CREATING YOUR PRODUCT ROADMAP
MORE BUYERS EVERY MONTH WORKSHOP #1: CREATING PRODUCTS THAT SELL
CREATING YOUR PRODUCT ROADMAP
FOR BEST RESULTS, PRINT THIS NOW SO YOU CAN TAKE GREAT NOTES IN THE MARGINS. (SERIOUSLY, PRINT IT. YOU’LL GET SO MUCH MORE OUT OF THIS MODULE.)
More Buyers Every Month Workshop #1 • Creating Products That Sell Creating Your Product Roadmap
CREATING YOUR PRODUCT ROADMAP If you’re reading this, I’m going to assume you’ve gone through the exercises in the first module, where you’ve made your personal expertise mind map and your partner expertise mind map. Haven’t Done It Yet? No Worries, Here’s What To Do Now If you’re one of those people who has been saying, “Those mind maps seem like too much work, I don’t want to do them,” that’s okay. You don’t have to do them (though you need to understand that you’ll be severely limiting your potential for products if you don’t). If you’re saying this because you’re strapped for time / worried about the workload, there’s an easy solution: Just limit yourself to 15 minutes for each mind map. You can do both of them on a lunch break this way, and 15 minutes is enough time to step up on the level of clarity you currently have regarding your opportunities. If you’re saying this because you think “I’ve got my product ideas figured out already,” I strongly urge you to giv the mind maps a chance, because they’ll help you clarify related products (think “upsells!”) and simple joint venture opportunities – the two things that will give you the easiest boosts to your bottom line. Just sayin’. Ok, so now that we’ve got that out of the way, I’ll go back to assuming you have some basic level of mind mapping going on. Now it’s time to take what you have and figure out what products you should work on first … and what products are the logical ones to follow. Let’s dive in.
2|P a g e
psst ... don't forget to take great notes in the margin.
More Buyers Every Month Workshop #1 • Creating Products That Sell Creating Your Product Roadmap
FIRST: THE SIMPLE WAYTO DECIDE WHAT PRODUCTS TO CREATE AND SELL Before we get into the details of creating your product roadmap, I want to make sure that you understand a very basic – but almost always overlooked – rule for choosing your information product topics. Normally, I’m not a fan of “rules,” because they usually come from people with a very condescending “I know best, and I’m going to tell you how to run your business” attitude, but this particular concept is so important I’m willing to take the risk of making that impression. This is a concept that took me my $10,000/year business and turned it into a $100,000/year business. Here’s the rule: The Most Important Rule Of Product Creation, Period Don’t make products you “think” will sell. Make products that the audience you have access to has specifically said they’ll buy. This is a huge deal, because it makes the difference between busting your tail to make even the smallest level of sales and pretty much having audiences ready to buy, Visa card in hand. (Yes, that’s on the verge of sounding like a cheap internet marketer, but it’s true). Here’s the deal – it’s very tempting to say “Hey, I’m good at X, so let me make a product around it!” There’s nothing inherently wrong with that approach, but it may leave you high and dry when it’s time to start making sales, if you don’t already have an audience that’s hungry to buy that particular product. If you do have that hungry audience, by all means, go for it. But if you don’t, that means after you do all the work of product creation, you’ve got to do all the work of hunting down an audience and getting them interested in buying. I’m going to suggest the opposite approach – that you consider your audience’s immediate needs first, and let them drive your product roadmap. In fact, don’t think of it as your roadmap – think of it as theirs, because that’s when the money begins to flow. Think about it – if you ask your audience “What problem do you want solved right now?” and you immediately make a product to solve that problem, how easy is it going to be to get them to buy it? (The answer is “pretty damned easy.”) So consider this as you go into creating your product roadmap –that you’re going to be poised to make a lot more money if you’re responsive to your audience’s desires than if you’re trying
3|P a g e
psst ... don't forget to take great notes in the margin.
More Buyers Every Month Workshop #1 • Creating Products That Sell Creating Your Product Roadmap
to get them to be responsive to your desires. You may be in the driver’s seat, but you’re only getting paid if you’re chauffeuring them where they want to go. UM … WHAT IF YOU DON’T HAVE AN AUDIENCE YET?
