Developing and Refining Offers That Lead to a Killer Transformation with Julie Solomon [14 min]

0:0010 years ago, I made the decision to build my personal brand that was elevated, yet approachable, and reflected who I was, not just what I did. I created my website with ShowIt because it's true drag and drop freedom so you can easily build and update your site. Plus, their real human support team, game changer. Want to try it for yourself? Head to jasminestar.com forward slash show it for a 14-day free trial and first month free when you subscribe. Do you ever wish you could sit down with a wildly successful business owner and ask them, Hey, how did you build your business? How did you figure out what offers to create, how to price those offers, and who exactly to offer them to?

0:37If so, I want you to turn up the volume on this episode and grab something to take notes with. Those dishes, that laundry, the dog walking, whatever it is, it can wait. I want you to lean into this episode. My name is Katie, and I'm the president at Social Curator. In this episode of The Jasmine Starr Show, you're going to hear an exclusive question and answer session with Jasmine Starr and Julie Solomon. If you don't know Julie, she is a visibility brand strategy and brand deal coach, and she delivered a keynote address earlier this year during a visibility intensive that Jasmine hosted for students of her Your Biggest Launch Ever course.

1:12Right after the keynote, Julie and Jasmine had this conversation, the very one you're about to hear. And well, if you're looking for inspiration on how to build your own business with a plan, you do not want to miss this. Grab that pen and that piece of paper, friends, and let's listen in. Can you explain your product suite? Oh, and then can you explain the order in which you created them? And then can you explain, would you build it out the same way or would you do it different? So I want to make sure that we're all on the same page. These are such juicy questions. Okay. I want to make sure we're on the same page.

1:44Hang on. So product suite. These are all of the multiple offers that you can offer in your business. And we create them at different price points for different people on their stated journey. Okay. Take it away, Julie. Take it away, right? As she's taking it, you can go on. Okay. So I'm going to take you back to 2016, right? My first offer, which was a course called Pitch It Perfect that I still sell today was my introductory offer. I had that before I had a podcast. I had that before I had anything. It was literally, I had a blog, an Instagram, and I had this offer. It was$4.99. Okay. That was the entry.

2:23And what was the, what's the promise or like what's the, yes. So the promise of Pitch It Perfect is that it teaches content creators, influencers, or bloggers how to land paid brand deals. Got it. That course came from that story that I shared earlier about me landing that partnership with World Market. I started doing lots of those things when I had like no followers. And so people started coming to me and they're like, Julie, I don't mean to be rude, but you have no followers. I have millions of followers and I'm not making a dollar. Like what, what are you doing over there? Because you're, you're monetizing, You're getting these brand deals.

2:56Okay. I want to pause here. Yep. Here is Julie with roughly 2 ,000 followers. Yes. She got curious and started saying, how do I incite desire? And I loved, you notice I'm like a stickler for messaging. I will never forget. And I love it so much. Ugh. I took my offer from meh to money. That was really pretty because it helps us to stick. So I want you to be very careful about the words that she's using to get things to stick. So let's go back. You might be telling yourself that you don't have X. In her situation, she didn't have enough followers. And then Julie said, okay, I'm getting no's, but I'm finding a way to create value.

3:33She got her world market, ooh,$250 ,000, and then she saw a gap. People said, how did you do that? Now, here's Julie saying, interesting. I can make money teaching people what I did. I just want us to be very careful and watch what's going on here. Thank you. so that offer that course came out in the end of 2016 and it was janky i mean but do you remember like the chat rolls back then like we would have youtube and we would have to stream them to like a website yeah and then we would embed the chat roll because like they weren't sophisticated like it's so much more sophisticated and easier now so it was like this janky culmination my webinar i found a slide deck off uh etsy okay and because i'm not a designer so i was like found that off Etsy and I just wanted to make$5 ,000.

4:22If I could just make$5 ,000 and I didn't have a launch model, I didn't have a funnel. What I was doing at the time is I would go on Instagram and I would say, hey, I'm going to do this class. Do you want to come? And I would do that every month because I didn't know you could automate back then. I didn't know that there were like funnels and ways to make this a lot easier for yourself. So I would show up every month live and sell this janky webinar. and my first launch, I made$7 ,000 and I was like, I'm rich. I am rich. I have figured it out. And that was enough for me to go all in. And that's when I was like, I'm going all in.

