Trim the excess

Want an easy, climate-first approach to creating products and services?

Trim the excess.

Meaning: Resist the urge to pile on extras, bonuses, features, and more service in an attempt to make your offer seem more valuable.

The idea of taking a climate-first approach is to be intentional – deliver what’s needed, as efficiently as possible, without all the waste.

Eg: I recently paid a few bucks for a 28-day challenge that I’m receiving daily by email.

It addresses the exact thing I need help with, and promises to keep each email’s reading time under 5-minutes.

Perfect 👍

What I didn’t need, or select, or expect, or want – but got anyway – were the 6 bonus ebooks totalling over 300 pages.

That’s 300 additional pages I’m never going to read, because everything I want is coming in 5-minute chunks a day for the next 28 days.

To me, this signals that the seller either:

• Didn’t believe I’d be happy with just the challenge, so threw in some bonuses, or
• Simply wants to distribute more books

I got all my value when I signed up – as the seller, someone signing up is a pretty good way of knowing if what you’re offering is delivering the value they seek.

“Value” is something that I feel is worth my time, and I’m happy to hand over my email and a few bucks in exchange for. To me, the value was in the 5-minute daily emails… I got my value when I signed up.

I don’t know how many of the thousands of other people who’ve taken the challenge will read those extra books, but they now have them. Thousands of people storing hundreds-of-thousands of pages they never asked for, and will probably never read.

That’s not adding value, it’s just adding stuff.

Wanna make it super valuable? Keep it super focused.