A Flagship Offer is much like your Brand Identity.
It should be an offer you want to be known for.
The thing you want people to go around talking about when they're referring to you:
"Hey, do you know Mike Romaine? He teaches text-based creators how to make money writing online. Yeah, his Text-Based OS cohort is a MUST!!!"
We have learned about value ladders in the past, and you can have offers surrounding your Flagship Offer that ascend your audience through your ladder (essentially leveling them up over time with the value you provide at different stages), but the Flagship Offer is the one that is the flag you wave that tells people who you serve and the problem you solve.
In this deep dive we're going to be taking a look at some other creator's Flagship Offers ... but more importantly: how creators leveled up WITH their Flagship Offer over time.
In order to truly get the most out of this one you're going to need to be familiar with a few of the other things I have already taught (and share deep dives on):
All this to say: just like you learned how to Niche Down X Brand Wide for your niche and brand overall, you need to learn how to do this for your offers.
Specificity sells.
When you niche down you gain the ability to:
- Stand out.
- Specialize.
- Charge more.
But you also don't get locked into that niche and can level up over time (as we'll see an amazing example of from a massive creator in our last case study below).
So the goal of this deep dive isn't to convince you that you should niche down and focus on solving a hyper-specific solution.
This deep dive assumes you already understand that and instead sets out to show you how you can start with one offer and then slowly level up your offer stack.
💡Bonus Coaching Note:
The perfect pairing of this deep dive and last week's deep dive on how to repurpose your newsletter into paid products is a key component in understanding how and why your newsletter value proposition should be identical to your Flagship Offer's promise.
If you can master these two things your newsletter will not only become the engine of EVERYTHING you do as a text-based creator, but there will also be a perfect flow in your value ladder and your audience will easily ascend to buying customers who tell other people about your Flagship Offer.
✍️ Leveling Up With Your Flagship Offer
We're going to be going through a bunch of different creators and their Flagship Offers.
I'm also going to be taking a deeper look at a few creators that are great examples of leveling up with their offer over time.
But, before we dive into a couple specific creators, I want to zoom out and talk about Flagship Offers in general.
Your Flagship Offer can take many forms:
- A book
- A community
- A cohort
- A course
- And many other possibilities
And it can also level up over time, in more ways than just one:
- Your Flagship Offer can continue being the same value proposition and promise with your niche, but continue to level up as you iterate on it over time.
- Your Flagship Offer can start hyper-specific (Niched Down) and level up with you over time to match your future value proposition and promise (Brand Wide).
With both of these versions you start with the Niche Down X Brand Wide framework and decide how you level up as you learn with your own growth.
✍️ Different Types Of Flagship Offers
As I said, we'll be covering a few different creators, but I want to give you an example of some other Flagship Offers to give you an idea of the range you can work with as you build out your own:
- James Clear / Mark Manson = Books
- Jay Clouse / Pat Flynn = Communities
- Katelyn Bourgoin / Justin Moore = Cohorts
- Amy Porterfield / Jeff Walker = Courses
- Ben Thompson / Lenny Rachitsky = Paid Newsletters
- Matt Gray / Mariah Coz = Evergreen Group Coaching
The way you craft your offer is built around a handful of different things.
I have a ton of deep dives covering different types of offers, including one ranking paid offers on a freedom/price scale, but there's more to it than just that.
Your Flagship Offer should be a perfect blend of:
- Your Personal Style/Preference: How you like to deliver/the best way to deliver the promise to your audience.
- Your Niche/Audience Preference: Some niches will be more ideal for selling courses while others may be more ideal to go broad with books and sponsorships. It's important to learn what's best for your specific audience.
Note: Don't get too hung up on exactly how your Flagship Offer needs to delivered right this second. It will take some time to validate your offer ahead of launching, and this is part of your validation process.
💡Bonus Coaching Note #2:
When I first started my personal brand I was building my Brand Identity as The Creator Newsletter Guy. My value proposition was that I helped creators launch, grow and monetize their newsletter. That led to my signature offer that had the same promise, but delivered as a course and/or cohort.
Now I leveled up using the Niche Down X Brand Wide framework and my Brand Identity is text-based creator. My value proposition got broader. Now I help creators grow their audience and build a freedom-based business writing online.
So in turn, my Flagship Offer leveled up and became the same promise in the Text-Based OS cohort.
✍️ Leveling Up With The Same Value Proposition
Depending on how you decide to use the Niche Down X Brand Wide Framework you may not need to level up your Flagship Offer to become a DIFFERENT promise over time.
You may simply be able to iterate and update it each time and continue solidifying it as your Flagship Offer woven in with your Brand Identity over time.
Again, this really depends on where you start out with your initial value proposition, but I will give you a few great examples of creators who have done this for years and years.
There are creators who:
- Start niche and stay niche, continuing to own a hyper-specific Brand Identity over time.