4:56Wow. And then the next month I made 12, the next month I may have made 10. And then I kind of set between that like 15 to 30 K mark off of these monthly live webinars that I was doing until I went on automation. Okay. So let's pause here. Yep. So we've had a lot of conversations in and outside of the community around how much is too much. And what Julie did now at the time that you had made Pitch It Perfect around how many Instagram followers did you have? And the reason I'm asking this is because people say, I don't want to burn out my audience. But what Julie did was make that offer. And she did it once a month live and people felt a connectivity to it.

5:31And she was consistently having, you know, her first launch was$7 ,000 and on the back of about 2000 followers, as you did it month over month, were you growing exponentially your followers or you're kind of making the same offer to the same kind of group? Making the same offer because more than half those people didn't even see the first 10 times that I offered it. So, I mean, it's kind of silly for me to think that like, no one's paying attention to me. I'm sorry, but like, I'm not special. Everybody's too focused on themselves. They're not paying attention to my webinar. So, I've got to get it out there again and again and again and again.

6:01And I want to say maybe at the time I was probably like 5 ,000-ish followers. My following didn't really grow until I launched my podcast. So I was well below 10 ,000 followers when I was doing this. Okay, month after month. So then Pitch It Perfect was your first offer. And what does your current offer, your product suite look like right now? Okay. So I want to say something first because I think it's important. In 2016, I launched Pitch perfect. I did not create another single paid offer until the end of 2018. For two years, I went all in on that course. Making it better. And I wanted to become known, authority, I wanted to become known as, you want to learn how to pitch and land brand deals, you go to Julie Solomon.

6:45Period. End of story. So I spent two years refining and doing it over and over and over again. I launched my podcast in 2017, but that's free. And that did help pull in awareness. That's a nurture channel. But I went all in on that course. And I still, I mean, the course still sells every day today. And I haven't changed much of it. Like it's refined over the years, but the foundational elements, the strategic foundational elements of that course in 2024 is the same it was in 2016. So Julie's in here talking about it. And it still sells every single And she's going to go home and she's going to get notifications.

7:20I got one when I was in backstage. That's right. I sold for$5.99. There it is. There it is. And this is the kind of business that we would like to build. Yes. Now, you did that for two years. Did that for two years. And then in between the two years, you launched a podcast. I launched a podcast. And then what came next? And then what came next was something called the Influencer Academy, which no longer exists. I sunsetted it. I'm happy to tell you why. But I did that as a live launch model. So Pitch It Perfect, I was live launching every month. Then when I learned things like funnels and automations and an evergreen system, I put pitch it perfect on evergreen.

7:54So it was like the little baby that could. And then I started focusing my efforts on the influencer Academy, which is a$2 ,000. It was like a hybrid offer. There was lifetime access to a course. And then there was some in-person group coaching elements to that. Cool. And how much was that? 2000. So you went from$499 to 2000. And then what was the mindset that it took you to get there? Okay. So the mindset for me was really about wanting to figure out what was the next step for this customer. So they had gone into Pitch It Perfect. Y 'all say that one more time. My mindset was before I go and create 15 ,000 different things, I'm going to wait to see what this customer reveals to me as their next step of what I can offer them.

8:39Yes and amen. So I went, that's why I went all in with Pitch It Perfect for two years and I didn't create anything else because I was waiting to see what happens. The thing with Pitch It Perfect and what makes it so great is that people get, you can buy the course for, now it's$5.99, but people will go buy that course for$5.99 and land a brand deal that day. Like that, it's quick, you know, returns, quick, quick, quick, quick wins. It's like three hours to get through. It's really, really fast. So what was happening is that these creators, these entrepreneurs, they were starting to land paid brand deals.

9:10They were starting to make money. It was great. But then they were like, okay, what's next? And so what was next for them at the time is they were like, okay, I've got this brand deal revenue stream figured out, but like, who am I as a brand? Who am I as an influencer? That's the word I used at the time. You know, who am I? How do I generate, you know, more of a community? What's this thing called an email list? And like, do I need one? Got it. You know, so it was this next step of like, oh, they need to really learn how to create an online personal brand and have the fundamentals to sustain it so they can create their own products and services in the future.