Now, this all rests on you having an audience – and by audience I mean mailing list. But what do you do if you don’t have an audience yet?What if you’ve got 15 people on your list or at your blog, and you know what they want but you just can’t sell enough of your product to so small a group? Well, the good news is that the answer is simple – you draw in other people’s audiences and make them your own. The slow way to do this is by making relevant guest posts on blogs and trying to leverage social media to get attention. The faster way, however, is to co-create a product with someone who has your audience and is not a direct competitor. For example, if you’re in the golfing niche, and you want to make a product about how to select the perfect set of clubs and care for them correctly, you’d want to look for someone who’s the go-to person for say, teaching people how to get that perfect golf swing. That person isn’t selling golf club care products, and they probably don’t want to, but they might be eager to have you do the work in exchange for access to their audience. And then when you launch to that audience, you make sure they get on your list so you now instantly have a larger group of targeted folks. So that’s one example. Of course, let me play “devil’s advocate” and say that you can even do this working with a direct competitor. Yes, a direct competitor. Here’s how you’d do it. First, you find a competitor who is too busy to actually make any products of their own. Then you make a deal to co-create the product, with you doing most/all of the work and them doing most/all of the promotion, and then they’ve got an extra productwith their co-branding to sell their audience and you now have money and a larger list. It’s doable – not necessarily easy, but doable if you find the right competitor. A second way to build your audience is just to find the right affiliates. If you can build a few good relationships with bloggers who have audiences who are all expressing a desire for a particular product, you can swoop in, have them promote your launch, and you now have a larger, targeted list. Of course, this is all easier said than done – but that’s no excuse for not taking action and doing it if that’s the path you need to take.
4|P a g e
psst ... don't forget to take great notes in the margin.
More Buyers Every Month Workshop #1 • Creating Products That Sell Creating Your Product Roadmap
So don’t fret if you don’t have an audience –you can rapidly build one by drawing off of competitors and peers alike.
SO, LET’S GET TO WHAT THIS ROADMAP LOOKS LIKE Ok, so let’s talk about what I mean when I talk about a product roadmap, which is really just a mind map that you can use to sort out what products will give you the best return for your time and effort. Your product roadmap is basically a summary of three things: 1. What product topics are most likely to be marketable, 2. What related products you can build off of those topics 3. What order you want to consider producing them in. Let’s go into each of these items in a little more detail. WHAT PRODUCT TOPICS ARE MOST LIKELY TO BE MARKETABLE?
When I ask this question, I’m not just asking what people in general will buy, I’m asking what the audience I have access to will buy – whether they’re my audience or a partner’s audience – what they have expressed they want a solution for. Now I said “expressed they want a solution” because they may not have explicitly said they want to buy it, but they could have shown such enthusiasm for the topic that you just know they’ll buy eventually. Let me give you a quick example. One day years ago I stumbled upon a blog post that was all about how to become an early riser, how to wake up early and get things done. That blog post was on the front page of all the social media sites and got an unbelievable amount of traffic. People were all over this article like it was the Holy Grail. (Angels were cued up to sing for the follow-up post.) Of course, it was just an article, so it didn’t go into the details – which left a nice opportunity for me. I surveyed my audience and asked if they wanted this product and they gave an enthusiastic “yes,” so I made my “Becoming an Early Riser” program it and it was a big seller for me. I compare that to my time management course – which was created in the opposite way, where I made it first and looked for the audience later … and that didn’t sell nearly as well. The people who bought it loved it, but it was a lot harder to find those people because the audience I had access to wasn’t ready to pay for that information yet. Compare that to the “Becoming an Early
5|P a g e
psst ... don't forget to take great notes in the margin.
More Buyers Every Month Workshop #1 • Creating Products That Sell Creating Your Product Roadmap
Riser” program, which was flying off the shelves, so to speak. So asking questions to your audience can make the difference between poor sales and stellar sales. And here’s another example – I stumbled across a post on Ittybiz.com where Naomi Dunford was explaining how she had made $12,000 on an ebook and her audience was clamoring to find out how she did it. But she didn’t have time to write an ebook about launching ebooks … but by then I had a lot of product launch training, so I proposed a partnership. And we created a product that hit five figures in sales in a very, very short time. So, that first question you want to ask yourself is, “How likely am I to have access to an audience who really wants this solution badly enough to buy it?” In my personal experience it’s always easier to find the hungry audience first, then feed it what it wants. So ask this question and see what your research tells you. Don’t fall in love with a topic if you know you don’t have an audience willing to buy it. Or at the very least, if you feel like you simply must develop that product just to have it on your site, make it a small one. So, let’s move onto the second item. WHAT RELATED PRODUCTS CAN I BUILD OFF OF THIS PRODUCT?
