Summary: In this article I explore how to build a new business from market problem to launch, using research, IP, branding, productisation and marketing strategy.
5 things you’ll learn in this article:
- Why the best fitness business ideas should start with a real market problem, not just a good-sounding idea.
- How deep research can help you create stronger intellectual property, better services and clearer business positioning.
- Why naming, branding and website copy are useful tools for clarifying your business strategy.
- How to turn one body of knowledge into digital products, workshops, consulting, courses and ongoing content marketing.
- Why awareness, customer experience and word of mouth should be part of your long-term fitness business growth strategy.
For the last year, I’ve been building a new business. And every step of the way, I’ve been documenting the process.
The purpose of this article is not to talk about the business itself, but to go through the process, step-by-step, the process I took to take it from idea to launch.
Actually, let’s go back earlier than that – earlier than the original idea. I’ve seen too many businesses fail because they started off the back of what they perceive to be a good idea. But we don’t get to decide whether an idea is good or not – the market does that for us.
So instead, I started with the observation of a problem. After many thousands of hours of consulting to service-based business owners, I’ve noticed one very definite pattern emerge. Those business who prioritise customer experience make much more money than those who don’t.
Customers stay longer, spend more money, and refer their friends.
The problem is, most businesses
- Don’t know the value of customer experience.
- Don’t know how to go about improving customer experience.
I’ve been very interested in this idea for several years. It’s been one of the key pillars of the consulting work I do for at least eight years, but I feel like the ideas were only half formed. In early 2025 I spoke at a national industry conference in Hobart about customer experience, and the idea struck a chord.
So in August of 2025 I began with a thesis. This was the belief I held that would drive the project.
‘We believe in a future where people will crave real human experiences. To build a business that wins, you need to provide these experiences.’
This statement was my starting point. But I didn’t have a system to help businesses build that customer experience. I didn’t know the depth of the problems being faced by businesses. And I hadn’t gone deep enough into the research and published material in the area of customer experience design.
So this is where I began, by diving into the existing content.
And this was phase one of building the business. I’m going to call this phase ‘absorption’.
I created a comprehensive list of the 28 books that would form the backbone of my research. The idea here is that full immersion in an idea allows you to look for common themes and overlapping ideas to start to build a common language around customer experience design. More importantly for me, it also allowed me to create some new and original ideas by either combining existing knowledge into unique ideas, or by identifying blind spots in the current work.
I won’t bore you by listing every single title, but I went deep into books about customer experience, hospitality, word of mouth, loyalty, service design, memorable moments, and the psychology of why some experiences stick with us. I also read books built around specific companies and cultures, including Disney, Zappos, Starbucks, Airbnb, Ritz-Carlton, Macquarie, and some of the world’s best restaurants. Across all of them, the themes ranged from reducing customer effort and designing better systems, through to creating unexpected moments of delight, giving people stories to tell, and turning ordinary service into something genuinely remarkable.
I listened to the audio versions of each of those books, except where audio versions weren’t available, where I read the hard copy. In total I listened to just under 170 hours worth of audio books over 12 weeks – averaging 15 hours of consumption per week.
As I went, I took copious notes around ideas and terminology. These were direct notes form the texts I consumed, but also ideas that were inspired by what I read and listened to.
Some books were incredible, and I took multiple pages worth of notes. Others were less groundbreaking and maybe only gave me a single quote. I ended up with quotes, anecdotes, processes, definitions, and systems of customer experience – an extremely comprehensive body of work, almost like a meta review of the sum total of the knowledge in customer experience.
I learnt a huge amount from the global authorities on customer experience. And yet, I didn’t find the one book that made the other redundant. There was no ‘bible’ of customer experience that made all others redundant. This is what I then set out to create.
So, after 12 weeks of research, phase one, the absorption phase was complete.
I now moved into stage two, which was formalising the intellectual property. I knew that I wanted a unique proprietary process that I could use in multiple ways for the future of the business.
My first step was an important one. It was creating a terminology list of a common language I could use to explore the concepts of customer experience design. I needed to settle on this language before I could create any useful intellectual property.
Ultimately, I created and defined 91 terms or phrases. These ranged from existing terminology in the industry, like Benchmarking and Net Promoter Score, to novel terms proposed by existing thought leaders like Talk Triggers and Athletic Hospitality, to existing concepts like the Peak-End Rule and Hedonic Adaptation, and finally to some new phrases I coined like Remarkability Curve, The Supersizing Fallacy, The Snap Test and Intentional Magic.
Once I’d defined my language, I spent a lot of this time converting my notes from individual pages of notes on each book to extracting common themes from each book and putting them together. For example, multiple books spoke about the importance of service recovery, what to do when a customer has a negative experience, so any mentions of service recovery in my notes would be compiled into one section.
Each of these sections got its own heading, with the sum total of all my research on each topic outlined below it. These headings were then rearranged to form a coherent narrative.
