“What if nobody buys my product?”

In this episode, I addressed a common mindset block that many aspiring and new entrepreneurs face - the fear of 'What if nobody buys my product?'

I shared my personal journey and experiences with imposter syndrome in entrepreneurship and offered some advice on how to shift your energy and tackle the initial challenges of launching your own digital product.

Watch this to shift your 'stuck' energy and ensure that lovely digital product of yours gets created, launched and the attention it deserves ;)

Take care,

Shikah

Transcript

 Hello friends. Welcome to another episode. I am Shikah and I used to work as a counselor, but right now I am an online entrepreneur.   I've created many digital products over the years, and I've sold them as well.   And today I want to talk about a particular mindset block, which can hinder you from launching something you've always wanted to launch or stop you from doing something you've always wanted to do.

If you are someone who's been playing with the idea of creating digital products and selling them, or if you are a coach or influencer or a blogger and you've always wanted to create something and sell it, but something has been stopping you, maybe you have this particular mindset block.

Alright, so the mindset block that I'm referring to is this thought that "what if nobody buys my product?" You may have that fear in your mind and this is a very common thought, especially if you have never created a digital product before, or if you are someone who has some imposter syndrome, then this thought is something not new to you, I would say.

And I don't want you to punish yourself for having these thoughts because these thoughts are more common than you think. I started my digital product business about five, six years ago in 2020. And even I have these thoughts, even though I have counseling experience, formal counseling experience, formal certifications in this topic, and I have informal certifications as well.

So I have experience and certifications and interest, but even then, I also had a ton of imposter syndrome before I started this online business in 2020. So it's nothing new and I don't want you to feel that you are, you know, you are someone who's a quote unquote 'loser' for having these thoughts because these are more common than you think.

And I'm going to share some things that you can do to shift your energy about this.

So this whole episode is not about doing mental gymnastics or some kind of mindset work for you to reframe your thoughts but I just want to shift your energy and just give you more motivation to just get startedtoday, tomorrow, or sometime soon. Alright, so when you have this thought, "what if nobody buys my products?" And then you might feel, "Oh, no. I will feel embarrassed. I'll feel ashamed. Maybe the people I know will be laughing at me. “Oh my God, she started a business and nobody's buying her products.” That's so embarrassing."

You will feel embarrassed by imaginations of failure and imaginations of doom. But your thoughts are not always real. If you are someone who is a little bit of an overthinker, a bit of a, someone who does not have a very positive mindset, your thoughts are going to be feeding you with all sorts of disaster scenarios, which may not even happen.

So acknowledge that these are just thoughts and these are just your fear based thoughts in particular. And of course, I don't want to encourage you to be totally delulu and delusional and have this rainbows and sunshine attitude and be totally ignorant of the challenges that come with this digital online space.

I want you to be positive, but also reasonably positive. I think that's what I want you to do. So what are the things that you can do to give yourself some encouragement in this aspect

is to remind yourself that you will not know if something succeeds or not until you actually start doing it. So if you always wanted to create a workshop, for example, a 30 minute workshop  teaching your audience something, and you are too scared to do it, I would say just do it because you will never know whether it will fly or not until you actually do it and put it out there, and even if nobody buys it at the beginning, I don't think it's a sign that, that you are a failure or this idea is a failure. Not at all.

Because sometimes when you put something out there, it does take time for it to gain traction. It takes time for people to take notice of it and sometimes it takes time for people to consider about buying it or even to buy it.

And at the same time, if something is not selling really quickly, it can be duemto many other reasons.  Maybe the marketing was not sharp enough, the positioning was not sharp enough, or maybe the topic is not something which is interesting to the audience in general. So there are actually many other factors which contribute to the product not selling as fast as you dream or as fast as you hope, and it has nothing, it probably has nothing to do with you personally. 

So I want you to bear in mind that in business it may take time for things to be sold for people to pay attention to your things. It takes time to market something and not to give up immediately when something is not selling. You know, some people might just take it off the market, take it off their blog, or take it off their blog shop when nobody is buying it.

But that is not the approach that we want to take. There was one time someone I know wanted to set up a business and the thing about that is that she got really nervous about launching her business.

