Passion to Profit: Create a Business Offer Your Customers Can’t Refuse | Entrepreneurship | E2 | Presented by Intuit

Now on Spotify Video! Crafting a winning business offer is one of the most critical and often overlooked steps in building a profitable venture. Without a validated offer, even the most passionate entrepreneurs risk building a business no one needs. In this second episode of the Passion to Profit series, presented by Intuit, Hala Taha breaks down the building blocks of an irresistible offer. You’ll hear from powerhouse entrepreneurs like Alex Hormozi, Amy Porterfield, and Russell Brunson on how to master the art of giving people exactly what they want. In this episode, Hala will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (01:24) Market Research: The Key to Starting a Business (09:41) How to Position Your Offer for Success (11:22) The Power of Value Selling (17:54) The Psychology of Pricing (21:50) How to Test and Refine Your Business Offer Intuit, the maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks, is expanding its world-class network of tax and bookkeeping experts. Whether you want a side hustle or a career pivot, Intuit offers the tools to help you grow as an entrepreneur. Their supportive team, mission-driven culture, and Intuit Academy—a free, self-paced training platform—mean you’re set up to succeed, even if you’re just getting started. Learn more or apply now at intuit.com/expert. Sponsored By: Intuit, The Maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks. Learn more or apply now at intuit.com/expert. Resources Mentioned: YAP E199 with Alex Hormozi: youngandprofiting.co/TheValueEquation YAP E244 with Amy Porterfield: https://youngandprofiting.co/QuitMyJobBuiltaBusiness YAP E302 with Cal Fussman: youngandprofiting.co/PowerofQuestions YAP E155 with Kelly Roach: youngandprofiting.co/ConvictionMarketing YAP E312 with Russell Brunson: youngandprofiting.co/Million-DollarSalesFunnel YAP E337 with Adam Schafer: youngandprofiting.co/MindsetEntrepreneursWhoWin YAP E150 with Bob Burg: youngandprofiting.co/Go-GiverSalesStrategy YAP E318 with Rudy Mawer: youngandprofiting.co/PlaybookforScalingBrands YAP E106 with Josh Kaufman: youngandprofiting.co/LaunchingaBusinessSideHustle YAP E332 with Reid Hoffman: youngandprofiting.co/ScalingValuableCompaniesFast Passion to Profit E1 - ⁠youngandprofiting.co/PassiontoProfitEp1⁠ Passion to Profit E3 - ⁠youngandprofiting.co/PassiontoProfitEp3⁠ Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap YouTube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Disclaimer: This episode is a paid partnership with Intuit. Sponsored content helps support our podcast and continue bringing valuable insights to our audience. Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Startup, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business Podcast, Startup, Passive Income, Online Business, Solopreneur, Founder, Networking

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hala Taha?

  This episode of Young and Profiting is brought to you by Intuit, the maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks. If you're looking for a flexible career opportunity that lets you help others while building your own path, Intuit is inviting Yap Gang to join its world-class network of tax and bookkeeping experts. Visit Intuit.com/expert to learn more or apply now. Hello, young and profiteers. Thanks for joining me in episode two of Passion to Profit. In this series, we're helping you go from big idea to an even bigger income by turning your passion into a thriving business. In the first episode, we talked about getting mentally ready to take that leap, building the confidence, clarity, and purpose to finally get started on your dreams. But once you've made that leap, a new question then comes up. What exactly are you selling? And why would somebody want it right now?

• 0:45Hala Taha?

  Because passion without a clear offer is really just a hobby, folks. To build a sustainable business, you've got to create something that people truly need and are willing to pay their hard-earned cash for. In this episode, we're breaking down the building blocks of a truly magnetic offer, from identifying pain points and pricing smartly, to testing your ideas and knowing when it's time to change directions. You'll hear from business powerhouses like Alex from Ozzie, Amy Porterfield, and Russell Brunson, entrepreneurs who've mastered the art of giving people exactly what they want. So let's dive right into it.

• 1:23Hala Taha?

