The Business Sherpas

Developing Product & Business Strategy for a Professional Development Startup

We worked with a best-selling author, educator, and Ph.D. to productize her knowledge and enable her to monetize her profile and expertise — reaching a wider community of educators and delivering real impact.

The Challenge

Our client was feeling overwhelmed by the whole startup journey — and receiving a lot of conflicting advice. She was unsure how to develop her product, and how she was going to build, monetize and manage it all in addition to her existing duties as a speaker, educator, wife, and mother.

The Solution

Initially, the client hired TBS simply to help develop a pricing strategy for a product, but during due diligence with her at the start of the project, it became clear that her product was not as developed as initially thought and that there was significant development work to do before getting down to pricing. We hosted a mini brainstorming workshop to help her determine which ways she could productize her knowledge and expertise would build a good business.   Having explored the various revenue, pricing, and productization implications of each option we settled on building an online community that would collaboratively and interactively develop the professional development courses she wanted to provide. TBS researched several online community platforms, synthesized the features, ranked them, and presented our findings to the founder to make the final choice.

The Outcome

We’re now working with our client on setting up the creator onboarding and content creation processes. Next, we’ll help her establish a business development system to manage her marketing, lead generation funnel, revenue model, and contracting processes.   Having felt overwhelmed and doubtful about her ability to pull this off, the founder is now feeling that this business is very doable and confident about her role. We’re on track with the product development roadmap we created and looking at a beta launch in a few months, with the full product launch due at the beginning of 2024.

That’s us in a nutshell.

Now let’s talk about your business >>

“Alex was new to the cc industry and quickly got up to speed. He worked onsite and had direct client interaction. Alex has a professional attitude and asked appropriate and challenging questions about the work streams he is involved with. He is able to take input from different stake holders and use that to adapt the project plan to make the end product more robust, adaptable and usable as well as complete the project on time. “

– Sharad D.

“TBS were proactive in thinking about ways to maximize the value of their work, doing a thorough, timely job in the process. I would be happy to engage them again.”

– Cordell H.

“Excellent feedback and insights on our proposal strategy and content.
Helped us hone our message. Will hire again!.”

– James D.