In my last email I said that the core of a successful business is a great match between a hungry market and a valuable service that satiates that hunger.

But how do you know when you've got that match?

Back in the “good old days” you didn't have much choice.

You'd talk to people about it.

You'd grab a coffee with potential clients (or people who knew them) and ask them about whether they thought it was a good idea.

Then you'd pull together a tentative program and offer it to people you thought would be good clients. If they signed up you knew you were on to something. If they didn't you went back to the drawing board.

Then you ran your program (or did your coaching or whatever it is you do). You got feedback and you used that to shape up your offer before you went out to the big wide world.

These days we seem to have lost the art of that small-scale startup.

Today all the gurus will tell you to develop an online training program for passive income. Develop a bunch of videos. Then create a clever funnel with upsells and downsells and lots of automation. Then run Facebook ads to send people through that funnel.

All sounds great. And it skips that rather embarrassing step of actually getting feedback from real people.

But it turns out, it's that feedback that makes or breaks your program.

What if you've missed the mark? What if people don't have a burning desire for what you're offering What if there are a few key things you need to tweak to make it really attractive?

Sadly, you don't get that data when you start with a clever automated funnel. You only get it by talking to people.

So my advice is to start by getting feedback from real people (who you know will be honest with you). And then to launch a low-cost pilot version of your program where you work with people personally.

If you can't sell that, you'll never sell the “passive income” version.

And that live program will give you amazing insight into what your audience really finds helpful and what it doesn't.

So that if you eventually launch a passive income version it will be 10x better.

But until then – start small and start live.