Improve Your Business Idea (with guided workbooks)

1. Introduction: Get Clear on Your Business Idea: An idea isn't that difficult. But doing something with it, turning an idea that you have into an actual business, that's incredibly hard. This way, 92% of people who have a dream of starting something never actually take any actionable steps. And today, we're going to change that. My name's Art Harrison. I'm a former founder, I'm a current founder. And over the past 20 years, whether I was starting social networks in my 20s, working in the healthcare industry, or starting another software company in my late 30s, early 40s that grew to over $60 million in valuation. I have both experienced the ups and downs of trying to clarify ideas. I always struggle with it a little bit. It's hard to take an idea, one that maybe could apply to everybody and to make decisions to challenge yourself, to refine that idea down to something that you know is the right thing for right now. And that's what this course is all about. Throughout this course, you're going to walk through the same four workbooks that I go through every time I need to clarify one of my ideas. And I say every time because refining your idea is not a one time thing. It's incredibly important to do at the beginning to make sure that you have some focus, and some of it's going to be based on assumption. But over time, as you learn more, as you actually get your first customers, as you get feedback, and you have failures because you will have some failures and setbacks, just come back to this course. Come back to these workbooks and refine a little bit more. Once you have that type of clarity, the actions you need to take, what you need to build, how you need to position yourself becomes so much easier because you have a clear definition, a Northstar of what your idea is, what makes it special, who's struggling right now, and you have a simple way to say it. And that's what you're going to get out of this course to join me. Let's walk through these workbooks. Let's try to make it fun. Let's try to make it light. This isn't going to be an overbearing course. But by the end of it, you will have a one sentence pitch. You'll be able to tell people what it is you're doing, why you're doing it, and you will feel so much more confident and clear in what comes next. So let's get into it. Let's start talking about how to define the problem that you're solving, because the problem is the foundation of everything else you're doing. 2. Lesson 1: Define the Problem You’re Solving: Jump right into our first step, which is defining the problem. You know, if you wait till the end of this entire course before you start refining your own idea, you're going to have to come back. You're going to have to think about things. You're going to forget because chances are you're not even going to do the whole course in one sitting. So instead of doing that, I want you to actually pause the video and try to do your best job of answering all the questions and getting to the resolution of this particular module. And this is probably the most important one, because if you don't understand the problem you're solving, you don't have a business. And it's really easy to go too broad. Ask any entrepreneur, if you have talked to anybody who has succeeded and those who have failed, they'll tell you that a lot of times the best thing you can do is you can be more specific. You can go small, solve something really, really well, and then expand from there. That singular focus will make everything that you do easier. Every decision will become clearer. The ability to talk about your problem for other people to relate to it will all become so much better because you are willing to dig in just a little bit deeper. In order to solve a problem, you also have to understand what the goal of the people having that problem really is because people are way more likely to buy something that helps them achieve their goal than just something that solves a problem. In the workbook, throughout all the lessons, we're going to talk about the starting idea of people struggling to eat healthier. And throughout each of the lessons, we're going to help take that simple idea and refine it to something that is way more specific, way more focused. In order to do that, you have to think about why people want to eat healthier. And there's many reasons. People might want to eat healthier because they want to get into the best shape of their life. They might want to look great for their wedding or their ex's wedding, whatever it is that motivates you. Maybe they just want to live longer, be healthier, happier. Those are all reasons or goals that people have. Also recognize that no matter how great and unique you think your business idea is, there's probably 20 or 30 or 1,000 other ways to solve that problem. Goal is to get into great shape for a wedding. You could go to the gym. You could change your diet. You go on some fat diet, buy some home equipment, and start working out at home. There's an infinite number of ways to get into better shape. But that goal is still important to the person. And your job, ultimately, as you refine your pitch, as you refine the business idea you have, is to convince them that the biggest barrier to achieving that goal is the problem that you've identified, and the best way to solve that problem is with your product, your solution. That's how it all comes together. So in order to do that, I want you to start by just asking yourself with your idea, what is the underlying goal? What is it that people truly want to achieve? And how would their lives be better if they actually achieve that thing? I'll use myself as one more example just to make sure that you really understand how this works. You know, I'm making this course right now to help people refine their ideas. That's the problem that I ultimately came up with. That people struggle to take the ideas they have and to turn them into a pitch, something that they can speak confidently and clearly about. But that's not the goal. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, You know, my goal for today is to just have a better pitch. The goal is that people want independence, freedom. They want to have a better financial future. They want to work for themselves. That's the goal that I believe you probably have. That's why you're here watching this video. So that's what you need to do, as well. Write down what you believe, what you understand right now is the goal, the aspirations of the people who are having this problem. The next thing to do is to just go a little deeper. Now that we understand the goal that people have, we need to understand the barriers that are preventing them from achieving that goal. Are you talked about it a little bit. You know, using the healthy example, people want to be healthier, but they struggle to have the right amount of time. They have failed at all their past attempts of going to the gym or their diets. Those are the barriers. That's what you need to do now. Now it's about asking, what are the underlying problems that prevent people from achieving that goal. Maybe you end up exactly where you started. Maybe you had already done a little bit of this work, even subconsciously. But the real point here is to write down anywhere 1-3 different obstacles that people are facing. I'm not going to overtalk this one. I want you to just try it right now. Say it out loud, write it in your workbook, identify the problems, and I'll be back to talk through about what do we do once we actually have some of those problems identified. Okay, great. So you know the goal that people have. You've identified the things that are stopping them from achieving it. But now I want you to go a little bit deeper. This is actually my favorite part. This is when I get most excited when I'm doing this myself. Now it's time to use the five why. Ask yourself the simple question of why? Why does that matter? Why is it that they have that problem? Just ask yourself over and over again why to see if there's even more underlying fundamental problem that is preventing people. And you always want to keep the goal in mind. Using our example of people struggling to eat healthier, of believing that the obstacles or the barriers they face are their struggles with past diets or their inability to have the right amount of time, if you look at the workbook, there's some core questions in there. They don't have enough time to prepare nutritious meals. Well, why? Why don't they have enough time? Well, Because they work a lot. They have busy schedules. Oh, they are trying to advance in their career. Why do they want to advance in their career? Well, they're trying to make enough money to buy their own house. Whatever it is, you can just keep asking yourself why? And the more you do that, the more you're likely to uncover a fundamental problem that is preventing them. You know, a lot of businesses end up being so different than what they were originally started to become. The more you ask yourself why, the more you may uncover something that is very different than what you initially believed, and that's okay. You know, ask yourself why because at the end of the day, if your goal is to create a business, it has to be something that's not just for you, not just because you like the idea, but because it is fundamentally going to help someone. All businesses are solving a problem. They're making people's lives better. They're helping them achieve some goal. And that goal isn't always life changing, but it's still critical for you to understand what the most pressing problem is, and then to identify whether that's a problem that you personally, your idea, your skills are a match to solve. Oh, I want you to take the time out now if you haven't been doing it throughout the course. I really recommend you pause here and you go through this exercise, go back and do the other ones if you haven't done them yet. And then we're going to wrap up with the final step, which is just trying to put that into a little bit of language. Awesome. I'm so glad that you're actually working through this and hopefully you're seeing the value already in the way you think about your own problem. But let's try to actually write it down now. If you look at the workbook on the final page or the second last page, the goal is to write the final problem statement. And I give you the example here. I talk about where we started. People want to eat healthier. And we ended up with a specific problem statement. It's not the best statement in the world. It still has so many gaps, so many unknown, so much stuff to work on that we're going to do in the other modules. But we went from people want to eat healthier to people struggle to eat healthy because they don't have the time to prepare nutritious meals due to their demanding work schedules and their lack of simple meal planning solutions. Is already a far more specific problem statement. Yeah, it means that maybe I'm not appealing to teenagers that need to eat healthier to, you know, succeed on the wrestling team. I'm not talking about how senior citizens don't have the right budget or finances to be able to afford the healthiest, most nutritious ingredients. Those are problems. Those might be valid problems for new business ideas for myself or for someone else. But this problem statement for this fictional thing, I'm not starting a business about healthy eating. Is already far more defined. And that's your goal here. Take the time to just go back through what you've written down, the goals that you understand, the obstacles you've seen, your five is, what you dug any deeper into and try to write a simple statement that describes all of those things so that you can use that as we go forward in the next modules. That's it. You've got your problem identified. It may not be perfect. It may not be exactly what you had imagined as you started this course, but you've got a foundation. And what we're going to do in the next module is we're going to take that, and we're going to start exploring who has that problem. Take a break if you need to, but I want you to show up there ready to do the work again to go through and identify exactly who your audience is, who has the problem in a way that you can address. And who can you actually reach? Because those are all incredibly important aspects to be able to build a business that succeeds. 