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When I first started doing this work, I assumed that once I had an audience, everything else would be easy. I’d “have a platform,” and that platform would more or less guarantee success for whatever I decided to make next, whether that be books, courses, challenges, Kickstarters, you name it.
After hundreds of products, launches, and experiments, I’m sorry to report that an audience doesn’t guarantee success. It gives you two things:
- A group of people you have the opportunity to serve
- A group that is inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt
When your offer is aligned, your existing customers will consider it seriously much faster than strangers will. They’ll open the email, click the link, and at least think about backing the Kickstarter or preordering the book, but you still have to earn every “yes.”
WEbinar
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When you make something they already expect from you, getting that yes is easier, but if you come at them with something completely new, then you basically have to earn their trust again.
You can have ten people or ten thousand people waiting to hear from you, and if the thing you’re offering doesn’t match what they expect you to offer them, it’s going to land with a thud unless you do the work.
Alignment is the overlap between what lights you up enough to finish, what your people are already leaning toward, and what makes sense in the broader ecosystem of the moment.
When everything is aligned, you sell with ease. When they don’t, everything feels heavier than it should because the product doesn’t fit.
Misalignment isn’t bad. It just means your audience failed to see the value of what you’re offering. Sometimes, they really need what you’re selling, but they don’t know it yet. Other times they know exactly what it is, they just don’t have the context to care.
- Sometimes misalignment means you built the right thing at the wrong moment.
- Sometimes it means you built the right thing but explained it the wrong way.
- Sometimes it means you built something brilliant but your audience associates you with something else entirely.
None of that is a moral failure. None of that means you should burn the project to the ground. It just means there’s a gap between what you made and how they’re currently seeing you.
Misalignment is just data that reveals to you where the bridge to success is missing a section.
Sometimes that bridge is easy to build, and all you need is to reposition the offer, tighten the messaging, or show how the dots connect. Other times, the bridge requires more heavy lifting.
- You have to warm people up.
- You have to educate.
- You have to shift the narrative.
- You have to earn the right to talk about a new thing.
And occasionally you realize that the thing you made is not for this audience. It’s for the next one, or a smaller one, or a future version of the one you have, or even a future version of you. Misalignment is always pointing somewhere. The trick is figuring out whether it’s pointing you to:
- A clearer message
- A better container
- A different moment
- Or a different group of people entirely
Unfortunately, we often stuff that “failure” away and never want to look at it again, but it’s only in launching, and then looking at the wreckage that you can find your bearings.
Alignment is finding the path of least resistance, and misalignment helps you discover where the resistance lives. If you pay attention long enough, misalignment will show you where your next breakthrough is hiding.
The more consistently you deliver things your audience likes, the more often they’ll buy from you, and the faster they’ll make those decisions.
We talk a lot about:
- What’s working right now
- Which ads are hot
- What trend is surging
- Which platform has the best visibility this quarter
We talk much less about how long we’re actually giving something to work and how long we’re willing to keep showing up for an idea, a series, or a strategy before we declare it a failure
Humans default to “this needs to make money now,” but the most valuable thing success has given me over the years isn’t a bigger income.
It’s the slack to do weirder, more esoteric projects, experiment longer, and to let things have a longer time horizon to work before I walk away. The longer you give something to work out, the more likely it is to pay off. No guarantees, but the odds get better with time and iteration.
One of the most important things I’ve learned over the last couple of years is that of you stick with something long enough and keep talking about it in different ways, your effort compounds into success.
Now, I won’t commit to anything I can’t talk about for at least 1-2 years, and that I don’t have the time to grow for that long without seeing the benefit.
If you’ve built, or are building, an audience, here’s what I’d suggest reframing: