Things you can create for your customers. Or: share everything.
This post is based on a post I read yesterday about the "co-op business model" by Derek Sivers.
In that post Sivers tells the virtues of sharing everything you can think of to create value for other people without direct business value. My previous post about your blog being your first product touches this point as well.
Sivers basically points out three things:
You already have something other people need or could use
For example, you can blog about manual solutions for problems your future product is going to solve for your customers.
Also. A lot of successful web companies contribute by creating various open source plugins or applications for other software developers.
As a designer or author you could create e-books or step-by-step videos about how you work and what your process is.
Find a way to share it with everyone who needs it.
It doesn't really matter what you share as long as you can share it with friends, colleagues, competitors or basically because you just like to be a nice guy.
If you fear that no one needs what you have to offer think about the following:
If even just one person can benefit by one little thing you product you have already doubled your personal value to the world. This is because not only you as a single person got some value but you scale yourself to 200% for helping one more person. That person can then even help someone else with your solution which means you will have tripled your worth to the world about that single problem.
If it takes you some effort to produce something you can charge a little for it.
Sivers shares some great examples in his post so I won't list them here. But his most important example is the million dollar business that grew out of his way of helping other independent artists to sell music CDs online. He describes a great deal of this in his book Anything you want