🧩 The Platform Puzzle

John Meese

Feb 8, 2019 — 2 min read

While you’re at a beach house with your family for the week, someone (let’s call him Josh) sees one of your blog posts on Facebook and clicks over to yourwebsite.com.

Intrigued, Josh peruses your website for a few minutes and finds a gold-mine of valuable resources all related to a central theme (emphasized by the promise your website tagline conveys).

Fascinated, Josh downloads your template for taking action and receives a welcome email from you, along with a PDF. The initial resource is helpful, and Josh becomes hopeful. He wonders,

Could you be the guide he was looking for all this time?

Two days later, Josh receives another email from you—this time with a free lesson from your change-your-life course. It’s incredibly helpful, and he’s grateful—but not ready to buy your full program yet.

Josh purchases one of your more affordable, bite-sized courses, and is immediately blown away at how much value he gets. Excited, he rushes to practice the new tips you gave him—and he easily succeeds.

You come back home with your family, refreshed and relaxed, and hit send on a pre-written email announcing a limited window to join your change-your-life course (albeit at a premium price).

Convinced, Josh rushes to be one of the first customers to buy your full program, and plans to spend his next Saturday consuming the program and jotting down detailed notes.

That may be a fictional story, but versions of that story play out every week now that platform-builders dominate the web.

In fact, at the same time Josh goes through that story similar stories could play out for Jessica, Jacob, and Matt. When you complete the platform puzzle, success scales.

Stay Focused to Succeed

I've shared several articles about learning to assemble each of the five crucial pieces of the Platform Puzzle, and build a rock-solid foundation for getting heard in a noisy world.

These five puzzle pieces take work to develop, but if you get each one right you have nearly guaranteed your online success.

Conversely, without these five interlocking pieces you’re building a shaky platform that either won’t work or won’t work for long.

Affiliate income, 1-on-1 coaching, and other platform add-ons all have their place—as do video stories, live broadcasts, and other fads.

These are the five puzzle pieces that show up time and again in every successful platform business.

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