  When it comes to building an offer, everything starts with your audience. If you don't know them, you can't sell to them. This goes deeper than just the numbers or the demographics. It's about truly understanding your audience's pain points, their desires, and what they're willing to spend to fix their problems. Because even the best product won't land if it's targeting the wrong market. Now, Alex from Ozzie knows this better than most. As the founder of Acquisition.com, he's seen what works and what doesn't. Here's his famous $100 million offer framework for finding the right market for your offer.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  The first thing is you want to make sure that the people actually want what you have. All right, so typically, I express that as pain. They're in some sort of pain, they're suffering some problem that they want to solve. And the bigger the problem that you solve, the more money you make for it. Right, so number one is that they're in pain. Number two is you want the marketplace to be growing rather than shrinking. Right? Because if you could have a tailwind, if you're going to do the same work, you might as well have something pushing behind you. The flip side of that, I can give examples in a second.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  The third one is you want them to have the spending power. Because the worst thing in the world is like, you've got a market that's growing. There's a painful problem that you want to solve and that you have the ability to solve. But then they ain't got no money, right? A friend of mine had a resume business, right? He wanted to like, help coach people on their resumes and whatnot. And he called me up one day, he's like, "This is brilliant, I'm gonna make all this money." And it turned out, he was like, "Dude, they're all broke, they're all on unemployment." Now, you could make the argument that helping people with a resume inherently is not bad. But he had picked the wrong market to serve. If he had helped corporate executives get raises, he probably would have made a lot more money. Right? But he was picking unemployed people to help them get a job, rather than helping people get a better job. Right? Tiny difference.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  But the lever on how much money you can make, serving different audiences, is the name of the game. The reason many of the Fortune 500 companies are enterprise, like Salesforce, like, they're enterprise, well, they've gone down market now, but like, they built their value on the fact that they served very expensive customers. Million dollar, two million, ten million dollar year contracts. It's because you get to charge based on the value of their business, not yours. And that's one of the beautiful things about this.

• 3:30Hala Taha?

  After you've zeared in on your potential market, your next move is to figure out what they're already buying and how you can serve them even better. That means diving into your niche, studying the competition, and getting crystal clear on the problem you are uniquely positioned to solve. Amy Porterfield is a top online marketing strategist, who has helped thousands of entrepreneurs build winning offers. In this clip, she shares how to research, refine, and position your offer for a real impact.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  First thing is going back to that research. We've got to research. What's out there? What are people paying for? Who are your competitors? What are they selling? What are their price point? What does their audience look like? We're gonna do some research. I'm not talking about six months of research, but some really quality time where I want you to document what you're learning and what's out there. So that's one of the things we're gonna do, is we're gonna create an offer. But once you start to sit down and put together your offer, you need to really pinpoint the challenge you are solving, or desire you're meeting, but it's usually a challenge or a pain point. So I want you to have a statement at the Top of a Google Doc where you're taking your notes. This is the challenge that I am solving.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  These are the results that I am promising. Now, this is very clear because when you start to create whatever it is you're going to put together, it always comes back to, but is this true? Whatever I just put together, is it going to solve this problem? Whatever I just put together, is it going to meet that challenge where my students are at, or clients, or customers right now?

• 5:01Hala Taha?

  It's one thing to do your homework and spot a need, but it's another to truly understand how your audience wants that need solved. And that clarity, it only comes when you start asking the right questions and paying attention to what your audience is telling you. And I learned this firsthand early on in my journey. I noticed that listeners and my social media followers were connecting with my show in ways I hadn't expected. They kept asking me for advice to grow on LinkedIn, for example. And so I put out a LinkedIn masterclass, I adapted, I pivoted. And that's how the Yap Academy was born, which has generated over a million dollars in course revenue. So whether it's through one-on-one conversations or deep audience research, it's this kind of feedback that's gold. And nobody understands the power of a well-asked question

• 5:43Hala Taha?

  better than Cal Fussman, legendary interviewer and host of Big Questions. He explained to me why asking your customers the right questions can unlock game-changing insights.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  Let's say I'm an entrepreneur selling something.

