Do you know the difference between monetizing and productizing?

Transcript

Hi there, it’s Peter Winick. I’m the Founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and here’s the idea that I’d like to share with you today—and that’s this:

In my conversations—my daily conversations, every day—with thought leaders that are potential clients, colleagues, friends, I ask them, “What are you working on? What are you thinking about?”

And nine times out of ten—maybe even more—they’re telling me about how they’re productizing their work.

“I’m going to take these ideas from my book and turn it into this thing,” or, “I’m going to create another app,” or, “a video-based training system,” etc.

And my pushback is always that productization is not monetization, and that you need to sort of work that backwards and ask a different question.

The question that you should ask isn’t: How can I productize my ideas? That’s easy. There’s an infinite number of things you could do with your ideas.

But rather: How do I most effectively monetize them?

Now that requires a deep understanding of the marketplace that you’re serving—pricing, sales, marketing, distribution. Those are questions that need to be answered before you start to think about—or more importantly, execute on—productization.

So anyway, my question to you is this:

What are you doing to monetize your work, as opposed to productize your work?

Love to hear your thoughts.