Now, you’re probably familiar with the concept that it’s a lot easier to sell to a customer than it is to a cold prospect. People who have bought from you before already know, like and trust you, they already know what they’re getting and they are much more willing to give your other products a chance. Well, that same concept extends to what I call “product chains.” The idea here is that if someone buys a product from you, the shortest path to additional sales is to sell them something directly related to the product they just purchased. It’s not only easier to create, since it’s likely that this related knowledge is easier to come by than some brand new topic, but it’s easier to sell. If you’ve just sold me a guide on how to take better photographs, I’m certainly going to be willing to consider a guide on how to upgrade to a better camera. Or maybe how to sell the pictures I take to some online site, or start a wedding photography business. This is the product equivalent to “do you want fries with that?” and it’s an important strategy for leveraging a buying audience so that they buy over and over again. Solve a need, then find out what needs they have before, during and after they’re working through that solution, and you’ve got a much easier sale and a much happier customer.
6|P a g e
psst ... don't forget to take great notes in the margin.
More Buyers Every Month Workshop #1 • Creating Products That Sell Creating Your Product Roadmap
So think of one product as the stepping stone to related products and mind map that out. One easy way to do this is to check out the sales pages of competitors – they’ll have either started working this plan themselves, or their sales pages will give you clues to other needs that particular buying audience has. Orbetter yet, ask your audience. Hold a quick question-and-answer style call and ask them what their biggest questions are regarding that topic, and you may find you have all the spin-off product ideas you can handle. Ok, now on to the third item: WHAT ORDER DO YOU WANT TO PRODUCE THESE PRODUCTS IN?
At this point, hopefully you have a mind map with specific product ideas that you’ve brainstormed from what you’ve covered in your personal expertise mind map, your partner expertise mind map, and the general research you’ve done on your audience’s needs. You’ve got an idea of what you’re capable of producing, and what your audience wants to buy. At this point you can begin sorting the order you want to create our products in so you can start getting to work. The mind map below is a quick example of how you could do this. You can see that I’ve started with my audience, which is online marketers, and I’ve laid out three product ideas, things I could create a very generalized product around. Then I’ve created a few spin off products I could make, where I could maybe go into greater detail on each topic.
I used the markup feature of my mind mapping software to add little “1, 2, 3” icons to these ideas so you could see what order I think I should produce them in. You can do this as well, or you could just drag topics around until they’re in the order you want. 7|P a g e
psst ... don't forget to take great notes in the margin.
More Buyers Every Month Workshop #1 • Creating Products That Sell Creating Your Product Roadmap
Now, I want you to notice something about this diagram – that some of the items are listed in order of progression and some aren’t. For example, for the “How to Get Affiliate Sales” product, my spin-off product ideas go from basic to advanced – I start out with how to set up the affiliate program itself, and then I go into how to recruit affiliates and then how to get them to promote. That’s a logical progression of skills to learn. On the other hand, for the “How to Build Your List” product, the idea for how to set up the list management software is last, and the more advanced topics come first. The reason you might want to do this is because you have a hungry audience who has expressed they are ready for the advanced products right now, and then you want to add the beginner content in later to round out the offering. So keep that in mind as you sort through items. The order of products should be determined on the basis of demand and marketability, from what people want to buy right now, and that’s not necessarily going to be a neat progressive order. It may seem like chaos, even, but it’s really just focusing on going where the money is, where people are willing to spend right now? ONE IMPORTANT THING TO REMEMBER SO YOU DON’T GO INSANE
When you create your product roadmap you’re going to want to remember one important thing; this roadmap should never be considered to be “etched in stone.” In fact, it’s probably going to change frequently as your business grows. Why? Well, there’s three main reasons: •
As your audience grows, you’re going to get more people who are expressing what they want to buy from you, and so the current “hot topic” will change. This is especially true once you start pulling in other people’s audiences.
•
Also, as your audience gets more comfortable with you, they’ll be willing to reveal more of what they really want – and that could change your roadmap dramatically.
•
And finally, times change. You may have your next 10 product ideas organized, but by the time you get to product number 4, your audience’s interests may have evolved and changed, and you’ll have to adjust your roadmap accordingly.
So keep these three things in mind and don’t be worried about the fact that your roadmap will change periodically and need freshening up. The roadmap is your personal guide to where you see the money is being spent … so take the time to develop it out for your next few products and make sure you’re on track for creating the products that people want to buy. 8|P a g e
psst ... don't forget to take great notes in the margin.
