How To Profit From Pain

In this LMScast, Chris Badgett clarifies that “profiting from pain” refers to generating enormous value via the resolution of significant issues rather than exploiting people. Because conventional educational systems concentrate on teaching knowledge (mechanisms) rather than addressing why someone urgently needs that information, pain is frequently misinterpreted in the classroom. In actuality, they purchase pain alleviation and a clear route to a better result rather than classes, coaching, or memberships.

He presents Dane Maxwell’s client-Result-Mechanism structure, stressing that everything must begin with a single client rather than a product. The course or coaching program is only the means by which the client transitions from suffering to relief. The client has a problem they wish to avoid and a goal they wish to achieve. The majority of course designers fail because they don’t fully get the suffering that generates actual market demand and instead think like experts, creating material first.

Chris distinguishes clearly between severe pain and mild discomfort. An instigating event, such as a divorce, the birth of a child, sleeplessness, slowed company development, or an impending deadline like retirement or a lease expiration, can cause acute pain. People actively seek out answers and are prepared to spend since these difficulties are urgent, time-bound, and emotionally taxing. For this reason, pain-relieving offerings perform better than proactive but non-urgent “vitamin” courses.

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Episode Transcript:

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. Today I’m gonna be doing a solo episode with you about how to profit from pain. So pain is very misunderstood in the education space. We’re gonna get into that. When I talk about profit, I’m not talking about exploitation, I’m talking about value creation.

So having a clear offer with clear conversions and more impact by solving pain, how to think about pain differently. By the way, we have a whole lesson in the Lifter LMS Academy course called the Perfect Offer Playbook, where we go even deeper on pain than what we’re gonna talk about today here. But I wanted to loop you in to start thinking differently about pain.

Either in a new online course or coaching program or even business that you’re creating and how does leverage that to your advantage so that you can create much more impact, make more profit, have more fun, have a lot less friction, and doing the hard work of education entrepreneurship. So there’s a great old episode on this podcast that I did with Dane Maxwell.

He dropped this solution from his book Start From Zero. He says that the holy grail of business is three things, a customer, a result, and a mechanism. And once I heard that framework and started using it and what I do, everything just started clicking for me. And we’re gonna. Unpack that, but basically you have to have a clear customer.

I’m a big fan of putting a customer at the center of your business, not your product or your service, or your course, your membership or your offer. So a clear customer, the mechanism is how you do what you do. Ideally, it’s a unique mechanism. Now your mechanism will be unique no matter what, because there’s only one you, which doesn’t mean you can’t borrow.

Pieces and parts from other folks, just like I just did with Dane Maxwell’s framework of the customer result mechanism. But the mechanism is basically how you do what you do when you create a course and it’s teaching somebody something. Maybe there’s quizzes, assignments, action items, and so on. The course is really the mechanism to create a result for the person.

The result is the third piece of customer result or customer mechanism result. A clear customer has a specific pain they want solved. They want the result, which is to move away from that pain towards pleasure. And the way that you do that is through your unique mechanism. So that’s the framework we’re operating under, but we’re gonna talk almost exclusively on the customer aspect and within the customer aspect, we’re gonna talk about the pain.

So the cost of mechanism first thinking, which is actually what most course creators do, and it’s not their fault. And I’ll tell you why in a second, is I’m a subject matter expert. I know all these things. Let me just give you my mechanism. Whether that’s getting in shape, starting a business, finding the love of your life, whatever it is, I have a mechanism for that, and my course just teaches you exactly what to do with all of that.

But the cost of mechanism first thinking is that you’re starting to build features of a product, a course in this case, or a coaching program without really understanding the pain deeply. So you’re giving either too many ideas or cool ideas versus really following the market pull that is generated by pain.

So this is a very common trap in course creator businesses, membership sites, any kind of e-learning or coaching co company. Is we as subject matter experts become mechanism first thinkers. Or we are basically, ’cause we’re in love with all these cool mechanisms that we found that can help somebody.

But the challenge is a lot of people don’t start with the most important question. When they’re creating an online education offer, which is who? Who is this for? And we’ve all heard about the customer avatar, the ideal customer profile. All of these things, but so you need to have a specific who to make your course targeted, but within that, who is the actual pain that all, everything that we’re doing bubbles up from When you understand the pain deeply, it makes it much easier to sell.

