A lot of people underestimate how hard it is to help people achieve their dreams.
Especially if we're coaching them to level up through acquiring new skills or removing roadblocks.
Bottom line: Helping people change their lives is extremely difficult.
Why is this important? because I think far too often building a business online has become about marketing, offers, copywriting and closing the deal, and NOT about how to make the best product in the marketplace.
We are all encouraged to use the internet to build our dream lives by selling products, but so phew people talk about how do you create an AMAZING product.
In fact most of the advice is that you already have everything you need to start a business, they say -- "you just need to help someone a few steps behind you". Which is really only partially true.
Being slightly ahead of someone else doesn't really mean you know how to coach them to get to where you are now. It doesn't mean you can't figure it out either, but don't fool yourself that it's going to be easy.
You can put material in a course, and you can learn how to sell it. You can even get 100 clients, but that doesn't mean you have a good product.
Without a good product that REALLY works you will eventually fail. That early momentum you had, the 5-10 clients you had, that will all go away if you can't eventually develop and improve your product so that it's really really really good.
How often have you received a testimonial only to feel deep inside that this person is just doing you a favor?
I had lots of those in the beginning, "Yea, Stephen is a great guy, loved working with him" -- this is a testimonial from someone who "likes" you, not someone that really loved your product.
People might like you, and they may not regret working with you, but do they really rave to others about your product?
So you have to ask yourself why you mostly focus on marketing and closing deals and not on customer success.
Sometimes even when we're experts we don't always know what will make our customers successful. But you have to start thinking about it, you have to start taking repeated and sustained actions to improve your product and figure it out.
Or whatever you're building will eventually fizzle out.