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[00:00:07.280 --> 00:00:08.720] What's new with you?
[00:00:08.720 --> 00:00:14.880] I got this gigantic omnidirectional treadmill for my MetaQuest.
[00:00:14.880 --> 00:00:20.640] Like this virtual reality treadmill, like that shit.
[00:00:21.040 --> 00:00:24.800] So you like walk on it and then you walk in whatever game you're playing, too.
[00:00:24.960 --> 00:00:27.360] Yeah, you basically, people should look it up.
[00:00:27.840 --> 00:00:30.400] It's called Catwalk C2 Plus.
[00:00:30.400 --> 00:00:33.680] I mean, it's like, what's that Ready Player One movie?
[00:00:33.680 --> 00:00:38.000] I've never actually seen it, but apparently people say that it's like the Ready Player One.
[00:00:38.640 --> 00:00:39.840] Hey, what's up, Justin?
[00:00:39.840 --> 00:00:40.320] Hey, guys.
[00:00:40.320 --> 00:00:46.720] Channing is just telling me about his omnidirectional VR treadmill that he just bought.
[00:00:47.040 --> 00:00:48.320] It takes up half of my room.
[00:00:48.480 --> 00:00:51.520] I have a gym, and basically, I can't use anything in my gym.
[00:00:51.520 --> 00:00:52.400] You put it down.
[00:00:52.400 --> 00:00:57.360] It's like this 360-degree tiny little bowl.
[00:00:57.360 --> 00:01:03.120] And it's got these shoes that you wear, these special shoes that are effectively mouse pads on your shoes.
[00:01:03.120 --> 00:01:13.200] And it connects to your MetaQuest, like the VR headset, in a way where when you walk on it, it's basically like moving the joystick forward and back.
[00:01:13.200 --> 00:01:20.640] So when you're in games, the whole idea is, if you want to do VR, is like to be in this immersive situation.
[00:01:20.640 --> 00:01:26.800] But it's obviously not very immersive if you have the glasses on, you have the visuals around, you have the settings.
[00:01:26.880 --> 00:01:27.920] So you're just standing there.
[00:01:27.920 --> 00:01:30.720] And yet, to like move, you have to move your thumb up and down, right?
[00:01:31.120 --> 00:01:31.680] So how is it?
[00:01:31.680 --> 00:01:32.480] Like, how does it feel?
[00:01:32.480 --> 00:01:34.560] Like, what's your review of this treadmill thing?
[00:01:34.560 --> 00:01:35.680] I've done it like twice.
[00:01:35.920 --> 00:01:39.520] All the reviews say your brain has to adjust to it.
[00:01:39.520 --> 00:01:42.880] So for me, it's extremely difficult.
[00:01:42.880 --> 00:01:44.640] You instantly start sweating.
[00:01:44.640 --> 00:01:48.000] Like, everyone's like, you got to have like three big fans pointing at you.
[00:01:48.160 --> 00:01:51.440] It sucks, but it's also crazy and interesting and good.
[00:01:51.440 --> 00:02:03.960] But the one interesting thing I'll say about VR, and like part of the reason why I would buy some crazy shit like this, is for the most part, people that get virtual reality headsets get them to play games.
[00:01:59.680 --> 00:02:05.000] Like it's like this fun.
[00:02:05.240 --> 00:02:09.800] Oh, I want to go and like do a shoot-em-up or I want to do like a role-playing game.
[00:02:09.800 --> 00:02:19.320] But for me, the reason why I'm really interested in it is because I'm really interested in like the innovative grown-up shit that VR can help me do.
[00:02:19.320 --> 00:02:26.520] So for example, I had an idea and I was like, well, it would be really cool if there was some VR app that helps you with public speaking.
[00:02:26.840 --> 00:02:30.280] I know a lot of people, before they give speeches, they go and stand in front of a mirror.