• 5:57Speaker 03

  What's the most important thing to me? Knowing what my customer or would-be customer is thinking. I mean, there's nothing more important. Like, you can have the greatest idea in the world. If there are no customers that want it, it's not gonna fly. So just asking your customer or potential customer or...

• 6:32Speaker 03

  Anybody that you're talking to about the thing that you are trying to create or that you're selling to get a gauge on whether they would be interested in purchasing it or whether they know somebody you'd be interested in purchasing it. I mean, that's, that's the bedrock right there.

• 6:53Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  And so many times I run into entrepreneurs and, and they don't ask those questions. And, and when I'm talking about asking those questions, it's different. This gets to your question. It's very different from putting out a survey that says, on a scale of one to 10, what do you think of this?

• 7:17Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 7:19Speaker 03

  Is it a six? Is it a seven? Is it, and who's, who's six is another person's nine? We, we, we don't know that. It's very different from like looking somebody in the eye and saying, what do you think about this?

• 7:35Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  Do you like this? Does it bother you in any way? And I think you'll find that people will be happy to tell you how they feel or, or think.

• 7:47Hala Taha?

  Once you start listening closely to your audience, patterns begin to emerge. And so do the problems that nobody else is fixing. Sometimes the biggest breakthrough isn't about inventing something brand new. It's about identifying what's missing and being bold enough to fill that gap. Kelly Roach, a top tier business coach, told me about how spotting an industry blind spot helped her scale a business that delivered real results.

• 8:10Speaker 04

  I have to really identify the gap, right? This is something that I have been teaching for years. And I will tell you that the business owners that really understand how to identify the gap in their industry, they become multimillion dollar successes very, very quickly. In every industry, there is a wide open gap, right? The best example that I can give that everyone can identify is the taxi industry, right? The taxi industry was like off the rails with so many issues for decades. No one did anything about it, right? It was inconvenient. You could never get a taxi when you needed it, right? We could go on and on and on. So in came Uber. They filled the gap and it was just like spontaneous combustion, right?

• 8:52Speaker 04

  And now look at that industry and people are even starting their own private car fleets where they have their own, you know, two, three cars that they're running out, almost similar to like the Airbnb, the RBO industry where they're literally like running out their own cars, right? Because there's, there's a gap. And now especially in like the luxury space, like people wanna, you know, they're going on vacation, right? You're in a normal car dealership. You're like, eh, I don't really want a Jeep Liberty on my vacation. I want like a Ferrari, right? Right? So that's like an obvious thing. But the thing that's so interesting is that there is a gap in every industry. There are big issues that no one has taken the time. No one has taken the concern.

• 9:37Speaker 04

  No one has taken the money to innovate and create a solution.

• 9:41Hala Taha?

  Now, finding the gap in your industry is half the battle. The next step is learning how to frame your offer so it captures attention and sets you apart. And that's exactly where a lot of new founders get tripped up. Russell Brunson, the legendary marketer and founder of ClickFunnels, says the key isn't to tweak the current landscape, it's to totally reshape it. Let's hear how Russell thinks about crafting a new opportunity instead of simply offering a better version of what's already out there.

• 10:05Speaker 05

  New opportunity is basically looking at something saying, look, I know you've tried this in the past and you failed and it's not your fault. It's because of the system you were using was broken. I have something that's a new opportunity that's different, that's not a better way to do that. It's a different way to do that. I think about like some of the great inventions of all time, like Steve Jobs, when, you know, his prolific, you know, him on, on stage, this is when music's out, the people had CDs and stuff and, and he could have came out and said, hey, guys, I figured out a better way to do CDs. Now you see these don't hold 10 songs, it holds 100 songs. But he didn't do that. He stood there in front of it. In front of entire world say, look, this is how you you carried your music to the past CDs, but we're getting rid of CDs. I'm throwing them out the door. This is a broken system and I have a new opportunity. Boom. He pulls out the iPod, a thousand songs in your pocket. It wasn't a better way to CDs. It was a new opportunity, a new thing.

