🧩 How to find your message (and validate it)

The only reason my business exists is because I ran a ‘first-fit’ event.

Back then I had no audience, no products to sell and quite frankly, no idea 'what my message' was. All I had was some knowledge that others might find useful.

So I reached out to Google Campus (who had an audience of entrepreneurs) and asked them if I could run an event.

The event title? 'How to Land a TEDx talk.'

160 people signed up.
80 people turned up.

The rest is history. I share this because…

Let me explain…

So many aspiring thought leaders struggle to land talks because they assume that being passionate about a cause is enough.

It's not.

We don't get to choose our message, our audience does (and they care far more about their problems than they do about our passions.)

So that's where we must start.

Why Most Thought Leaders Never Get Booked

Most thought leaders struggle to gain traction because they fall into the trap of thinking their passion is enough.

In reality, until we're prolific enough to be given free rein to talk about whatever we want (the 0.1% of us), we mere mortals have to make sacrifices on the messages that we share.

Perfect alignment between:
1. What our audience is interested in 😃
2. And what we are most passionate about ❤️‍🔥

... is extremely rare 🦄.

[And that's ok 🙂]

How to Validate Your Message

In order to find Speaker Market Fit, we must validate our message.

How? By running a 'first-fit' event 🧩.

✅ If people sign-up and turn-up; you're onto something.
❌ If people don't, it's time to tweak.

Best case: You've taken the first step towards traction.
Worst case: You've just saved yourself a huge amount of time and wasted energy.

Either way, it's a win win.

Brutal? Yep.
But it's the cost of entry.

The fastest way to 'get it right'? 🎯
Ask... never assume.

Last week, we released v1 of our SpeakerMarketFit GPT to members of MicDrop.

It's purpose? To hypothesise the lowest friction route to Speaker Market Fit based on our core speaking topics.

The output? A roadmap and a first-fit event to test, for real, in public.

We're not taking on any new members until October, but if you're interested in being part of our next intake, head here to join the waitlist.

Have a great week!

Alex