Failing is an essential part of entrepreneurship. In fact, some of the most valuable lessons you’ll ever learn in business will come when things don’t go your way. Still, we want to avoid the wrong path as much as possible. That’s why having a map to guide you on your journey is vital!
In this episode, I share a powerful framework to set you up for success. Listen in because this exercise will help you understand your niche and move in the right direction!
So, how do you navigate your way to the top of your online space? The simplest way is to start with a market map. Today’s session will walk you through this step-by-step process.
You’ll uncover the best places to reach your audience, key players in your niche, products people are paying for, and your unique opportunity in the space. No matter what level you’re at in business, this process is a game-changer!
Tune in, and don’t forget to access our free resources to help you create your market map at SmartPassiveIncome.com/getset!
You’ll Learn
- How to use failure to grow and build confidence in business
- Why you have to create a market map to know where you’re going
- The importance of niching down to build your audience
- Finding the spaces where your ideal followers congregate
- How to identify the key players in your niche
- Understanding your market and the products that sell
- How to find your unique position and opportunity in your niche
Resources
- Access our free resources to help you create your market map at SmartPassiveIncome.com/getset
- Enroll in our Smart From Scratch course to start building your business
- Subscribe to Unstuck—my weekly newsletter on what’s working in business right now, delivered free, straight to your inbox
- Connect with Pat on Twitter and Instagram
SPI 855: A Framework to Save you From Failing at Business
Pat Flynn: Failing is a part of doing business. I know we’re conditioned to believe failure is bad, but in fact, in entrepreneurship and in business, it is a great thing. It helps you learn faster. It helps you get back up and learn confidence. It takes failure. But the truth is failing is not a great feeling, right?
We don’t want to try and fail. We want to get up, do things and welcome a failure when it happens, but we don’t want to try for failure. We want to try to avoid failure. And today I’m going to give you a framework to save you from failing at business. And if you are just starting out, this is going to be the number one most helpful exercise that you can do.
I’m going to walk you through it step by step. We’re going to do it together. You’re welcome to actually create a spreadsheet as we go along, or you can just kind of hear me talk about it and build one as we go. But if you already have a business, this will also be helpful because a lot of times, if you’ve already started in business, maybe you didn’t start the right way or in the right direction, maybe you accidentally or surprisingly fell into something without doing the research behind it before getting into it, in which case you might not be setting yourself up for complete success because you haven’t had yet an overall picture of the market that you’re in.
And that’s exactly what we’re going to do today, help you find that market map. If you’re traveling anywhere, what do you want beforehand so you know which direction to go. So you don’t fall into traps. So you make sure you go the right way. You need a map. And so we’re going to build a market map together for your niche. Before we get into this, let’s talk about the niche thing in the first place.
If you are starting from scratch and you’re like, I want to build a business for everybody. That is wrong. Just straight up, you will not succeed by trying to build a business for everybody. And I am speaking from experience myself, trying to please everybody, trying to create something that casts a wide net that has a lot of potential customers.
Things are so saturated these days that if you go wide, you’re going nowhere. If you try to help everybody, you’re going to help nobody. So I just wanted to get that out of the way. As I always say, the riches are in the niches. And I know it’s pronounced niches, but let me keep the rhyme. Thank you. Okay.
Let’s build your market map again. If you’re just starting out. Awesome. If you have started already, then some of this will be easier for you, but there’s going to be a lot of holes that you’re going to want to fill as well.
To help you organize this as we build it together, we actually have something for you. You could actually go and get a sheet. Or an Excel file that we have. It’s not technically Excel, but it’s a Google Sheet that you’re welcome to go and get at the smart entrepreneur toolbox or set. We want you to get set the smart entrepreneur toolbox. There you’ll get access to a number of different assets that we have for you for free.
And ranging from some mini courses and such, as well as some assets like this, the market map exercise. You’ll find that there. All you have to do is go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/getset, and you’ll be able to get set, right? Smart entrepreneur tool toolbox. See what we did there? We like to have fun and have pun.
Anyway, the market map, let’s talk about it. And you’re welcome to download that now. You could press pause, SmartPassiveIncome.com/getset. Or you can listen to this and then go and get that. I’ll remind you about the link again at the end, but that is free. So in this spreadsheet, you will see a number of columns.
