The easiest way to convince someone to pay for your product is by arguing how much more money they’ll earn or save by using your solution. If your product costs $30 per month and each customers makes or saves on average $300 through your product, the buying decision becomes a no-brainer.

This is, of course, why looking at your own expenses and the expenses of businesses in your niche and is such an effective strategy.

If we combine it with the strategy to bet on trends, we end up with the “pickax strategy”.

In short, the idea is to sell pickax during a goldrush instead of mining for gold yourself. This is one of the best guidelines for entrepreneurs because while miners may or may not find gold, the people who sell the mining equipment are certain to make a fortune.

A perfect example for a recent goldrush is cryptocurrency trading. While some traders might have made some money, the founders of companies like Coinbase and people who sold trading courses certainly made a fortune. Further examples for recent goldrushs are venture capital, online coaching, AI, dropshipping, SEO, content marketing, and affiliate marketing.

During a goldrush everyone has dollar signs in their eyes. Hence, it’s usually easy to sell a product to them, as long as they’re convinced that your product will help them get a piece of the pie.

The first step is, of course, to find a goldrush. But since I’ve talked already about various ways to identify trends in my “betting on trends” article, let’s talk about what you can do once you’ve found a promising goldrush.

Types of Pickaxes

The key task is to find out what kind of pickax the participants in that particular goldrush will find useful. To get you started, here’s a list of common types of pickax that you can build during a goldrush:

• Sell ideas
  • examples: Softwareideas.io, Gaps.com, Starterstory.com, Bankless Newsletter, Trends.co
• Sell data
  • examples: Get Latka, Coinmarketcap, Crunchbase, Messari, Detailed.com
• Sell tools
  • examples: Mudrex, Angel,
• Sell access to a community and connections
  • examples: WIP.chat, MegaMaker, Nomadlist
• Sell guidance
  • examples: courses, books, coaching

The pickax strategy is nowadays well-known and used by many savvy entrepreneur. In some sense, selling pickax has become a goldrush in itself. Hence it may make sense to go one step beyond and try to sell heads and handles (or whatever they need to build their pickax) to pickax sellers.

Selling Heads and Handles to Pickax Sellers

To understand what you can sell to pickax sellers, just have a look at the list in the previous section.

You could:

• Sell a product that to people who want to sell ideas.
  • An example is Substack.
• Sell a product that to people who want to sell data.
  • An example is DataForSeo.com.
• Sell a product that to people who want to sell tools.
  • Examples are Laravel Spark and Saas Pegasus.
• Sell a product that to people who want to sell access to a community and connections.
  • An example is Mighty Networks.
• Sell a product that to people who want to sell guidance.
  • Examples are Teachable and Podia.

Another possibility is to build a product that makes easier to identify new goldrushes. Existing products that do this are BuiltWith and Treendly.

Now it’s your turn to identify upcoming goldrushes and to start selling pickax. Or maybe to sell heads and handles to pickax seller? Or maybe you want to go even beyond that and start selling steel and wood to head and handle seller? (I think at this stage, we’re talking about companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon that provide the infrastructure that all gold rushes rely upon. It’s not really realistic for humble entrepreneurs to start competing with them.)