3. Lesson 2: Identify Your Target Audience: How it's time to open up the defining your audience workbook and really figure out who it is that's struggling with this problem that you just identified in our first lesson. This is the shortest of our workbooks, but that doesn't mean that it's the easiest exercise to go through. You know, identifying the audience can feel like you're limiting the potential reach of your problem, but you have to do this. You know, everyone experiences problems differently. You might have an idea of teaching financial literacy to people. But if those people are teenagers, if they're professionals in their, you know, early 20s, if they're people that have just had kids, if they're retirees or people that are about to retire, all of those people are going to have completely different needs when it comes to their financial literacy, the products that they're going to want to choose, what their motivations are, what the goal ultimately is. Just think about goals that we went through before. Senior citizens goal might be to maintain the nesting that they've been building for the past 40 years where someone in their 20s is just thinking about buying their first home. Someone in their 30s is thinking about putting a little money away for their kids to go to college. Audience is so important because it changes how you approach the solution, changes how you design it, how you market it, how you position it. It changes the features, the functionality, changes everything. So defining the audience is so important, and it's something that doesn't have to be that difficult. What you really have to do is just ask yourself, who feels this pain the most? That's the first step to do. We're going to whittle it down to people that you can actually reach, people that are a good fit for you. But the first step is just to say, who is this? And the way you know you're doing it wrong, the way you know that you haven't defined your audience yet, is when you just say people. That's the first red flag. If you just say, people who want to eat healthy, you haven't done any of the work to really identify the different types of people and potentially what their different needs are. So our goal here is to start with a broad list, to ask yourself, who struggles with this problem the most, who's actively searching for a solution to that problem, and who would benefit most if that problem was solved? Because ultimately you want to find the people who would be most likely to be your customer. And you may have to make some decisions as you go. The biggest audience might not be the right audience for you, but we're going to start by just listing the different groups. You'll see in the workbook that we came up with young professionals who are working long hours. They want to eat healthier. But there's also parents that want to create a healthier environment for their kids. There's also teens and college students who are eating poorly for the first time, maybe on a really low budget. Those are all different audiences that want to eat healthier. But we want to go through and list all of them, and then in our next step, we're going to identify the one who is our primary audience. So take a few minutes and just write down three to five. It doesn't matter, again, if they're perfect. Just try to make them specific, try to arrange them or scope them to a time in their life, to a role in their, you know, industry or within their company to an age. Try and find something that truly distinguishes them from the other group. There shouldn't be a ton of overlap. You should be able to identify distinct groups that all have this problem. Now that you've got your three groups, it's about refining it to the ones we can reach easiest. And I want to make sure that I'm crystal clear here because this is one of the areas that I hate, and I often get derailed when I'm trying to go through other people's courses or when I've hired consultants in the past. You're not trying to build a persona. This isn't a psychographic or demographic, thesis on these people. There is a point, and there is a time and place to do that, where you actually mam your ideal customer, where you describe every magazine they read, where they live, how they commute to work, and the podcast they listen to but you don't need that until you are already running and thriving as a business. When you're trying to scale it, that's when you really want to get that granular with your audience personas. Right now, we just want to pick one of the potential audiences and identify why we're choosing them. So the questions that we have in the course here are, where do these people hang out? That's, you know, a little important. But the reason we ask that question is to understand if you're also thinking of a solution that works the same way. You know, if the people aren't online and you're trying to build an app, well, then there probably is disparcy if that's the right word, between who that audience is and what you're going to do, and that may not make them the best fit. They shouldn't probably be your primary audience. You can also ask yourself how easy it is for you to reach these people. Do you have a connection? Are you of similar age or experiences? Do you have some credibility with that group? You know, I probably wouldn't be the best person to be building something for teenagers because of my meme knowledge right now. But if you can find a group that understands you that you can speak to that you can actually reach, then that makes it a really viable audience. So what you want to do in this stage is just ask yourself, who are these people? What is their makeup? What is unique about them? And which one should be my primary audience, and how am I planning on reaching them? This isn't a business strategy. It's not a marketing strategy right now, but just a little bit of justification. That's really the whole point of this is just for you to justify to yourself that the audience you chose is really one that you have a potential to reach, to engage, to build credibility with, and to ultimately sell your product to. So take the time, answer these next two questions. Who is the primary audience? And why is it that I can reach them? You may not be perfect here, and maybe your answer is that I can't right now, but that is also clarity. The clarity that you get from knowing that there isn't an audience that you can reach that well might be the clarity you need to figure out the next actions. Now that you have that audience, you're going to have to figure out how to build a better presence on Twitch, how to start your website