The first column is going to be the first of four P’s that we’re going to come up with or find. All of these P’s relate to the niche that you’ve selected, and if you haven’t done that yet, then you’re not ready for this work. You need to pick a niche first, and this is what’s going to help you understand whether or not it’s worth moving forward or not, this exercise.
So you need to pick one, and if you need some help, if you have a thousand ideas and you need to narrow it down, Great. We can help you if you have zero ideas and you need to find one. Great. We can help you where just go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/smart cause that’ll take you to Smart From Scratch, which is a course that we have again, completely free for you to help you pick a niche that is related to something that you’re interested in versus just like picking one because yeah, you could potentially make money in this niche.
Anytime I’ve seen anybody choose a niche because it is potentially going to make them money before they decide that it is actually in alignment with who they are, what they want to do, their strengths, extras et cetera. It’s always failed. So we want you to choose a niche that aligns with who you are and what you have to offer and we’ll help you do that.
SmartPassiveIncome.com/smart. So that’ll take you there and walk you through the process. So once you nail that niche, great, you’ve nailed that niche. Now it’s time to dig that ditch or do some research, right? Nail that niche, dig that ditch. That doesn’t work as well, but I’m going to keep that in here anyway, because I’m just having a good time sharing this information with you.
Okay. Your market map, it’s going to be divided into a number of columns. The first column, the left most column is the first of four P’s that we’re going to come up with and find the first P are places. So if you’re writing this down and doing this with me, it’s places. And now you’re going to spend some time and you might only need 15 to 20 minutes to do some search.
You might already know some of these. I would recommend if you have some in mind already, put more in there, go do some more research and find some more. Ask around what are the places? Because the places are where this target audience, where this target market congregates. Where do they go to? What websites do they visit?
What events online and offline do they go to? What communities exist? Where do these people spend their time? I want to list all those things. Now while we’re here, I’m going to share with you some techniques that you’re able to use to do this research. So here’s a, here’s a very, very here’s one that you might not know about.
It’s called Google. So if you Google your niche and insert the word website for blank, you know, blank being your niche or communities for blank where do I find blank, whatever search you need to do to find a, where these people exist, events for blank. Live events for blank. Virtual events for blank. Go to Reddit.
Look up blank. And then see which communities and subreddits exist. Put all of those down. Include the URL so you can go to them. And just this one exercise alone will give you a lay of the land all the places that your target audience goes to. Where they might have interest. Where they spend time. Where, potentially, they might spend their money.
But we’re going to get to that a little bit later. Right. This is really important. This is going to give you an opportunity to go to those places later when you start to dig in a little bit deeper with. What kinds of things are popular in these places? What kinds of discussions are people having there?
What are the biggest problems and struggles that seem to show up? These are the kinds of things you can find once you nail down where these people exist. Because if you can’t find these people, you can’t help these people. So that’s places I would aim to write down at least 20. That might seem like a lot, but I find, and I’ve noticed this about my students too, who struggle at the beginning of this, sometimes it just takes a couple resources to start to just unlock a load of resources, right?
You might even get lucky and find you know, sometimes when we do this. We have bloggers, and people on Reddit, and other communities, and even on social media, people who literally list a lot of these places. I mean, they’re doing the collating for us, which is awesome. So, you might get lucky and find those.
Find 20 places that your target audience exists. It could be places that are, you know, very primary and they show up there all the time kind of thing, or it could be something that they kind of meander into every once in a while. You don’t have to think too hard about this. Just include those places because you’ll want to be able to utilize this later.
Second column, the second column are the people. Now, some of these people may overlap, right? Because people are congregating at these websites, for example, that you find, or communities, well, there might be community leaders or owners of those websites whose names you’ll wanna include on this list as well.
This is more important to have the who, the person, the personality, the influencer, the leader in this space. Well, who are the authors? Who served this audience? Who are the social media personalities that show up at the top of take talk and linked in who are the big players that have already spent the time and have created the content and have been in the space to earn trust with this audience already.
Why is this important? Because you can see what’s already working. You could see where there may be holes. You can get inspired and motivated by them. And down the road, you might even be able to partner with some of these people. If what it is that you create and how you serve this audience compliments what they do and up serves their audience.
I love that word up serve, not upsell. Up serve, hopefully not set though. That’s not what we want to do. And the more you know about who these people are and, and get to know them a little bit, these are the people who you should be building relationships with. You should follow every single one of these people.
