The Hardest Part About Developing Platform (Who Are You Anyway?)

The hardest part about developing a platform is deciding what you're all about. In business terms, it would be considered your unique selling proposition (USP).

Identifying this USP—or your reason for being!—involves deep self-knowledge, an understanding of what you want out of life, and how that interrelates with what other people need and enjoy.

It boils down to 3 questions:

Think of it as a Venn diagram.

What are you passionate about?
What's the unique content,
authentic experience, or remarkable work you would undertake even if
you weren't paid for it? What motivates you to get up in the morning?

Who's your audience?
What are the needs of your audience? How do they want to be approached? What
kinds of appeals are they most receptive to? Where can they be found?

What are your strengths?
When
are you strongest in interacting and reaching and serving? What formats
or mediums are a good fit for you—and match your passion? When is your
content/service/product at its best? (Example of bad fit: Your passion for the cave dwelling Luddite movement combined with your Twitter marketing strength.)

What you're looking for is
that moment of peak experience, when who you are and what you're
passionate about and how it is expressed or manifested all comes
together to create a compelling experience that your audience needs and loves.

Think
about times when you've experienced peak performance, the times when
you felt you were in your absolute element, better than anyone else in
the world at what you were doing in that moment. You felt happy,
fulfilled, relaxed, joyful. Some people call it "flow."

That's the seed of your platform.