• 10:48Speaker 05

  And that's like, you know, boom, takes off. Sending you the phone when he came out with the iPhone wasn't like, here's a better way to your phone. He's like, the phone is broken. Here's the new opportunity. Right? When we, when we launched ClickFunnels, the same thing, like, there were a lot of website building platforms at the time. There were platforms into email marketing, there were platforms into CRMs. If I ever came to say, hey, I have a better CRM, I have a better thing, like, now we're fighting on features and stuff instead, right? No, no, we have something that's completely different than you guys ever thought about. We have a platform that builds this new thing called funnels. And like, it's a new opportunity, which is why I think it took off 10 years ago as fast as it did because we introduced a new opportunity.

• 11:21Hala Taha?

  I want to repeat what Russell said here. He said, standing out gets you noticed, but delivering value is what keeps people coming back. If you really want your offer to land, don't start out by asking for money. Start by proving out your value. And that's exactly what I did with Young and Profiting Podcast. I spent over two years just building my platform, creating consistent content and growing a loyal audience before I ever brought on a single sponsor, before I ever put out a single course or had a single agency offering. I just focused on connection over cash, trust over transactions, and that foundation became the reason why my audience was ready to buy from me when the time came. That's also the approach that Adam Schafer took when building Mind Pump Media into a multimillion dollar fitness brand. He had the product ready, but he didn't push for it until people

• 12:05Hala Taha?

  were practically begging for it. Why? Because when you lead with value, your audience doesn't just want what you're selling, they need it. Let's hear how Adam pulled it off.

• 12:14Speaker 05

  But really comes down to providing value and, and, and, and practice that. And then always looking back at yourself for, I mean, just like the other stuff that we talked about, people are so quick to point the finger at the other people, right? The victim like, oh, well, they can't afford, oh, they're not the right customer. Oh, it's like, no, we, none of us ever look at that like that. Like, if something is not working in the business, or we're not being successful, it's like, what are we doing? What are we not doing to give that customer enough value that they, they don't even hesitate to spend that? And that's how we, that's when we started the podcast, we actually had

• 12:50Speaker 06

  The product ready to sell. So MAPS Fitness Products is the foundation of what scaled and built this business originally. That's what brought us into the millions of dollars was the digital programs that we sell online. And we had that before the podcast even started. But we agreed not to sell it until people were begging for something from us. We didn't want to go in and already try and monetize. It was like, let's go first, since we're not media guys, let's go first prove that we can provide so much value on this podcast that it organically grows. We didn't want to spend any money on advertising. We weren't trying to do all the Instagram, social media hacks. It was like, lean into the value thing. Let's go put out something that is so valuable that people are willing to share it. And then

• 13:34Speaker 06

  listen, if I can't prove that before I'm even trying to sell anything, I would be a fool to try and sell something first. This is what I give advice to coaches and trainers that are trying to duplicate what we've done. It's like, you're already trying to think about the product or the thing you want to sell. You haven't even proven that people want to hear what you want to give them for free. Go prove to your audience first that you have something valuable enough that they'll listen or and/or share with other people. Go solve that equation before you figure out your price point of your product or your thing you want to sell and allow them to dictate what product or what service you come up with. But that's the first, that's the first problem in this equation that you

• 14:14Speaker 06

  need to solve is can I provide enough value to a specific audience that they're going to listen?

• 14:21Hala Taha?

  Once you've proven your value like Adam Schafer did, the next step is to turn that value into meaningful impact. Because lasting success isn't just about products sold or downloads counted. It's about trust and building a reputation that lasts. And that only happens when your audience knows you're in it for them and not just for the payday. As Bob Burg, the bestselling author of The Go-Giver, explains, shifting your focus from getting to giving isn't just the right thing to do. It's the most profitable move that you can make.

