Productize a Service by Identifying Pain Points For Your Course
All the six figures in six weeks gurus tell you to productize a service to make more passive income. But if you’re not identifying pain points that are the real root of the problem, then it ain’t gonna work.
In my last episode, we heard from Suzanne Pue. She’s a free diving hypnotherapist, a yoga teacher, an energy healer, and a happiness trainer; she’s got a lot going on and she’s been teaching people how to free dive for 25 years. So she already has stuff for this course.
She's got an hour long theory video. She's got shorter clips. There's a 117 page manual that her industry uses as the standard. She already knew these things weren't enough for her students.
Listen for the full episode
AND the BS Breakthrough (where I break down how this all applies to you)
Starting with the real problem clients struggle with is half the battle.
Don’t productize a service until you’re asking the right questions
So wtf does “productize a service” even mean? Generally, to make some specific service repeatable and packaged so you can sell it like a physical product. Courses are often dumped into that category.
When we focus on logistics, it can make us feel productive. This is in part because its concrete. If I want to know how to make my course accessible, I can go find a checklist somewhere and check it off.
But if we’re not asking the right questions first, we waste a lot of time and energy because what exactly we need to do is guided by our foundations.
Sue, a guest on Course Creation Crap, came onto the show with three very specific questions. She wanted to know
where to host the course,
how to legally protect the course information, and
what formats to use to make it accessible.
All three are great questions, and I answered exactly zero of them. That's not because I couldn't, it's because we needed to work through some other shit first.
She came in originally wanting to take her Zoom theory session and make it an online course that was chunked better, one that made it so they actually got to the end of it. This is totally reasonable.
But she wasn’t ready for these answers. They're good questions that you ask once you know exactly what you're doing, but they come later in the process. So instead of answering her questions, we dug into what she was actually building.
Identifying pain points under the pain point
Ahh, pain points. The love language of entrepreneurship/solopreneurship or whatever ship you’re driving to make money by serving others in some capacity. You often only know the pain points that folks are vocal about (makes sense), but under those verbalized pain points are where the real problems lie.
As Suzanne was talking about the way the course fit into her business, I realized her questions were more about implementation than the logistics. When she started talking about the thing her clients really struggle with the most: they take the theory course, they read the manual, they get to the live dive, and they have a hard time holding their breath.
And she knows why.
It's typically mental blocks, stress, and lack of flexibility. As I was listening, I heard something that she hadn't named yet: the actual problem that she was solving.
She wasn't solving a free diving problem. She was really solving a nervous system regulation problem, which she mentioned, just not in relation to the course itself.
The course that she was planning needed two steps. Step one is the thing that people needed before any of the theory was planned. It's learning how to breathe and be in their own body. That's a smaller course. That is a stepping stone. It is a different course.
It's one that can serve her in multiple parts of her business. It opens up what she does to a wider audience where she can guide them to what their next step is. For some of them, it is going to be the free diving course; for some of them, it's going to be the other things that she loves to do.
Building these foundational pieces that get people ready to do the next step since they're not coming already prepared to do it. They're going to face all kinds of barriers.
Three things for identifying the pain points in order to productize a service
I hate courses being called products because they’re experiences; BUT the core of productizing is creating something with a predefined solution, scope, timeframe, price, and so courses do hit all those boxes.
BUT (I gotta lotta buts in this post), IF you’re not productized around the right solution, it’s not gonna sell. In order to have the right solution you need to be really honed in on the exact problem.
The problem your clients name is rarely the whole problem.
And it’s your job to figure out the whole picture by looking for the source of the pain point. The pain point is the symptom.
Sue's students said, “I can't hold my breath for more than a minute.”
That's a symptom. The actual problem, as Sue pointed out last week, is that they never learned to breathe correctly. Their nervous system was on high alert. Their body was doing exactly what it's designed to do when someone tries to hold their breath underwater, which is panic.
For you, what do your students say that they need and what's actually underneath that?
As a course designer, you often have to bake the broccoli into the cupcakes. Giving them what they think they need, but also what they don't realize they need, because a course that solves just the stated problem might be completely different from the one that solves the underlying problem.
Logistics questions are sneaky ways to feel productive while avoiding foundational issues.
With love, because I've seen it a hundred times, concrete logistics will make you feel like you’re getting shit done but are a waste of time unless you get the foundations right.
The number one question I get is: What platform do I use?
And yes, that will matter. But if you're spending a lot of time on the things that you don't need to worry about yet, before you've really nailed down what the transformation your course is going to create and how you're going to get them there, then you might have to go back to the drawing board.
You'll be wasting a lot of time. The platform question is going to take you much less time. Once you know what you need the platform to do for you, picking the platform is faster and more effective.
The design question is going to take longer, but it matters more.
If you're stalling on logistics right now: do you actually know what you’re building?
What you do live isn’t automatically a course
Live things don’t equal asynchronous things. Some can, but it’s not the default.
Sue has been running live Zoom theory sessions for free diving for a while. She knows her content. She took all of that and she made it into a video that folks can watch. She does know, though, that it's not working.
When you move from something that's live, where you can read the room and catch when someone is confused, where you can actually see their face, even if it's a Zoom room, where you can call people out and ask if they understand, you lose those things.
When you go to something that is more on demand, you have to build in that connective tissue.
How to identify the real pain points in your own course
Step one, write down the problem your students or clients say they have.
Then write down what you think is actually happening underneath it.
See if there's a gap. That gap might tell you that something needs to happen before you get to solving the problem that they say that they have.
How do you find what is actually underneath it? This just comes from the work that you're already doing with people.
Step two, if you've been stalling on logistics questions, like platform and pricing and technology and making sure you have perfect videos, ask yourself, honestly, do I know what I'm building?
Do you have an actual map of the things you're asking them to do and the information they need to do it? If the answer is no, then put the logistics questions away.
They'll still be there when you actually need them, and focus on the foundational pieces first.
If you're sitting on a course idea and something keeps getting in the way of you building it, or you have a course and it's just meh, grab a strategy session. I can do the same online course consulting for you.
Podcast Music credit: Alex Mitchum
Alex, Catrina's youngest brother, was a jazz guitarist. This was one of the last stems he recorded before he died, and his family established a scholarship in his name at his alma mater. Please consider donating: https://www.alexmitchum.com/scholarship