How to Leverage Your Audience to Find a Problem Worth Solving

From my previous post, you'll recall a PWS is a Problem Worth Solving.

The two highest leverage activities any aspiring course creator can do to find a PWS are meet with people 1:1 and conduct workshops. Then you have to pass The Mom Test.

My trajectory changed forever.

My path became clearer when I started jumping on Zoom calls with course creators.

I heard the same common challenges. They all fell in one of two buckets:

• Organizing ideas into digestible learning
• Finding an audience of students

Then I started offering free workshops.

I shared frameworks from my 15 years of designing learning for companies. Just like Derek Sivers said would happen:

What seemed obvious to me was amazing to others.

Drawing on Nicolas Cole's advice, I packaged my ideas into a category: Transformational Online Courses.

Finally, I had to pass The Mom Test.

Rob Fitzpatrick's idea is that if you ask your mom whether your idea is good or not, she will say it is! Because she loves you, she will lie to you. Most people don't want to crush your dreams, so you need to develop good questions to get good feedback.

Whenever someone had a problem, I dug deeper for specifics.

Some ideas from the book for good questions:

• Tell me more about that.
• Talk me through your process.
• What did you try before?

Armed with market research, I was ready to launch. But don't expect it to be easy. Keep repeating this process until you find your PWS. I've had two failed courses without Course-Student Fit... but that's a story for another essay. Build trust before products.