Having all my research and ideas compiled into categories allowed me to start to piece together what was perhaps the most challenging part of creating this intellectual property: the systems and frameworks that could actually be applied to a real-world business.
This was quite a long and frustrating process, as I had a lot of complexity that I wanted to simplify. I had so many ideas that I struggled for a long time to connect them into a logical narrative. After a lot of resistance, and a lot of eureka moments, I finally settled on an extremely practical and evidence-backed process, which would ultimately become the proprietary Gobsmack Customer Design Framework.
From here, I wanted to use the sum total of all my research, the common language that I had created, the real-world examples I’d found in my research, and the Gobsmack Customer Design Framework to create an all-encompassing manuscript. Basically, this was the book I wish had existed to save me 168 hours of reading.
The final text manuscript was 188 pages, comprising 18 different sections.
This second phase, formalising the IP, took every spare second of my time throughout November and December of 2025 – 55 hours of total writing time. Importantly, AI involvement in this was kept to a minimum for two important reasons. Firstly, I knew I wanted to create something new and unique, and that all AI would do was summarise existing knowledge. And secondly, I find the process of writing is what helps me to formulate my ideas. If the writing were done for me, there wouldn’t be any space for these ideas to form.
I did however have a few AI assists. For each of the concepts that I wrote about, I also created simple AI-generated hand-drawn style sketches to help explain the ideas graphically, and I also used AI to help me research real-world examples of each of the concepts that I was exploring.
At the start of January in 2026, I had a completed manuscript and moved from creating the intellectual property of the business to business branding.
This branding phase began by deciding on the business name. I knew I wanted to draw inspiration from young, energetic brands like graphic design firms and marketing agencies. I wanted the name to evoke feeling and emotion, the sort of feeling that the customers of the businesses we would consult for would experience as a result of our work.
I didn’t need the name to explicitly state what the business would do, so I ruled out names like Experience Engineers, Experience Designers, the Experience Consultancy, Experience Works, etc. I’d already determined that the business name would have a byline ‘Designing remarkable customer experience’.
I wanted the name to be an invented word, but with inspiration drawn from an existing concept that people would understand. This would make it much easier to do things like register business names and websites, domain names, further into the process. I wanted a two-syllable word with strong, sharp vowel sounds.
I played around with concepts like ‘Experiology’, ‘Jaw Drop’ and ‘Blow Your Socks Off’, finally settling on ‘Gobsmack’. The business name and the domain name were both available, so I registered those.
For the logo, I knew I wanted to draw inspiration from old-school comic books with words like ‘pow’, ‘bam’, and ‘ouch’, with Starburst outlines next to the stereotypical Batman comic book slap. But I also knew that my target clients for this business would be professional businesses, so I wanted to contrast the element of professionalism with a bit of fun. This resulted in the final logo with the ‘gob’ letter being in a professional serif font, and the smack being in a much heavier and more aggressive comic book style. Once I had the basic design of the logo, I experimented with a lot of different colour palettes. I wanted something high contrast and a little bit removed from my other brands and settled on an orange, blue, and yellow colour palette.
This logo allowed me to create an overall design system that would give consistency across online and print materials.
As part of this branding, I also gave names to each of the distinct elements of intellectual property we created, like the Gobsmack Design Framework.
With the intellectual and visual brand now developed, I set to work on building the website. I always find that building a website for my businesses allows me to really consolidate my ideas, as it forces me to distil nearly 200 pages of intellectual property down to the absolute essentials.
I follow a very set template for every website I build:
- Section one is a summary statement for above the fold.
- Section two talks about what sort of person the business is for.
- Section three introduces some social proof with testimonials.
- Section four talks about how the business will work.
- Section five has some social proof in the form of client stories.
- Section six is a call to action.
I created all the marketing copy using my previous work in marketing psychology and put the main landing page live. At this stage, I hadn’t yet finalised the different service offerings that the business would provide, although I’d been taking notes on this over the previous months, so we’re starting to narrow down our value proposition.
In February of 2026, I moved into stage four, which was starting to productise the business.
Based off the design brief that I’d created for the business, I built a template of what I would like printed materials to look like. I created a 20-page sample of our visual imagery and page layouts, which I provided to one of the virtual assistants I regularly use. At this stage in early 2026, AI capabilities were not yet sufficient to create my desired output. I then shared my 200-page document with the virtual assistant, and he created a series of theory- and practise-based workbooks which would go on to form the basis of the Gobsmack Design System for in-person events and consulting.
While the VA was working on that, I was designing the larger scale printable materials, including a 3m long experience design and mapping banner, which all of the clients of Gobsmack Consulting will use as part of their experience design process.
After a couple of weeks of work from my VA, I received the completed version a total of 492 pages of high-end graphic design across five different manuals. Total cost around $200 Australian.
This was the first productised service offering, the downloadable series of online PDFs (the five different manuals) that would guide business owners through the customer design process. I did a soft launch of this product, but at this point still hadn’t announced anything publicly or to my network. I marketed this product exclusively through Meta and used this as an experiment of how successful a marketing campaign could be if I handed over the entire decision-making process for the marketing campaign to ChatGPT. This was Gobsmack’s first product and continues to sell for $497.