• 14:49Speaker 07

  Basic premise of the go giver is simply this, that shifting your focus, and this is really where it all begins, shifting your focus from getting to giving. Now, when we say giving in this context, we simply mean constantly and consistently providing immense value to others. Understanding that doing so is not only a more fulfilling way of conducting business, it's the most financially profitable way as well. And not for any way out there woo woo type of magical mystical reasons. It makes very logical, very rational sense. When you're that person, Hala, who can take your focus off of yourself and place it on serving others, on discovering what they need, what they want, what they desire,

• 15:32Speaker 07

  focusing on helping them solve their challenges and problems, taking your focus off of yourself and making it about helping to bring them closer to happiness, people feel good about you. People want to get to know you. They like you. They trust you. They want to be part of your life, part of your business. They want to tell others about you. Now, we would say in terms of go giver and go getter, it always depends about how you define terms, okay? So, what we like to say is, we love go getters because go getters are people of action. You know, you're a go getter as well as a go giver. You're a person of action, right? You started in radio, you went into, you had your blog that you had, you led a whole group of teams. As that died down, now you went into something else. You're a go getter.

• 16:15Speaker 07

  But you're always providing value to others. You're a go giver. And so, we like people to be both go getters, people of action, and go givers, people who are absolutely focused on providing immense value to others. We would say the opposite of a go giver is a go taker. And that's that person who feels almost entitled, if you will, to take, take, take without having added value to the person, to the process, to the situation. And they tend to... Be frustrated because they rarely have the kind of sustainable success that they believe they have.

• 16:52Hala Taha?

  Okay, you've asked the right questions, you've shown up with value, and you're building something rooted in real service. But now we come to the point where the real finesse comes in, figuring out your price, your positioning, and whether your offer actually delivers. After the break, we'll dive into how to test your idea in the real world and what to do when things don't go as planned. At Gap Media, we've trusted Intuit products for years. We started with QuickBooks to keep our business finances organized from the ground up, and it's been instrumental in helping us track our growth and manage our finances effectively. And now Intuit is expanding its world-class network of tax and bookkeeping experts for TurboTax and QuickBooks. Whether you're looking to work full-time, part-time, or simply supplement your income, Intuit offers flexible schedules that fit your lifestyle,

• 17:37Hala Taha?

  helping you build a personalized career path on your terms. And you won't be doing it alone. You'll have the support of a credentialed team. Plus, you'll get free training through the Intuit Academy to build confidence and develop your skills in tax preparation and bookkeeping. This means whether you're already experienced or just getting started in the field, there's a path for you. Intuit's passionate about helping people, customers, and experts alike create meaningful impact through financial clarity. If this sounds like an opportunity that you've been waiting for, head to intuit.com/expert to learn more and apply now. That's I-N-T-U-I-T dot com slash expert. Welcome back, everybody. Before the break, we talked about how to build value before asking for the sale. Now it's time to talk numbers, because a brilliant offer without the right price tag?

• 18:21Hala Taha?

  Well, that's a missed opportunity. Pricing can feel pretty intimidating, especially when you're starting out, but it doesn't have to be a guessing game. Amy Porterfield is back to break it down. She explains how your early pricing strategy can evolve and how clear expectations can turn casual buyers into lifelong customers.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  Another part of the offer is the price point. So playing around with the price point is very normal. What I always suggest to my students is, let's start a little bit lower and go higher over time. It's very awkward, I know this firsthand, going high and then feeling like you need to bring it down. It's just an awkward thing with the people who paid the bigger amount of money. And I've been there before. Sometimes mistakes are made, but I'd rather see you gradually increase your prices versus having to take them down. So we're going to come up with a price point. Another part of your offer is, is there a payment plan? So I've had a lot of success over the years with my one-on-one consulting and with my digital courses to offer a payment plan to make it an easy yes for people to get involved,

• 19:22Speaker 02

  especially when I was a no name, when no one really knew who I was or what I could offer, making it easier for them to get into business with me with a payment plan always worked out well. So if that makes sense for your offer, I'm all about it. And another part of your offer is the guarantee. So for a digital course, it might be 30 days, 60 days. For consulting, you can kind of play around with what if they're not a good fit? How do they get out of it? Whatever it is that you want it to be, you're the boss. You're the creator. Make sure it feels good to you, but then you've got to communicate it. The only thing that matters is expectations. They are very clear what they're paying for and what they get. So these are some elements that make a really beautiful offer.