[00:02:30.360 --> 00:02:32.120] They go and talk into a closet and they rehearse.
[00:02:32.120 --> 00:02:36.280] But that's like super, you know, separated from what the actual experience is like.
[00:02:36.280 --> 00:02:42.920] I'm like, it would be cool if you could stand on a VR stage and have like a VR audience and then practice your speech or whatever it is there.
[00:02:43.000 --> 00:02:44.040] Turns out that exists.
[00:02:44.040 --> 00:02:45.720] It's called virtual speech.
[00:02:46.120 --> 00:02:46.600] That's cool.
[00:02:46.600 --> 00:02:47.480] There's other stuff too.
[00:02:47.480 --> 00:02:48.760] I'm not going to get too much into it.
[00:02:48.920 --> 00:02:50.360] I'm into meditation.
[00:02:50.360 --> 00:02:59.560] They have this app called Trip, which just completely immerses you into this weird, basically sort of made-for-meditation app that's really dope.
[00:02:59.800 --> 00:03:09.000] They have, like, I'm into these things called memory palaces, where you sort of mentally simulate walking through an environment and it helps you to remember things better.
[00:03:09.000 --> 00:03:14.040] I think there's some show where that was kind of popularized, and I'm kind of into it.
[00:03:14.120 --> 00:03:14.600] Sherlock Holmes.
[00:03:14.760 --> 00:03:16.040] They had a Sherlock Holmes.
[00:03:18.040 --> 00:03:22.520] There's an app called Librarium, and it's literally a memory palace game for VR.
[00:03:22.520 --> 00:03:25.800] So there's all these kind of things, and that's kind of like what I use it for for the most part.
[00:03:25.880 --> 00:03:27.240] Yeah, I play ping pong.
[00:03:27.880 --> 00:03:29.000] Oh, I love ping pong.
[00:03:29.720 --> 00:03:30.840] I play table tennis.
[00:03:30.840 --> 00:03:33.320] I play regular tennis.
[00:03:33.320 --> 00:03:39.640] I'm like, I got one last year, and I haven't figured out all of its capabilities yet.
[00:03:39.640 --> 00:03:47.200] I was spending a lot of time playing it just as like, we have a gym in our house, so I go to the gym here, and we have a gym that we belong to where we live.
[00:03:47.440 --> 00:03:53.120] So I don't need any more exercise stuff, but I do like the Sabre game that gets you moving around, and that's a lot of fun.
[00:03:53.680 --> 00:04:00.800] Yeah, I'm like the most simplistic user of VR, but I can't wait to see how I learn to use it more in the coming, I guess, months and years.
[00:04:00.800 --> 00:04:02.000] So I'm glad I have one.
[00:04:02.160 --> 00:04:02.880] Tell you that much.
[00:04:02.880 --> 00:04:05.840] I'm going to get your username and we can ping pong it up.
[00:04:06.080 --> 00:04:07.600] I'm a game.
[00:04:08.720 --> 00:04:09.200] So shit.
[00:04:09.200 --> 00:04:09.440] Thank you.
[00:04:09.440 --> 00:04:10.080] I want to see you guys.
[00:04:10.160 --> 00:04:10.480] All right, cool.
[00:04:12.480 --> 00:04:13.520] I should probably introduce you.
[00:04:13.520 --> 00:04:15.040] We're already live and recording.
[00:04:15.520 --> 00:04:17.360] You are Justin Welsh.
[00:04:17.360 --> 00:04:21.600] You are a very popular solopreneur, very inspirational as well.
[00:04:21.760 --> 00:04:32.480] On your Twitter bio, actually, you say that you're tweeting about the process of building a portfolio of one-person businesses to $5 million, which is an awesome goal.
[00:04:32.480 --> 00:04:34.240] And you're not just tweeting about it, but you're doing it.
[00:04:34.240 --> 00:04:37.760] Like last November, I think you cross lined the $3 million mark.