- Start niche in different areas, level up their businesses over time and then eventually roll out their Flagship Offers in a more broad capacity...THEN continuing to level up over time.
Let's take a look...
🔎 Jeff Walker's Product Launch Formula:
Jeff Walker initially launched Product Launch Formula in 2005!
He has been iterating and updating it for 20 years now and even has his bestselling book as a way to ascend his audience to it.
Jeff is a great example of staying extremely niche and iterating on one offer over and over again.
Offers and niches like Jeff's Product Launch Formula, where a creator doesn't have to level up with their Brand Identity / Flagship Offer over time [while still being niche] typically stem from a creator having prior experience.
🔎 Justin Moore's Brand Deal Wizard:
Jeff got in early and owned the Brand Identity around product launches.
But Justin Moore first launched his cohort based course Brand Deal Wizard in 2021, matching his value proposition designed to help creators effectively pitch, price, and secure long-term brand partnerships.
Justin is another great example of starting niche with a specific offer for a specific audience and staying niche.
And, he also just released a book, Sponsor Magnet, to help ascend his audience to it.
Seeing a trend there?
🔎 Marie Forleo's B-School:
Marie Forleo originally wrote a book called "Make Every Man Want You" all the way back in 2008.
From there she went on to do 1:1 coaching programs and group programs, working with clients through life coaching and helping them build a business around their passion.
(Remember, this is way back in 2000-2010 or so when there wasn't so much competition and even an extremely broad niche could be a blue sea of people to serve).
Marie Forleo then launched B-School in 2011, in collaboration with entrepreneur Laura Roeder, under the name "Rich, Happy & Hot B-School."
She later rebranded it to just B-School and has been iterating on it for nearly 15 years!
🔎 Amy Porterfield's Digital Course Academy:
Similar to Marie Forleo, Amy Porterfield started in a different niche but eventually worked her way up to her Flagship Offer.
Amy started by focusing on teaching people how to use Facebook marketing strategies and then eventually turned that into Facebook ads and list-building tactics. These ranged from 2012-2015 and she continued to launch other list-building and smaller courses in her growing niche.
Eventually Amy launched the first iteration of her Flagship Offer Digital Course Academy in 2019, building on years of experience teaching online marketing and list-building strategies.
✍️ Leveling Up Your Flagship Offer Over Time
This section is going to be more powerful if we hyper-focus on one creator.
And who better to focus on than Justin Welsh?
Justin has been featured in tons of our deep dives, and is a great example of a creator who niched down but branded wide and leveled up over time.
We'll go through the whole journey piece by piece, but let's just give a quick look at what we're going to look at on each end of it:
- Justin started on LinkedIn focusing on providing services to SMB SaaS founders. Hyper-specific and extremely niche.
- Justin is now considered the thought-leader behind "Solopreneurship" (his Brand Identity) and reaches millions of creators and founders.
But there's a lot that took place in between that journey, and we're going to do our best to go through as much as needed to see the full "level up" process.
Let's start by taking a step back.
I don't want to just glaze over the fact that Justin was EXTREMELY specific when he started.
In case you scrolled right by the image above, his LinkedIn bio reads: "I coach SMB SaaS founders to accelerate recurring revenue to $50M."
It is very obvious who he helps and how he helps them.
🔎 Analyzing Justin's Value Prop, Audience & Offer Promise
At this point in his journey we can see Justin's value prop and promise are as follows:
- Who He Serves: SMB SaaS Founders
- Value Proposition: If you follow him you'll learn more about how to accelerate recurring revenue toward $50M.
- Offer/Promise: He coaches SMB SaaS Founders to accelerate recurring revenue towards $50M.
Do you see how clear this is?
The ascension from following him to trusting him to taking him up on his paid offer is a no-brainer because the value proposition is an identical match to the offer.
Read that again, because there's more where that came from.
But then he began leveling up...and so did his Flagship Offer.
✍️ Flagship Offer Level Two: The LinkedIn OS
Next up we can see Justin now has 120,000+ LinkedIn followers at this point in his journey, but he's still relatively specific.
He leveled up and got more broad, but stayed specific in who he helps: LinkedIn creators.
Even at 120,000 followers Justin was still more-or-less a glorified LinkedIn growth guru.
And guess what: his Flagship Offer stayed specific to that as well.
🔎 Analyzing Justin's Value Prop, Audience & Offer Promise
At this point in his journey we can see Justin's value prop and promise are as follows:
- Who He Serves: LinkedIn Creators
- Value Proposition: If you follow him you'll learn about growing your audience and income on LinkedIn.
- Offer/Promise: His course teaches you how to build your audience and business on LinkedIn.
After seeing it twice in a row it should be extremely clear what's going on.
Even Justin Welsh, a creator now making millions and millions of dollars as a solopreneur each year, started extremely niche and matched his value proposition to his offer's promise as he was leveling up.
