Everything you see in life was or is at some point an offer that somebody created, and someone else (e.g. you) paid for. You traded stored energy (money) for a thing which provides Value to you.
“Value” is vague and thrown around often but it’s the worth that you assign to a thing. If the value (perceived benefit) is not worth the cost, you don’t buy that thing. Simple as.
There are so many terrible offers out today, and yet, people buy them. People buy shit on a stick as art. there’s literally you can literally sell anything although obviously you want to sell something that actually benefits people and the more value or perceived benefit that your product offers or that you can make it look like it offers the more people will part with their money for your offer.
Looking at it through this lens, it doesn’t seem so hard to create something that would provide value to at least one person in the world that you could put a price tag on, and start offering it.
It kind of demystifies business when you look around and you see everything as an offer. My secondary computer monitor at the right of my desk—it was an offer and for me it was worth it, and I bought it about eight years ago
The candle that’s over on the left side of my desk. The commodity pens from Amazon (Amazon Basics?) that I use. My voice recorder. I’m just literally looking around at the things on my desk, but offers are everywhere you look. Our Vitamix blender. The He-Man poster on my back wall. The salt lamp under my electronics workbench. Our SUV.
But think higher level too. It’s not just consumer products. The house we’re living in was an offer. Big plots of land bought by and sold to land developers in order to create subdivisions, are all offers.
And ofc the SaaS that you want to make and those that you use every day are all offers. Google Workspace, Zoom, Salesforce, Slack 🤮, Dropbox, Calendly. Notion, Atlassian 🤮🤮🤮. All offers, all value-adds in at least someone’s mind.
Again business doesn’t seem that hard whenever you look around and see that everything is an offer. Just make your thing and make it a little bit better than what somebody else does and then offer it and charge the same price as they do or even a little less.
Of course I’m simplifying things, things aren’t always that easy, but that’s the basic gist of it.
The purpose of thinking all this thru is to help myself understand how I can build my own offer(s), what I can offer to people. I’ve been having a whole lot of trouble trying to understand how I can package my own experiences, knowledge, and abilities into something I can offer people that would provide them value. And yet I do it all the time when I interact w/people in daily life, and I know I can add value. So it’s kind of a, I don’t know, paradox, conundrum, something. The “business” side of things scares me.
I also think maybe I’m scared of putting myself out there, promoting something, especially on my own social media accounts. I’m scared of failing, yet we’re all gonna die someday and most people don’t care who you are anyway. They don’t think about you. You’re as much as you think about them thinking about you.