How to decide the topic for your newsletter: what customers buy [Build in public #2]

The first step to choose the topic for your newsletter is the selection of a general sector (read about it in the first part).

After that:

1. we made a list of our readers’ pains,
2. in the end we defined the topic around the most monetizable problems.

Let’s see these two steps in more details.

Reader’s problems

For We Who Think the general sector is personal-growth. What problems are relevant in this area?

We used three different level of analysis.

First we started with our own experience. We wrote down a list of our problems related to personal-growth.

• Tired of being stressed out?
• Tired to make progress too slowly?
• Tired to self-doubt your own decisions?
• Tired to never have time for your projects?
• Tired to be stuck in boring or useless activities?
• Tired to not have likeminded people with whom to share your experiences?

That is already a good starting point, but it’s better to have a wider analysis.

So we added to our list, problems that our customers mentioned.
For this task we had an advantage thanks to our private community of Italian speaking entrepreneurs.

During the years we had plenty of chances to talk with them. By February 2020 we knew what were their most common problems in terms of personal-growth.

If you don’t have already a private community, don’t worry.

You can invite for a coffee:

• one of your customer,
• or a friend interested in the general sector of your future newsletter.
  (You really really don’t know a person like that? Join a community online and chat with one of the members there.)

Ask them:”In the context of [GENERAL SECTOR] what makes your life painful?”

Remember to always follow-up on this first question. When you dig deeper you always find the best answers.

The final element of analysis are the competitors. What do they talk about in their articles, videos, podcasts, etc.

By now online there are competitors in every sector. Check out what problems they target with their free content or their products.

You don’t find any competitors? That’s a big sign of alarm, I will come back on this later.

In the personal-growth field there’s plenty of other competitors. We used the title of they article to expand our list of relevant problems.

What the customers buy

We started to work on We Who Think with a business purpose.

At this point we had a long list of problems. But we wanted to focus only on 3-10 monetizable ones. If you have more than 10 you won’t be relevant for anyone. With less than 3, you risk to limit yourself too much.

From there we will refine based on the audience response. But the audience had first to understand what our focus is.

So we had to reduce our list.

We used 3 parameters:

• competitors,
• skills,
• passion.

First we checked for which problems the competitors were selling some products or service.

If they keep doing it means that customers pay for those. We kept those problems, and cancelled all the others.

After that, we checked our skills. For what problems were we able to help our readers?

This was easy. If we knew how to solve a problem we kept it. In our list. Otherwise we canceled it.

Finally we used our passion as the last filter. We kept only those problems that were interesting for us.

Passion is an over-used word. But we had already checked that these problem were monetizable. At that point we wanted to work on something enjoyable.

So our final list, the initial topic for We Who Think, were:

• Why my results are always so slow?
• Why I’m not always thinking clearly?
• Too many opportunities, which one is the best for me?