• 20:05Hala Taha?

  After you've mapped out your beautiful offer and set a price you feel good about, the next challenge is understanding how that price lands with your audience. Because pricing is not just numbers, it's about psychology. The way your offer is positioned can either create friction or spark impulse. And if your offer feels off, it might not just be the product, it might be your product positioning. That's one reason that Rudy Moore, the investor and entrepreneur behind Moore Capital, suggests that starting small can be the smartest way to unlock bigger wins down the road.

• 20:35Speaker 08

  Most of our stuff, we actually start at under a hundred dollars. Okay. And there's a big important psychology lesson here. Under a hundred dollars, psychologically, most people don't need multiple decision-making processes. They don't need to review it multiple times. As soon as you go over a hundred dollars, and especially over 500 or 1,000, there needs to be multiple touchpoints and multiple conscious decision-making processes involved. Great way to, I explain this, is you know, when you're lining up at a CVS, Walgreens grocery store to pay? Have you ever saw on the side of the aisle where you're in the line, where they say, "You can buy a TV here for a thousand," and then the other side, it's like, "You can buy a jet ski for 12,000." And you can buy, you know, a new couch for 2,000.

• 21:21Speaker 08

  No, you never see that. Why? Because it's too expensive to be spontaneous, right? But that's what a lot of people are doing in their ads. When they sell to cold traffic, they're saying, hey, buy this $12,000 jet ski. It's like, I came here to, I'm bored at work looking at my, you know, friends' photos. I'm not ready to buy a jet ski. So you have to, I try and start them low, get them in the ecosystem. And another easy analogy is you're going to date before marriage, right? When there are one following, you can say, hey, you want to come on a week's vacation with me? If you went up to a stranger in the street or on a dating app and the first message was, hey, you want to come on a week's vacation? And I'm like, who the hell's this, right? So you got to date a little and then you can elevate that process as a relationship builds.

• 22:04Speaker 08

  Same psychology with dating, same psychology with the user journey.

• 22:08Hala Taha?

  Now that you've crafted your offer and priced it with purpose, here's your next big move. Don't treat it like it's set in stone. The most successful entrepreneurs are not stuck on version one. They test, tweak, and level up based on what actually works. If you want real traction, you've got to get real feedback on your offer. Josh Kaufman, bestselling author of The Personal MBA, breaks this down with two simple strategies: shadow testing and field testing.

• 22:32Speaker 09

  So there are two primary methods that I really like to use for this. The one, the first one is, is the fastest and the easiest, which is called shadow testing. And this is essentially, so it has many different forms. Sometimes it's called concept testing. Sometimes there are prototypes involved, but it, but it's always this testing an idea with potential customers before you, before you make anything. Like just, you know, an idea on a sheet of paper, just presenting it to the people who are most likely to buy from you and asking the critical question, which is, is this something that you're willing to pay for?

• 23:17Speaker 09

  And the strongest version of this test is you actually take orders from them. Like, yeah, sign on the dotted line, you know, we won't charge you until it's ready. But, you know, essentially think of what Kickstarter is, right? Like, there's no product, there's a lot of development and sometimes manufacturing and long, expensive processes that need to happen before, before the, the product is ready. But the Kickstarter, it's just a page. It's just some images. It's some text on the internet. There's nothing there, but it's enough that potential customers can look at it and say, "Oh yeah, that sounds cool. That's for me. I would like to preorder one." And Kickstarter makes that very easy to do.

• 23:59Speaker 09

  And so for most forms of businesses, shadow testing is something that is very, very valuable and worth doing because it can help answer that critical question immediately. Are you making something that people are willing to pay for? The longer term form of testing that is just as if not more valuable is field testing. And so it's making the thing and then you, as the business owner, you and your staff and the people who are involved in this particular market. The best situations where the company improves to the greatest extent most quickly are very

• 24:41Speaker 09

  often the companies that use the thing that they themselves make. Because think of it from a speed of learning or a feedback cycle sort of thing. Like if you're using the thing that you make and something goes wrong or something breaks or you know, it's like you know, right away, you can act on that information much more quickly than waiting for a bug report to come in from a customer with incomplete information and incomplete context. And so anytime there's an opportunity for you to use the thing that you make, you end up improving the quality of the product or the offer much, much faster than you otherwise would.