[00:04:37.760 --> 00:04:39.520] So I have a ton of questions about this.
[00:04:39.520 --> 00:04:41.680] First, why $5 million?
[00:04:41.680 --> 00:04:43.760] Like, how did you pick that number?
[00:04:43.760 --> 00:04:45.520] Yeah, it's a really great question.
[00:04:45.680 --> 00:04:53.440] I have a really poor answer, which was just like, when I got started, it seemed very out of reach.
[00:04:53.440 --> 00:04:58.400] It seemed like extremely improbable to me at the time that I decided on that.
[00:04:58.400 --> 00:05:01.280] And I sort of come from the SaaS world.
[00:05:01.280 --> 00:05:06.800] I was a former executive at a SaaS company, a couple of SaaS companies, and did 16 years, I think, in technology.
[00:05:06.800 --> 00:05:09.120] And so I was used to creating OKRs.
[00:05:09.120 --> 00:05:12.400] And so I was used to saying, okay, you know, shoot for a big goal.
[00:05:12.400 --> 00:05:16.560] And if you get 70% of the way there as an OKR, you've done well.
[00:05:16.560 --> 00:05:20.160] And so I thought, well, if I do 5 million, that's probably never going to happen.
[00:05:20.160 --> 00:05:22.560] So 70% of the way there would be 3.5 million.
[00:05:22.560 --> 00:05:23.680] That would be pretty cool.
[00:05:24.560 --> 00:05:27.520] So that was like the science behind picking that.
[00:05:27.520 --> 00:05:31.720] And I feel like, you know, it's more achievable than I thought.
[00:05:31.720 --> 00:05:32.200] Yeah.
[00:05:32.200 --> 00:05:33.000] Aim for the stars.
[00:05:33.000 --> 00:05:34.760] And if you fall short, you'll hit the moon at least.
[00:05:29.680 --> 00:05:36.760] Sort of whatever, whichever order that goes in.
[00:05:36.840 --> 00:05:38.680] I can never remember which one's further away.
[00:05:38.680 --> 00:05:39.960] So yeah, exactly.
[00:05:39.960 --> 00:05:42.920] Aim for the moon, and if you miss, you'll be lost among the stars.
[00:05:43.080 --> 00:05:44.120] Is that $5 million?
[00:05:44.120 --> 00:05:46.040] Like, do you imagine that as being cumulative?
[00:05:46.040 --> 00:05:47.320] Like in total, you want to hit that?
[00:05:47.320 --> 00:05:49.800] Or is that like you want that every year?
[00:05:49.800 --> 00:05:54.440] And no, when I started, it was cumulative.
[00:05:54.680 --> 00:05:56.280] That's how I was thinking about it.
[00:05:56.280 --> 00:06:00.040] Because when I started, I never had the intention of working for myself forever.
[00:06:00.040 --> 00:06:03.320] I thought of it as like a cool proving ground.
[00:06:03.320 --> 00:06:07.320] Because unlike a lot of people that do this, I don't know how to code.
[00:06:07.320 --> 00:06:13.720] And I don't know how to build products in the traditional sense of how you might think about products.
[00:06:13.720 --> 00:06:17.480] So I thought that this was not going to be something that I would do for a long time.
[00:06:17.480 --> 00:06:27.080] So I was like, if I can go out and just cumulatively earn this money, again, money doesn't mean everything, but it's like, it's a good indicator that I'm doing something right.
[00:06:27.480 --> 00:06:34.440] But as my business is growing, I think there's an opportunity for me to do that on an annual basis based on some of the things that I'm doing.
[00:06:35.160 --> 00:06:37.640] I don't really want to shoot for a monetary goal.
[00:06:37.960 --> 00:06:46.040] My goals are more like a work to income ratio that I'm trying to achieve is a much more important goal than I think total income or revenue.
[00:06:46.040 --> 00:06:51.800] Yeah, I think most people, when they're thinking about making money, are really thinking about like making time for themselves.