So you can understand the kinds of things that come onto your feed, the things that the community wants to learn about the questions that the community members are asking these people and just gauging how they interact and maybe how they don’t. There’s a huge opportunity for a lot of smaller businesses and smaller personal brands to show up and serve big because the bigger players just don’t have that opportunity or don’t have that time or they’ve already gone beyond the point at which they can allow for one on one access. You, if you are just starting out, that can be your advantage. When I started out with my lead exam website, that was a huge advantage. Because I could personally reach out to every single person who left a comment on my blog. Every single person who gave me an email, and in a little bit of their time, I gave back even more, and a ton of value, so much so that they were like, Here’s my money.
Same thing with Smart Passive Income. When it started as a blog, every comment I replied, There wasn’t a ton, but I see too many people, back then I saw it all the time, now at least social media, it’s social, so people are likely to reply, but even still, they don’t. But back then, most people who left comments weren’t getting replies at all, and I just saw a huge opportunity in the teaching entrepreneurship space to show up and show up quickly, so that’s what I did.
Eventually, I couldn’t do that anymore, which is why I say again. You have the opportunity to do that. If a person sends you an email, don’t let it go. Reply, and the sooner you could reply, the better. It’s not always possible to reply immediately. But again, what do you have that these bigger players do not?
People can have more access to you. You have more time, hypothetically. Yes, you are likely working another job or busy with family and stuff. So I, I say that with a grain of salt. Comparatively, You are able to give more attention, maybe not as much time versus attention. One single person who reaches out and says they need help can be so valuable for you and you so valuable for them.
And imagine the story that could be created there that could be amplified later. Imagine trying to collect a number of these stories from individuals in your audience. This is why it’s important to A, know where exactly they exist, aka places, and to know who it is that they trust, and who has earned their trust already, and the kinds of people that you could partner with down the road.
People. So we have places, people, and now we’re gonna talk a little bit of business. We need to do some research, by the way. I would try to get 20 people on there as well. And if you wanted to do more awesome, I mean, if possible, put everybody like, if somebody was doing this from scratch and they were doing it really, really well, I would imagine that they would have a board in their home office or a piece of paper, just a giant piece of paper or a foam board or something on their kitchen table, sprawled out with post it notes and like thread tied to pins, almost like a investigative like, you know, murder case kind of thing, but you’re not solving a murder, you’re solving the puzzle of who is here in this space, and what are they known for, and what are the qualifications they have, how did they get here, right, so before we even move on to the third I, I do want to talk a little bit more about the people here because in, in, in addition to just who are they and writing their name down, this is why using an Excel sheet or a Google sheet like we have to offer again, if you want to go, if, if you by now are like, Pat, I need that resource.
It’s by the way, it’s not super complicated. It’s just a google Sheet that’s organized in this fashion. So, again, you can go and get it at SmartPassiveIncome.com/getset. So go there now. Get access to the Google Sheet. You’ll see a lot of other resources there too. Don’t get too overwhelmed by them.
But we have explanations in a little bit about what those are. And, yeah. Start filling this out because more than just like their name and maybe a link to their website or x profile or LinkedIn profile I mean you want to include those as well if ideally you want to include maybe where they seem to be most prominent Maybe it’s LinkedIn for example Include a little bit more information about them as you find out more.
What are they known for? What kinds of things do they seem to do? What’s their vibe? I mean you can put your own spin on this as well. For example, if I was a designer, a graphic designer and I was trying to find people a man named Chris Do would be on, on that list. I’ve interviewed Chris. He is absolutely amazing.
You could find him at The Futur, but I’m not the future, like back to the future, past, present, future, but The Futur with F U T U R is his website. Just let me double check that T H E F U T U R. The future, yeah. Business and design education revolutionized. So Chris, Chris Do, who is the founder and the personality there, I mean I would include him on the list, but I wouldn’t just be like, okay, Chris Do and move on, you know, Chris Re and Chris Mi no just kidding. Do, Re, Mi,, right?
Sorry, I had a lot of coffee right before this, but I needed a lot of energy to give back to you because this is work that we’re doing, but it’s also exciting. This is game changing for so many people. So having a map gives you such an advantage. Even an advantage over the people who are in the space that you’re in, who might be just so locked in or, or so hyper focused on something and not seeing the clear indications from the community about where certain things should go and that’s where you can step in.