It makes it much easier to create content and so on. And the truth is that. An audience or a market does not buy a mechanism. They want a solution to their pain. Now that pain might just be boredom and they want entertainment. That’s what movies do as an example. So there’s different types of pain.

There’s what I would call big T trauma or little T trauma or, just a, there’s all kinds of flavors of how severe is the pain, how important is this pain? How much will this pain make the person want to take action, or is it a pain that they can just ignore? There’s a lot of details in the pain, but my recommendation to you is to find what’s known as an acute pain.

So what makes an acute pain different from vague discomfort? Acute pain often has something like what we call in copywriting, an inciting incident, and what that means is it says place in time where something happens and it generates a lot of pain and it’s very like time bound like this happens, then this pain happens.

And once we target that, we get really specific. With our acute pain. So just to give some examples of acute pain, there are so many out there, but I’ll just give you some off the top of my head. One example might be a relationship has ended, whether that’s a divorce or breakup, that’s an acute pain.

So back in the day when I used to study affiliate marketing exam as an example. On the affiliate marketplace called ClickBank, where you could find affiliate offers to promote the top selling information product on that platform was called. How to Get Your X Back. Okay, which is a very specific customer result mechanism, clear, plain pain point. Clear result, all in the name of the information product, which was like a course or an ebook, something like that.

So getting dumped by a partner or a spouse. Or even in your dating years is very painful. And so this offer. How to get your ex back is tying into the pain that comes when a breakup happens in a relationship. And that is a very acute pain when you have a new baby especially as a first time parent. It creates pain now.

Pain, having a child can be a beautiful, wonderful thing. It makes your heart grow bigger. I love my children, but when they come, new pains emerge. Like impact on sleep, impact on, let’s say the husband and wife relationship impact on your work. ’cause now you have this other full-time job called being a parent.

Okay? So there’s a lot of pain here. I remember watching someone launch a course and coaching program on sleep training for first time parents for their new babies. This person was basically a sleep coach. So that is a mechanism like I’m gonna, I’m gonna help give you the tools and tips and strategies and tactics to help set your child off on a good foundation of sleep.

And for you, the parents. But it’s very specific. Another example, if we’re talking about sleep there’s a lifter LMS user that does very well who works on the pain of insomnia. So insomnia is very painful if you’ve ever experienced it. I’ve been there. I’m not, I’ve always struggled with sleep, and that is a pain that I would be willing to invest in to get a solution or IE the result.

So that I can live in the world like a normal, well-rested human being. So, insomnia is an obvious great pain. There are all kinds of medical conditions or psychological conditions that create pain. When we think about pain, we’re often thinking about physical pain. Some of the examples I’m talking about are obvious, but there’s a lot less.

Obvious kinds of pain. For example, in business you might not have any physical pain. But let’s say you’ve created your product and nobody’s buying it. That’s very painful. Let’s say you have a successful business and you’ve been growing every year, and all of a sudden that growth stops, that’s called a growth ceiling.

A growth ceiling, even though you’re doing well, but you stop growing is a painful event. So that stalled growth. Creates pain. That was the I stalled. Growth is the inciting incident, if you will. Next, let’s talk about the difference between a painkiller and a vitamin. So a, let’s call it a course that is a painkiller will definitely remove and solve the pain.

S a vitamin is more like a proactive solution that maybe is a good idea, but there’s no clear, obvious pain underneath it. For example, if you look at something online like the biohacking community or the longevity community. These are people who want to get in the best shape of their lives, even when they’re older.

They may want to try and live forever. That’s the longevity community. And these people do a lot of proactive things and they, they actually take a lot of vitamins and supplements and things, but the biohacking community is super small compared to the global population because biohackers.

By design are very proactive and maybe some of their motivation is driven by an acute pain as well. But it’s a smaller market within the broader market because a lot of biohacking things are proactive and the reality is. A lot of the population is reactive. So an incident happens, they experience a lot of pain, and they they go looking for solutions.

So finding an acute pain it’s really obvious when you find one. So if you’ve ever experienced a challenge like it could be anything like, let’s say you’re a. Looking to buy your very first house. Alright, there’s some pain there because you don’t know what to do. You don’t know how to negotiate the price.

You don’t know. You wanna make sure you’re picking the right house for the largest financial transaction of your life. And let’s say your lease is up for your apartment in four months and you need to figure this thing out. So we have a deadline. This creates a lot of urgency around that pain of needing to find a place to sleep at night that you can afford and so on.

