Momentum Podcast: 678

The 5 Laws Of Ideal Avatar Identification (With Dre Baldwin)

by Alex Charfen

Episode Description

Understanding your avatar, your ideal client, is the key step to ascending the Billionaire Code and growing your business. When you have a clear picture of who you are going to serve, you can respond to their needs and create products to get them the results you want.

At a recent event for our coaching members called The Charfen Summit, we had the opportunity to hear from Dre Baldwin, the CEO of Work on Your Game. Dre has gone through the process of getting hyper clear on his avatar, and it has been an absolute game-changer for his business.

Dre implemented a strategy of conducting avatar interviews, and in that process, he realized that he wanted to serve a completely different set of people than he thought.

If you apply the same strategies that Dre did, you will see your business grow faster than you ever thought possible.

Full Audio Transcript

This is the Momentum Podcast.One of the things we talk about all the time as a company is getting really clear on your avatar. Understanding your avatar or your ideal client is the key step to ascending the billionaire code and growing your business. When you have a clear picture of who you're going to serve, you can respond to their needs and create products to get them the results that you want them to have.

We just wrapped up the Charfen Summit, an event where we bring together all of the members of our coaching programs, and we had the opportunity at this previous summit to hear from Dre Baldwin, the CEO of Work on Your Game. Dre's gone through this process of getting hyper clear on his avatar, and it's been an absolute game changer for his business. The strategies that Dre implemented are things that we talk about all the time in our coaching programs. And here's just a little spoiler for you. In that process, he realized that he wanted to serve a completely different set of people than he originally thought. I hope you enjoy this special presentation by Dre Baldwin.

Alex Charfen: I'm Alex Charfen, and this is the Momentum Podcast, made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers, and creators of all kinds. Those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny, we define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop, and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future. And instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly, the most important people in the world because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution, and we always will be

Dre Baldwin: What I'm going to talk about is the ways that I started to, or we, my company, we started to target our ideal avatar. And the reason why this was an important thing for me once I got into the Charfen Program is because, I don't know everybody in here, but how I got into this business in general was I was, my background is in sports, I was playing professional sports, but I was publishing content on the internet way before it was a cool thing to do. So I had this audience of people who found me and I started creating products and selling them and creating products and selling them just randomly, [inaudible 00:02:37], there was no strategy, there was no structure to it. It was a gift and a curse that came with that. The gift was, it was working and people were buying stuff and we're making money. But the curse was, there was no plan and there was no structure.

