The Game Plan The Perfect Way To Start Your Marketing By Arvindh Sundar PutThePlayerFirst.com | @arvindhsundar What’s inside? What’s inside? 2 This Is Your Call To Adventure 3 How do you start your marketing perfectly? 4 What does The Game Plan do? 4 What is The Epic Story? 4 The Structure of The Epic Story 5 The Epic Story in Business 5 Filling Out The Game Plan 6 The Questions 7 What do you do after filling out The Game Plan? 8 Write your Epic Story 8 Optional: Use The Game Plan to build a better business. 8 Create marketing content 8 What comes next? 10 Summary 11 Thank You 11 PutThePlayerFirst.com | @arvindhsundar This Is Your Call To Adventure As a solo founder, there are 2 main reasons why your business will fail: You build something that nobody wants OR you don't know how to talk about your product in a way that your customers care about it enough. The Game Plan is designed to help you avoid both. It's a battle tested framework that helps you visualize & iterate upon key parts of your business model to build a successful business. The Game Plan is also the perfect way to figure out what to say to who so that they listen - marketing in a nutshell. The Game Plan is intentional design for marketing, powered by video game concepts. It helps you build the core narrative for your business and gives you a solid process to create infinite content for marketing your business! And, if you’re up for some sidequests, you can also use it to build a stronger, more resilient business that has a higher chance of succeeding! It’s the framework I use to help my consulting clients build profitable businesses. It’s freaking powerful. Let’s go. (҂◡ ̀_◡́)ᕤ With love from Bengaluru, this is Arvindh saying over and out. P.s. I’ve added a summary at the end. PutThePlayerFirst.com | @arvindhsundar How do you start your marketing perfectly? Here’s a quick rundown of what we’re gonna do: ● Fill out The Game Plan to think your business through. ● Write up your Epic Story. ● Optional: Use The Game Plan to build a better business. ● Use Explosive Questions to create infinite marketing content. Let’s dive into The Game Plan. What does The Game Plan do? The Game Plan works because it is built on top of The Put The Player First Framework - a tried and tested framework I’ve used to help 100s of clients gain traction, make sales and grow their businesses. I built The Put The Player First Framework based on the research done by Dr.Joseph Campbell, who studied stories across cultures, space and time to build The Monomyth. Since then, The Monomyth has become wildly popular in movies, novels, video games and roleplaying games. I combined The Monomyth & Dr.Joseph Campbell’s research, my 15+ years of marketing & startups experience, my Masters Degree in Communication and my love for roleplaying games & videogames and 10+ years of experimentation to build The Put The Player First Framework. The Put The Player First philosophy has three key principles, but the most important one here is: Everything is an adventure. The Game Plan reframes your business as an epic adventure. And at the heart of The Game Plan is The Epic Story. What is The Epic Story? The Epic Story is a template for you to tell the story of your business. You will use it to talk about your business to customers, make marketing content - tweets, videos, sales pages, blog posts, PutThePlayerFirst.com | @arvindhsundar threads, copywriting stuff - and invariably, plan out your business strategy. It goes like this: The Structure of The Epic Story The Hero lives in a Broken World - a world that’s been plagued by Monsters. The Hero has tried fixing their Broken World, but has not been successful. One day, a Guide (with Superpowers!) arrives in the Hero’s world and presents an adventure - a way out of The Broken World and into Paradise. The Hero accepts and sets out with The Guide. Armed with The Guide’s Weapons & guidance, the Hero goes on to fight Monsters, complete Quests and Level Up. Along the way, they gain Loot and eventually, upon the end of their adventure, reach the Paradise they set out for. The Epic Story in Business Converted to a business context, The Epic Story looks like this: Your customer is unhappy with their current state of affairs. They’ve been trying to make a change, but their problems and obstacles are holding them back. One day, they find you and discover your offer. They’re hesitant initially, but later, after gaining trust in you and understanding why you’re doing what you’re doing, they buy in and take your help. With your help, your customers discover a new way of doing things, expanding their network and meeting others on the same journey as them. They solve their problems, gain experience and earn things they value. They acquire new skills, and make progress in their journey, hitting important milestones along the way. Ultimately, they address the underlying problems and undergo a transformation - building the life they want. PutThePlayerFirst.com | @arvindhsundar Filling Out The Game Plan You can download The Game Plan bundle in ZIP format here. The Game Plan is a single page document that takes The Epic Story and breaks it down into key elements that you need to capture. You can fill this out in one of 3 ways: 1. Print out the PDF and fill it out by hand. (This is the most satisfying) 2. You can import the SVG into Excalidraw or any other vector editing software and fill it out there. (This is my preferred method) 3. Easiest: Copy the questions below into a document and answer them. (It’s not as much fun, but hey - it works!) PutThePlayerFirst.com | @arvindhsundar The Questions The 10 elements of The Game Plan, and their corresponding business elements are: 1. The Hero: Who is your customer? 2. The Broken World: What is the status quo – the current state of affairs that makes your customer unhappy? 3. Monsters: What are the problems, pains, frustrations, unmet needs and unmet desires that make your customer feel miserable? 4. The Guide: Who are you? 5. The Weapons: What are the content, products, services, systems & other things you can give your customer that will help solve their problems? 