This is how you’ll know it’s time to innovate

If you’re having trouble getting someone to try your product (especially if it’s free), you’ve gotta change your pitch.

You’ve likely already heard of “The Chosen,” the first ever multi-season series about the life of Christ. It’s been viewed over 350M times and has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and 9.8/10 on IMDB.

But if we go back in time to when Jeff Harmon was first helping get this incredible series off the ground, he had a hard time convincing people to watch it. (Don’t tell anyone this, but it even took his brother, Daniel Harmon a couple weeks to turn it on.)

So, Jeff started inviting people to his house and very kindly insisting they give the first one, two, or three episodes a try. And every time, they were hooked.

That sequence of events—in part—inspired Jeff and the rest of the Angel Studios team to create the “Pay-It-Forward” model which allowed millions of people to watch this show, and changed the trajectory of TV forever.

Essentially, the Pay-It-Forward method lets anyone watch the first episode of The Chosen for free, and then they have the option to pay it forward, giving someone else the chance to watch the next episode for free.

It turned out to be a multi-million dollar idea.

Like the saying goes, “Give a man The Chosen and he’ll forget to start it. Teach a man to watch The Chosen and he’ll binge it all night.”

Jeff realized that if someone else who felt passionately about the show could inspire other people to give it a chance, once they started watching, the show was so captivating that they wouldn’t be able to stop.

Weirdly enough, convincing consumers to try your product is one of the hardest parts of growing your business, and what other companies try might not work for you. For the best results, you often have to pave your own way. And there’s no formula for that—but there is a process that helps get to success quicker and with less wasted time and effort. It starts with ideation, then experimentation—and when done right, that leads to true innovation.