CREATING YOUR PRODUCT ROADMAP
FOR BEST RESULTS, PRINT THIS NOW SO YOU CAN TAKE GREAT NOTES IN THE MARGINS. (SERIOUSLY, PRINT IT. YOU’LL GET SO MUCH MORE OUT OF THIS MODULE.)
More Buyers Every Month Workshop #1 • Creating Products That Sell Creating Your Product Roadmap
CREATING YOUR PRODUCT ROADMAP If you’re reading this, I’m going to assume you’ve gone through the exercises in the first module, where you’ve made your personal expertise mind map and your partner expertise mind map. Haven’t Done It Yet? No Worries, Here’s What To Do Now If you’re one of those people who has been saying, “Those mind maps seem like too much work, I don’t want to do them,” that’s okay. You don’t have to do them (though you need to understand that you’ll be severely limiting your potential for products if you don’t). If you’re saying this because you’re strapped for time / worried about the workload, there’s an easy solution: Just limit yourself to 15 minutes for each mind map. You can do both of them on a lunch break this way, and 15 minutes is enough time to step up on the level of clarity you currently have regarding your opportunities. If you’re saying this because you think “I’ve got my product ideas figured out already,” I strongly urge you to giv the mind maps a chance, because they’ll help you clarify related products (think “upsells!”) and simple joint venture opportunities – the two things that will give you the easiest boosts to your bottom line. Just sayin’. Ok, so now that we’ve got that out of the way, I’ll go back to assuming you have some basic level of mind mapping going on. Now it’s time to take what you have and figure out what products you should work on first … and what products are the logical ones to follow. Let’s dive in.
2|P a g e
psst ... don't forget to take great notes in the margin.
More Buyers Every Month Workshop #1 • Creating Products That Sell Creating Your Product Roadmap
FIRST: THE SIMPLE WAYTO DECIDE WHAT PRODUCTS TO CREATE AND SELL Before we get into the details of creating your product roadmap, I want to make sure that you understand a very basic – but almost always overlooked – rule for choosing your information product topics. Normally, I’m not a fan of “rules,” because they usually come from people with a very condescending “I know best, and I’m going to tell you how to run your business” attitude, but this particular concept is so important I’m willing to take the risk of making that impression. This is a concept that took me my $10,000/year business and turned it into a $100,000/year business. Here’s the rule: The Most Important Rule Of Product Creation, Period Don’t make products you “think” will sell. Make products that the audience you have access to has specifically said they’ll buy. This is a huge deal, because it makes the difference between busting your tail to make even the smallest level of sales and pretty much having audiences ready to buy, Visa card in hand. (Yes, that’s on the verge of sounding like a cheap internet marketer, but it’s true). Here’s the deal – it’s very tempting to say “Hey, I’m good at X, so let me make a product around it!” There’s nothing inherently wrong with that approach, but it may leave you high and dry when it’s time to start making sales, if you don’t already have an audience that’s hungry to buy that particular product. If you do have that hungry audience, by all means, go for it. But if you don’t, that means after you do all the work of product creation, you’ve got to do all the work of hunting down an audience and getting them interested in buying. I’m going to suggest the opposite approach – that you consider your audience’s immediate needs first, and let them drive your product roadmap. In fact, don’t think of it as your roadmap – think of it as theirs, because that’s when the money begins to flow. Think about it – if you ask your audience “What problem do you want solved right now?” and you immediately make a product to solve that problem, how easy is it going to be to get them to buy it? (The answer is “pretty damned easy.”) So consider this as you go into creating your product roadmap –that you’re going to be poised to make a lot more money if you’re responsive to your audience’s desires than if you’re trying
3|P a g e
psst ... don't forget to take great notes in the margin.
More Buyers Every Month Workshop #1 • Creating Products That Sell Creating Your Product Roadmap
to get them to be responsive to your desires. You may be in the driver’s seat, but you’re only getting paid if you’re chauffeuring them where they want to go. UM … WHAT IF YOU DON’T HAVE AN AUDIENCE YET?