This is her first time doing business, I believe, and she was very caught up and nervous about launching it. But the thing is, I wanted to tell her that when you launch something, it's not going to be all "fireworks" and money coming in into your bank account unless you're someone who's pretty experienced in this area.

So sometimes when you launch something, there's crickets. Nobody's buying it. So I don't want you to place so much pressure and expectations on yourself when you are about to launch a new product or a new service or a new business, don't put that kind of unnecessary pressure on yourself because like I mentioned, it takes time for things to gain traction.

It takes time for people to get their eyeballs on your product. So don't launch something and then expect all sorts of miracles to happen on the day you launch something. And the reason why I say this is because I sometimes experience this as well because I launch digital products probably once every two months, sometimes even every month.

And sometimes I put so much expectations on a particular product. And when it does not sell as much as I hope on the first day or second day, I start feeling discouraged. And I think that is quite a silly attitude to take because sometimes it's just not the right time for your clients or customers or audience to buy your products.

And it may take a longer time for them to warm up to your products before they want to buy them. Maybe your positioning, like I mentioned, is not strong enough, so it can be due to many other reasons which are not related to you at all, this is what I want you to bear in mind, and that is, sometimes it takes time for people to buy your products and that's fine.

That's okay. Another thing that I want you to bear in mind is that sometimes your product is good enough and because of your imposter syndrome or because sometimes you have this, what I call the 'curse of knowledge', you think that your product is very basic, when in general it can be really helpful. So some of us have that kind of mindset block going on.

So when you have these mindset blocks going on, this is going to stop you as well from launching your product or slow you down from launching your product.

'Curse of knowledge' is when you think that people already know that what you are teaching. I have that also like some things come very naturally to me, but they're new to people and I've received comments, emails and also messages from people who consume my videos or my podcast episodes, for example and they say "they're so helpful" when to me they come so naturally I didn't - I wasn't even sure whether my episodes were helpful to be honest, but I do get messages and emails saying that my free content is very helpful.

So this is what I mean by the 'curse of knowledge'. Sometimes we feel that what we have is so basic, is so general, is so foundational, but that particular knowledge can be something new to someone else. It can be something that someone else learns for the first time. So you may have a curse of knowledge and that's why you have this fear that nobody's going to buy my product because "my product is so basic".

I think one of the things, the pitfalls that people fall into is that they immediately give up when they launch a particular digital product, maybe a workbook or planner or a workshop and then when nobody buys it, what they do is they immediately give up or immediately take it off their blog or take it off online shop and then stop trying.

I would say that's one of the biggest mistakes that someone can do in the online business space because sometimes it's just the copywriting on your sales page which needs tweaking.

Sometimes the products - maybe the niche or the way you position your product, the way you communicate the helpfulness or the benefits of the product needs to be tweaked. Sometimes, you just need to market it better. Maybe you need a bigger audience. Maybe you need to tap on someone else's audience, collaborate with a fellow content creator who has the same base as you, but not competing with you in terms of business.

Maybe you need collaborations to get more eyes on your product. So there are many reasons why that is not selling immediately. So don't immediately take it off your blog shop or take it off your online shop or whatever it is.

Give it a try. Tweak the messaging, tweak the sales page. Maybe you may even need to tweak the image itself - you can actually get templates online- product templates- online, Canva templates online, and you can tweak the product image to make it more appealing to your audience.

That can also be the reason why it's not getting a lot of attention. Sometimes it's the keywords that you use or you just need a bigger audience, you know? There are many reasons why it's not selling and not to just give up and stop creating and stop selling. Once you don't get the results that you want on the first day itself of launch.

So that's one of the biggest mistakes that someone can do if they are new in this online business space.   So I have a shop selling done-for-you workshops, as you can see here, and workbooks in the personal development space, mindfulness, goal setting, imposter syndrome and more.

And you can actually edit these products and sell them to your audience. You can go to my shop and buy them and so that you can launch your own products with ease, with speed, and knowing that they are created with someone who actually has experience in this field- in this field of counseling and personal development.

 So if you want to launch your own product quickly, you can get something from my shop and launch it. So let me know in the comments below if you have had these blocks before. You know, these thoughts of "what if nobody buys my products? What if my product is not up to standard? What if my products are not good enough?" If you have had these thoughts before, let me know in the comments section and maybe we can discuss .

Alright, see you in my next episode.

Goodbye.