Have You Ever Felt That You Are Not Providing the Value That You Could Be?

[Prodox]

‘Ello!

I’m Prodox, a 25-year-old software engineer, currently working for a fintech company.

I read unscripted recently, which brought me to this forum, and am now churning my way through the millionaire fastlane .

I’m from the UK but currently live in Tokyo - a pretty busy city, but comfortable to live in nonetheless.

I graduated from university three years ago now, joined a fintech startup, and moved to Japan. This company ended up getting bought out by a large global company and I’ve watched it grow pretty quickly… And also turn more and more into a place where I don’t want to be.

My salary doubled overnight and I received a small payout, so I’m pretty well off for a 25-year-old in terms of money, but the job is taking up more and more time as I get given new responsibilities, and is getting more and more stressful.

To make things worse, the job is a lot less fulfilling than it used to be and I don’t think I am able to provide the value that I have the potential to when working in this company or any other for that matter.

Recently I have decided that I want out and I immediately started working on setting up a business, something I’ve wanted to do my whole life anyway.

I started by thinking… “What do I have, that other people want, how can I transfer that to other people in some way”.

Well, I’m a software engineer and I have a blog that I started with the aim of making me look better in job interviews (funnily enough, I’ve never had to have a job interview), with a mailing list of about 800 people… But I haven’t updated it in years and the list hasn’t heard from me either, as soon as I send a message half will bin it and the other will unsubscribe.

That being said, I still get people emailing me to help them with things, my articles have been translated into multiple languages and it is being used as supplementary teaching materials in two universities (one in the US and one in Portugal).

However, I feel I have lost touch with what I was writing about as I had to focus my skilling up in the areas that I work in during my day job… Plus my day job has sort of killed it for me.

It’s still an option and I may revisit in the future, but for now, I want to try something new.

I have great productivity and organisational skills and using them I managed to take positions in the current company that I work for that resulted in an increase in responsibility and pay.

People often ask me how I get so much done, both in and outside of work all the time and ask me for advice - I take this as a good sign, I can definitely provide value with this way, whether people are willing to pay for it or not is another story, but that is something I need to experiment with to find out.

So, I decided to go with this.

Specifically, I decided to go with productivity for entrepreneurs, because they are the people I like to work with, and it allows for a slightly tighter niche.

I think that personal brands are the way to go, and if I have an existing audience who love me - raving fans - then it will be a lot easier to find clients.

I put some thought into how I should create my personal brand. I wanted to get started right away and Instagram seemed the easiest to get started on.

I created an Instagram account and have been posting daily tips to it, plus stories which I have been using to practice talking head videos for when I move onto youtube too.

In one month I’ve got just over 200 followers, which is… Not bad I guess, they say that your first 200 subscribers are the hardest to get, and my 200 subscribers seem to like me.

When someone subscribes to me, I send them a personalised video message saying thank you and to ask them if they have any questions or problems. This builds a relationship with them and also gets me more material to post and understand my target audience from… Or at least that’s the idea.

But the really mind-blowing thing that has happened, is that a lot of my followers have been messaging saying thank you for this, and thank you for that. They say that I have helped them get over certain hurdles and get back on track.

Oh my gosh, that feels amazing.

I put a lot of effort into the content I put out and to have someone come back and say “This really helped me thank you” it gives a buzz like no other. Sometimes I don’t want to post, but when I think back to this, I immediately get my head down.

I have also managed to get two people on a free coaching/consultation call with me and help them through some of their issues. The first took the effort to send me an unsolicited video testimonial a week or so after and I got an email from the other one a week or so ago saying what I told them to do is working well and they are making progress again. Wow.

I’m planning on starting a youtube channel soon and stumbled upon this thread https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/community/threads/creating-a-thriving-personal-brand-w-youtube-a-journal-a-personal-guide.93279/ by @Valier which has been a pleasure to read and I’m sure his insights will come in handy!

My goal is to build a small following of people who really resonate and connect with me by giving out tonnes of really great value and actionable tips that they can use.

And, once I have that small audience, I will create online productivity training courses to help people develop their own productivity systems based on a methodology that I came up with called “The Four Pillars of Productivity”, and processes like “The 6 Ds”.

Anyway, this is getting a little long so I’m going to cut it off here.

My next steps:

- Finish reading the millionaire fastlane
- Continue on building my audience on Instagram
- Start a youtube channel to build a wider audience
- Create a free email productivity course as a lead magnet to drive more people to my list (which is very small at the moment, under 50 people)
- Create a course and sell it.

I’m looking forward to becoming a part of this community and giving and taking as much value as I can. I’ve been reading around this forum and a lot of you are really inspirational and hard-working people, I can’t wait to become a part of that.

I’m planning on creating a progress thread somewhere, so look out for that too

Cheers.

 

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