Now, this all rests on you having an audience – and by audience I mean mailing list. But what do you do if you don’t have an audience yet?What if you’ve got 15 people on your list or at your blog, and you know what they want but you just can’t sell enough of your product to so small a group? Well, the good news is that the answer is simple – you draw in other people’s audiences and make them your own. The slow way to do this is by making relevant guest posts on blogs and trying to leverage social media to get attention. The faster way, however, is to co-create a product with someone who has your audience and is not a direct competitor. For example, if you’re in the golfing niche, and you want to make a product about how to select the perfect set of clubs and care for them correctly, you’d want to look for someone who’s the go-to person for say, teaching people how to get that perfect golf swing. That person isn’t selling golf club care products, and they probably don’t want to, but they might be eager to have you do the work in exchange for access to their audience. And then when you launch to that audience, you make sure they get on your list so you now instantly have a larger group of targeted folks. So that’s one example. Of course, let me play “devil’s advocate” and say that you can even do this working with a direct competitor. Yes, a direct competitor. Here’s how you’d do it. First, you find a competitor who is too busy to actually make any products of their own. Then you make a deal to co-create the product, with you doing most/all of the work and them doing most/all of the promotion, and then they’ve got an extra productwith their co-branding to sell their audience and you now have money and a larger list. It’s doable – not necessarily easy, but doable if you find the right competitor. A second way to build your audience is just to find the right affiliates. If you can build a few good relationships with bloggers who have audiences who are all expressing a desire for a particular product, you can swoop in, have them promote your launch, and you now have a larger, targeted list. Of course, this is all easier said than done – but that’s no excuse for not taking action and doing it if that’s the path you need to take.
4|P a g e
psst ... don't forget to take great notes in the margin.
More Buyers Every Month Workshop #1 • Creating Products That Sell Creating Your Product Roadmap
So don’t fret if you don’t have an audience –you can rapidly build one by drawing off of competitors and peers alike.
SO, LET’S GET TO WHAT THIS ROADMAP LOOKS LIKE Ok, so let’s talk about what I mean when I talk about a product roadmap, which is really just a mind map that you can use to sort out what products will give you the best return for your time and effort. Your product roadmap is basically a summary of three things: 1. What product topics are most likely to be marketable, 2. What related products you can build off of those topics 3. What order you want to consider producing them in. Let’s go into each of these items in a little more detail. WHAT PRODUCT TOPICS ARE MOST LIKELY TO BE MARKETABLE?
When I ask this question, I’m not just asking what people in general will buy, I’m asking what the audience I have access to will buy – whether they’re my audience or a partner’s audience – what they have expressed they want a solution for. Now I said “expressed they want a solution” because they may not have explicitly said they want to buy it, but they could have shown such enthusiasm for the topic that you just know they’ll buy eventually. Let me give you a quick example. One day years ago I stumbled upon a blog post that was all about how to become an early riser, how to wake up early and get things done. That blog post was on the front page of all the social media sites and got an unbelievable amount of traffic. People were all over this article like it was the Holy Grail. (Angels were cued up to sing for the follow-up post.) Of course, it was just an article, so it didn’t go into the details – which left a nice opportunity for me. I surveyed my audience and asked if they wanted this product and they gave an enthusiastic “yes,” so I made my “Becoming an Early Riser” program it and it was a big seller for me. I compare that to my time management course – which was created in the opposite way, where I made it first and looked for the audience later … and that didn’t sell nearly as well. The people who bought it loved it, but it was a lot harder to find those people because the audience I had access to wasn’t ready to pay for that information yet. Compare that to the “Becoming an Early
5|P a g e
psst ... don't forget to take great notes in the margin.
More Buyers Every Month Workshop #1 • Creating Products That Sell Creating Your Product Roadmap
Riser” program, which was flying off the shelves, so to speak. So asking questions to your audience can make the difference between poor sales and stellar sales. And here’s another example – I stumbled across a post on Ittybiz.com where Naomi Dunford was explaining how she had made $12,000 on an ebook and her audience was clamoring to find out how she did it. But she didn’t have time to write an ebook about launching ebooks … but by then I had a lot of product launch training, so I proposed a partnership. And we created a product that hit five figures in sales in a very, very short time. So, that first question you want to ask yourself is, “How likely am I to have access to an audience who really wants this solution badly enough to buy it?” In my personal experience it’s always easier to find the hungry audience first, then feed it what it wants. So ask this question and see what your research tells you. Don’t fall in love with a topic if you know you don’t have an audience willing to buy it. Or at the very least, if you feel like you simply must develop that product just to have it on your site, make it a small one. So, let’s move onto the second item. WHAT RELATED PRODUCTS CAN I BUILD OFF OF THIS PRODUCT?
