By this point, you should hopefully have a clearer idea of what your vision, mission, and values are. 

It’s now time to develop your idea into a more concrete product.

Depending on what career route you decide to take, your product could be one of three things:

Firstly, it could be a physical or digital product. For example, a digital product could be an online course or a mobile app.

Or it could be a vlog or blog in which you give away free content in order to quickly grow an online following, and then try to monetise your traffic later by creating affiliate partnerships.

Secondly, it could be a service (this is when you’d choose to become a freelancer). An example of a service would be a Marketing Consultant, in which you provide other businesses with strategic marketing advice. Consultants don’t actually deliver the work, they simply consult on how the work could be done more efficiently.

Another example could be to become a freelance Marketing Manager, in which you implement specific marketing services for different businesses.

As a freelancer, you could also offer both consultancy and service packages as a part of your overall offer.

Thirdly, your product could simply just be a plain old job, in which you sell your knowledge and skills to a single company.

What ties all of these different product options together is that they could potentially all be aligned to your vision, mission, and values. 

They may all also involve the same industry knowledge and contacts.

But they remain distinctively different in terms of that they are all vastly different products.

Now you’ll probably notice that we’re using the word ‘product’ quite loosely here. 

If your career route is to work your way up the corporate ladder, then essentially YOU are the product. You are selling yourself and your suitability to the job role. Rather than selling a product to an end consumer, you’re selling yourself to a company recruiter.

In that sense, you can think of this career route as a B2B business model. Your personal brand is the business, and you’re selling yourself to another business that hopefully shares your vision and values.

If this is the career route that you plan to take, then not to worry we will be covering this in more detail later in the course.

In a similar way, if your chosen career route is to become a freelancer, then again you and your time, and your skills are essentially the product, but rather than selling your skills to one single company, you are selling yourself to multiple companies.

We’ll be covering freelancing in more detail in Lesson 22.

One career route is not necessarily better than the other, but one might be better suited for you. 

At the same time, it is also feasible to suggest that you could pursue all three career routes at the same time, or at different periods of time within your career.

There’s a fair argument to be had that launching a digital product, such as an online course or app, as potentially the smartest of the 3 options.

That’s because, with the other two career options, the product that you’re selling is largely YOU and your time. Whereas with an actual product, you’re not giving away your time, you’re simply selling a product. So in that sense it’s a smarter business model as in the long run it will save you time.

Kickstarting your career by launching an online course or book for example can also be referred to as establishing an MVP (which stands for minimum viable product). 

An MVP is like a trial product to test your idea. But over time you may add additional products or services to help you fulfill your career vision. 

For example, if your MVP was an online course this could potentially be the catalyst to helping you build your industry knowledge, network and personal brand within your industry. You may then want to branch out by offering a freelancing consulting service. This will then give you far more klout if you then wanted to put yourself forward to applying for a relevant senior job role for a company within that niche.

Regardless of what career route you choose to take, what remains foundational at this stage is that you must begin by researching and developing the relevant industry knowledge and contacts in order to begin establishing yourself as an expert.

In a nutshell, the success of your career or business really boils down to two things, your product and your marketing.

Both are important, but focusing on your product, at least at the beginning, is the more important of the two.

There are a few reasons for this.

Firstly, essentially your product is your business, as it’s the key thing that people are paying you for.

Secondly, it’s what’s going to be the focal point that will help you grow your network. If people are excited about your product they are more likely going to want to connect with you. If you don’t have a product, then you don’t really have much to offer and people aren’t really going to want to connect. This is a key reason for imposter syndrome. If you end up focusing more on your marketing before nailing your product you’ll just end up feeling like an imposter.

Thirdly, focusing passionately on product development will mean that all of that knowledge gained while doing your product research can then later be recycled into your marketing activities.

This will not only help you improve the quality of your marketing, but will also help establish yourself as an industry expert and help you stand out ahead of your competition.

So it all begins with your product development.

In order to do product development effectively will require that you also do competitor, industry, and customer research too, which we’ll be coming onto soon.

But for now, it’s important to mention that all four areas of research are interlocked and not separate from one another.

