There’s no “Amazon for ideas”. What is the market for your thought leadership?

Transcript

Hi! This is Peter Winick. I’m the Founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And today, I want to sort of talk to you about something that has been rattling around in my head.

And many businesses, many industries are simple. And the reason that they’re simple that there is a clear marketplace. Right. If you sell coffee beans, there is a market, there is an exchange for coffee beans. If you’re in the financial services industry there’s tons and tons of exchange and markets, etc. If you’ve got a consumer package good, you can go to Amazon, or Ebay, or whatever the distribution channel might be.

However, the challenge that most thought leaders, authors, and speakers, and such have is there’s no market for ideas. There is no Amazon of ideas. There’s no marketplace you can just go to and list your ideas. Right?

And ultimately, as a thought leader, the product that you are selling is nothing more than your ideas. So, the struggle is figuring out how to take the ideas, how to package them, what format to put them in. There’s books. There’s speeches. There’s consulting. There’s advisory. There’s coaching. There’s e-learning. I mean the range is pretty broad.

However, you have to develop the market. You have to go to market. You have to figure out how to package, how to position, how to price. And it’s not as easy as listening to yet another coffee mug on Amazon.

So again, the question to think about is: If there is no real easy marketplace for your ideas, are you, does your product roadmap make sense? Is the packaging right? Is the pricing right? Is the positioning right? Are you in the wrong modalities and have not experimented with new or digital solutions?

There is no one size fits all answer. There’s no easy answer. But I would ask you to think about that a little bit and come to some realizations and insights, if possible. Thank you so much.