Premise Differentiation: Starting Prompt to Actively Develop Your Ideas

What problem do you solve?

That’s a bizarrely missing piece of our puzzle when we go to market.

But there’s an even better question to ask — one which helps us land on something which represents the starting point for our premises.

So here’s the “starter prompt” for developing premises that stand out.

Additionally, below the video, please find the “frustration statement” writing exercise to begin moving from a starter prompt to some starter writing.

Active Work: Premise Development

A premise is the specific, defensible purpose of a project or a brand, pulled from your personal vision for the audience.

It is NOT your topics. It’s your topic + your hook. Your premise is like the IP you’ve developed. It’s the big idea which may first come out publicly via your show, your home page, your newsletter, etc.

Again, it’s not WHAT you explore. It’s WHAT you explore and HOW you explore it, which gives others a reason WHY they’d care.

The role of the premise is to give the audience motivation to subscribe and shared language to refer others your way.

Your premise makes everything better and easier, from planning to production to promotion.

Step Zero: Consider all or some of this process

I could NEVER prescribe a full-scale change, but I did want to let you see what I do to bring an idea to market.

The key? It’s not about STARTING with the fully formed premise. It’s about BUILDING your idea.

That way, not only does the idea become stronger over time (as do you and your confidence), but you build audience around the ideas, like they’re with you on a journey.

Step One: Write your Frustration Statement

This is an internal writing exercise only.

Use this template to get some messy, emotional thinking out on the page. Don’t self-edit. You’ll refine later.

These are just rough, initial thoughts about why your work must exist and how it will serve others.

Why should they care? Because YOU care.

Why should they trust you? Because you know and even share their frustration, but unlike their friends, you and your work are assuming the role of leader, moving them AWAY from the problem TOWARDS your vision for something better. That’s what your content is: a journey towards better, and they’re invited.

Here is how to use your frustration statement (with an example):

a. Describe the problem in brief. What is it? Rant for just a few sentences.

(Remember to think about “the problem before the problem,” per the video above.)

e.g. For some reason, when people talk about “being creative” or “being a creator,” they think about purely BIG things. Big audiences, big acts of innovation, big risks. This only intimidates people or makes them feel bad about current results. It hurts creativity.

b. Why does the problem exist? What causes this as you understand it? Analyze things.

e.g. We can see the huge successes of others, the big followings, the final projects, the stories about our heroes, and we disassociate ourselves from the works we admire. It’s never been more visible to us or to those who are starting out. Additionally, even before social media, we only receive the final version of something that probably took a ton of effort, trial and error, and messing around – to say nothing of all the projects our heroes started and then killed before we saw them at all. The stories we get are ABOUT people doing big, outlandish things and their final projects or their work sitting on top of a huge body of work, most of which was bad.

c. Describe your vision for something better. Be opinionated and inspiring. Visionaries have vision. What’s yours? What do YOU see and want to show others? Where are you leading others? From the problem above to… what?

e.g. I want to reclaim the idea of being creative or being a creator back to what it is: a ton of very small motions forward. Creativity doesn’t mean “big.” It is the sum total of lots of little choices, any 1 of which YOU could make. I imagine a world where more creative people pursue their curiosity or simply start messing around and stop feeling so frozen by what they see from others. It’s a craft, a practice, a process of discovery. It’s not a lightning strike moment of brilliance or doing anything optically massive.

d. Describe your intended audience (or better, your “tribe”). Given all of the above, who is this work for? Write this last, since given the emotional writing above, you can now describe your audience using both demographics (i.e. the stuff you can easily see or learn) AND psychographics (i.e. the emotional stuff; how they think, feel, strive, etc.)

e.g. This will serve people who create across mediums but are craft-driven, obsess over quality, aspire to do great things, but feel stuck right now. They’re also using creativity and content as a means to build their brands and businesses, not just self-express (though they seem merit in simply expressing one’s ideas). They adore the making of it all and don’t just use content as a tactic to trigger a result, and they’re increasingly sick of what they find on social feeds and most business content elsewhere too. They use words like “art” in private and consider themselves “writers” or “hosts” or “filmmakers” privately, but they hesitate to say these things publicly because it’s either not part the broader culture of business or they have imposter syndrome. They’re feeling that inner fire to create things the way only THEY can but need a little extra fuel to that fire to turn inspiration into action (and perhaps some clear next steps to actually act).