9:47You were teaching them how to be the business of being an influencer. Exactly. So cool. Yes. And then what was the next offer? And then the next offer after that came Shine, which was a$5 ,000 group coaching program. And then came a mastermind. and then what was the mastermind called shine elevate so there were two levels there was like a accelerator version and then there was an elevate version and then how much is elevate elevate was 25 000 okay so i want us to back up there was a point in time where julie's offer went from 499 yep to 2 000 to 5 000 to 25 000 now julie described that the person who wanted to do what she did, I want to land brand deals, was$500 and then said, okay, but what's next?

10:39So then Julie created an offer to actually teach the business of being an influencer. And then she went to group coaching. So Influencer Academy was virtual, like watching classes in some live components, whereas the Shine program was live coaching. And it was higher proximity to me, which dictated the higher price point. And it was also access to my team. So now people were able to get my team's brain, my team's, you know, audits in their business, that sort of thing without having to go and pay contractors to pay a person in their own team because they got access to my team. And so that was really the next level because inside the Influencer Academy, people were like, okay, I'm ready.

11:23I'm ready to build, but I need help with implementation. I need, what about, you know, it's like a triage moment and I need someone to talk to? How do I get higher proximity to you? And then Shine Elevate was based on the need from somebody in the group coaching program. What was the value prop for Elevate? Because we went from 5 ,000 to 25 ,000. Right. This is a great question. So in my world, because of all the data that I was pulling, I realized that I had people that were, that they were sitting at around making between like 40K to 60K a year. So they had, and they were trying to get to six figures.

11:58So they had a high five-figure mindset trying to get to six figures. So that meant they had six-figure problems. They had six-figure strategies they wanted to go through and talk about. And there needed to be a little bit more of business maturity that needed to be cultivated and strengthened with that person to get them ready for something like a high-level mastermind container. Because my high-level mastermind container were for multi-six-figure business owners who are ready to go to seven. And the mindset of someone making 50K and their experiences and their challenges and what they're focused on, it's going to be vastly different than someone who's making 500K and trying to get to a million.

12:37So as a company, we made the decision, we're going to be able to better serve where these people are today by separating these out. And we're going to be able to give these people the nurturing and the education and the support that they need. and then these people that are at a higher level, they may not need to kind of pick our brains as much, but it's kind of like in car insurance, right? They wreck their car. They want to know that they can call me and I'm going to be there. Or if they need a connection to somebody or being able to build relationships and network, they had kind of already mastered some of the conversion issues with their business.

13:13They were ready for more visibility. That's great. And so two things that come up strongly for me. I wanted to cast a vision of your future by using a real life example of somebody who's starting very closely to where a lot of people are starting. And so this is such a beautiful example. Like Julie has built multi seven figure business based on mastering each of these steps and understanding what each person wanted. Then I also want to create a distinction that I think Julie really tapped on. Group coaching was Julie and her team disseminating information. Mastermind is I'm going to come in and I'm going to connect with other people in the room.

13:50And we're going to help each other and swap ideas. This is less about I help you or tell you what to do, but we help each other. And then in case that insurance comes in, it's like the car's on fire. This is what I need. And that's what you're paying a premium for. So I want to make sure that as you create your offers, you're saying proximity drives up the cost. Yes. How many people drive up the cost? Who is doing the servicing and what kind of room are you cultivating? Drives up the cost. And so I want to be very clear. She started an offer for$4.99 with 2 ,000 followers based on her experience of saying, hey, I have the band-aid of people saying, I want brands to invest in me with a tiny little following.

14:27That is all she did. Okay, I hope your hand hasn't cramped too much from taking so many notes. What resonated so strongly was the idea that Julie paid attention to what questions people were asking her about what she did, and then she developed offers that taught them how to do the same. So next time you're asked a question, maybe in your email, your DMs, or at a real life event, maybe you're in the carpool lane, pay attention. Write it down. You never know where that one question might lead. Thanks for listening to the Jasmine Star Show today, friends. We'll see you again real soon.