You've Got 2000 1 Odds

In the book Ideaflow, Jeremy Utley talks about how many initial ideas it takes to have success when making commercial products

He said you start with 2000 ideas

These 2000 ideas become 100 working prototypes

From there, 5 of them will become commercial products

Of the final 5?

1 will succeed.

This might be an optimistic estimate

James Dyson failed 5126 times before he managed to create the first bagless vacuum.

Although social media content is slightly different, because ‘failure’ doesn’t really matter - content is transient, people don’t engage, who cares?

Except it does matter.

Because our best content is a signal

Our audience is telling us that they’re interested in that topic, or our framing of it

So the right content can be the seed that grows into a new lead magnet, unique mechanism, programme, service or even business.

If we go back to the original equation?

Most coaches don’t have 2000 ideas

I would suggest that most would struggle to come up with 20

And I’m certain that most wouldn’t have more than 20 stored in a way where they could predictably find them

So when coaches say ‘I really struggle to think of ideas for content’

What’s actually the case?

Is that they don’t have enough ideas stored, or a place to store them that incentivises them to think of more than 20

The constraint for many is not their creativity, but their ability to capture.