So eventually, as Kelsey was talking about earlier, we started to get into, actually it was just me, got into this tactical hell of I felt like I was working all day but there was no actual tangible measurable progress happening. So, when I came into the Charfen Program, that was one of the reasons that I came in, and Alex started talking about finding your ideal avatar, it immediately got my attention. I said, this is something that we need to do so I can figure out who exactly are we selling to. Are we someone that people who play basketball? Are we selling to people who want that. I guess people can say some of the stuff that I talked about is mindset. Who exactly are we targeting and how? So that's what got me paying so much attention to the avatar identification. So what we did getting straight into it was going through the avatar identification documents that are shared in the Charfen Program, we started doing these avatar interviews. And the first avatar that we targeted was going to be people who wanted to play professional basketball internationally, because that's what I had done. And this was an amazing niche, it was a perfect niche because, or niche, because first of all, you had to have done it in order to be able to sell it. And I had done it. So that reduced my competition down to a very small fraction of people. And coming from the athlete world, I'll say something that most of you probably shouldn't say, but I can say it, is that many athletes are pretty good at playing but they're terrible at explaining how it's done. They're not very articulate. So I knew that I could at least explain it to people in a way that very few others could have. So everything went perfect, and we started doing these avatar interviews. And it was probably about 15 interviews into this process that I said, this is not and cannot be our target avatar. The reason why is because anytime that, and all you being entrepreneurs, you understand is, if you're going to sell something, you got to be able to give people a result. What outcome are we going to get them to? And in the sports world, the challenge is, everybody can't make it. Doesn't matter how much you want it, or how bad you desire it, or how hard you work, if you don't have talent, you're just not going to make it. So I could not promise anybody that you're going to make it to a certain point. So that was one challenge that I had that I couldn't promise them a specific outcome except giving them the information of here are the things you need to do. This is exactly what I did and many others. But everybody's not going to make it just because of natural selection process. That was the first challenge. The second challenge is once we started actually talking to these people, I realized that this wasn't the client that I wanted to build my business around. Once I started talking to these athletes, a lot of them younger who wanted to play professional sports, I said to myself, do I want to spend eight hours a day, 40 hours a week, talking to people like this or building my business around these types of individuals? And the answer was absolutely no, because I was getting asked a lot of remedial questions, I was getting asked a lot of questions about just simple things, even things about just how to get better at the sport. I'm trying to help you get to the pro level, I'm assuming you had that taken care of already, but you can't force people to be at a certain spot in order to target them. And I realized that the target audience that I really could help, the right people, was way too small of an audience, on top of the fact that if you really think about it, even those you who are not athletes, someone who's trying to become a professional athlete, usually they're coming out of college. And I know who I was when I got out of college. I was a broke college graduate living in my parents' house just trying to get a job. And job just happened to be sports. So what am I going to sell these people? They can't afford anything. Those were the three times that I had with this avatar. So we decided to do another round of avatar interviews, starting over from scratch, basically throwing those basketball players out, and just asking anyone in my audience. And I just sent messages out to my email list on social media and said, listen, I'm going to get on a call, I'm going to talk to people one-on-one, I just want to ask you some questions, I want to interview you. I want to find out where you're at, where you're going and how I could possibly help you. I had no idea of what people are going to say, where they were coming from, just anyone who knew of me, they could come find me. I had a good size enough email list and social media following that this actually got some people to sign up for these interviews. And we did start to land on the ideal audience. What we found was it was a lot of people in the business world or entrepreneurs, freelancers, solopreneurs, even people who worked in no traditional jobs who were just looking to advance and get better. And they just knew that there was more out there for them, and they just needed to figure out how to get to it, whether that was something internal or some things external. So those were really the type of people that started finding us. This is on the third point here on the slide, we realized that we had some underutilized value. There was certain things that I would talk about or I do talk about in my content and to my audiences that had nothing to do with playing basketball. I stopped playing basketball five years ago. I've evolved a lot past that audience. So if we were going to focus on them, it was cutting out a lot of the value that a lot of people were getting from me. And I didn't really realize that until we started doing the second round of avatar interviews. And people were saying, well, yeah, most of the people who follow me nowadays don't play basketball, or they used to, but they've evolved past the sport and they're following me for other reasons. That let us know that there was a lot of underutilized value that we weren't really taking advantage of by only focusing on a specific customer. So, the solutions that we achieved, first of all, we got a better grasp of who we were serving, what they wanted from us. We stopped targeting that less than ideal avatar. And then the third thing, which is a great thing that we got from the Charfen Program and that we're still working on in the Charfen Program was branding our processes. So that is not based on me as the sole attractive character of the business. And while, again, I don't know if anyone else can relate to this, many times, even nowadays, when we have people come into our groups and our company and we ask them, why did you join, why did you come in here, why did you sign up for this product, why did you get into this program? And they'll say things like, well, I've been following Dre since this, or Dre said that. And they're often mentioning me. And while that is a cool ego boost, and you're like, yeah, they signed up because of me, the problem is, eventually, if you want to take a vacation or if I have kids, I want to take care of, I want to go see my family or something happens to me and I can't be there at work, now, everybody's there because of me, and I don't want it to be that way. And it's something that Alex and [inaudible 00:09:13] and the coaches here talk about all the time is that, yeah, you sign up for the program, it's called Charfen, but