The reason some offers hit while others don’t, and what to do about it
Why your audience doesn’t automatically buy everything you make, what alignment really is, and how businesses can create offers that compound over time.
Hi,
When I first started doing this work, I assumed that once I had an audience, everything else would be easy. I’d “have a platform,” and that platform would more or less guarantee success for whatever I decided to make next, whether that be books, courses, challenges, Kickstarters, you name it.
After hundreds of products, launches, and experiments, I’m sorry to report that an audience doesn’t guarantee success. It gives you two things:
A group of people you have the opportunity to serve
A group that is inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt
When your offer is aligned, your existing customers will consider it seriously much faster than strangers will. They’ll open the email, click the link, and at least think about backing the Kickstarter or preordering the book, but you still have to earn every “yes.”
When you make something they already expect from you, getting that yes is easier, but if you come at them with something completely new, then you basically have to earn their trust again.
You can have ten people or ten thousand people waiting to hear from you, and if the thing you’re offering doesn’t match what they expect you to offer them, it’s going to land with a thud unless you do the work.
Alignment is the overlap between what lights you up enough to finish it, what your people are already leaning toward, wnd what makes sense in the broader ecosystem of the moment.
When those three line up, you sell with ease. When they don’t, everything feels heavier than it should because the product doesn’t fit.
Misalignment isn’t bad. It just means your audience failed to see the value of what you’re offering. Sometimes, they really need what you’re selling, but they don’t know it yet. Other times they know exactly what it is, they just don’t have the context to care.
Sometimes misalignment means you built the right thing at the wrong moment.
Sometimes it means you built the right thing but explained it the wrong way.
Sometimes it means you built something brilliant but your audience associates you with something else entirely.
None of that is a moral failure. None of that means you should burn the project to the ground. It just means there’s a gap between what you made and how they’re currently seeing you.
Misalignment is just data wrapped in disappointment that reveals to you where the bridge to success is missing a section.
Sometimes that bridge is easy to build, and all you need is to reposition the offer, tighten the messaging, or show how the dots connect. Other times, the bridge requires more heavy lifting. You have to warm people up. You have to educate. You have to shift the narrative. You have to earn the right to talk about a new thing.
And occasionally you realize that the thing you made is not for this audience. It’s for the next one, or a smaller one, or a future version of the one you have, or even a future version of you. Maybe it makes sense to build that audience now, or maybe it makes sense to put it in the cupboard forever. If you made something well, though, then it’s never completely wasted effort.
Misalignment is always pointing somewhere. The trick is figuring out whether it’s pointing you to:
A clearer message
A better container
A different moment
Or a different group of people entirely
Unfortunately, we often stuff that “failure” away and never want to look at it again. We stuff it away, or we put off launching, but it’s only in launching, and then looking at the wreckage that you can find your bearings.
Alignment is finding the path of least resistance, and misalignment helps you discover where the resistance lives. If you pay attention long enough, misalignment will show you where your next breakthrough is hiding.
The more consistently you deliver things your audience likes, the more often they’ll buy from you, and the faster they’ll make those decisions.
We talk a lot about:
What’s working right now
Which ads are hot
What trend is surging
Which platform has the best visibility this quarter
We talk much less about how long we’re actually giving something to work and how long we’re willing to keep showing up for an idea, a series, or a strategy before we declare it a failure
Humans default to “this needs to make money now,” but the most valuable thing success has given me over the years isn’t a bigger income.
It’s the slack to do weirder, more esoteric projects, to experiment longer, and to let things have a longer time horizon to work before I walk away. The longer you give something to work out, the more likely it is to pay off. No guarantees,but the odds get better with time and iteration.
One of the most important things I’ve learned over the last couple of years is that of you stick with something long enough and keep talking about it in different ways, your effort compounds into success.
Now, I won’t commit to anything I can’t talk about for at least 1-2 years, and that I don’t have the time to grow for that long without seeing the benefit.
If you’ve built, or are building, an audience, here’s what I’d suggest reframing:
Stop expecting an audience to guarantee outcomes. Expect attention, consideration, and the benefit of the doubt. Everything else is earned each time.
Measure alignment, not worth. When something doesn’t land, don’t jump straight to “I’m bad at this.” Ask if what you launch actually matched what my customers wanted right now? If not, how can you make the conditions for success happen?
Extend your time horizon. Give your offers more than a six-month window, especially the ones you care about deeply.
Build for compounding. If you’re going to commit to a niche, a series, a topic, or a format, choose something you can talk about, and show up to talk about, for at least 1–2 years.
Value ease, not just more. Earning the same amount of money with less panic and more predictability is a win.
You are going to misread the signals sometimes. You’re going to think something is aligned when it isn’t. You’re going to be convinced something will land and it won’t. You’re going to swear a project is pointless, and later realize it was the missing link in a chain you didn’t even know you were building.
Every product, every launch, and every experiment, even the ones that flop, help create the conditions for something bigger down the road. Sometimes the project itself isn’t the win. Sometimes the win is the skills you built, the clarity you earned, the connections you sparked, or the audience segmentation you accidentally did simply by putting it out in the world.
Sometimes a misaligned project is exactly what needed to exist so the next project can fit perfectly.
I’ve released plenty of books and articles that I knew would flop, but needed to be written in order for my broader point to land. I never had any expectations a book called Publishing is Broken, But It Doesn’t Have to Break Us would be a breakout hit, but in order to get people interested in my Hapitalist membership, I needed them to know about the industrial conditions holding them back, so we could use the same language to break through those blocks.
In order to write On Being Happy and a Successful Writer at the Same Time, I needed that book, and I needed both books to launch the Frictionless Growth Challenge.
The overarching point of Hapitalist doesn’t make sense without How to Thrive as a Writer in a Capitalist Dystopia, but I’m no so naive to think it will sell better than How to Launch a Book on Kickstarter or Direct Sales Strategy for Authors.
In order to distinguish myself from other teachers, though, and to make Hapitalist work, I need both kinds of books, even if the former are nowhere near as popular. I knew in 2-3 years, they would do more work to sell people on Hapitalist than anything else I could do.
Intentional misalignment can lean to deeper alignment down the road.
Sometimes, misalignment now isn’t misalignment forever. If you care about something enough, and it’s resonant enough, then there’s always a way to make that alignment happen.
Think about the arc of your career as a sequence, not a series of isolated bets.
Your offers are stepping stones. Some will be obvious winners. Others will feel like detours. Some will only reveal their purpose months later, when you finally understand how they connect.