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and I also wanted to come back to what I said earlier about the reason a lot of us don’t focus a lot on pain is. Because we were raised in a traditional school system. Where almost all of that is just teaching you mechanism after mechanism. So if you remember yourself or you have a child who said a certain subject matter was not very interesting, and they’re not into it and they don’t like it, it’s because they’re being given a mechanism for a pain.

They do not feel. So it’s the concept of. Just in case information versus just in time. So if you create a course, like just in case when you’re ready for it, you may want to learn these investing strategies and financial planning strategies so that you can retire one day. That’s very different from creating an investing course for people who are, let’s say.

10 years away from retirement and have no savings or investments. You have a mechanism to help them get them to a retirement-ready financial position. They’re feeling the pain of retirement approaching and having zero nest egg. That’s very painful. If I was required in school to take a class on financial or investing literacy, but I’m not feeling that pain, I would be a lot less motivated to do that.

Let’s talk about finding the right pain for you. You wanna find the overlap of the pain that your niche or your target market feels. You want to think about your lived experience. And how you have credibility and interest in this specific pain. This is why we often give the advice if you’re looking to create a course or coaching program or membership site, to focus on a earlier version of yourself.

Because number one, you’ve walked the journey, you were the customer, you figured out the mechanism somehow, and then you got the result. You remember that earlier version of yourself where there was so much pain, whether it was wanting to become an entrepreneur and start your own business, or to find the love of your life, or make some kind of health and fitness improvement, if you have walked those miles yourself, you’ll understand the pain.

You will also understand the inefficiencies. The mechanisms that you tried to put together to solve that pain. If you think you can solve that better and faster, it can work out well to create a truly unique and great training course. And remember, people pay for four things, speed, certainty, insight, and the fourth, which is to stay out of jail.

So if we. Look at something like an example we’ve already used, let’s say about the insomnia when we’re buying a course or a coaching program, if we’re the target market, the customer, we want either speed, like we want this insomnia to stop fast. We want certainty that it’s gonna stop and we’re gonna transform and transcend this challenge.

We want insight into why is this happening? How does this insomnia thing work? And we also wanna stay outta jail because if we keep going through life, sleep deprived, we might make bad decisions that could land us in a bad place. And usually one of those four things is primary. You don’t necessarily hit all four.

But I bring that up to say there will be one. That is primary to the pain that you solve. It could be speed getting away from pain. It could be certainty that you definitely can get out of the pain and that the, this program is gonna work. Or it could be insight. Just like really understand what’s really going on here.

That’s part of what psychology and psychological health is. Is, it’s all of those things, but it’s also includes a lot of insight into understanding what’s really going on, trying to get closer to base reality. So insight is very powerful too. And when you’re finding your pain, you basically have to marry the pain and really just devote yourself and your product and your program to it.

And it needs to have a strong course creator. Market fit, like you may see a pain out there, but if it’s not a pain you’ve experienced before or you only want to go after it because it’s trending in society or on social media or online or whatever, that’s not a good motivation. It really needs to fit you to have that founder market fit in.

When you’ve walked those miles, if you’re solving a pain through a course that you’re creating and launching that you have solved for yourself in your own life, that gives you a lot more credibility. You’re basically teaching from scars your own personal life scars and trauma that you’ve transcended than just putting theories out there and ideas and research and.

When you fall in love with an acute pain that’s right for you it creates long-term sustainability and motivation. For example, the pain that we truly solve at lifter LMS is that I see all this value trapped inside of people where they could go help lots of other people with pain in the world.

It’s a Buddhist thing in terms of reducing suffering. That’s really motivating to me. I love being in the pain removal business. We’re doing that with software, we’re doing that with content. But I love solving the pains of education entrepreneurs, which is, there’s three results they’re going for, which is income.

Impact in the world and creative freedom. Creative freedom is just designing the life and the way you work, the way you wanna work. So that’s super motivating to me and that’s why I’ve been doing this for over 15 years at this point. So it’s important to remember the nobility of solving pain. Pain is a signal, it’s not a weakness.

There’s a reason the human body. Experiences pain, whether in the body or in the mind, because it’s a signal something needs to be addressed. And when you find a pain and you build a solution to help solve pain, it becomes much easier to sell because you’re in the business of helping reduce the suffering, if not solve it for other people.

That is the most ethical, moral, human thing you can do as a human. So when you know you can help somebody solve pain, it’s, it makes selling easy ’cause you’re just trying to help people. So the next thing I want to talk about is the practical application and how you can look at this with your online course or membership site.

