Week 3 - Crafting ICP, UVP, and The Offer 👔

Even though last week, I shared my answer to the question, “💻 What do you do, and who do you work with?”, it doesn’t mean it is set in stone 😏

I’m a huge believer in the MVP (minimum viable product) approach, exactly when you come up with some quick low-hanging-fruit idea, try it, and improve it on the next step.

Still, I’ve recently read in Sahil Bloom’s newsletter about the skyscraper mentality (tl;dr - to build a skyscraper, you need a strong foundation), and decided to work on:

• what I’m really good at,

• ICP - ideal customer profile,

• and UVP - unique value proposition.

Actually, it was not just Sahil’s newsletter because my first step was asking chatGPT next:

(I’m sharing with you the full prompt so that you can understand better the direction I’m moving toward and remind you that chatGPT (or any LLM) is your friend if you don’t trust everything it tells you 😉)

At this moment, it proposed many things to work on, such as market and client research, crafting my UVP, making low-ticket offers, and even starting pre-selling, but I chose to slow it down and go for ICP and UVP.

Right! ICP, ideal customer profile, sounds great!

But what the hell is it? 😲

Yes, I understand that it’s someone with whom I would love to work, but how do I find them?

So, the next few prompts helped me to come up with the initial questions:

• Who do I enjoy working with the most? (Industries, roles, personality types?)

• Who has gotten the best results from my work? (Success stories?)

• What specific problems do I love solving? (What challenges excite me?)

• Who naturally finds value in what I offer? (Do they understand the impact?)

• What kind of clients drain my energy? (Who do I NOT want to work with?)

• Where do my ideal clients already hang out? (LinkedIn, Slack groups, podcasts?)

Still hard, so to make things easier, I decided to share with chatGPT most of the things that I’m doing and how I feel about them:

Important point: I had 9 things on the list, and afterward, I sorted them based on feedback I received earlier from people and yes, I do have a “What people say about me” Notion page where I collect all the nice things people told me 😊😏).

When I shared these things, it started creating my UVP for different clients I discovered earlier (yes, I keep iterating in one chat, so chatGPT remembers what I shared with it before), but I still needed to deal with ICP first to choose whom do I really like to work with, so here was my next prompt:

At this moment, I finally got some results that I started to like, but still needed iterating:

Also, in my ICP, I talked about 4 types of clients:

• startups and established companies that need community

• solopreneurs who want to build their brands

• freelancers scaling their businesses

• community builders aligning community goals with business goals.

Frankly? Too much!

So next, I needed to choose what category to focus on the most, and I made this prompt:

Here is an example of the results that I received (the same things were for other categories):

At this point, I have another reminder for you: don’t trust everything chatGPT says!

It told me that selling to startups and companies is low effort, fast monetization speed, and high revenue potential…

but it forgot that to make it work that way, those clients have to trust me, and I must invest a ton of effort into making those relationships, which is very hard to do if you’re invisible, so I also need to have a really good personal brand.

Anyway, I finished my ICP focus on:

• Businesses That Want to Build a Community

• Freelancers Who Want to Build & Scale Their Business

And when I asked chatGPT to connect my ICPs with things I liked doing, summarize it, and create some UVPs, here is what I’ve got after a few iterations:

Yes, still not perfect, but good enough to start with 😏

The following question is: how can I serve them?

So I asked chatGPT next:

And I didn’t expect it, but it gave me pretty good ideas right away:

But, once again, too much.

So, I talked to myself and asked myself this question:

“If I were to do one thing full-time, one thing part-time, and one thing occasionally, what would it be?”

So for full-time, it’s easy: that’s something I already do for 9am, CodeControl, and Freelance Unlocked:

🎯 Fractional Chief Community Officer (CCO)

For part-time, it’s what I propose for other clients I take:

🚀 Community Revenue Accelerator

The hardest part is the occasional one because I can easily do a workshop, team training, 1:1 coaching (both for business on community and freelancers on growth), podcasting strategy and implementation, speaking engagements, etc.

And it’s easy just because I constantly practice all those things myself. Every time I do a new thing (for example, a workshop for a team), I always create a template that I can reuse for every other client.

Hence, at the end of the day, it takes me just a few hours to adjust those templates and do a presentation, coach, or whatever.

So remember: always reuse your work!

Okay, so now I have my ICP, UVP, and ideas of what I can propose to clients, so finally, I need to prepare the visual offer I can share with potential clients.

Of course, I won’t overcomplicate and make a Notion page that I can easily share and adjust whenever needed.

So here was my prompt:

Looks a little long, but here is a hot take:

the more initial input you give to chatGPT, the better answer you’ll have on a first iteration!

And don’t worry about structuring it very well; for the prompt above, I’ve just dumped everything I had on top of my mind without overthinking!

So here is the Notion page I’ve got as a result:

Work with Yurii Lazaruk 🤩

To make this page full, I’ve created a Calendly link so that potential clients can book a call with me and a simple Google Form to get a little info about them first.

In Google Forms, remember to turn on receiving email notifications for new responses so as not to miss them (in the future, we’ll definitely automate this process better, but for now, it works 😁).

Also, I really prefer Typeform for surveys, but I didn’t have a personal account, so Google Form was faster 😅

So here you are!

Just after 7 hours (I’ve worked on this thing every day for 1 hour in the evening), you’ll have your ICP, UVP, and a simple Notion page with the offer that you can send to clients 😏

But client work is only a part of a solo business and not very scalable, so before jumping to finding clients section, next week, I’ll discover sources of additional income for my business, lead magnets for clients, and how to create them!

By the way, I’m currently finishing an amazing book, Solo by Christine Vallaure—a step-by-step practical guide to creating and running digital products—that already gave me a ton of ideas that I’ll be implementing in the upcoming newsletters 🥳

So definitely go read it, too, and use a promo “Yurii” for 10% off 😉 

upd. I’m still building my database of amazing humans, and I already have 24 answers there! 🤗

And since I constantly reach out to 5 people a day, I’m starting a new section “Daily actions” that will help you to understand what I’m constantly doing on a background in addition to what I share with you weekly 🙂 

Daily actions:

• invite 5 people to join the database of amazing humans

If you have any thoughts, ideas, or questions, please 👇

And if you’d like to walk The Road To $1M+ Freelance Business with me 👇

See you next week! 👋