That’s exactly what I did with Deep Pocket Monster and I’ll tell that story more toward the end here. But I would add Chris Do on that list and I would look up his socials and go in there and I’d, I’d go on LinkedIn. Chris on LinkedIn currently, I’m clicking around, has more than a half a million followers just on LinkedIn.
And from my experience, if you have even. 10,000 followers on LinkedIn, you can do some incredible business there. And he’s, he’s killing it. So he posted something 13 minutes ago. It is very late in the evening right now, which is really interesting, so I’m going to make note of that. He posted something the other day that has hundreds of comments.
I’m noticing as I scroll down, a lot of his posts are in fact posts with really, really amazing graphics that pop. In fact, he’s often black and white in these photos with some color behind it. So it definitely stands out, right? So I’m going to make note of that. Note of that, right? He also does, and I know this about Chris, I didn’t need to see this now, but I know this, on his YouTube channel, he’s unique because what he does is he, in real time, with his clients and students, you watch him break down the a pitch for a design job you watch him like role play with his audience.
So I would write down like role plays with audience live. It’s some of the most intriguing stuff you’ll see about how he’s able to craft his pitches and get really, really high end clients for his design work where other people. And, and, you know, in the audience might only get hundreds of dollars. He might get thousands.
And he just shows you how he manages those conversations. Super interesting. So that’s just one person. So this is, again, an exercise that’s not going to happen overnight. And it could be something that you could build out over time. If you’re just starting out and you have 30 minutes a day. This is perfect to build this map out across the next couple of weeks to start filling in this information, because by the end of that, you will have something so valuable.
It’s going to save you so much more time than just kind of building a website right now, which you shouldn’t even do. Cause you don’t need a website. I’ll talk more about that next week. You should build a Stan Store first, if you’re going to build anything, but even before that, before doing the research, like you’re just jumping into things, it’s going to be so much harder to not just course correct, but more brain correct, or mentally correct, how hard that is. This research isn’t just something that’s relatively easy to do. It is so useful. But more than that, it will motivate you. You’re gonna start to see patterns. When you start to locate these places and discover these people, you’re going to start to get an understanding of, well, there’s like 10 people who talk about this thing, but nobody’s talking about it in this way.
Again, this is exactly what happened when I did this exact exercise when I went into the Pokemon space and at the end of 2020. So anyway, super helpful.
So, continuing on, places, people, more information about them, what you’ve noticed, what kinds of things stand out to you about them, and then products.
What things are for sale that are targeting this audience? A few ways to look this up. Number one, you might know some of the stuff already, so write the stuff that, that you know is for sale. Different products, both physical and digital. What offerings from coaches exist. Write it all down. Put it all on the sheet.
And in addition to when you find these items, put the price next to it as well, and a link to go directly to it. Again, this will be so helpful when you move forward. Another way to find products that your target audience is buying. is to look up on Google and see what ads show up. These are companies that are paying money to get in front of people who are looking for or interested in that particular topic.
So that’s a great way to sort of like backdoor find what products are serving this audience. Now, Little note here. This doesn’t necessarily mean people are buying these things. It just means these are products that are serving this audience. You can learn a lot from that. You can learn a lot about price range and where the sort of spectrum exists as far as like, okay, for something like an online course, people seem to be paying anywhere between 29 and 500 for this.
When it comes to getting coaching for whatever it is, right? It seems like it’s going to cost this much or this much if you are. In the fly fishing niche, which is something that I do enjoy myself and I always use as an example, you might find that one offering for people who are into fly fishing are guided tours and you can go and actually start to do some research on how much money people are willing to pay.
And I know you could pay thousands of dollars, which I have done to go fly fishing in certain places. To get a guide, how much is it for a private single guide? How much is it to go with a group? Does seasons matter? All these things start to give you information as you find this, especially when it comes to, you know, ultimately what we want to happen is eventually some of that money in this space, that market goes to us in some way, shape, or form, you’re not going to know exactly yet how that’s going to happen, but what an amazing tool to have to be able to position yourself to be able to find it.
From the people that you find from the places that those people exist or where those people exist and the products that they’re already buying another great and fascinating way to find out what people are buying is to literally ask people what they’ve recently bought. That relates to blank. So back to fly fishing, Hey, fly fishermen, maybe you might be in a community.