[00:06:51.800 --> 00:06:52.600] Yes, totally.
[00:06:52.600 --> 00:06:59.320] It's some degree of like, I want my financial freedom, which means I want to have enough money to support me doing whatever the hell I want in life.
[00:06:59.320 --> 00:07:05.000] If that's hanging out with my family eat more or going on vacations or even just making more time to do other work that's more interesting.
[00:07:05.000 --> 00:07:06.840] I think that's a pretty common approach.
[00:07:06.840 --> 00:07:15.120] And so, if you have like this ratio in your mind of like work to income, you know, and it's high enough, income to work, then I think that's pretty awesome.
[00:07:14.760 --> 00:07:19.040] What the public often sees is someone putting a revenue number up.
[00:07:19.360 --> 00:07:25.520] There's a guy who's really, I'm not going to mention his name, but he's making a killing financially.
[00:07:25.520 --> 00:07:32.160] He does some consulting work, but he works like 24-7 around the clock, high stress.
[00:07:32.160 --> 00:07:38.800] In the situation where you see the number, you see the revenue, and a lot of people are like, you know, they go wide-eyed and they go, I want that too.
[00:07:38.800 --> 00:07:42.080] But if they saw what that was attached to, they would be like, hell no.
[00:07:42.080 --> 00:07:44.160] Are you talking about Brett from DesignJoy?
[00:07:44.160 --> 00:07:45.840] I had him on the podcast last year.
[00:07:45.840 --> 00:07:50.000] And he's like, I'm doing two million a year in revenue with my, you know, my agency.
[00:07:50.000 --> 00:07:55.360] And it was like, I'm also working 18 hours a day, seven days a week, drive myself insane.
[00:07:55.360 --> 00:08:02.080] I have friends like that, and their businesses are booming, $3 million businesses, $4 million businesses, mostly service-based.
[00:08:02.080 --> 00:08:08.960] So tons of time, tons of projects, like marriages are suffering, physical and mental health are suffering.
[00:08:08.960 --> 00:08:11.760] And like, I get this thing, and I wrote about this the other day.
[00:08:11.760 --> 00:08:14.480] You know, a traditional word is shiny object syndrome.
[00:08:14.480 --> 00:08:20.320] I get like shiny outcome syndrome where I see like the outcomes of other people and immediately I get wide-eyed.
[00:08:20.320 --> 00:08:22.880] I'm like, oh, if that guy can do it, I can do it.
[00:08:22.880 --> 00:08:24.720] And then it's like, wait a minute, hold on.
[00:08:24.720 --> 00:08:29.920] What is that person sacrificing and doing to get that thing?
[00:08:29.920 --> 00:08:33.200] And if I don't want to do that, then don't make that the outcome that you're shooting for.
[00:08:33.200 --> 00:08:35.280] Like you can't get tied into that.
[00:08:35.280 --> 00:08:36.000] It's super hard to do.
[00:08:36.640 --> 00:08:39.920] People don't broadcast what they're paying to get the revenue numbers they're getting.
[00:08:39.920 --> 00:08:43.040] No one's like, I made $6 million this year and also got a divorce.
[00:08:43.040 --> 00:08:45.680] You know, they should say the first part.
[00:08:45.680 --> 00:08:46.960] Yeah, yeah, totally.
[00:08:46.960 --> 00:08:47.520] Totally.
[00:08:47.520 --> 00:08:50.320] So, you're doing a lot of things, right?
[00:08:50.320 --> 00:08:53.840] You've got a huge email list of 70,000 people on it.
[00:08:53.840 --> 00:09:03.800] You do coaching, you do consulting, and you've got product businesses that are generating recurring revenue, which is really cool because you're not a software engineer, so it's pretty rare to have that.
[00:09:04.040 --> 00:09:05.880] What's like your breakdown in terms of revenue?
