Monday memo #53
Make a button.
The Monday memo is food for thought to fuel your week.
Hi everyone,
We live in a digital world. A world of screens. We search, browse, click, scroll, and if we see something we like or want, we can buy it with the click of a button.
Every time you click a button to buy something, there’s a seller at the other end, collecting the money and delivering the product or service.
Here’s the thing. As a buyer, you make choices about what to buy, but it’s the sellers who create the choices. The internet shopping economy is created by sellers. If nobody offered anything for sale, there would be nothing to buy.
Exercise.
Here’s your exercise for the week: Make a button. Create a possibility that wasn’t there before. Make it possible for buyers to choose you. Create a new choice, an option that wasn’t available before.
What should you offer? For this exercise, it doesn’t really matter that much. A promise you can keep. Something you can deliver. It can be as simple as an hour of your time on a Zoom call.
How much should you charge? Again, for this exercise, that doesn’t really matter either. When you are learning to draw you’re going to make a lot of bad drawings at first. Learning to be a writer means writing a lot, and first drafts are often terrible. But doing bad work is a necessary step on the journey to doing d]good work.
The point of this exercise is to practice the art of creating an offer. If you haven’t done it before, it might be a bad offer. Keep it simple. Start small. An offer is a promise, made in advance, that if someone pays you X, you will deliver Y. So if you’re just starting on this journey, make promises that you are confident that you can keep.
The button puts your promise out in the world. It gives your family, friends, fans and followers a way to show that they like you, that they appreciate your work. When somebody clicks that button you won’t just get a payment. You will get a feeling that you are appreciated, a confidence boost, a signal that you are valued, that you matter, that your work matters.
Give it a try and see what happens.
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