or your app or how to build an audience in whatever way is right for the primary audience you ultimately select. Alright, I'm going to give you a moment. We'll pause it here, and then we'll talk about just putting this together into your one sentence pitch for your audience. Well done. I'm glad that you're staying with me that you're actually making progress here because this is what success looks like. If you're doing things, if you're taking steps, if you're thinking through the problems, not just of your audience, but your own problems, and you are on the path to actually succeeding. And this next step is one of my favorites. You'll see it in the other lessons coming up. I love formulas. I love taking a lot of the guesswork out of writing these sentences because remember, we're not aiming for perfection, and we're also not aiming for marketing speak. We're trying to create clarity for ourselves, for us to just be able to talk about it in human language. The formula here is simply my audience is the primary specific group you just selected, who struggle with the problem that we identified before because of the main reason that we identified probably when you went through the Y exercise. That's all you have to do here. You want to make sure that you aren't being too broad. You're not just saying my problem is that I help people eat healthier. You want to get more specific than just saying, I help busy people or busy professionals eat healthier because, yeah, you worked in a little bit of the audience, but you still weren't very specific. You want to be able to do something like we have in our best example, where we say, I help busy young professionals who struggle to eat healthy because they don't have the time to prepare nutritious meals. May not be the most glamorous statement, but already, if you are working along, if you're thinking about this example case we have, we started with simply, I want to help people eat healthier. And now we've identified that they are young professionals, that they're struggling to do it because they don't have time to prepare nutritious meals. We already have the foundation of a real business there. Okay, that's probably what we're going to solve them. We're going to help these types of people create nutritious meals. I don't know how we're going to do it yet. We'll find out in the next lesson, but that's your goal. So take a few minutes, write down your one sentence audience statement. Don't overdo it. Don't try to be clever. Don't try to put extra spin on it or talk about benefits or, you know, anything else. Right now, you're just trying to identify who that audience is and to tie it back into the problem and the goal that we identified earlier on. And that's it. We now have a goal. We have a problem. We have an audience, and you can go through and refine it a little bit more. You know, in each one of these lessons, there's a final adjustment section. You can use the questions there, you know, does this audience statement clearly define a specific group? Can you easily find and reach this audience? Would someone experiencing this problem immediately recognize themselves in your statement? Use those to challenge yourself. This is part of the fun of creating a business. You have to become your own worst enemy. You have to become your own critic. You have to constantly ask yourself, have I refined this enough? Is there a little bit more clarity that I can bring to it? And if not, great. If you can't right now, that is absolutely okay. But just ask yourself the question, be willing to say, You know what? I haven't done enough. I can do more. I can make this a little bit better. But don't get hung up on it. You know, progress needs to keep happening. You're not going to get it perfect. I'm going to say it over and over again in this course. But ultimately, just try to get a little bit better each time you do this, and you will be amazed at the results that it brings you. Okay, next up, we're going to move on to the solution. This is your actual business. You know, now we have identified what we're going to solve, but we have to talk about how to solve it, what it is about your thing that's unique and a few tips and traps along the way. So I'll see you there. If you haven't done the work yet, do it now. Yeah, you need to have this clarity to be able to go through the solution section in the best possible way. So if you haven't back through the other lessons, make sure you have your individual statements for the problem and for your audience, and I'll see you over in the solutions module. 4. Lesson 3: Refine Your Solution & Unique Value: You're halfway done. You're halfway through having that clarity, the confidence to be able to state your solution, your idea with so much more detail than ever before. So the next step is to open up your solutions workbook. It's titled Clarifying Your Solution. And we're going to walk through the steps to make sure that you really understand what it is you're going to provide these people, this audience that you've identified, how you're going to help them solve that problem, to overcome the obstacles and ultimately achieve that goal that they had. This is the business building part of this workshop, where you really understand what it is you're building. The first step is why I told you to do the work before you got here is to simply restate what that problem is and who the audience is. You know, using our example that I keep going through our eat healthier example, we know that the problem is that people struggle to eat healthy because they just don't have time to prepare nutritious meals. We know that the audience is young professionals working long hours that want to maintain a healthy lifestyle. There's no extra work to do that. We covered that in the previous lessons, but it's really important when you're doing work like this to keep yourself centered, to make sure you don't fall back on your broad idea that you started with, that you don't start changing things as you go. So take a moment, write it down. I'm not going to do a big pause here because you should know this. If you don't just go back through Lesson one and Lesson two, make sure that you have statements for each of those things. And then let's move on to defining the transformation because the transformation is what people are willing to pay