What exactly are you selling?

If you searched for your idea in Week 2 and found someone already doing it, please don't panic. Robert Merton (1961), a sociologist of science, collected cases where two or more people made the same discovery independently of each other, and he argued that this happens all the time. The same idea simply arrives in many heads at once.

And being first doesn't protect you much either. Golder and Tellis (1993) went back through the history of 50 product categories, from disposable nappies to personal computers, and this is what they found:

These are big companies and old markets, so don't take the exact numbers too literally. But think about two teachers who both run "AI workshops for schools". The school will buy from the one whose example made sense to them, who answered their email the same day, and whose face they'd already seen ten times on LinkedIn. So put your energy into how you'll do it, and into making sure people know you before you ask them to buy.

Lynn Shostack (1977) argued that most offers are a mix of service and product. So picture a line: on one end there's pure service, where it's you in the room, and on the other end there's a product that works without you. The hours below are only an illustration, and they include preparation, travel and all those messages.

There's research that fits my experience. In a review of 36 studies, Rao and Monroe (1989) found that buyers use price as a clue to quality, so a higher price makes people expect a better product. Those studies were about consumer goods, not consultancy, but if what you really sell is expensive expertise, a cheap side product can send people the wrong message about you. So where on the line is your real offer?

A productised service is a service you sell like a product, with a fixed scope, a fixed price and a fixed time frame, all written down before the client even asks. It's an idea from practice, popular with consultants and designers, and the best-known book about it is John Warrillow's Built to Sell (2011). A package needs six lines, and the one almost everybody forgets is the last one: what's not included. Here's a real package from my own business, the retainer I offer after every curriculum project:

I know, "personal brand" sounds like something for influencers. But Gorbatov, Khapova and Lysova (2018) reviewed 100 studies and defined it much more simply: a strategic process of creating, positioning and maintaining a positive impression of yourself, based on your own mix of characteristics. They also point out that social media made this a job for ordinary professionals too, and teachers have so much to show.

Social media also changes the order in which selling happens. Before, a stranger saw your offer first and then had to decide whether to trust you. Now people can watch how you think for months before they ever see a price, so when they finally write to you, a lot of the trust is already there. In Edelman's 2025 survey of about 15,000 people in 15 countries, 80% trusted "customers like me" as a source of information about brands, and only 58% trusted influencers. So you don't need to look like an influencer. Show your real work, the way you would show it to a colleague.

And if you don't have clients to show yet, you can still show your work. This is what I did:

Marketing researchers call this the customer journey. Lemon and Verhoef (2016) reviewed the research and described three stages, before, during and after the purchase, and they show that what happens after one purchase feeds into the next. And step 4 is often where the money is. Gupta, Lehmann and Stuart (2004) estimated that keeping 1% more customers raised a company's value by about 5%, while finding new customers 1% more cheaply raised it by only about 0.1%. They studied big companies, not a teacher with a laptop, but you'll see it yourself: finding a new client takes many more hours than working again with someone who already trusts you.

You don't need to build all four steps now. Just write down what comes before and after your offer, so you know where it fits.

We experts are really bad at noticing our own jargon. In experiments by Camerer, Loewenstein and Weber (1989), people who knew more couldn't switch that knowledge off when they guessed what less informed people would think. Words like "formative" or "scaffolded" feel completely normal to you, and a parent or a finance officer has no idea what they mean. You won't catch this by rereading your own page, so you need someone else to read it, and quickly. That's the five-second test from usability work (Perfetti, 2007): you show a page for five seconds and then ask what it was for.

Fill in the six lines, what's not included, and what comes before and after. If you did Lesson 3.1 on this device, your offer, your buyer, their biggest pain and the result they want are already there from your canvas, so just change them if you need to. For the price a first guess is enough, because we'll work on pricing in Week 4. Then press the five-second test, hand your screen to someone, and see what they remember. You might be surprised!