[DAY 4] Where are you stuck? challenge post
Post your challenge responses here.
Thanks for hanging out in the Frictionless Growth Challenge this week. Today, we’re expanding on the growth-to-monetization parallel by showing you how to recognize (and break through) the biggest blocks holding you back using the HAPI Compass.
It took me years of tinkering, hundreds of tiny adjustments, countless failed experiments, and more than a few existential crises, to develop the HAPI Compass, and it’s become foundational to everything else I teach.
At its core, the HAPI Compass is a four-point system designed to help you find alignment and direction in your business. It’s about learning how to triangulate yourself and solve the right problem with the right solution.
Author business challenges usually show up in four buckets, which are mapped to the four cardinal directions of our HAPI Compass.
(H)eart challenges come from the ideas, projects, and creative work that light you up and resonate deeply with who you are. These are challenges intrinsic to the work itself.
(A)udience challenges come from the people ready to champion, amplify, and ultimately buy your work. These are challenges revolving around growing a fandom that resonates with your work.
(P)rioritization challenges form around choosing (or failing to choose) one high-leverage move at a time, letting wins compound, and buying yourself runway for the next right thing.
(I)ncome challenges revolve around the revenue that funds your life and fuels your creative work. These are challenges around people buying your work.
Your biggest challenge will almost certainly form around one of those areas, but we’re horrible at recognizing which one is really blocking us. What makes it harder is that there is significant overlap between them.
Is the reason somebody doesn’t respond to your work because there is a flaw in the design (Heart) or because you built the wrong audience (Audience)?
Is the reason people aren’t buying because you need a better landing page (Income) or because you have to change who you’re attracting (Audience)?
Is the reason you’re burned out because you hate what you’re working on (Heart) or because you’re doing too much (Prioritization)?
(Side note: This is one reason Hapitalist is so great, because you have a bunch of people experienced in the same methodology that can help you triangulate).
Yesterday, we talked about how Audience (or growth) blocks and Income (or monetization) blocks have wildly different and diametrically opposed solutions.
Solving monetization blocks is about raising the price and becoming more exclusive. Meanwhile, solving growth blocks is about dropping the price and becoming less exclusive.
And yet, we constantly try to solve Audience blocks with Income solutions, and vice versa. Worse, we often go about trying to solve both blocks at once, leading to us stall or even go backward.
If you want to solve your biggest challenges, you need to use the right solutions, which means you need to know what your biggest challenge is right now, and almost nobody does, especially about themselves.
Today’s task:
Pick the HAPI Compass direction where your friction is the highest.
Write one sentence about why you think that problem fits into that compass point
Brainstorm one thing you could try to ease it.
Now, post it in today’s challenge post. Then, post it on your social media #fgchallenge
Tomorrow, we’ll sew it all together.
My most pressing challenge right now is Income. Trying to sell back list books and comics online is tough right now. Cons are good for sales, but have been rejected from several this year already, which has taken a big bite out of my expected income that I was hoping to leverage elsewhere. Solutions I'm thinking about are to try different methods of driving traffic to online store, including paid ads, flash sales, and video.