for. This is where you need to really think about the before and after statement of your particular. Use myself again, just so that you can see that I'm going through this regularly when it comes to the products I build, like this course or my overall business. Before you took this course, the problem was that you had an idea, but you just didn't know how to talk about it clearly. You were maybe bouncing around. You were unsure of whether you should build an app or a website, whether you should put your time in trying to raise money or talk to people or cold call, whatever it was. But after this course, you will have clarity on what your idea really means, how it's going to become a business and how it's going to impact people's lives. And as a result, you know exactly what your next few steps are. You know what you should or shouldn't do, where to put your time, your energy to validate your idea, to go out and find your first customers or to build your prototype. That's the before and after transformation. That's why you'd be willing to give me the time you've been giving me. And I want you to do the same for yourself. You know, you can use the example here, which is before people took or bought our eat healthy product, they were relying on takeout. They were feeling sluggish and they didn't have any time to prepare healthy meals. But after we build, what you're going to find out is maybe a meal kit, they have healthy, easy to prepare meals that fit into their schedule. You need to be able to identify that transformation. It's going to be so important for your future pitches, for your roadmap, for all of the work you do to know that every aspect of your business should be helping people make that transformation and see that final result. So take the time now to write your before and after statement. Don't aim for perfection. Don't worry if it's still a little vague in some places because like every other time, we're going to keep refining it. Okay, now it's time for you to talk about the thing that maybe has you excited. The thing that brought you to this course, the thing that is kind of eating at you, making you want to take the leap and the risk to actually bring your idea to life. It's describing how your solution works. And the goal here is to keep it simple. Remember, you're not creating marketing material right now. You're not trying to convince someone that yours is better than anybody else's. All that you really want to do is figure out the simplest way to solve that problem and to create that transformation that you just described. You know, what format does it take? Is it an app? Is it a product, a service a solution? How is your audience going to engage with it? Is it knowledge? Is it a physical product? Is it coaching, you know, whatever it may be? Just think about what it is that you are going to create that's going to create that transformation for them, that's going to solve their problem. You know, for me, I decided that I was going to create a dead simple course that I wanted to create something that wasn't just theoretical, that was hands on. That's why I decided that I was going to create a series of four workbooks and video lessons that would help someone work through taking a rough idea, a broad idea, and to get it to the point where they could talk about it easily and confidently. In our examples in our workbook, we decided that it was going to be a meal delivery service that provides prepared ingredients and quick recipes tailored for busy professionals. You know, that's not anything groundbreaking. It doesn't describe how it's different than any other meal kits that are on the market right now, and that is absolutely okay. What you're trying to do right now is to just describe a product or a solution. And the question to ask yourself is just if someone were to buy this, if I refined it a little bit more and knew what made it unique, would it help people achieve that transformation, overcome the obstacles that they were previously facing, and would they ultimately achieve that goal? And if your simple statement does that, then you were golden. You've got exactly what you need. So take some time, write it down and join me back for the fourth part of this, where we identify the unique aspects. That's kind of the special sauce. What are you going to bring to the table? Okay, so you have the simple description of your solution. Now it's time to talk about what it is that's going to be different about yours. You know, the reality is that there is going to be other solutions for every single problem that exists. There's going to be competitors, whether they're already there, whether someone sees your success and tries to copy you. So what you need to figure out is what is it about yours that's going to be different? And this usually isn't price. It's usually not packaging. It might be if that is truly the thing that you can do better than anyone else. If you have the best distribution network, if you have, you know, former Apple designers that are on board, maybe that is the thing that's going to differentiate you. But a lot of times it's something else. It's something that is unique to your experience. It's something that hasn't existed before. Whatever it is for you, you have to figure out what makes it unique. In our healthy example, you know, just reading off the workbook, the one that you should have access to, as well, what makes that fictional idea different is that unlike traditional meal kits, that service is going to provide 15 minute recipes with local ingredients and minimal prep time specifically designed for professionals with demanding schedules. You know, there's a lot packed into that. But in that simple statement, we identify what it is. It's obviously a milk kit. We discussed that in the previous section. It's focused on these 15 minute recipes. There's other milk kits out there. Some of them have 45 minutes, some of them have more detailed instructions or they're teaching you how to the a gourmet chef. But no, this one's 15 minute meals. It's local ingredients, and that is something that we added in because we understood the audience, these young professionals who have real desire to support their local community to be a little bit more farm to table focused. So we're focused on local ingredients, and the goal is to make sure there is minimum