my advice. But of course, let me do what's best for you.
Let us know what happens. And listeners, if you have a question, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. We are featuring them throughout the year, along with updates from other listeners as they launch their projects. I'm so grateful to make this program for you every day. Be sure you're subscribed.
You can listen to an Apple podcast or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. I've been using Castbox myself recently. I really enjoy it. So if you're looking for a new podcast player, maybe check that out in the App Store or on Google Play. But wherever you get your podcasts, that's where I'll be.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Sidus Will School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