you're not signing up for Alex, you're signing up for the outcome that you're going to get from the process. So one of the things that we're working on right now, it's going to be a big thing going into the next year is making sure we take all of our processes and the outcomes that we help people get, it's mostly been through me, but getting it out of me so that people can get that outcome, whether they're getting it from me or they can get it from an inanimate object, a program, a process, or another person that can teach it. But we have to get it off of it all being based on me because the outcome, somebody can want to get this outcome from us, they might not even like me. But if they can get the outcome, then they can still come through us and get it so I'm not the sole attractive character of the business, even though that's a cool thing and it does work to bring people in, we don't want them to come in and think that that's the only thing that they're paying for or paying attention to. As I just said, we found better people for our avatar interviews, and these were the type of people that once I started talking to them, I said, all right, these are the people that I actually, I wouldn't mind talking to these individuals, I wouldn't mind having a call with one of these people on a day-to-day basis. We got clear on who we wanted to work with, also, who we did not want to work with. As we started doing these avatar interviews, looking at the Google doc for the interviews, it said on there I believe, after you have 20, you get a little bit of a feel of who your avatar is, what their hopes, needs and desires are. And once we got to about 20, we started creating a minimum effective, we got the minimum effective[inaudible 00:10:49] feedback, and we started creating a minimum viable product or the MVP. And we started putting together a program, basically a coaching group program, where we took all of this stuff that we have and put it into one streamlined process after only doing 20 avatar interviews. And then we kept going doing interviews while we were creating that product. And as we were doing it, we started putting together that product, and we started having follow-up conversations with our ideal target avatars, and I'll get to that in a minute. But there were three questions that I added to the document that maybe some of you could use. And these are, I added these questions simply because my business was based on me as a person. So everyone who has come to that avatar interview was coming there not just because it was a way for them to vent and talk about what they had going on, but because they got to have a one-on-one conversation with me. So I added these three questions and they gave us a ton of insight. The first one is how'd you find out about or hear of me? And we learned a lot through that. Second one is, what do you get from me that you can't get anywhere else? This was probably the most important question that we asked because this right here told me, what is it that we are bringing to the table that nobody else is bringing to the table? Or at least in the eyes of the consumer, what are we bringing that they're not bringing? So that question told us at times about where we need to direct our energies as far as what we're going to offer moving forward. And the third question as well, what have you learned or got from me that helped you the most and why? And then the last one, knowing what you know of me, how can I help you out right now? And I asked them directly, I said, if I was creating a new program or making a new product, what would it be, and why would that be the best thing for you? And that basically told us what we needed to do next, what we needed to create next. And then people specifically, Dre, I don't want to be part of this big group where's a bunch of people. I want to be able to work with somebody one-on-one or I want to be part of a community. I want to meet like-minded individuals. They told me exactly what they wanted. So that told us exactly what we needed to have in our product. And I'll get to that in a moment what happened. Once we got the minimum viable product, basically means, for those who don't know what that means, I think most of you do, we basically created the sales page that said, this is what we're offering, we created the whole sales page. It's going to have, here's the pieces, one, two, three, four, five, everything laid out exactly how you get it. Here's exactly what it's going to cost. And then we had a second conversation with our ideal avatars. So after we did about 30 or 40 of these avatar interviews, me and my assistant, we went through the document, that is another thing that we did, I think I mentioned this on a call. I had my assistant go through the Google doc, basically copy and paste out each answer from each person, and put it into a Google sheet. And we put all the questions along the top row, and then all of the people's answers along the X axis and the Y axis. So then I can go to question number three, what is that third question, and I can see each answer from the third question, each answer from question number 10. We went through that document and we started highlighting the target people. I said, all right, this person, this person's an entrepreneur, this person wants to start a business, this person's a target. I love talking to this person. And we highlighted those people, and then we went back and had a second round of interviews with that, it was maybe 10 to 15 people, with our minimum viable products. I sent them the link to that page, a private link, had them take a look at it, then I got on a call with them and I asked them these questions here. What parts would move you to say yes, what would make you sign up? What would hold you back? What doesn't matter? What's missing? What questions are unanswered. And they basically helped us shape this product. So we went back to the drawing board, fixed the product up, and then we were able to put it out and start getting people into it. And funny enough, I guess not funny at all, but the people ended up signing up when we initially launched it in our soft launch, we were like 90%. Every one who we had the second conversation with, they all signed up because they had basically designed a program for us. So this is something that was a big diversion from what I had done in the past, which was believing in my own genius, just come up with an idea, create it, put it out and hope people buy it. And it had worked again. It was a gift and a curse. It worked many times, but then got me into this tactical hell of doing everything on my own, but I wasn't getting any results. Alex Charfen: That was really powerful presentation. I hope you took away a lot of notes from everything that Dre talked about. Maybe you're at the same point in your business that Dre was at where you need to get hyper clear on who you're going to serve in order to grow your business quickly and predictably. If you're ready to get hyper clear on who your avatar is, we're ready to help you. If you go to billionairecode.com right now, you'll be able to get on a call with a member of our coaching team and find out which of our coaching programs is the right fit for where you're at in your business right now. Let us show you the strategies that we use to get hyper clear on your avatar so that you can grow your business fast. Go to billionairecode.com right now to get started.

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