prep time, so they can just whip it together and have their meal to start aiming towards their goal of a happier, healthier life in less than 15 minutes. That's the type of statement that you're aiming for, as well. So it's up to you, you know, there's no right way to do it, but just try. Write it a few times. Refine it. Ask yourself, is that word really needed? Is that really different or is that just something that is nice to have? Is the audience gonna think as different? I think that is the last little bit before I pause that you should think about. A lot of times the things that we think are different are things that are unique to us. What's different about my software is that it was written so eloquently. That's not really important to the end user. The end user wants to know that it works. They want to know that it was more cost effective, that it was faster. How you built it, the love and care you put into it, probably isn't that big of a differentiator. If it is for you, fine, try it out. But my honest advice to you is to think about what's different for the audience, the person experiencing it, not how you built it differently, because that is not always something that translates to the people who are ultimately going to pay you for their different experience. Hey, pause here, write down what it is that makes your thing different, and then we finally get to bring it together with another one of my favorite formulas. Okay, we're really cooking here. You are almost done all the fundamental work. You know, the next module, the last lesson is bringing it all together to that final statement. But before we do that, we need to have a statement about our solution. But even this statement does need to incorporate pieces from the other lessons that we've already worked on. So, if you have a look in the workbook at our next step, which is the final solution statement, you'll see another one of my favorite formulas here. This time we have I help audience. You know who they are. You've already defined them. Solve a problem buy and this is your solution, which is different because of that unique differentiator. You get to bring all of those elements together. If we look at what we have from our healthy example, I help busy professionals eat healthier by providing ready to cook meal kits that take less than 15 minutes, which is different because we use locally sourced ingredients and AI generated meal plans. What I want you to notice here is that I added in something that wasn't identified earlier on. You know, I went through this pretending that I was the fictional founder of this eat healthier business, and I realized as I was walking through this process that if I need to find a way to reduce their time, to make it unique to them and their personal schedules, their personal preferences, that AI might be a real differentiator. To be able to customize the plans, not just having two or three options, but to truly customize it to them would be a differentiator. So I added that into my final solution statement, and kind of thinking you need to do here, because you've identified little pieces before, if there's an easier way to say it, incorporate that. Try it out, experiment and see what you come up with. You know, this is the final step before we bring it together. And don't worry, we're going to refine what we do bring together, but really put in the effort to make sure that you've got everything right and to challenge even the things you felt set on before. Now that you have your solution identified, do you have the right audience? Do you have the right problem, the right goal? If not, just go back and refine those. It's okay. And if you do, then just write it out, make sure that you feel pretty good about it, and we'll move forward into the final lesson. Alright, take some time. I'll wrap up, but take some time to write it before we go on. Alright, you did it. You've got all three of your statements. You have your problem statement, you have your audience statement, and now you have your solution statement. Just like you did before, take a look at the final page with your final adjustments. You know, there's some questions you can ask yourself. Is it clear? Is it compelling? Are you truly different? If you answer no to any of those questions, then you should go back and do the work a little bit more. Spend a little bit more time. You know, you might be rushing just to move on to the next lesson. But remember, this isn't for me. This is for you. I want you to succeed. I want you to do the best job, and I want you to watch this entire course, but I only want you to do it if you're getting value from it. So if you don't feel like you've really hit the right mark, if you don't have the right answers for any of those questions yet, then go back and just try them a little bit more because we're going to move on to the final statement, but you want to feel at least pretty good about what you have in order to ensure that that final step is as good as it can possibly be for right now, for the stage you're at. Alright, I will see you at our last one, which is putting together our one sentence pitch that brings clarity to your idea. 5. Lesson 4: Craft a Powerful One Sentence Pitch: You excited? I'm excited. I'm excited because I can't wait to see what your pitches are. That's what the final assignment is going to be. Once you have the absolute final version of your pitch, I want you to share it. And I don't just want you to share your pitch, but if you have any other information, if you have a website, if you have a product page or anything else, share that as well, because who knows? Maybe we are your audience. Maybe other students, maybe I am your first potential customer. So share your pitch, get us excited about it, and maybe you'll even not just have clarity, but you'll have the first lead that leads to the first customer. That's the most exciting part of starting a business is actually having people that are interested that see themselves in your pitch. And want to know more. And we get started in this lesson with another formula. But it's actually not a new one. All you need to do to get started is to restate the statement that you came up with in the last lesson. That statement already has your audience, your problems, your solution and your differentiator. So if you haven't done it