This is going to get very meta, so pay attention.
For a while I’ve wanted to have a product outside of the marketing niche, and I’ve had a few false starts already.
Before I give any more detail, this is going to be my “build in public” series behind the scenes.
I want to talk about how I half-validated my idea, what I’m doing to get started, and hopefully keep some momentum and have a bit to talk about as it grows.
I’ve done a lot of background here so this is a fairly long catch up post.
For a while I’ve had a memory domain that I keep looking back at.
TotalMemoryImprovement.com
I first came across it reading “Ask” by Ryan Leveque. He talks about the original name for his “Rocket Memory” course.
I checked the domain, saw it had lapsed and picked it up.
Later I built a test for remembering names on the site and made a few affiliate sales for Jonathan Levi, who I was working with at the time
Jonathan got tired of the memory niche a couple of years back and I didn’t have anywhere to send the traffic.
I had the idea of putting my own course on it but the idea of me dedicating myself to becoming a “memory guy” is pretty laughable if you’ve ever met me.
I needed something wider.
I know the advice is always to “niche down” but that’s shitty advice until you have some data.
This is how I started instead.
1. I looked at my bookshelf.
My bookshelf has some obvious themes:
Rowing books
Cycling books
Marketing books
“Getting shit done” books
There’s no money in rowing.
At 100kg I’m not a credible cyclist.
Honestly I’m bored to tears with reading & writing about marketing all day. Sorry, not sorry.
The last category is kind of interesting, and tackles what I just said about marketing.
It’s all the mind games you play to keep pumping content to win the games of SEO, social media, and email.
And it loosely relates to the memory niche which, for me at least, is more about skill acquisition than rote learning.
So I took it a step further.
2. Look at some bookstores
Honestly the number of books about getting things done and how to focus against the onslaught of social media is endless. There’s definitely capacity in the market for more players.
I’ve also seen two big chunks of the economy who need this apart from marketers.
– Creators, who make money like little media businesses through sponsorship and ads.
– Every poor sod who has to engage in “Thought leadership” on LinkedIn, which is just about anyone who ever owned a suit these days.
3. Do the Ikigai test
Thee are the 4 overlapping questions of
– Does the world need this? It seems so. There’s masses of books being sold in big numbers
– Will the world pay for this? Yes (see above), and there’s a mass of money being spent on apps, supplements, consulting and more to help with it.
– Am I good at this? Hmmm. I’ve been better, but at some point I lost it a bit. This blog started in about 2006 but has had some long breaks, when I was going through some tough times.
Starting it again has helped me think clearer, consume better content that just Twitter, and also inspired a few email related tools which have helped my day job.
– Do I love it?
Actually yes, and it has the added advantage that I can’t do it for you, so I won’t get pulled back into client work that destroys the creation time.
I want to throw in some more criteria that Alex Lieberman tweeted a short while back:
https://x.com/businessbarista/status/1811787380761788554
It’s definitely high need, and a look at Google Trends shows me a whole bunch of related trends are growing, some of them quite fast.
Honestly at this point I just need to get going, but for reasons I’ll explain another day I need a brand for the project, rather than doing it all under my own name.
5. Choosing a brand
My best advice on this is, pick a name that’s really broad and gives room to pivot later.
The existing memory domain didn’t do that, but I’ve seen enough overlap in this world with things like bio-hacking, longevity, productivity and so on that the word “superhuman” kept popping up.
This sounded like too big a claim, but then I had a thought.
What if we’re already superhuman and it’s modern life that’s screwing us up?
What if socia media and being “always on” would defeat Superman?
The phrase “We’re only superhuman” kept getting stuck in my head, and events settled on a domain name:
onlysuperhuman.com
I figured signing of as “We’re Only Superhuman” would be a fun touch.
So that’s how far I’ve got.
Next step is quite simple. Just crank content on socials and build the email list until something pops.
I’ll talk more about the content plan soon.
If you have any questions, just drop it in a reply to my emails. I want to keep this going in tandem with the productivity stuff to show you how a content-driven business evolves.