6. The Guide's Superpower: What sets you apart from everyone else who can help your customer? 7. Quests: What are the things your customer needs to do to solve their problems? 8. Level Up: How does your customer transform internally and externally by completing the Quests? 9. Loot: What valuable things does your customer get by completing the tasks and making progress? 10. Paradise: What does your customer’s perfect world look like - a world where they have no problem, pain or frustration? PutThePlayerFirst.com | @arvindhsundar What do you do after filling out The Game Plan? With The Game Plan filled out, you have captured the key building blocks of your business on paper. Now, you can do 3 things: 1. Write your Epic Story. 2. Use The Game Plan to build a better business. 3. Create marketing content. Write your Epic Story Stitch your answers together in the structure of The Epic Story shown above and you now have a narrative (story) you can use to start marketing and talking about your business. Optional: Use The Game Plan to build a better business. Go through each of your answers and list out the assumptions you've made. Transform these assumptions into falsifiable hypotheses - and test them out by running experiments. The idea behind these experiments/research is to actively find dangers for your business and address them. Based on what you discover by running experiments, iterate through different versions of The Game Plan and your Epic Story. This is the easiest way to bulletproof your business. Eventually, you'll iterate into a plan that has a high probability of success. Create marketing content All marketing exists to influence the supply and demand curve. So, before you start creating content, you need to understand the market. You do that by hanging out and participating in conversations where your ideal customer hangs out. Don’t start selling straight off the bat. Instead, focus on building relationships that you can strengthen over time. Start helping your PutThePlayerFirst.com | @arvindhsundar customers with actionable advice and you have deposited enough good will, you can offer other (paid) valuable things - The Weapons! As for the messaging (what to talk about) - here’s a technique I use ALL the time: Explosive Questions. To have a near infinite source of content ideas that your audience would be interested in, look at each of the answers you wrote for The Game Plan and ask who, what, when, where, why and how. Answering those questions will give you content that your audience will be interested in. In my answers to The Game Plan, one of the Monsters my Hero faces is: “They are unable to design their business and communicate the value they can provide in a way that would make their customers pay attention or money.” So, I start using the Explosive Questions and end up with this list (this is not an exhaustive one. I just quickly built this up to illustrate the technique): - Who - Who struggles with structuring their business? - Who struggles with communicating the value they provide? - Who are the kind of customers who will easily pay money or attention? - - What - What are the obstacles in designing a business? - What does value communication look like? - What makes customers pay attention to marketing? - What makes customers pay money? When - When should I look at designing my business? - When should I communicate my value proposition to my customers? - Where - Where can I find customers who will pay money? PutThePlayerFirst.com | @arvindhsundar - Where should I talk about my business while providing value? - - Why - Why should I use The Put The Player First Framework? - Why should I bother with designing my business? - Why should I bother with getting my customer’s attention? How - How does The Put The Player First Framework work? - How do I design my business? - How should I communicate value to my customers? - How should I ask customers for attention? - How do I get my customers to pay money? As you can see, there’s a near infinite amount of questions you can answer to come up with to create content ideas for your business. As you grow your business, you can look at adding your flavor to the content you create to stand out. (҂◡_◡)ᕤ What comes next? By now, you should have: - Completed The Game Plan. - Crafted your Epic Story. - Started creating your marketing content. After this, there are many different ways forward: - Learn more about content creation - Define your social, your discovery and your distribution channels - Start email marketing - Build marketing funnels to add rigor to your marketing engines. - Learn copywriting, psychology, influence and sales tactics - Learn building in public - Build out your brand identity If you need help, you can reach out to me on Twitter! PutThePlayerFirst.com | @arvindhsundar Summary Here’s a bullet point summary of this document: - The Game Plan is also the perfect way to figure out what to say to who so that they listen - marketing in a nutshell. - The Game Plan reframes your business as an epic adventure. - The Epic Story is a template for you to tell the story of your business. - The Game Plan is a single page document that takes The Epic Story and breaks it down into key elements that you need to capture. - There are 10 elements of The Game Plan and each corresponds to an important part of your business. - Fill out The Game Plan on a printed copy, image editor or in a text editor. Get the files in the bundle here. - Stitch your answers together to build out your Epic Story. - Create marketing content using Explosive Questions. - Bonus: Send me your completed Game Plan on arvindh@puttheplayerfirst.com if you would like feedback on it. - Optional: Use The Game Plan to test your assumptions iteratively - and build a better business. - Optional, but highly requested: Send me a tweet with honest feedback about your experience! Thank You As you work through this, I want you to understand something important. We win by building something that our customers want to come back to everyday. We win by playing the Infinite Game. Good luck! (҂◡_◡)ᕤ With love from Bengaluru, this is Arvindh saying over and out. PutThePlayerFirst.com | @arvindhsundar