yet, I don't know why you wouldn't it down, go back and learn how to do it in the previous lesson, and then make sure that you add it to your workbook here. I'll set the foundation for the refinement we're going to do to take that, which is maybe a little bloated right now, maybe a little bit more complicated, maybe still too vague and to turn it into something that you can go out and share with the world. Pause, and let's get that down, and then let's move on to the next step, which is improving the clarity and simplicity. Okay, simplicity cannot be overrated. You if a 10-year-old can't understand your pitch. If people don't see themselves in it, then you probably aren't as clear or as simple as you could possibly be. So this is the time to take what you just wrote on the previous page, that statement that you have that covers everything and you just ask yourself if there is a simpler way of saying it. We're not aiming for a step backwards. We don't want to end up with a vague statement like I help people with nutrition by giving them food. That's a step backwards. That is not helping you have something that is specific, that is simple, that is clear. Instead, what you want to do is get to something like we have in our example here, which is I help busy professionals eat healthier by providing them 15 minute meal kits with pre measured local ingredients and AI powered advice. It's still not perfect. It's still not the final statement that we're aiming for, but we simplify it a little bit from what we had before, and we got something that is getting really, really close to defining this business, this idea that we have. Really, what you want to do is you just want to ask yourself, as I said, can a 10-year-old understand it? Does your target audience immediately recognize themselves and their struggle in that statement? And probably most importantly, can I say it in a single breath? I know that in the example I have in the workbook. I can't really say that in a single breath. I'm going to try right now for you, just so you can hear it. And I highly recommend that as you write these down, you say them out loud because if this is your business, if this is your idea, you're going to say it more times than you would ever imagine. So if I look at the statement we have here, see how I do. I help busy young professionals eat healthier by providing 15 minute meal kits with pre measured local ingredients and AI powered advice. You can hear that I was struggling just a little bit to get it out, but that's okay. You know, as I've said countless times throughout this course, it's not about perfection. You know, I could try to refine that, and I will in the next step. But even if that one's a little bit too long, if it still brings me more clarity and more direction, then that's good enough from now. You're not going to have anything perfect. Your website is not going to be the way you want it. Your product in its first version, is not going to have every feature and function you had always dreamed about, and that's okay. If you get hung up on perfection, you'll never make progress. So just try to write something that is clearer that your 10-year-old self or your 10-year-old niece or nephew will understand. And let's see where you get. Now you've got that. Now it's about emphasizing the benefit. You know, a thing that a lot of people get away from as they go through these steps is talking about how someone is going to benefit from all of this solution. You get so focused on the words, the audience, the problem, blah, blah, blah, that you don't help them see the life that they ultimately want in your statement. So you get to ask yourself, you know, how is my solution making their life better? We kind of haven't been through that. You should know the answer to that. Maybe you don't have the words yet, but you should already know because you've done the work. That's how all this stuff adds together. You end up with a final statement, and that's great. But it's the underlying work that actually helps you move forward because when you have other questions along the way, you realize you've actually answered them. You have them written down in these documents. So the question is asked, how does my solution make my audience life better? And what is the core benefit they receive from my solution, from my product? So, it's our second last one here, but looking at our eat healthy example, one that we literally started with just, I help people that struggle to eat healthy or I give people food to eat healthier. We refine it down, do I help young professionals enjoy healthier, locally sourced meals with custom ready to cook meal kits that take less than 15 minutes to prepare? The benefit is that they are going to enjoy healthier locally sourced food or meals. And the other benefit is that it's going to take them less than 15 minutes to prepare. And all of that is seen in that single statement. So that's your goal here is to really try to make sure that whatever you've written, whatever you have in the previous step, is that it is speaking to the benefits. You know, is it going to save them time or money? Is it going to help them achieve that goal they have? Make sure that you write a version of it may not be that different than what you already had, but just try to make sure that the benefit shines through so that people don't just hear about a product, but they hear about a solution to the things that have been ailing them. Alright, I'll give you a moment to do that, and then we'll be back to really do our final refinement to build the final statement for your idea. Okay, this is it. This is the final moment. And if you're working alongside me, you might notice that in the workbook, I don't even have an example here. We're done with our eat healthy example, the fictional business. At this point, I don't want you to think about anything else. I don't want you to be clouded with all of the random ideas I have with the way that I define this course, my business, by pretend eat healthy meal kit service. I want you to really think about your solution, what it is you're going to do for people. It's time to polish it to the point that you feel excited to share that with other people. I want you to really think about every word. I want you to think about what you could cut out. If you cut out the front end, the