With this digital product launched, I designed the other services provided by Gobsmack Consulting, including:
- a keynote
- a two-day workshop
- a two-day intensive
- online one-on-one consulting
- online group consulting
- and an online video Master Class
With the final workbooks completed, I had these professionally printed as a final draft and proof of concept for all and any future businesses who would be working with us.
At this point, I had a fully completed design framework that could be applied to any business. So that’s what I started to do. I began to follow my own design framework on the other customer-facing service-based businesses that I run, specifically my business consulting work. Treating my own business as a client, I overhauled the service experience for my clients. At the time of writing this, I’m currently applying the Gobsmack design framework to the lifetime experience. Currently, the upstairs hall in our house is dominated by a massive 3m customer experience map and hundreds of sticky notes. Long story short, the system works.
In March of 2026, I moved into phase five, which was to prepare marketing materials and ongoing content distribution for our launch.
The first step of this was to organise a full-day video shoot. I worked with Bruce from Gingerbeard Media and booked a high-end warehouse location for the shoot.
The purpose for this shoot was both to create an online video course, which would be the video version of the downloadable PDFs, and also to create our entire future content marketing material.
Ultimately, over one massive shoot, we captured over nine hours of video, almost 400 GB of 4K content. The vast majority of this was me using a teleprompter to guide the viewer through the entire Gobsmack intellectual property material. For me, personally, this was a massively draining day, both physically and mentally. Nine hours of standing on the spot, talking to a camera. This left me with a raging week-long headache, but more importantly, a massive bank of high quality video content.
On that day, we also filmed marketing videos for each of the services we would offer.
At the time of writing this, this video content has been leveraged into our initial digital marketing, primarily focusing on sharing stories of global customer experience champions. I’m still in the process of editing all the content for the online video-based course and additional online video-based content with more of a theory focus. I’ll also be able to leverage this video content into an audio-only podcast format.
One of the key considerations for me with this was the ability to leverage our intellectual property into multiple formats.
Also in March of 2026, I built a standalone website landing page specifically for our first in-person event, which would be made available only on my existing consulting clients.
Moving into April of 2026 and still in the preparation for our launch, I set up our digital online presence, including social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Google Business Profile and YouTube.
I pre-created a year’s worth of content (which was all leveraged from the written, image-based, and video-based content I’d created) and started posting on these digital platforms prior to any official announcement being made. I also used the written intellectual property to extract two years’ worth of articles, and I started posting these on the website. The purpose of this was to ensure that on launch week, we already had a considerable digital online presence with plenty of material to give people context on what Gobsmack Consulting is all about.
I also created on-brand templates for regular email communications with my network.
In phase six, I finally moved to our launch. This was May, 2026.
Prior to launching, I refined my elevator pitch for the business. I knew a lot of people would be asking me about what we do, so I spent a long time refining it down into one statement. It’s probably a little bit long for an elevator pitch, but it’s as succinct as I could make it.
This is what I settled on.
‘Most businesses give people a perfectly adequate level of service. But no one goes home and says, ‘You have to hear about this completely adequate thing that happened to me today.’ So Gobsmack helps businesses create customer experiences that are actually remarkable. We go into a business and map every single touchpoint a customer has with them. We then use our customer design framework to help turn those ordinary moments into wow moments people remember and talk about. Customers forget what you do, but they don’t forget how you make them feel. These experiences make customers feel something and give them a story to tell so come back more often, stay longer, spend more money and bring their friends.’
With the elevator pitch locked away, it was time to show my baby to the world.
And that’s why I am currently. Working my way through my initial launch plan with the sole purpose to build awareness.
The current focus is not to sell anything, but to position myself in people’s minds so that if and when they or someone they know need help creating gobsmacking customer experiences, they know where to turn.
This is the first part of my larger marketing thesis, beginning with awareness, and then once we do start to push harder to monetise our services, to provide such a remarkable experience to people, we create our own flywheel of growth.
So that’s the full process, from noticing a real problem in the market, to immersing myself in the research, formalising the intellectual property, building the brand, creating the products, developing the marketing assets, setting up the digital presence, and finally launching Gobsmack into the world. It’s all built around one central belief: in an increasingly automated world, the businesses that win will be the ones that create real human experiences people remember and talk about.
Your action steps:
- Start with a real problem: Before launching a new business, identify the client problem it solves and why the market would care.
- Build your intellectual property: Create a clear process, framework or system that turns your knowledge into something clients can understand and apply.
- Productise your expertise: Look for ways to turn your coaching, consulting or fitness business knowledge into workshops, PDFs, courses, group programs or premium services.
- Create content from the work you already do: Use your research, frameworks, videos, client stories and lessons to build a long-term content marketing system.
- Launch for awareness before selling hard: Give people time to understand what you do, why it matters and how your fitness business or service can help them.