Now, you’re probably familiar with the concept that it’s a lot easier to sell to a customer than it is to a cold prospect. People who have bought from you before already know, like and trust you, they already know what they’re getting and they are much more willing to give your other products a chance. Well, that same concept extends to what I call “product chains.” The idea here is that if someone buys a product from you, the shortest path to additional sales is to sell them something directly related to the product they just purchased. It’s not only easier to create, since it’s likely that this related knowledge is easier to come by than some brand new topic, but it’s easier to sell. If you’ve just sold me a guide on how to take better photographs, I’m certainly going to be willing to consider a guide on how to upgrade to a better camera. Or maybe how to sell the pictures I take to some online site, or start a wedding photography business. This is the product equivalent to “do you want fries with that?” and it’s an important strategy for leveraging a buying audience so that they buy over and over again. Solve a need, then find out what needs they have before, during and after they’re working through that solution, and you’ve got a much easier sale and a much happier customer.
6|P a g e
psst ... don't forget to take great notes in the margin.
More Buyers Every Month Workshop #1 • Creating Products That Sell Creating Your Product Roadmap
So think of one product as the stepping stone to related products and mind map that out. One easy way to do this is to check out the sales pages of competitors – they’ll have either started working this plan themselves, or their sales pages will give you clues to other needs that particular buying audience has. Orbetter yet, ask your audience. Hold a quick question-and-answer style call and ask them what their biggest questions are regarding that topic, and you may find you have all the spin-off product ideas you can handle. Ok, now on to the third item: WHAT ORDER DO YOU WANT TO PRODUCE THESE PRODUCTS IN?
At this point, hopefully you have a mind map with specific product ideas that you’ve brainstormed from what you’ve covered in your personal expertise mind map, your partner expertise mind map, and the general research you’ve done on your audience’s needs. You’ve got an idea of what you’re capable of producing, and what your audience wants to buy. At this point you can begin sorting the order you want to create our products in so you can start getting to work. The mind map below is a quick example of how you could do this. You can see that I’ve started with my audience, which is online marketers, and I’ve laid out three product ideas, things I could create a very generalized product around. Then I’ve created a few spin off products I could make, where I could maybe go into greater detail on each topic.
I used the markup feature of my mind mapping software to add little “1, 2, 3” icons to these ideas so you could see what order I think I should produce them in. You can do this as well, or you could just drag topics around until they’re in the order you want. 7|P a g e
psst ... don't forget to take great notes in the margin.
More Buyers Every Month Workshop #1 • Creating Products That Sell Creating Your Product Roadmap
Now, I want you to notice something about this diagram – that some of the items are listed in order of progression and some aren’t. For example, for the “How to Get Affiliate Sales” product, my spin-off product ideas go from basic to advanced – I start out with how to set up the affiliate program itself, and then I go into how to recruit affiliates and then how to get them to promote. That’s a logical progression of skills to learn. On the other hand, for the “How to Build Your List” product, the idea for how to set up the list management software is last, and the more advanced topics come first. The reason you might want to do this is because you have a hungry audience who has expressed they are ready for the advanced products right now, and then you want to add the beginner content in later to round out the offering. So keep that in mind as you sort through items. The order of products should be determined on the basis of demand and marketability, from what people want to buy right now, and that’s not necessarily going to be a neat progressive order. It may seem like chaos, even, but it’s really just focusing on going where the money is, where people are willing to spend right now? ONE IMPORTANT THING TO REMEMBER SO YOU DON’T GO INSANE
When you create your product roadmap you’re going to want to remember one important thing; this roadmap should never be considered to be “etched in stone.” In fact, it’s probably going to change frequently as your business grows. Why? Well, there’s three main reasons: •
As your audience grows, you’re going to get more people who are expressing what they want to buy from you, and so the current “hot topic” will change. This is especially true once you start pulling in other people’s audiences.
•
Also, as your audience gets more comfortable with you, they’ll be willing to reveal more of what they really want – and that could change your roadmap dramatically.
•
And finally, times change. You may have your next 10 product ideas organized, but by the time you get to product number 4, your audience’s interests may have evolved and changed, and you’ll have to adjust your roadmap accordingly.
So keep these three things in mind and don’t be worried about the fact that your roadmap will change periodically and need freshening up. The roadmap is your personal guide to where you see the money is being spent … so take the time to develop it out for your next few products and make sure you’re on track for creating the products that people want to buy. 8|P a g e
psst ... don't forget to take great notes in the margin.
