Episode Details

What's one of the biggest "rookie mistakes" when putting a landing page together?

It's the rookie, sitting down and writing the entire page at their desk. If you want a reasonably boring landing page, write it yourself.

But what if you didn't write it yourself? Who would write it for you? Find out more in Part 2 of this series.

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: How do you find the ideal client? Part 2: What happens when you dig into a single problem? Part 3: What do you do with all the other problems?

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There's a reason why I moved from PC to the Mac.

In 2008 I had to do a series of presentations for a radio station. Since the clients of radio stations are always looking for ways to get the attention of their clients, the presentation of The Brain Audit seemed like the perfect match. If there's one thing I'm very possessive about, it's the slides for my presentation.

I tend to make changes, simplifying the content and moving the slides around until the very last minute. Even if I have done the presentation dozens of times before, you can be sure I will be making changes at the very last minute.

In this case, the terms of my contract prohibited me from making those changes at the last minute.

The radio station was putting all their slides together in advance, so all slide decks had to be submitted the week before the presentation. This rattled me enough to show up three hours before I had to make my presentation. The technical crew was more than happy to let me go through a run through of my presentation on the big screen.

As I clicked through the slides, I realised that something was wrong. The presentation I was seeing on the screen looked a bit like my presentation, but somehow it was different.

The weird part was that it looked better than what I had done.

After I had got over the shock of someone tampering with my presentation, I asked the crew how they had gone about changing the presentation. "We didn't do anything with the presentation itself," they said. "We just ran it through keynote — which is a presentation software for the Mac."

That one idea was enough to get me hooked onto the Mac, even though I had used the PC for close to 15 years. The Mac had solved a problem that I didn't know existed. It had taken the best possible presentation I could muster, and made it far more beautiful than I could imagine.

Since then, I have dumped all my PCs and stuck to the Mac. So does this make me the ideal client?

It does not, because I wasn't aware of the problem in advance

To find the ideal client, you have to find someone is already deeply aware of the frustration they are facing. If you find someone like me—someone who's surprised and delighted, you're going to get a very shallow rendition of the set of problems the client faces—and most certainly never get to the depth of the biggest problem.

You have to find someone who already has a problem

And the best place to start could be a random place like Facebook. Since everyone already has an opinion on Facebook, you may shortlist your ideal client based on a friend that responds to your question.

You may have a tiny list of subscribers on your e-mail list, and if you send out a request, there's a good chance that at least a couple of responses will show up in your inbox. If you already have clients like we do, you're often still like a newbie, especially when you want to launch a new product or service.

Let's say we want to launch a product on how to take outstanding photos with your iPhone

In many cases it's easy enough to locate a great client, and it's more than likely that they would like to take great photos, but don't know how. Once you interview them over the phone, or in person, you'll quickly f