Maybe, you know, somebody who just went fly fishing. You can just ask them, Hey, what was the last thing you bought? That was so helpful when it came to fly fishing, or what was the last piece of fly fishing gear that was most helpful? Have you bought anything that was not a piece of gear? Related to fly fishing that has been helpful.
All of those answers you’ll want to write down. If you are on a, an already existing business, imagine how helpful this would be to understand, you know, where else money is going besides you and can you partner with them? Could these things become things that you become an affiliate for? If you don’t know what that means, that means promoting and recommending those products and getting a commission when you get people to buy through a link that is tied to you. I’ve generated multi millions of dollars through affiliate marketing, not creating those products yourself, but actually recommending them instead. And that trust that you build with the audience allows you to recommend and then earn a commission on certain products.
But it’s also something that you gotta be careful of. We’ll talk a little bit later in the year when we get into monetization. about affiliate marketing, specifically in tips for doing that. And for those of you who have been in this space for a while, you know, affiliate marketing has been around for a very long time.
It is still here and it is still going strong. It’s a little bit different the approach people aren’t just spraying every product in front of their audience anymore. That just does not work. Audiences are much, much more perceptive and aware of what is being sold to them. Which is why when you choose to promote another company or another person’s product, you want to be sure that it completely aligns with your target audience’s goals.
But when you find a product that works extremely well, oh my gosh, that thing can become the sole, like, life changing, money making device product in your business. And it’s not even yours. It’s, it’s just so fast. I love to see that. Because then everybody wins, right? You are winning because you’re generating revenue.
The company’s winning because they’re getting people to trust your recommendation and become a customer. So they’re generating more revenue. That’s trust that they could not earn themselves because they want to hear it from somebody like you who might be a user or somebody who they trust that recommended the product and then the customer in the end is getting a product that hopefully serves them as well.
Everybody can win. I love business where everybody can win. And one of the only ways to know what works and what doesn’t or what may work and what may not is to build this market map. So products where they exist include the link. What are they? What do they do? What kind of people do they serve is another good question that you can add on to this or take a note of, and you can just write additional notes next to the product inside of your Google sheet, your market map, and the price again, the price being really key for you to begin to understand just kind of how money moves around this space.
Now, for those of you who are just starting out, I know you might be a little overwhelmed by this particular exercise, but I promise you is completely worth it. And it’s something that’s. Easy to do on your computer in your free time that you can build. And once you have this map, you’ll be able to understand a few things.
And again, I’m speaking to those who are inside of their first kind of few weeks of business, or just few first few months, you haven’t generated any revenue. Maybe you’re starting over and you want to do it the right way. Great. You will understand not just the lay of the land, but you are also going to, after internalizing a lot of this, you are going to understand whether or not you believe that there is something that you could offer here. That there might be a hole that you can come in and fill. That maybe a certain segment of this audience is being underserved and you can come in and offer your experiences, your expertise, your energy to, to better serve that audience. You might also find that after doing some research, and you might find this out just even in the first column, people or places or products, one of these might indicate to you that this is not where you want to be, you might find that the only things people are buying are under $10, like a lot of Etsy little things here and there. And it’s like, okay, that’s cool. But if you want to grow bigger and scale to, you know, life changing revenue, then maybe that might not be a, be the way to go. That’s not to say you can’t generate life changing revenue from smaller digital products that only cost 10.
Trust me, I sold a $19.99 e book in 2008 that I generated six figures from. So I’m not saying that that’s you know, a red flag, but it may be. Maybe you don’t want to get into that game and you want to get into one where you are serving less clients but for a lot more money in a more white glove service kind of fashion.
Maybe you want to consult. Your understanding of the space combined with who you are and what you know you have to offer. Some of the stuff that, again, we teach about in Smart from Scratch, that’s where you find that Venn diagram, right? Market fit with you and fit with you to the market. That’s where the magic happens.
And this market map helps you understand that. Now I had said earlier that there are four P’s. We’ve only talked about three so far. The first one is people. The second one is places. Third one is products. What’s the fourth one?
The fourth one is your position, or if you want to think about it like this, your pole, your flag that you’re planting into this space.
And this is an exercise in and of itself to begin to understand how you can come in here and disrupt it a bit, add more value. What are the things you can do to plant your flag and have a position in this space? Because if you try to come up with this and it just is seemingly like a worst version or a brand new version of something that kind of already exists, right?
