I’ve finally been feeling *just* well enough that I have been able to restart doing some behind the scenes work on Normal Systems. Nothing too fascinating, just finally pulling some thoughts out of my head and into draft sales pages.
One offer not on the website yet will be a day of voxer type offer. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s basically a day of some kind of coaching (mine will be systems focused, given the name and topic of the business), but it’s asynchronous through a voice/texting app.
I was skimming other peoples sales pages who do day of voxer offers to glean FAQs or cool things I could rewrite onto my sales page for the offer. I ended up quite shocked at how cheaply people were offering it. Some were $200 for a day. I don’t know about you, but for me, $200 for a days work is not a sustainable price for a business.
True, some people run multiple clients on the same day, but the ceiling seems to be about three at at time, it’s too much otherwise.
(How many at a time will be the kind of thing I test in my beta launch month of it.)
There’s a particular facebook group where I know people are fairly familiar with this type of service offer, so I posted in it saying something to the effect of “How is $200 sustainable, please charge more. At $200 a day I assume you’ll barely be paying attention to me.”
Some likes, some responses with the gist of “they don’t need to pay that much attention to you, that’s what a VIP day is for”.
They said their VIP days are the offering where you get someones full attention, *not* a day of voxer.
I think there was also an implication that VIP days are synchronous.
Here’s the *next* layer.
A few days ago I had posted in the same group about sales people who are all “omg you have to come to this training live you get the most out of it that way” and basically discrediting that, primarily from a time zone perspective – Australian time doesn’t play well with lots of US and UK synchronous workshops.
And lots of people agreed. I actually thought I might get a little hate (it’s not a nasty group, but I thought I’d get disagreement) but the comments were overwhelmingly supportive and in agreement.
Twist the two together…
In the same group, people are saying that asynchronous learning is good, but asynchronous one-to-one work is not as valuable. This feels like a disconnect. There was even some implication that day of voxer is an unimportant, kind of silly little business offer that you don’t have to take seriously.
(I don’t know if I should extrapolate from that that my expectations are incorrect in that a day of voxer one on one day isn’t supposed to be personalised and … what? You pay a bunch of money for impersonal advice you could google? I don’t like the possibility that someone was suggesting that.)
Why are you talking about this?
The entire point of me setting up Normal Systems is that I need a business that replaces my day job salary and allows me to work around my fatigue and pain. AKA I need the business to be asynchronous.
When people imply synchronous as more valuable it feels like a small kick in the guts to me. And when I have very little ability to work on changing things and starting a business, it stings a bit more. “Hey you’re working on something that’s not valuable!”
The thing is, I already have things written about why asynchronous is best, both published and in draft, I’ll be focusing on it in social media posts… I know I have fantastic skills and I know I can do the work.
I guess after a few years of “UGH you want workplace accomodations” I’m still very sensitive to even mildly implied kicks to my plans.
