How do you ACTUALLY build a service to sell?

[Upsilon]

I was just reading this thread from @Joe Wee who made the jump from reading to applying the lessons in this forum, and he got success. In the thread he explains how he went from getting 2-5 leads per day to getting 30 leads in a single day, using nothing but resources he found on this forum. And he was also nice enough to link to all of them, so if you want to replicate what he did, you basically have a starting point.

That cause-and-effect relationship - where the more you apply the more results you get - made complete sense to me. Maybe it's because I spent a long time in the pickup industry, where the math is pretty simple: the more approaches you make, the more dates you go on; the more dates you go on, the more chances you have of finding a girlfriend, or whatever else floats your boat.

(Heed my advice, younglings! Instead of spending all your time looksmaxxxing and waiting for a girlfriend to fall out of the sky... while talking to precisely zero girls, you could actually start reaching out to girls and try to make things happen. Sorry for the digression, but I've heard of plenty of young men nowadays who can't find a partner. The same way you won't land a job without sending out resumes, you probably won't find a girlfriend without talking to girls.)

Onwards.

Although all of that makes complete sense to me, I feel like there's still a large piece of the puzzle missing for a lot of people:

Having something to sell.

I was fortunate enough to find someone who mentored me in copywriting, so eventually I had a skill I could sell as a service. But if I hadn't been so fortunate back then, I honestly wouldn't have known where to begin.

And the fact that I learned copywriting in the first place was mostly blind luck. I met a guy through the pickup community who was a digital nomad doing copywriting, and he offered to teach me. Not exactly something most people would have access to...

...which made me want to start this thread, just as a fun discussion to have, and hopefully to help someone who needs this:

How do you think someone with no skills and no job experience can build enough skill to start selling their own service?

I'm talking about the actual delivery of the service.

Most marketing courses focus on how to position yourself and market something you already know how to deliver. In fairness, you could take one of those courses, offer to apply what you learn for free for a few people, learn through experience, iterate, and so on until you're good enough to start charging for marketing services.

But I'd like to hear answers with a bit more imagination.

So, what's your guys' take?

 

[Ryuzaki]

I don't think it's all that involved. You find a skill that there's a demand for at any level. If we take YouTube for example it can be as simple as thumbnails design coupled with psychology, it can be video editing, it can be channel-wide strategy. If it's SEO, it can be article writing (don't do this in the current day), on-page SEO, technical SEO or page speed optimization, it can be link building. It can be front-end design. You just pick something that's in demand that somebody needs at the beginner (broader, lower prices), intermediate (less demand, medium prices), expert (lowest demand, highest prices).

My opinion is that that's the easy part. The hardest part is marketing, which is establishing authority and trust and being visible, and then copywriting, price anchoring, and all the stuff required. You can have the best offer in the world but if nobody sees it then you fail. This is why I've seen 1,000 developers make the coolest tools then immediately abandon it when they realize they now have to be marketers or hire one.

So the important thing is healthy margins, and this is, in my opinion, over decades, why I've only ever offered luxury services at luxury prices. Why should I need to acquire a million customers when I can acquire ten and give them the white glove service and spend the time digging into diminishing returns for those that want the competitive edge?

But back to your question of "how does someone develop the skill?" YouTube, blogs, documentation. Education is the least of the worries. Information is free and everywhere. The first problem is discipline in practicing and learning. The second and biggest problem is marketing.

Even with complex tasks you can start selling well before you're ready. It's not a great idea but you can achieve sales with good marketing and bad products and services. That's fly-by-night nonsense, though. But the point is the learning isn't the obstacle. Discipline and time/energy investment is your first hurdle. It's what separates the men from the boys, not the learning.

You can learn how to dismantle and rebuild engines on YouTube alone. You can learn quantum physics if you desire. The question is, are you going to do the work required to understand it and apply it? And then are you also going to put on your marketer hat?

 

[DanielS]

For the B2B crowd, 99% of the time they only buy revenue - you must deliver a positive ROI. So, your objective needs to be to create revenue or save revenue. For example, businesses purchase social media marketing services to make money - not to get followers, etc. They might say they want more of a social presence, but the objective is always to gain more revenue at the end of the day.

The B2C crowd is a little different. With this crowd (and B2B, to be fair) you need to have a product/service that directly addresses their pain points. And these pain points need to be painful. There's a reason why finance, weight loss, and relationship offers are usually the top offers in the B2C space.

The B2B crowd has more money to spend but the offers are almost always DFY/DWY. The B2C crowd has less money to spend but the offers can be more passive in nature - self-paced educational programs, etc.

As far as actually learning things, it's unbelievably easy today. Fire up YouTube, watch videos, follow the tutorials, and utilize AI to create you own personal learning curriculum. I've been using AI to teach me how to setup HyperFrames lately. I ask it how to do the process and then paste in screenshots and tell it to tell me what to do next.