middle, the end, would people understand it just as well? Would they still see how it's going to transform their life, how they're going to move from that before to their after experience? You know, that's the goal here is to get it to the point where you're not saying anything unnecessary. You want to write down the best possible pitch that you have that you can use going forward to tell other people. And as I said at the beginning of this force, it's just as important to have this so that you can question every other decision you make. This is a statement that you should have on your wall, have it posted as a sticky note on your laptop that you will remember every time you're thinking about going down a new path, about building something new, about bringing someone on board, whatever it is you're doing, this statement is something you can use as a gut check. Does this decision, does this thing I'm thinking of doing, does it support that statement? If it doesn't, then it's probably not the right thing. And that is the true value of having this statement. So, give it a try. See if you can get it under 20 words, see if you can clearly state the who, the what, the why and see if it sparks curiosity or interest. And if people would genuinely want to learn more. If they would, then you're probably on to the right thing. Okay, you did it. You've got your one sentence pitch. That's all that it takes. And again, it may not be perfect. It may not be everything that you've dreamed of. It may not sound as good as Nike's slogan or Coca Cola's, but that's okay. They didn't start with the perfect pitch. They started with something. And that's what you have now. You have something tangible, something that you feel a little bit better on and something that hopefully you can justify more because you've done the back end work. You actually have reasons behind who your audience is, what your solution is, what problem you're solving, and what the goal of your audience ultimately is. And that is the type of motivation, the type of foundation you need to move forward. So go through the final adjustments, make sure that you question yourself. If there's a better way to do it, if there's a word or two to change that would bring clarity. Great. Maybe it's time to just share it with a few people. You know, the assignment that we'll do in the final lesson is for you to share it with me, but it's also worth just sharing with someone that you trust, your family, your friends, seeing what their feedback is, seeing if you get a different response now than whatever you would have gotten before when you said, I have an idea of building something, but I don't really know what it is or why it's a business or how it's really going to be different? See if you get more interest, more intrigue now. I think you will. And I can't wait to see your pitches in our last, you know, class lesson. 6. Wrap Up: Next Steps to Bring Your Idea to Life: Hey, you've done the work. You've walked through each of the lessons. You've identified the problem and the goal that underlies it. You've figured out who your primary audience is and how you might be able to reach them. Why they're a good audience for you, Your solution, how is different? And hopefully now you have a simple 20 or less word pitch that you can use to go out and talk about your idea with so much more clarity than you had before you started this course. You know, I wanted to keep it as simple as possible. That was my thesis. That was my differentiator for this course. I didn't want to make it bloated. I didn't want to have you do a bunch of quizzes and exercises. So the final step is just to publish your final pitch statement. You know, share it with the world. What I recommend, and I'll give you a template is to just share your pitch, share a little information about yourself. And if you have a website, if you have a social media account, do you have anywhere that other people can go and learn about your idea. That in there as well. A lot of people are going to read it just for inspiration. They just want to see how other people write their pitches, what the outcome of this course is for other aspiring entrepreneurs. But if you have an audience, if there are people reading your pitch anyway, why not give them somewhere to go to learn more? So I want you to take a few moments, open up a document, write your pitch out. If you need to refine it a little bit, go back in the course, take a few of the lessons again, make sure that you have something that you're confident and comfortable sharing, and then put out those other details in there, and we'll all take a look. You know, not everybody's going to look at everything, but I know that I'm going to try and look at every single one of them. And if you're there, if you have an account I can follow, if there's a website I can check out, I will be there, and I will try to give you feedback if there's a way to do so. You want to learn more about ideas of working for yourself, of taking the raw thoughts, the dreams you have, and turning them into something really. You can find not only my pitch in the assignment section, but you can follow me on YouTube. Art Harrison official. You can go to my website, artharrisonoficial.com, and you can look for more forces. This is what I'm going to be doing every day, every week. I'm going to be thinking about the struggles that I am currently having as a current founder, and entrepreneur, ones that I've been through before. Try to document all of them. And every time I come across one that I actually need to solve, I'm going to build something just like this course that works both for me and for you. So I would love to have you on my newsletter as a subscriber. I'd love to just have you join the community of fellow entrepreneurs, and I can't wait to see what we all build together. I know we can be successful. I've done it before, and I know that all that it takes is finding ways to get over the barriers that we encounter, to keep making progress, to avoid perfection, to have a little bit of fun along the way. And ultimately, if you can do that and stick with it, success is there to be had. There's no magic silver bullet. It's all about just waking up every day and trying. And that's what I'm going to keep doing, and I hope you do it along with me, and I can't wait to see where we both end up.