Prompt Playbook: Starting an Online Business PART 2
💰 Starting an Online Business using AI | Blueprint
With a business idea in hand it’s time to go to market.
Already?
Yup- we go to market ASAP so that we know whether or not there even is a market!
I’m covering the top-level here but this is a big task! If you want more details I’ll be running a live accelerator in a few weeks on this exact topic. Waitlist here.
Let’s get started:
Captivate the market with your lead magnet
Once you have a business niche in mind we need to test whether there is a market for it or not.
This, more than anything else, is what sinks new businesses.
Competition we can work around. Product development we can work out as we go. Sales channels we can decide later.
But if there is no market then the business is dead in the water.
Before we leap in and start building we need to know whether a market exists. And the only proper way to know is to build something called an MVP - a minimum viability product.
We want to create the most basic form of value that our business offers and see if people want it.
For example, taking an idea from the last Part let’s say my business idea is
Specialised AI Course for Specific Industries: Develop and offer online courses that focus on how AI can be applied in specific industries like healthcare, finance, or retail. Tailor the content to address the unique challenges and opportunities in each sector.
I could run off and and develop the courses, build a website, hire a training team and run advertising to gain clients.
But there’s a risk that I do all of that and find that my market doesn’t care. They don’t want the value I’m offering. Disaster!
Instead we need to build a minimal version of this value and test it out with the market.
Specifically we are going to create a “lead magnet”.
A lead magnet literally acts as a magnet for leads (emails).
You’ve seen them before, even if you don’t know the name.
Any time you need to give an email to receive a free ebook: lead magnet.
Email for a checklist? Lead magnet.
Email for a Notion document? Lead magnet.
Here’s a prompt
Act as a marketing consultant for my business
Based on the business idea I will provide at the end of this prompt
Generate 5 lead magnet ideas with brief descriptions. They should be text based, easy to consume, easy to create.
Ask me which I prefer then generate the full text of the lead magnet.
Create a hook title for the lead magnet and a brief description I can use in social media to encourage downloads. No emojis, no hashtags.
My business idea is [copy/paste business idea]This will generate a list of potential lead magnets for you
Go ahead and tell ChatGPT which to produce and it’ll spin out the full text. Here’s the start of an output:
Need more detail? Fill in the gaps manually (recommended) or ask ChatGPT to flesh out the text. Either is faster than writing manually from scratch.
Once you have valuable content keep it simple. We don’t need to turn this into a beautiful, fully designed report.
Instead I recommend getting the text into Notion and then creating a public link. Here is an example of one of mine, simply set in a Notion document:
Live link here: Example lead magnet.
Next step is distribution and (crucially) knowing how many people have downloaded your lead magnet. That tells us how popular it is.
The simplest way is to post onto social media asking people to DM you to get sent the link.
This lets you gauge interest. It’s a manual process but more than sufficient to see if people are interested.
Don’t have an audience? I can help there. When I run accelerators I take my students’ lead magnets live to my audiences.
This tweet for example had 5 student’s lead magnets attached as a thread. 87,800 views on the thread and a decent chunk of traffic sent through to download their lead magnets.
Another alternative (if you don’t have an audience yet) is to run advertising. Putting $10 behind some ads to test a market is a very low cost compared to investing in a business and realising there’s no market!
Premium Prompt - Automated Backend
The above method is great for testing the waters.
But I also want to give you a quick look at my tech stack for making it i) automated and ii) easy to launch lots of lead magnets.
Launching lots of lead magnets is particularly important because frankly we don’t know which will hit. We need to keep nudging the market to see what resonates.
For a more automated backend I use
Notion
Gumroad
Hypefury/Tweethunter/Typefully
Lead magnets are created in Notion. You can also use Word or Google Docs to make a nice PDF but personally I like the design and ease of sharing that comes with Notion. It’s also free.
I use Gumroad to give away my lead magnets and collect email addresses. Gumroad takes a cut of your sales but because lead magnets are free it means Gumroad is free.
I create a product, set the price to $0 and then make the contents of the product the link to the Notion document. Simple as that.
This means to access my Notion document someone has to first give me their email address in Gumroad. It creates an easy “opt in” mechanism.
Finally I use Hypefury/Tweethunter/Typefully to run DM giveaways on X. Either of the three platforms will do the job - I suggest trying their free trials and seeing what works best for you. My personal preference is Tweethunter.
Here’s an example of a DM giveaway tweet
That has 20,000 views and 363 people asking for the lead magnet.
Hypefury/Tweethunter/Typefully will automatically send a DM to anyone who asks for the lead magnet. That DM thanks them and gives them the Gumroad (not the Notion) link so they can claim their lead magnet.
That means 363 new X followers (they need to follow to receive my DM) and up to 363 new email subscribers.
I run one of these a day generally for strong X and newsletter growth.
If there’s interest I can shoot a full video tutorial and add it to the community. Just say in Chat and I’ll film it all.
Pulling it together
Today’s issue gives you the core foundation for not only testing your market but also driving newsletter subscriptions.
I’ll also be running 6 weeks of Accelerators on this starting soon. Waitlist here.
In tomorrow’s issue we’ll go more into the newsletter. What it looks like, what its function is and how to grow one for free (or even whilst making cash).
A reminder of what we’ll be covering this week
Part 1: Discover your profitable business niche
Part 2: Captivate the market with your lead magnet
Part 3: Effortless email list growth
Part 4: Deep dive into customer needs
Part 5: Save the world with your creations
Until then, keep PROMPTING!
Kyle