• 25:23Hala Taha?

  But even after you've tested and refined your offer, the game isn't over. The best entrepreneurs don't just iterate what they've built. They start to alert to what the market is trying to tell them, even if it means heading in a totally new direction. Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn and partner at Greylock, reminds us that true innovation often comes from letting go of the original plan.

• 25:43Speaker 10

  Obviously, people are familiar with pivots because it's not working, right? And there's different ways to get to the conclusion before it totally is a train wreck. Like you want to make the decision it's not working before the train wreck happens, you know, change tracks. But one of the things that people under describe is a pivot to a new opportunity. And this is like, in some sense, this is the PayPal story that we were talking about a little earlier. Because they said, well, we have this really great, unique technology. And oh, we're figuring out that it's not really going to work. And we're pivoting away from it because it's hard to get to market. And then what happened is you release this kind of Palm Pilot plus a synchronizing payment service. And what happened is eBay people started using it.

• 26:29Speaker 10

  And I remember the first week in the conversation at PayPal was, who are these eBay people? Should we stop them from using our product? And it was like, no, no, those are our customers. None of these people are our customers. Those are our customers. We're going to pivot entirely towards them. And so pivoting towards opportunities, seeing what happens. And sometimes, by the way, it's like, oh, you've been working on the software product. And now AI is here. And you're like, okay, I'm going to do AI. Like, yeah, I know I did this last 18 months of work, maybe three months of it's recoverable. Because that's the opportunity. And that pivoting towards big, new opportunities is one of the things that really creates these successful businesses.

• 27:09Speaker 10

  And, you know, because we want to tell this kind of heroic story where she or he had this original vision that came down from on high. And they came down with the two stone tablets. And they said, I've got this vision that goes on forever. And that's the reason I'm a genius. And it's like, well, actually, in fact, a lot of things happen based on, well, I was in the game. I was learning and I saw this new opportunity that emerged from a market, a technology, a set of things with competitors. And I moved towards that. Like, for example, Google, its theory of, it's when it launched, it said, we're going to sell enterprise search. That's our theory of the game. Then they saw, and then, oh, it's not working. Oh, our backup plan is to put double click ads on top of it.

• 27:53Speaker 10

  Oh, shit, the whole ad market went. What do we do? Oh, now we end that AdWords. And they pivoted from enterprise to consumer, and then consumer to using elements that they'd seen from the market, but inventing their own version of how to make a really powerful business. And it's one of the most powerful business models that's been invented in human history so far. And so that pivoting towards opportunity is one of the things that entrepreneurs really need to keep in mind.

• 28:21Hala Taha?

  Well, there you have it, Yap Gang. The most successful entrepreneurs are not the ones who cling to their first draft. They're the ones who listen, adapt, and evolve. They ask better questions. They respond to what's working and what's not. And whether you're adjusting price, pivoting your niche, or rebuilding from scratch, the willingness to stay flexible is what is going to keep you in the game. Because the market is always talking. The question is, are you listening? In our next episode, we'll help you take the next step, sharing your offer with the world. Because it doesn't matter how valuable your idea is if nobody gets to hear it. Get ready to dive into the art of messaging, marketing, and building trust with your audience. This is your host, Alataha, and I'll see you next time on Passion to Profit. I've got to give a huge thanks to Intuit for sponsoring today's episode.

• 29:06Hala Taha?

  Intuit is inviting our Yap fam to join its world-class network of tax and bookkeeping experts. If you've got experience in tax and bookkeeping, or even if you're just getting started, this is an incredible opportunity with flexible scheduling and the chance to make a real impact in people's lives. It's the perfect side hustle or main hustle. So if you're ready to get started, visit intuit.com/expert to learn more or apply. That's Intuit, I-N-T-U-I-T dot com slash expert to get started.