You’ve had an idea for a new service you could offer. But how can you figure out if it’s worth doing, exactly who it’s for, and what the package would look like (length of time, exactly what’s involved, cost)?
I’m a great believer in taking action, in experimenting, and in getting feedback. It’s how I’ve developed, evolved and discarded all sorts of ideas for services and courses over the last 10 years, and I’ve helped clients to do the same.
So my tip is to find someone who needs help with the thing you’d like to do. And work with them.
- You could help them for free in return for feedback and a testimonial (this works well for one-off calls. Once you’ve done a couple of free ones I would suggest moving on to charge something for your time though.)
- You could charge a small amount of money (I did this when I was testing a short course, and I’ve done it for one-off small pieces of work when I knew there was potential for a lot more work afterwards.)
- Or you could do a skill swap where they help you with something in return (if you want to test a service that you deliver over a few weeks, and they have a skill or some knowledge that you would find helpful if delivered in a similar way, this could work well for both of you).
Which one of those is best depends on what you’re offering and your own circumstances – but the key is to try out the service on a real person.
What are the benefits of doing this?
By doing this you’ll learn what your potential clients actually need, what they need when, what stage they are at and how they talk about their challenges.
And most importantly (as I do talk about finding the joy in your business!) you’ll find out whether you actually enjoy delivering this service to this particular type of client – or how you can tweak it if there’s something about it that you really don’t like. (I did some 1:1 social media training for a while when I first started out as a freelancer, and it was only by trying it out in a few different ways that I figured out that it wasn’t for me.)
If you’d like some help to figure out how to make an idea happen, I offer a range of coaching services that could help with this. You can find out more here or contact me to arrange a chat.