[00:09:05.880 --> 00:09:08.040] Like, how much of that is coming from different sources?
[00:09:08.280 --> 00:09:12.600] Yeah, I have two sort of flagship products that are information products.
[00:09:12.600 --> 00:09:14.920] So, I'm like, I'm a knowledge entrepreneur.
[00:09:14.920 --> 00:09:15.480] That's what I am.
[00:09:15.480 --> 00:09:17.960] Like, I have knowledge-based products.
[00:09:18.360 --> 00:09:20.440] 70% of my revenue comes from those products.
[00:09:20.440 --> 00:09:26.440] Another 15% comes from recurring revenue from what I would call a subscription email that you pay for.
[00:09:26.840 --> 00:09:34.280] And then there's a smattering of coaching and consulting, which I've stopped doing completely actually as of about three months ago.
[00:09:34.600 --> 00:09:34.920] Cool.
[00:09:36.120 --> 00:09:36.440] Thank you.
[00:09:36.440 --> 00:09:38.280] I wanted to reinvest that time into something else.
[00:09:38.280 --> 00:09:43.080] There's newsletter sponsorships, there's affiliates, there's all these other little things.
[00:09:43.080 --> 00:09:47.960] But the bulk of my business comes from my information products.
[00:09:47.960 --> 00:09:53.480] And the way that my subscriptions work is I think of my information products as Trojan horses for subscriptions.
[00:09:53.480 --> 00:10:04.680] So it's, you know, get a lower cost, high-quality information product, put it in front of people that want to learn how to do something, get them into the product, and use the product to sell the subscription.
[00:10:04.680 --> 00:10:10.280] So put them through modules that are interesting and then say, hey, like, we can go advanced on this module.
[00:10:10.280 --> 00:10:21.080] I actually send a monthly email that'll take you a little bit deeper and then roll those folks into a recurring revenue email subscription, which is like, doesn't matter if one person subscribes to it or 20,000 people subscribe to it.
[00:10:21.080 --> 00:10:22.440] I just write one email.
[00:10:22.440 --> 00:10:31.480] It's just the same amount of work and it scales pretty well, just like a SaaS product without all the exact concept of the ladders of wealth creation.
[00:10:31.480 --> 00:10:33.240] It's this blog post written by Nathan Berry.
[00:10:33.240 --> 00:10:34.200] Have you read it?
[00:10:34.440 --> 00:10:37.720] I have not read it, even though I know Nathan quite well, but I should.
[00:10:37.720 --> 00:10:38.200] Yeah.
[00:10:39.000 --> 00:10:39.960] It's a good one.
[00:10:40.200 --> 00:10:45.520] You're kind of doing exactly what he talks about in that post, where you sort of start off trading time for money, right?
[00:10:45.520 --> 00:10:48.800] You were an exec at a couple of high-growth startups.
[00:10:48.800 --> 00:10:53.120] I think one of them you helped take from like zero to $50 million in annual recurring revenue.
[00:10:53.120 --> 00:10:54.320] But that's your time.
[00:10:54.320 --> 00:10:55.520] You go to work every day.
[00:10:55.520 --> 00:10:59.840] If you stop going to work, you get fired and you're no longer making any money.
[00:10:59.840 --> 00:11:06.560] And then you eventually build up to like the higher and higher ladders where you're selling a service business, like you did consulting and coaching.
[00:11:06.560 --> 00:11:09.440] It's still time for money, but at least you're not working for somebody else.
[00:11:09.440 --> 00:11:17.760] And now you've stopped doing that and used the money and the connections you got through that to basically sell these info products and sell a newsletter, which is much more scalable.
[00:11:17.760 --> 00:11:22.560] I want to walk through all these steps because I think a lot of other people want to emulate what you've done.
[00:11:22.560 --> 00:11:23.920] Maybe we start at the very beginning.
[00:11:23.920 --> 00:11:25.840] You had this awesome job.