Now, there’s two ways to look at it. If you’re already moving and things are going pretty well and you’re making in income impact and creative freedom in your life, that’s great, but maybe you can jump in and just reexamine the pain that you solve. Study it more. See if you can articulate better in your messaging, in your copywriting.

Weave the pain into what you do. You’re not trying to manipulate people. You’re just trying to throw the signal out that this is exactly the pain that we work on for these types of people. This is how we do it, which is the mechanism. And I would like to invite you to, for me to come, help bring this information, this education, this coaching, this content into your life to help solve the pain.

If you’re newer and you’re just getting started with like your first course or your first coaching program, you are in a great opportunity to do the reflection, to audit your own life, to look at the all the pains and challenges that you’ve overcome. Look at your skills, your life experience, your knowledge, the knowledge of others.

Look at the research, do competitive analysis, and really find those pains. And also look for pain that is urgent. So when you have a new baby come into your home, it creates urgency. When you, let’s say enter a new relationship, it creates urgency. If you really hate your job and you’re trying to find something else to do with your career and your life, there’s urgency there.

And there’s also opportunity costs. Like what happens if they do nothing? They don’t move forward. Like, how, what will the pain do? Will it just keep remaining chronic? Will it get worse? What opportunity costs are lost by doing nothing and so on. So think about this, even beyond software as an example.

So if and courses and coaching and online communities. How can we work with this pain in a way that where we’re just a catalyst for reducing the suffering out in the world? And what do we want to commit our education entrepreneurship work to? So when you have a clear pain, you get better students and you get better outcomes.

The mechanism or your course content, or your coaching or your online communities, it all gets so much better when you’re, you really start with a clear customer with a clear, very specific pain. It happens to me in my life. It’s happened many times where I have an acute pain and then I go online and I start looking and I start finding.

A hundred books on the topic or in these courses and these Facebook groups and Reddit threads and be a pain anthropologist because there’s, once you really isolate the pain and look at it just like when I was getting ready to have my first baby, I went into the the books and the websites and the content and the courses.

Because it’s urgent, like you only have nine months, probably less to once you’ve realize what’s happening, to get ready to solve the pain of not being ready to have a kid. And then you’ll see giant communities around these core pains of having your first child or starting your first business or, dropping weight if you’re, you’ve been struggling with weight as an example, or whatever the physical or the fitness goal is. So Lifter, LMS is an enabler in this process to help you solve pain for your people. Lifter LMS is not the hero. You’re the hero in your niche ending suffering for. Whatever your core customer’s main what their main pain is.

So if you’re already moving, I want to encourage you to just revisit, even if you think your business is pretty good and pretty solid, really dial into the pain. There’s a concept in entrepreneurship called a pivot. Let’s say your business is doing well, but it’s not, it hasn’t replaced your day job or anything like that.

A lot of times when that’s happening and you have some traction, either you’re not clear enough on the pain or there’s another pain adjacent that is, would be much better that your same person has at the same time. So you’re focusing on the wrong pain. So for example, in business coaching or in entrepreneurship, let’s say you’re focused on a specific mechanism about, how to sell more as an example. So you’re a sales coach, but you’re a full stack entrepreneur and you really understand all the stuff. But then you realize, a lot of my people, they’re taking my sales training and they’re doing all right, but they’re not doing great. Let’s revisit. Maybe I should also add some coaching or another course on developing the product that we sell, which happens before you sell.

Because maybe they’re trying, they’re selling too hard on the wrong product and then that, product aspect of your training takes off because you found an even hotter pain. So it’s okay to pivot or add on or even just try something new. So the best thing you can do as an education entrepreneur is listen to the market and.

A lot of times we stand around with our fingers in our ears, not listening to the market, just making what we wanna make, making assumptions about pain and results and who our customers are. But I call this, the ground game. You gotta get out from behind your computer. You gotta go hang out with the people that are having this pain.

You gotta talk to ’em. You gotta ask them what have they tried, what’s worked, what hasn’t worked? What provided temporary relief, but not lasting relief. Get dig into the pain is my point. So that’s it on this episode of how to Profit From Pain. Again, we’re not profiting to exploit, we’re profiting because we’re creating extreme value because we understand the pain, the nuances of the pain, and, pain is something we want to heal, so it’s not like we’re profiting from people in pain. We’re actually profiting from helping people heal.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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