The Price of Netflix

IN THIS ISSUE

What is really the cost of all those Netflix viewing hours?
Why solving a narrow niche and high-ticket problem can make you rich.
What you need to spend your time on to solve valuable problems.
5 big idea concepts that create compounding value.

What is the real cost of Netflix and all those hours spent watching TV?

I’m here to tell you it’s not the $6.99 to $19.99 subscription price, it could actually be way, way more. But let’s circle back to this idea toward the end of the newsletter.

You…From Scratch

I’m making an assumption that you have a good job or enough excess that you could afford to invest in yourself each month. Or maybe, you send money away for retirement and can rechannel some or all of that money. The point is, you have some excess at your disposal if you had something smart you could do with it.

This money is going to be used to bootstrap you into a new existence as a problem-solver for a narrow niche of high-ticket service providers.

Think (but do not get stuck on) injury lawyers, plastic surgeons, cosmetic dentists, and so on.

The problem you will solve for them is bringing them new business. And with a high-ticket service provider, there will be large margins and greater rewards for finding this new business.

But if you don’t know how to solve this problem, you’re going to have to start from scratch.

The Midnight Club

Learning how to solve a problem starting from scratch is going to take a lot of time.

You’re going to have to burn the midnight oil.

You’re going to have to trade those Netflix viewing hours for hours spent learning, building, and iterating on your solution.

Your excess is going to fund all of this until your iterations get to the point where your solution becomes marketable.

You’re probably wondering where your time will be spent and what you’ll be doing.

Here are some ideas:

Joining and reading Facebook groups where your future customers and/or their clients hang out
Reading books that your customers read and their Amazon reviews
Reading Reddit post discussions around the problems they face
Interviewing real people who represent your customers or their clients
Learning how to begin a marketing conversation with your customers and their clients
Learning how to build or buy solutions, deploying them, and reflecting on the results
You take courses to get closer to expert on some needed skills.

I already suspect I’m losing you because you think this may be too hard.

But this is the challenge for a lot of us—doing things that are hard.

Maintaining focus and belief.

It just gets too hard and you’d rather just watch Dead to Me or Virgin River.

Money Heist

So before I lose you, let’s talk about the money potential.

I don’t know what you do for a living, but a good many people are miserable at their jobs. Their reasons are all over the map, but invariably it comes down to people just wanting their freedom.

How much income would buy your freedom? You should think about that.

Would it be $10,000 per month? $20,000? $30,000?

For many people, any of the above would work just fine.

The good news is this has been demonstrated to be very doable. People I’m around appear to be building digital agencies that reach monthly revenue levels of $100,000 and even $500,000.

Obviously, at those revenue levels, it’s not just you. You have a fully-scaled company!

But back to the money. It seems too good to be true—like stealing. Like some kind of elaborate heist.

Formula 1

It isn’t stealing, it’s just several powerful concepts all combined together to yield the possibility of success at this magnitude.

Assets

As I mentioned way back in my first newsletter, Starting You, Inc., the wealthy work for assets and equity.

In solving problems for this high-ticket customer niche, you’ve been building an intellectual property asset; an iterated solution that few could duplicate.

Your funded investment and your time have led to an income-generating solution asset.

Build Once, Sell Twice

The headline is a nod to Jack Butcher’s great creator course by that title, but the reality is you’ve built an asset that can be leveraged many times.

How many injury lawyers are out there? Plastic surgeons? Cosmetic dentists?

A bunch!

And what this means is that your solution asset can be deployed to each new customer nearly without change. What works for one customer, pretty much works for another.

Copy and paste service delivery!

Each customer gets easier to acquire and fulfill.

But also, each customer improves the solution and makes every other customer’s solution better.

It’s a very key concept that you’re creating an asset and you’re putting it in “circulation” or “flow” as the term I’ve used so much in past newsletters.

How does your investment in time and money look now?

McDonald’s-ize

By design, your solution solves a narrow niche problem and you intend to solve it over and over for different customers.

What this means is that you start 90% solved with only 10% necessary for customizations (high leverage).

What this does not mean is that you start over from scratch for every customer (low leverage). If you did this, your time and energy would not go very far.

Like McDonald’s, you don’t create custom solutions, you create customized solutions leveraging systems and processes to get repeatable results.

High-Ticket = High Margin

Why did you choose that narrow customer niche of high-ticket service providers?

It’s pretty simple.

Your solution is worth more.

Go big or go home. It’s just not worth going through the trouble of solving a low-dollar problem.

You need to strongly consider who you want to work with and what the rewards are.

Equity

Returning to the idea that the wealthy work for assets and equity, there’s the equity side of this exploration.

The ultimate end game is a scaled-up cash-flowing business that now represents huge equity.

Keep that equity or sell it.

If you ask me, these concepts combined together represent a great formula.

From drive to survive to drive to thrive.

The Good Place

If you think of your journey, there’s really that one hard period where you divert your cash excess and your Netflix viewing hours in pursuit of this reality.

Do you think you could do it?

If not you alone, could you partner with someone who supplies the superpowers or the willpower that you might lack?

I honestly think every one of us could do this.

It comes down to a choice:

The Good Place or House of Cards?

What are you choosing?

— Bill

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When you are ready, here are some next steps…

Pick any of my recommended courses to continue investing in yourself
Build your digital assets using the tools I recommend in my toolbox.