A you know, just a copycat version or a less experienced version of something that. You know, two of the people on your list are kind of experts at and there’s no way that you can differentiate yourself then. Okay. It’s going to be a little bit harder. So this is, this is going to be probably the hardest part of the exercise is determining your position in the space and your position in the space is a hypothesis.
It is a guess. It is a wish it is not going to be necessarily where things end up, but it is where you can imagine yourself going because that’s going to be helpful once you start to show up in these places. Right? And I’m not saying you come up with a position. I’m going to create the number one blank, blank, whatever you go into a community and you say, Hey, my name is Pat Flynn, I’m going to create the number one, whatever. That’s not what I mean. I mean, you might have a position in this space that’s like, and I’ll give you a very clear example. This is in the Pokemon space, in fact. One thing that you can do with collectibles, not just Pokemon cards, is you can take your cards and get them graded and authenticated.
It will then get a grade or a score, and get sent back to the owner, encapsulated in a little, the, the, the lingo is slab. But it’s just a plastic case that these cards are then encapsulated and they’re sealed permanently unless you like, want to break it. And oftentimes they have more value as a result of high having a higher grade.
There’s a whole market of people who just invest and, and, and buy cards to then grade and then, and then flip. And you know, a lot of people like to put their collections into these things ’cause it protects them. It like preserves them. So you could get your cards graded and there are a couple companies that have been in the space for a very long time.
One of them is sports professional sports authenticator PSA, and another one is CGC. They’re known for doing more comics, but they’ve gotten into the books or excuse me, Pokemon space and collectible space. So they’re, they’re wildly known Beckett is another one as well. So those, those are kind of like the big three, but there’s another company that’s coming onto the scene.
Their name is Tag, T A G, and they are coming in as disruptors. They. have a position in the space as the only one that has the patented technology to precisely grade a card without the errors that a human could provide. And that is often a piece of feedback that we hear in the community all the time that these other companies have, which is the grades are not consistent.
You can in fact get a card graded, send it in and then get it back and then crack it, send it in again, and it’s going to come back a different grade. That’s not good. So Tag is coming in and they’re coming in with this position. Our company is going to do this. This is what we have to offer. And this is the, this is our proprietary stuff now.
They’ve spent a lot of money and time to come up with that technology and be able to position themselves as, as such, but that, that’s a product and it’s in a different space. So I’m just using that as an example. When you are clear with your position, everything becomes so much easier. And it’s something that you could practice.
You can change. You can hypothesize a bunch of different things and come up with one. And that’s what I want you to do. Come up with, after you create your market map, what is your position in the space, right? For me, when I did this exercise for the Pokemon community, you know, first of all, before selling anything.
Which, I actually don’t sell anything. I do, I do quite a bit of affiliate marketing, but I’m more of an entertainer. I generate a lot of revenue through YouTube and YouTube ads, and my Shorts channel. But I do have the opportunity to sell things. I, I have sold things like merchandise and such, hats, etc.
But, still, I was coming into this space as a nobody. I didn’t know anything about it. And in fact, I was just really excited about seeing what I could do here. And I used the Market Map exercise to help guide me. And so what did I do? I, number one, found all the places these people exist. Okay, cool. I found PokeBeach.com. That’s a news website that always has the earliest information about new set releases. Wonderful. There’s a website called TCG Stadium. Cool. A lot of collectors go there to find out the price of their cards. Cool. There’s PokemonCenter.com. They drop these new sets and they’re often very limited and the websites crash every single time.
Cool. I’m gonna write that down. Here are a couple YouTube channels that I found where people love to show up live every single Tuesday. Cool. I’m gonna write that down. That took a little bit of time, but I was able to kind of develop a map. Even just through that and determining the people who were there, I discovered there were like sub niches in the Pokemon space.
And that was so helpful. There are certain people in certain places and certain forums that talk specifically about the super high end collectible part of Pokemon. I mean, I’m talking cards that are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, the Pikachu illustrator, the first edition base set Charizard and learning about that was fascinating, but I found that I didn’t want to be there.
I don’t have any of those higher end collections. I don’t want to spend the money to get into that. I don’t have enough history to even know much about it. So I’m going to not, you know, focus there. And that’s great because now it narrows down where my position is. It narrows down which part of this, you know, on this map, there’s a lot of land and some of this land is untapped.