But let's keep going because as he continues getting more and more broad (Niche Down X Brand Wide) it gets a bit harder to serve EVERYONE.
✍️ Flagship Offer Level Three: The Content OS
At this point in his journey Justin had 240,000 LinkedIn followers and also expanded onto Twitter as well.
He was beginning to own his category as the thought leader behind Solopreneurship, but his Flagship Offer continued being The LinkedIn OS.
The problem?
He was getting a ton of followers and newsletter subscribers from Twitter who weren't necessarily interested in moving over to LinkedIn and since he wasn't ready to launch a new Flagship Offer he needed to give them something else to buy...
So he launched his Content OS.
🔎 Analyzing Justin's Value Prop, Audience & Offer Promise
At this point in his journey we can see Justin's value prop and promise are as follows:
- Who He Serves: Solopreneurs (Solo creators)
- Value Proposition: If you follow him you want to build a lean one person business by growing an audience and making money the way he does.
- Offer/Promise: His course teaches you how to build a lean one person business by growing an audience and making money the way he does.
So Justin still had a Flagship Offer but built another offer around it to diversify his income as a new segment of his audience came in and he prepared to be able to level up his new Flagship Offer to match his Brand Identity and growth.
Let's see how it went...
✍️ Flagship Offer Level Three: The Creator MBA
Justin has now expanded to multiple platforms and grown an audience to over a million followers and 200,000 newsletter subscribers.
He uses his LinkedIn OS and Content OS the same way we see Jeff Walker and Justin Moore use their books to ascend their audience up the value ladder, and now Justin Welsh has a brand new Flagship Offer to match his much broader Brand Identity.
His brand grew over time, after being hyper-specific and niche, and so did the offer.
But through the process his value proposition and who he served matched the promise that his Flagship Offer solved.
THIS is what ascends views into engaged readers into repeat buyers.
🔎 Analyzing Justin's Value Prop, Audience & Offer Promise
At this point in his journey we can see Justin's value prop and promise are as follows:
- Who He Serves: Solopreneurs (Solo creators)
- Value Proposition: If you follow him and subscribe to his newsletter you want to build a more fulfilling life with a lean, profitable, one-person business.
- Offer/Promise: His course teaches how to build a lean, scalable business online and sets the stage for a new era of lean, focused, and profitable internet businesses.
Recap: From a small creator selling 1:1 services to a massive creator with over a million followers, Justin continues his value proposition aligned with his promise.
✍️ How Can You Find YOUR Flagship Offer?
Let's start by talking about what NOT to do...
You do NOT want to start in an extremely broad niche with a matching extremely broad promise.
Here's an example:
- ❌ Who I Serve: Men Over 30
- ❌ My Value Prop: I help men over 30 build a business online.
- ❌ Offer/Promise: The 6-Fig 30 Club - A Cohort Based Course Teaching Men Over 30 To Create A Business Online.
This is trying to force specificity, and it's not what you want to do.
I'm not doing anything differently for men over 30 that makes my value proposition and offer any more special than someone else's offer to build a business online.
I can likely talk to them better than someone else, so it's okay if that's part of my broader umbrella niche, but I need to get more specific with my value prop and Flagship Offer.
Here's a better example:
- ✅ Who I Serve: Creators
- ✅ My Value Prop: I help creators build an evergreen group coaching program from scratch and begin getting their first clients.
- ✅ Offer/Promise: The Evergreen System: Discover how to build your hyper-scalable evergreen group coaching program that allows you to get your first client with a small audience and scale without trading all your time for money.
Do you see how much more powerful this is?
It's extremely specific.
And my value proposition is identical to what people would be subscribing to my newsletter for and in turn telling me that they want my Flagship Offer.
The ascension is clear.
🔎 So How Do You Actually Get Started...?
It is crucial that you start by finding your obsession.
You are going to need to go the extra mile and deliver more value than other creators are willing to in order to stand out and not just put out the same regurgitated content as everyone else.
This deep dive will eventually be turned into something I teach in paid offers.
It will be a section in one of my playbooks, and a lecture in Text-Based OS.
Why?
Because I'm giving so much value.
More than you're likely to find in the majority of other newsletters.
But a percentage of my audience will still buy to learn more.
To have the information delivered differently, and to get my help with their specific/unique situation.
This is how far you need to be willing to go with your research and value - and why it's so important you start by finding your obsession.
Once you have your obsession you can find your unique differentiator (specific niche) and turn it into a unique value proposition that will be aligned with what you want to teach your audience.
The next obvious step is teaching your audience that exact thing at another level.
A playbook. A course. A cohort. Coaching. Etc...
The promise of your Flagship Offer matches your value proposition, and in turn you're essentially building it as you write your newsletter deep dives.
Which brings us full circle to my first Bonus Coaching Note about how this all ties back to last week's deep dive on repurposing your newsletter to paid offers.
