AP 0938: I Can’t Find an Audience for My Passion; How Do I Move On?

AskPat 938 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey what's up everybody, Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 938 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.

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We have a question coming in today from David, but before we get to that—no, nothing. Let's just go. Here we go.

David: Hey Pat, David from Temecula, California. I have a question for you. When you have done keyword research on the passion or idea that you have that you want to move forward into making either a blog, a course, or some sort of product out of, and the idea itself doesn't seem to have—or provide enough of—the audience that you need to move forward with . . . But the idea itself keeps coming back, sticking in your mind, and you can't really get past it—my question really is: How do you move past it?

What ideas do you have, maybe even to possibly take that same idea, and maybe split it into other ideas, maybe combining it with something else? But my main concern is truly finding out why I can't move past this idea that I have. Every time I go to try to do research on it, to move forward with making a product, or course, or trying to get subscribers, or a blog, I still find myself struggling to find an audience for that. But, I still can't seem to move past the idea, because it's such a passion of mine that I feel like I can't find the audience that's out there for me, and I was wondering what your thoughts were on that, and any ideas you have will be great, thanks.

Pat Flynn: Hey David, thank you so much for the question. I really appreciate it. You know, you mentioned a few things there like keyword research. I want to talk about keyword research really quick. It's not the only thing that you should use to validate your business idea before you move forward with it. I wanted to get that out of the way.

A lot of people start with keyword research. They see there isn't a large search volume, and then they kind of ditch it and move onto something else, and it just saddens me because keyword research—yes, it used to be like the only thing you would look at, but that is not how it goes these days. It should be one of potentially many factors, and priority wise, it's not the top one in most cases, for what would make a very successful long-term business these days. Just because people aren't searching for a particular term that you type in doesn't mean people aren't looking, or need what it is that you have to potentially offer.

Now, I would definitely recommend, David, that you go through my book Will It Fly? to find, potentially, where these pockets of people exist who could potentially end up using what it is that you want to create. Again, I don't know exactly what that is, but what I do know is that you have this passion for it so much that you keep coming back to it, and in my eyes that means that no matter what the research says, that you should just at least move forward with it in some way, shape, or form, to get it to a point where you can actually have other people use it. Whether that's a prototype of it, whether that's seeing drawings of it, it doesn't matter. What I want to happen is conversations between you and people who this is made for, so that you can get from the voice of the potential customer, a yes, or a no, or this is great, or it's not how it should be, or what should you do differently.

I feel like all that's happening right now is just guessing, right? And wondering, and the what-ifs, right? There's no better way to know and get rid of those what-ifs than to just go out there, and just put it out there and make it happen, right? So, you might need to create some sort of minimum viable product, or spend time doing that, or validating it, and finding that audience. And I feel like you just haven't done any sort of conversation. It doesn't matter how big the audience is yet. What matters is you find people, and a lot of times when you find even just one or two people, they will help lead you to that watering hole where everybody else it.

And so, there are some tools out there that you can use like SimilarWeb.com, I think it is, or something similar to that. Is it SimilarWeb? Let me just double check, but SimilarWeb.com, I think it is. Somebody was telling me about this site yesterday, and it's really cool because you can put, I think it was—was it Clay Hebert, actually from CrowdfundingHacks.com? He told me about this site, and if you find one person, you analyze, you know, an app that they use, or a website that they go to, you're likely to find similar websites where people just like them go to. And you can use SimilarWeb.com to discover that, and that way you might not find that grand place where people exist just from those conversations, but through a little bit of research using some of these smart tools like this, you can then, potentially, find that.

So, these conversations, really important. Using tools like SimilarWeb to kind of help you discover “Okay well, what else, or where else might these people go?” That's really important too, but I think it's just really important to continue to move forward, and to not let yourself psych yourself out of both directions, meaning, “Oh, I don't have a big enough audience. I'm not going to do it,” versus, “Oh well, I just am not sure if this is going to work or not. I'm not going to do it,” and then on the other side, “I'm going to do it, but I'm not sure if it's going to work.” Just do it, okay? Get something in there, find people, find out where else they go, have a conversation, and put something in their hands, or in their head that they can comment on—you can take it from there. I think those conversations are going to be what's either going to tell you yes or no, and will help you let go if you need to, or push forward if you need to.

So, there you go. David, thank you so much for the question. I appreciate you, and I want to wish you all the best of luck. I also want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. So, you'll hear from my assistant in the next couple weeks, and we'll hook you up with that free of charge. And for those of you listening, if you have a question that you would like potentially featured here on the show as well, just head on over to AskPat.com, and you can ask right there on that page.

Thank so much, I appreciate you, and here's a quote to finish out the day, by Anais Nin. “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.” And David I challenge you to expand your life by having courage, and to everybody else out there, I challenge you to do the same.

Thanks, all the best, and I'll see you in the next episode. Bye.