I’ve talked a lot about the need to avoid perfection.
The perfect offer, the perfect product, the perfect sequence…
Most of us want to make sure we get as close as possible to having everything “just right” before we actually launch…
(and, of course, that ends up keeping you stuck in an endless cycle of tweaks, edits, and revisions)
What I’ve noticed though, is that (nearly) everybody caught in that endless cycle knows they are doing it.
They SAY that they get it…
They know it doesn’t all have to be perfect…
But 6 months later… they’re still trying to get everything just right before they finally get started.
It’s an easy trap to get caught in.
After all… you also don’t want to go to market with a poor idea (or one you haven’t fully thought through).
So how do you balance the need to create something quality, with the need to actually get started?
The answer’s simpler than you might think.
And if you’ve been feeling a bit stuck lately… a bit like you’re going in circles…
I shot this quick video for you.
It’s about the easiest way to get stuck… and what really moves the needle when you're starting something new:
So I had this question come in on my YouTube channel. “Jeff, you're a great teacher, yada, yada. I wish to know how you started your marketing journey and how you grew bigger?”
And I get this question, well I get it a lot. A lot of people ask me this question and I understand it because I think at the root of it is, people, they don't really care so much about me but they want to know about their path, about whether it will work for them, about whether they can have the success, whether they can build a business.
And I know I was wondering the same thing back when I got started. There weren't very many examples. There weren't too many people that were building a business online back then. That was it. Literally the 1990s, the mid-1990s when I started out.
So my journey, my story is well documented. It's in my book, it's in my videos, it's all over the place. I'm not going to go into it here. I started out, I was a stay-at-home dad and I had nothing going on and that's all I'm going to tell you about it other than the fact that it was, it was desperate times for me. And that's one of the reasons, say, I can remember when I was starting out with nothing going for me, no assets, very little money to spend, no marketing experience, no entrepreneurial experience, no following, no list, no positioning, no brand, no list, no product, nothing. Because of all those things, even though it's been coming up on 30 years now, I can still remember just how desperate I was to take some control over my life. That I have a soft spot for those people that are just starting out. So this is, I mean, if you're just starting out, the thing is that I have no idea where you are in your journey, what your skills are, what your interest is, what your assets are, how much time you've got, all of those things.
So I can't speak to your specific path but what I can say is that my journey was just putting one foot in front of the other and trying to build little tiny successes. And then take another step and another step.
I remember for some reason early on I figured out or I had this inkling, this feeling that building an email list was the path to freedom. I mean, it was just, I don't know why but even back then when I was just starting out that was so obvious. That hasn't changed. Whatsoever you need, an audience, you need to build a following because well, you just need someone to sell to, right? And what I can tell you is that when I started out I would, maybe, I put up a lead magnet. This is decades before we had that term. But I put up a lead magnet, an opt-in form. And every three or four days I would have someone subscribe to my email list. And I thought that was absolutely amazing. And I kept on doing work and trying to find ways to drive traffic into my lead magnet. And then I started getting one person a day subscribing. And that was amazing. And then I started getting two people a
day on average, subscribing, and that was incredible. And I just kept on working it and working, and working it, and eventually I got up to about 30 people a day opting in. And that was like, just do the math, and that's almost a thousand people a month. And that's when things started to happen. And I just, well, they actually started happening before that but that's when I could just start. Start to project out that this was going to be a real business at some point.
And so it's just this process of no one figuring out, no one knows the perfect business, the perfect offer, the perfect anything, initially. I mean I started out teaching people about the stock market. That's miles away from teaching people about marketing.
I taught people about the stock market for eight years before ever got into teaching online business and teaching entrepreneurship and how to
launch. So what I'm saying is probably your first business, your first offer is not going to be the one you end up with. So what that says is you just need to get started because the first time you put something out there it's not going to be amazing because it's the first time you're doing it no one's amazing at anything the first time they do it. It's just a process of putting one foot in front of the other.
You know, back when I started, in some ways I had it really easy. It wasn't like everyone had an email list, everyone was publishing a newsletter, everyone was publishing anything, people didn't even, very few people even had opt-in forms on their website. And so it was relatively easy to get people to subscribe via emails. That was relatively easy. The hard part there was that technology was incredibly hard back then. Taking online payments was almost like rocket science. And, oh by the way, there weren't very many people online so there weren't very, very many people to sell to.
So I had huge advantages when I started out. I had huge disadvantages. Another disadvantage was there was no one to learn from. There's literally no one teaching online marketing in 1996. It just didn't exist. And so I had to find my own way which meant I went back and studied direct marketing from long before that.
So that was the negative. I didn't have anyone to learn from, you know, the positive for anyone there right now is there's so much out there. There's so many trainings and teachings and you can just learn whatever you want to learn almost instantly. That's an amazing thing.
The negative is there is so much out there it's easy to get overwhelmed, it's easy to get caught up in that bright shiny object where every day you're learning something new and you just keep on learning and learning and learning and learning. And you know “just in case learning” where you're just like, I'm going to just keep on learning new things just in case I ever need them. And you're never going to get around to doing anything. That's the negative of this these days.
The other negative is you don't know who to trust because you know there's a new pop-up guru like every five minutes in my Instagram feed. So you know there's positive and negatives at any time. There's huge positives for me when I started out, there's huge negatives right now. It's still the greatest time to be an entrepreneur. You know in past times, it took so much capital and so much effort and so much time to start a business.
Now, I mean anyone with a phone can start a business almost immediately. So it's an amazing time and also you know there's a lot of competition so you got to be good so there's pluses and minuses in every time in every circumstance but the one thing that never changes is that taking that first step and getting your first clients, getting your first offer out there is how you get in the game and how you learn to get better.
You can't truly start learning until you're in the game and you're not in the game until you've made an offer. So if you're just learning, learning, learning from every different guru every single day and just bouncing around “just in case learning” instead of “just in time learning” then you're just never going to go anywhere.
You have to get your first offer out there.Get feedback from the market. Adjust knowing that it's not going to be perfect the first time. But if you keep on moving forward towards your goal then you're unstoppable.
So I'm Jeff Walker. Wherever you're watching this, scroll down, leave a comment for me, and let's go get them this week.
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