I had a lovely mom contact me this week with the start of a delightful business idea that she’s super excited about… the problem is that I can see, using my 13 years of pinpointing niches, that her business idea is going to be a very tough sell—most likely resulting in no clients and burnout. Here’s the thing, she’s trying to sell joy… but joy is a hard sell when people care about meeting their basic needs.
This business idea is straight up not persuasive enough.
So what’s wrong with her idea?
This mom isn’t my client, and I don’t want to call her out, plus it might be more useful to you, the reader, for me to generalize the issue a bit. I’ll start with what she’s doing right. She’s using a skill she currently has and that she’s passionate about.
The problem is that she has also picked a business that is much harder to launch because it goes after people’s wants and not their needs. What I mean by this is it’s a pleasure sell. It leans into elevating life to the next level via pleasure.
Now I love me some pleasure and work to instill more of this in all of my clients’ lives, BUT for a new business it’s easier to lean into your ideal client’s biggest pain point.
It’s the difference between me calling the plumber and agreeing on an emergency fee because my pipe has burst, it’s flooding my home, and I can’t be without water vs. a plumber suggesting I might want to upgrade my pipes to prevent a future issue 1-2 years down the road.
Pleasure does sell. (Vacations are a good example of this.) However, solving people’s unbearable problems are the easiest way to launch a new business and make money.
If you want to have a successful business, the easiest and fastest way to launch with success is to lean into your audience’s biggest pain point that you can solve. From this place of solving their pain point, you can then move them into the joy they’ll experience once it’s solved.