We’d actually recommend that one of the most straightforward and effective ways of developing your product is through competitor research. This will help you build the foundations of your product. And then once you have the foundation in place, you can then start to redevelop the idea so that it becomes unique, (and better than your competitor's product).

In summary, don’t start from scratch. Copy and improve on what others have done before you.

Read as much as you can about your industry, and use your own intuition to assess what ideas from within your industry (and from your competitors) inspire you.

Then take the best ideas from your customer, competitor, and industry research, and merge them with your own ideas that you should be developing during your product development, to then create something unique.

Generally, the process of building your product is to discover and develop a unique and interesting narrative that solves your target audience’s problem. 

To put it simply, this basically means you’re writing a book.

We like to call this your product narrative.

Through the process of writing this, you’re not only creating a potential product in itself, but you’re also actually creating the blueprint to your long-term career.

As your product narrative will become foundational to when you later build your product, whether that’s an actual product, or a B2B consultancy service, or the skills and knowledge that would be essential for your desired job role.

Additionally, what you’ll also find is that this process of structuring and developing your research is that it will also make you smarter too. As you’ll be creating stronger neural pathways in your mind to help you retrieve that information faster than if you hadn’t gone through the process.

So, when doing your customer, competitor, and industry research, you should be taking notes and then reorganising those notes to fit into your own unique structure and narrative.

A lot of people when doing research simply browse the internet and hope that that information remains in their minds. Unfortunately, this is a fatal mistake. It’s important to get into the habit of copying, pasting and then organising and saving the information that you have discovered into your product narrative.

For example, here’s a rough breakdown of how you can go about the process. You can think about splitting the process into phases:

For example:


Phase 1: Would be to sketch out your own unique structure. So using your own ideas when you developed your initial vision, you should be able to structure what you believe to be a unique narrative to solving your customer's problem.

Phase 2: Is to then incorporate the ideas from who you feel are the best and most inspirational thought leaders currently operating in your industry into your product narrative through your competitor and industry research.

Phase 3: Is to then do an extended phase of further competitor and industry research and again organise this research into your narrative (This is because over time the deeper you go into your industry research, you’ll discover better quality thought leaders to mine and add into your narrative)

Phase 4: Is to then consider completely reorganising your narrative to ensure that it is more relevant to the needs of your customer. You should be able to use the insights from your customer research to help you here.

Phase 5: Is to then do another round of competitor and industry research in order to beef up any weak points within your narrative.

Finally in Phase 6: You can then do a final draft to polish things off and ensure there is a consistent tone throughout. Having a unique and consistent tone and perspective is really important to help your product and marketing stand out.


Although your product may largely be made up through the existing thought leadership ideas already found within the industry, because those ideas are slotted within your personal vision and narrative, and then go through so many filters and drafts, the final product ends up being something quite unique. 


Developing your product narrative should therefore be a constant process of planning, researching, and reflecting until you finally nail it.

So the first step in this process is to set up what we call your ‘product narrative’ to help you save and organise your research. 


Hopefully, you should have already set this up in Lesson 1, when you created your eBook folder. If not, then we’d suggest going back and reviewing that first exercise.

The idea here is to simply set up a series of different Google documents and save and label each document within the eBook folder you would have bookmarked in your browser.

Make sure to label each Google document as a specific chapter or category of your business.

Remember at the beginning when your first set this up, this will only be your initial narrative. Once you start doing your industry research this narrative is likely to change.

Once you have your narrative structure in place you then want to begin the mammoth task of developing it.

Here are some initial tips to bear in mind before you go about it.

Firstly, as mentioned, when you’re doing your industry research don't just read a book or listen to a podcast and assume that the information will stay in your brain and be there when you need it. Take the time to copy and paste the new information you’ve learned into the relevant Google document. This means that when it’s time to work on a particular chapter of your business, you can find those notes quickly and then put them to good use. 

Secondly, of course, you don’t want to just copy and paste the information that you want to save. Instead, take the time to translate whatever you're saving into your own words. This not only forces you to better comprehend the information and understand it on a deeper level, but it also allows you to develop your own unique perspective and tone too.

A final tip is to keep your purpose in mind to help keep you motivated. Imagine yourself already as an industry expert, and that you’re doing all of this research because you want to be able to clearly communicate and teach this unique solution that you’re creating to future customers and clients.