What untapped land can I plant my flag on or build my home on? Right? So long story short, it was very, very clear to me that number one, I wasn’t going to be able to compete on collection because I didn’t have one. I was building one. I wasn’t going to be able to compete on history because I’m new to the space and I could not, I mean, I could read about it and relay stuff, but it wasn’t going to be as good as people who knew people who were insiders and who could come up with these amazing stories.
No, I couldn’t compete with that. I couldn’t compete with getting access to packs early because there was no way for me to do that. I didn’t even know anything about it. So where could I compete? I could compete with telling stories and doing challenges. Nobody was doing challenges in the space where they were trying to either find a certain card by a certain period of time or collect and complete a set by a certain period of time.
There was nobody who was really going into the community and out into the wild into card shops and filming those experiences and transactions and so I just said you know what I’m gonna go out into the wild and film myself collecting and talking and negotiating and just we’ll see if I can create some stories from there and the cool thing is nobody had ever seen anything like that before and so it didn’t even matter if I was collecting cards that were worth nothing because it actually isn’t even about the cards.
It was about the community and the transactions that were happening and if I got a good deal or if I didn’t get a good deal and this is where I started to lean into once I started to see it work. Some of the stuff we tried didn’t work. We tried telling the most beautiful stories about new and or about cards that a lot of people didn’t know about.
I was finding out and digging into a lot of promotional cards and things that kind of you couldn’t find in packs. And we told some incredible stories about them and they just didn’t hit very well. And as fun as they were to create, I was listening to the audience, I was experimenting, and I was also looking at the analytics.
And then, fast forward to today, now four years later after starting that channel, the channel is at 1.4 million subscribers. It is generating, it’s, it’s the most profitable thing I’ve ever done. Because it’s a very lean team. I also started a shorts channel now 204 days ago. And at day 199, it hit 1 million subscribers.
And no, I did not link to it from my other channel either. It was kind of an experiment. And I’ve talked about this before here on the, on the, on the show. I’m not going to go too deep into it now. But all to say, a lot of this, again, was a result of creating this market map, understanding a space, who the players were.
For example, one of the big players in this space, his name is Nick, I actually had him on the show before PokeRev is his username, and he actually was a fan of the SPI podcast back before he started. So it was kind of a, a fun moment to learn that this creator who I found, who I really enjoyed watching his Pokemon stuff, was also somebody who enjoyed listening to this exact podcast.
Years and years ago, as he was trying to figure out what his thing was, right? And he eventually landed into Pokemon and became literally the top Pokemon creator. And I became a moderator for his channel on his live streams every Tuesday. I started to learn even more about the community and what they loved, what they didn’t love and how they reacted to things.
And this was all information that helped me by getting involved. And that’s your next step from here. In addition to just creating this market map, because you can analyze and create the little pin board with the thread going around all day long, but it is only when you get involved can you understand where you should invest right when you get involved, you know where to invest It’s very similar to a quote that I have about building community, which is when you can get other people involved they will invest so that’s we’ll save the community building for another time.
But for now market map. Great. You have this map. Go to those communities. Start having conversations. Inject yourself into those places. And it was me going in as a moderator, learning about this community, having direct lines of communication with them and with PokeRev that I then understood. Okay.
Nobody’s doing what I think I can do and bring here. I can take what is my unfair advantage, which is years of content creation and storytelling and podcasting and bring it to the space and tell the story of these cars and create challenges in a way that nobody’s ever seen before. Here we are. So I hope this was helpful for you and I hope that you will go and download that or get access to that sheet if you haven’t already.
All you have to do is go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/getset and we’ll get you in situated there. It might link to it directly or it might link to a page where you can go and get access to that. After you put your name and email, we’ll get you access to a toolbox. You know, shortly thereafter.
So the other resource I mentioned was our Smart From Scratch course. This was a course that was at 1. Hundreds of dollars. And we’ve made it free because we’re here to help you, especially those of you who are just starting out, if you haven’t nailed your niche yet, or you have too many ideas and you don’t know where to start, go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/smart, and go and get our course Smart From Scratch. And we’ll help you from there. So good luck. Thank you for listening. And I look forward to serving you in the next episode, because we’re going to tell you how you can connect this audience that you’re building to some stuff that you can offer and start generating for some revenue sooner than later.
We’ll talk about that in the next episode. Take care. Bye.