The Observation Fallacy

How to do the first thing first                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 March 07, 2024 | [Read Online]( Do the first thing first. Logical. The challenge is how do you know what is the first thing? This is the number one mistake I see entrepreneurs make. I include myself in that assessment. The reason it’s so hard is you don’t know what the first thing is until you gain experience. You have to build the car from start to finish, then you know what is the start and what is the finish. It’s a [catch-22](. You can’t do the thing until you’ve done the thing. So, what can you do when you’re trying to do something you’ve never done before? The Observation Fallacy The solution can appear obvious at first. Watch others who succeed, do what they do. Easy right? The problem with this strategy is it gives you some parts of the car, but not the sequence to construct the car — and you’re still missing most of the parts. I call this the Observation Fallacy. You can observe success. It’s all around us, especially online. If you’re interested in selling something, building an audience, or doing anything digital — there are countless examples to follow. You can observe every piece of content a person publishes on social, read every email they send, visit their sales pages, buy their products. Unfortunately, this well meaning education process is lacking a key ingredient. You don’t know what order to do things in. This will lead you to copy what someone is doing today, without knowing what came yesterday, or last year, or the year before that. For example, people are killing it on TikTok using a certain type of video, you do the same. Nothing happens. Someone launches a product and makes hundreds of thousands of dollars. You copy their launch formula and no one purchases from you. Why? What’s going wrong. You’re missing parts of the puzzle. Key parts. You do smart things, but without key elements in place, without the steps being completed in a certain order, you don’t get results. Foundation Metrics Here’s a better strategy to follow… You need to know your foundation metrics. When you know the numbers that matter, you can see indicators of heading in the right direction. If those numbers are not where they need to be, then you know only to do actions that impact those numbers. You may recall a few newsletters ago I wrote about [Core Metrics](. Core Metrics are the numbers I look at to make sure my business is on track. Foundation metrics are similar and some will stay to become core metrics long term. In the short term though, foundation metrics might matter only for brief periods as you lay foundations for a new business. They also change over time. New metrics emerge as your business grows. What a foundation metric is depends on what you are building. For content and education businesses, at first it’s usually something to do with audience growth. Subscribers, followers, viewers - they show progress. If it’s really early, your foundation metric might simply be some kind of interaction with people to give you feedback. For example, how many people did you interact with this week? If these numbers are not moving forward you’re doing the wrong things. It could be the right thing, but you’re doing it at the wrong time, the wrong step in the process. What Foundation Metrics Matter I can’t answer this question specifically for you because your situation and your business are unique. What I can say is most foundation metrics should be tied to eliminating constraints. Take a simple example with a teaching business. You want clients to sign up for your $5,000 coaching program. If you don’t have a way to present this offer to the right target people, people who have the necessary trust in you to purchase, then no sales occur. Your constraint is lack of access to an audience ready to buy. Your job is to grow your audience and create content that builds trust. Your foundation metrics are thus tied to audience growth and creating key pieces of content that build trust — your life story article/video, your key teaching methodology content, testimonials/examples etc. I created a short course (inside my Laptop Lifestyle Academy) on how to use an email sequence to build trust. The emails in the sequence are: 1. Welcome/Lifestory 2. Ah-hah moment leading to breakthrough 3. How-to email to teach what you learned from the breakthrough 4. Testimonial/case study story from someone you helped Then the next four emails in week two are about selling your offer: 5. Make a special offer 6. Deal with key rejections 7. Breakdown your product benefits 8. 24 Hour deadline warning This email sequence is a great trust building and selling tool. It can do everything within two weeks and just 8 emails, if you have the right people reading those emails. If no one reads those emails, or they are not the right type of person, it doesn’t matter how good the emails are. In this situation my foundation metrics would be first to make sure I have new email subscribers joining each day. If this isn’t happening, I have no way to get metrics from the emails. Once you have subscribers joining your list, then you watch the metrics on the 8 emails - open rates, click-through rates, and of course sales of the product. From there, everything you do is about improving those foundation metrics until you are making the sales you want. Now you might be thinking — I don’t know how to get email subscribers! This might be overly basic, but to get email subscribers you need a web page where people can enter their email to join your email list! If you don’t have this page, that’s your immediate constraint. Everything you do should be about getting this page setup. Remember how I said order matters? When I showed you those 8 emails, you might be thinking, I’m going to write them this week. However, there is no point devoting all that time to writing an email sequence if you have no way to get subscribers. It’s so easy to focus on steps that might be important, they might even be necessary parts of the process that you will need very soon. But soon is not TODAY. Solve today’s problem today. I’ll end this newsletter with a simple question you can ask yourself… Are you working on today’s problem or tomorrow’s? Yaro P.S. If you enjoyed this newsletter, you will also enjoy my post on the [Theory Of Constraints](. 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