HHW Therapists 56 - How to Know If You Actually Have Proof of Concept

I am going to dive in because I'm feeling energized by a topic that has been coming up a lot in coaching calls that I've had this week with people in my mastermind.

And it's something that I hear about a lot generally when we think about you know this isn't even just about diversifying your income streams this is very applicable to therapy practices as well but we always have this question around this concept of proof of concept right like how do i actually know i have something that people want whether that is a specific therapy service or offering, whether that is a digital hand, not digital hand, what digital product or something like that.

If there's something that you're trying to put in front of people, right? Whether that is a service, whether that is a digital product, whether that's something physical that you want to put in their hands.

So we'll have these ideas, right? And we think about marketing them.

We want to put it out there.

The steps to doing that are essentially you have to identify, here is the thing I want to put out there, right? Is it a coaching program? Is it one-to-one coaching? Is it a EMDR intensive for breakups? Is it a workbook on healing from inner child wounds? whatever it is, right? So we spend all this time developing the details around that, building up marketing like website.

Maybe you do organic Instagram marketing.

Maybe you look at paid marketing, if that's Google ads or meta ads.

So you spend all this time and energy and effort and maybe money if you are hiring a coach or even just building up the systems like Kajabi, Thrivecart, all that kind of stuff.

So you're spending all this time and energy and money because ultimately what you hope is that there is proof of concept.

You want to make sure, hey, this thing actually works and I can keep scaling it.

I can keep selling it, whether that's I can now definitely sell my therapy hour for 225 and above, or I can definitely sell this coaching program for 997, right? So what typically happens for people is they launch something and and they get some interest, right? Let's say even you start by launching an opt-in, whether that's, again, for your therapy practice of tips for overcoming XYZ, or whether you're trying to do more digital products or coaching program about the best ways to do ABC, whatever it is.

It's kind of hard to work in generalities like this.

But you put it out there.

You get some opt-ins to your email list.

You maybe get people scheduling discovery calls.

You maybe get someone buy a low-ticket product from you, like a little $7 workbook or something like that.

So you get really excited.

You're like, okay, cool.

This clearly is working.

Now let's change the offer up a little bit.

And usually what most people do in the coaching or digital product realm specifically is Most people start with what's called a beta test or a beta launch where they offer the thing for the lowest cost it'll ever be for the purpose of, okay, right, let's get anyone through this and then get some testimonials out of it.

All well and good.

That's exactly how I started my coaching business.

But then the problem becomes, right, the whole reason we do a beta test is let's see if anyone will buy this product.