6. Do you know how you will get predictable sales?

I can tell you from experience, though, that if you’re building a brand, you don’t want to get into the business of cutting prices. You want to be near the top price point in your market. The reason is simple: It’s much easier to scale a premium brand than it is to scale a low-priced brand. Only companies selling inventory in massive quantities can

Focus on your customer, not your competitor. One of my mentors, Kevin Nations, has his own rule of pricing that I like: Find out what the customer wants, find out what solving their problem is worth to them, then charge them a little bit less than that.

2. What do they already buy? Can you list at least three to five products that your group already buys? If you can’t list at least three products, you’re in the wrong market. At this point in the process, it’s really tempting to make up a product idea from scratch, but I recommend that you start by identifying what your person already buys.

People buy products that say something about themselves. Paying twice the price for Bulletproof Coffee versus the competitors says that the person is a high performer.

It’s important to define your customer around someone you know well. Don’t pick a group of people you know nothing about unless you’re prepared to do a lot of research on them—make sure you can identify at least one pain point shared by the group, and how you can serve that pain point with a collection of products.

I discovered it the hard way, and it took me ten years of “failed” entrepreneurship and over-work to finally understand that you can’t really be happy unless you’re doing something that benefits other people. To put it in business terms, you can’t be successful until your work is valued by someone else, which is why starting with the person is so i

People will always pay a premium to solve their specific problem. That’s why we choose brands—because they are for us. This is why you absolutely must hammer down the “who” behind your product. If you can speak directly to your target market, you can charge twice the price while creating loyal fans.

1. To whom are you going to sell? You