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I just gave a guest lecture last week at University of Texas for a class on entrepreneurship.

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There are some people here who don't try for shit.

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One of the key questions that many of the sparring entrepreneurs in the classroom ask is,

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what should I sell? First off, we have to define what are the actual things that can be sold?

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And this may sound crazy, but there's actually fewer of them than you think.

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And there's digital and physical formats of each of these things, which actually give you

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14 different things you can possibly sell. Once I define those, I'll talk about how we can

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increase the scale of the deliverable that we have using something that I call the delivery

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cube. Number one is you can sell products. You could sell a physical product, which would be like,

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I sell water bottles. A digital product would be something like a PDF. The second category is

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services. So this is stuff you do for other people. In the physical realm, a service would be a

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massage, mowing someone's lawn, fixing someone's car. On the digital side, oftentimes that service is

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something that happens in the digital space. So if you are an ad agency and you make ads,

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the ad itself that you're making is a service. Also, buying media is a service. All of those

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things would be digital services. Category three, you have access. Physical access is like,

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you lease a building. You gain access to the building. Digital access is you gain access to a

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library of digital content like Netflix. Category four is attention. You can sell or buy physical

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attention. That could be like a billboard. Cars physically drive past it and see it to the same

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degree. Facebook and Google have digital attention and they sell the eyeballs and the attention of

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that audience. Category five, like the hurricane, is risk selling insurance. You can ensure a building,

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but you can also ensure against in the digital format a cyber threat. If you're an established

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business owner and you sell physical products or even services, you can sell the risk associated

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with it, which is like ensuring the product. So some people give guarantees, but you can actually

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get people to pay for a guarantee, which is insurance. Just like AppleCare is just paid for insurance.

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The next thing you can buy or sell is money itself. The entire banking industry is predicated on

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buying and selling money and the rate they charge is the interest itself. And so you can have physical

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money, right? Like the actual US dollars, you also have digital money, which I'm not going to get

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into crypto, but that is a form of digital money. Category seven is an endorsement or brand.

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In the physical world, I say, hey, you can use my logo on your shirt and you give me a percentage

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of all your sales in the digital world. When they sell a check mark on Instagram, that is selling

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an endorsement, it's selling a brand, it's selling some sort of status that gets transferred and a fee

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is paid as a result of that. One of the key points here is that it can be a combination of those

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categories. So if someone sells a rock concert, for example, you're selling access to an experience,

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but you might also sell drinks and t-shirts while you're there. Now you might record it and then

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also sell the digital versions of that. Do you know what I'm going with here? In terms of picking

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which one to sell, it's mostly going to come down to two things. One is the resources you have and

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your skills value experience. If you're a first time entrepreneur, then you're like, well, I don't

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have any other experience, but you actually do. And let me hear me out. Your parents did something.

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And if you don't have parents, the people who raised you did something. And if no one raised you,

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people you knew did something and you were around them. So like, for example, my mom is a doctor.

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She's an eye surgeon. So I know a lot of stuff about eyes. That would be a category of stuff that

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I actually know a lot more about than you might expect. If your dad was a mechanic, you probably know

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what a carburetor is. I have no idea what it is. I've heard the word before. Oftentimes you've had

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little odd jobs. Like when I was in high school, I was a blender tenor and then I did catering at

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an orthodox Jewish company. You probably know a lot of stuff just from osmosis of being around it.

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We have these seven things digital and physical. Is there any one of these that I already have a

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little bit more experience with? And then of those things, which problem is the biggest that I think

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I can solve, given the resources that I have access to? What I was talking about with this

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entrepreneurship group is that they had a hundred dollars to start their business. Now that would

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probably preclude you from most physical products, probably most kind of digital like software type stuff.

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And so most of the time you're going to start selling your time, which is often services.

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Here's the first thing I provide them as value to for the least amount of money to me. That's

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where your sweet spot is as the first or next thing that I would probably package himself.

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Once you've established that, how can I enhance or make it more or less valuable or more or less

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profitable for me as business owner? The delivery cube has six pieces to it. That's eight, six.

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Number one is can I deliver this thing one to one in a small group? Can I deliver it one to many?

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Each of these have different value propositions that are associated with them. If you sold semi-private

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group stuff, it's a small group of five people doing something that's different than doing a

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webinar to a thousand people at once versus having a call review system where you review someone's

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calls to give them feedback one-on-one. The second frame of the delivery cube is do it yourself,

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DIY, DWI, which is done with you, as in you're holding their hand through the process of whatever

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it is you're doing, or done for you where you do all of the work yourself and you sell them a

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final product or some final outcome. Each of these give you different levels of scale. Do it yourself,

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you can sell it unlimited out. Typically, the value is smaller. Done with you, you have in between the

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two extremes of do it yourself and done for you. Done for you is the most expensive typically,

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sometimes the easiest to sell, but one of the hardest things to deliver on. The third frame is

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what level of support am I going to do and specifically on what medium? Am I going to offer support

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via chat? Am I going to offer support via email? Am I going to offer support via phone call? Is

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it going to be Zoom call? These are all different ways that I can support whatever the thing is

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that I'm selling. Obviously, if I do email support, that's going to be significantly more scalable.

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It'll probably also be significantly less valuable than somebody whose real time available to hop

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on a Zoom call whenever they want. Filter number four is how do I want them to consume the thing?

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They can consume it visually. They can consume it audio-wise. They can consume it live. They can

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consume it recording. They can consume it visually via text. So there's different ways we can have

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people consume some sort of thing whatever it is. Anything that's live is typically going to be

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perceived as more valuable. And if it's in person and live, probably the most valuable and probably

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the least scalable. On the flip side, if I did something that was recorded and was digital,

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it would be the most scalable, but probably the least valuable. The fifth lens is the speed

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and convenience of whatever we're delivering. This comes down to multiple things. One, is it 24 hours

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or is it just nine to five? Frame two is how many days a week am I maintaining that level of service?

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Three is how fast is that response? So I might be open 24 hours a day, but I have responses that

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are guaranteed in 24 hours, which is different than saying I'm open nine to five, five days a week,

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but I respond within three minutes. And the ultimate extremes are either you're overstaffed,

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but your customers don't have to wait. You incur inefficiency so that they have convenience,

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or they incur the inefficiency and all of your staff is 100% utilized because they're going to

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call to call to call all day long. Different strategies, there's wildly successful companies that

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do both. Frame six is what I like to call the 10x to one 10th test. If I charge 10 times more

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for my current thing, what would I have to change about my thing that I sell in order for it to be

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worth 10 times more? This ultimately gets me thinking in much bigger ways about how much value I

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would need to provide. Let's say I go from a 10,000 dollar thing to a 100,000 dollar thing that

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still would be profitable at a 10,000 dollar thing. It just makes me think differently because I now

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have to justify my 100,000 dollar price tag. The flip side of that is equally powerful, which is

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if I had to deliver the same or even more value than I currently am, but I could only charge one 10th

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the price that I currently am. What else would I do that would be perceived as value would not cost

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me enough so I could still justify one 10th the price but maintain my value? This gives me a very

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good starting point to both figure out what the first thing I might want to sell is and then how

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can I scale it and make it more profitable and or more valuable to my end consumer and think through

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the ratio of how many people I would need internally in my company to facilitate that. And so this

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is what I was explaining with the University of Texas. And if this was interesting to you, we actually

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have the entire full lecturing Q&A. The links somewhere around here, I'm sure it'll be available to you.

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If you want to watch the little thing, go click there and check it out.