[00:11:26.240 --> 00:11:27.440] It was going well.
[00:11:27.760 --> 00:11:36.480] At the end of it, you were burned out so badly that you had a massive panic attack, I think is the way you described it on the Andy Hackers Forum when you wrote about this.
[00:11:36.480 --> 00:11:38.480] And you had to call 911.
[00:11:38.480 --> 00:11:40.160] What led to that level of burnout?
[00:11:41.280 --> 00:11:43.840] How do you even get to that place?
[00:11:43.840 --> 00:11:47.760] I think a lot of people think that's like my founder story and a load of crap.
[00:11:47.760 --> 00:11:49.440] It's actually like the most true story.
[00:11:50.240 --> 00:12:00.720] I'll kind of give you the background, which was when I got hired at Patient Pop, I had done a five-year stint at Zock Doc, which was a big New York City company kind of back 2009, 2014.
[00:12:00.720 --> 00:12:04.560] I was a real early hire there, ended up working for the CEO over five years.
[00:12:04.560 --> 00:12:06.080] And that was a tough place to work.
[00:12:06.080 --> 00:12:09.360] And so you kind of forged a good work ethic and high performance.
[00:12:09.360 --> 00:12:11.920] And I turned that into my first executive job at 32.
[00:12:11.920 --> 00:12:18.160] I was the VP of sales at a company called Patient Pop in LA, pre-revenue, got them zero to 50.
[00:12:18.160 --> 00:12:25.040] And what happened was: someone wrote a tweet about this, and I can never remember who, but I always remember what he wrote.
[00:12:25.040 --> 00:12:34.440] What happened was every day, like I thought I was going to be there for $1 million, $3 million, $5 million in recurring revenue, and then they'd go get somebody older, more experienced, better, and higher over me.
[00:12:29.840 --> 00:12:36.600] And I'd like to happen.
[00:12:36.920 --> 00:12:38.920] I kept going and going and going and going.
[00:12:38.920 --> 00:12:42.440] And I got to a point where like every day was a new dollar.
[00:12:42.440 --> 00:12:45.320] Every day was a new employee number that was like unforeseen.
[00:12:45.320 --> 00:12:46.360] I had never done it before.
[00:12:46.600 --> 00:12:49.160] So every day was a new challenge.
[00:12:49.160 --> 00:12:53.880] And burnout doesn't come from working really hard because I can work really hard forever.
[00:12:54.200 --> 00:12:56.840] At least less so as I get older.
[00:12:56.840 --> 00:13:05.560] But what burnout comes from, in my opinion, is loss of control, where it's like this stacking of problems that I could not figure out.
[00:13:05.560 --> 00:13:06.920] I didn't know how to solve them.
[00:13:06.920 --> 00:13:09.720] I didn't know how to solve the problems that were happening at the business.
[00:13:09.720 --> 00:13:19.080] And when you start to work on one problem and then another one stacks and then another one stacks and then another one stacks, pretty soon you start coping in ways that are pretty common, right?
[00:13:19.240 --> 00:13:19.960] And that's what I did.
[00:13:20.200 --> 00:13:26.280] I coped in ways such as overeating, overdrinking, no sleep, lack of exercise.
[00:13:26.280 --> 00:13:34.600] I was 225 or 230 pounds drinking a bottle of wine every night, eating a ton of, you know, Halal Brothers takeout in LA.
[00:13:34.600 --> 00:13:37.960] And like everything just came crashing down at one point.
[00:13:37.960 --> 00:13:40.280] It was December 16th, 2018.
[00:13:40.280 --> 00:13:43.320] I woke up, my fingers got real numb.
[00:13:43.320 --> 00:13:45.000] We were going to get some food, me and my wife.
[00:13:45.000 --> 00:13:48.120] My fingers got real numb, and I started having this really weird feeling.
[00:13:48.120 --> 00:13:55.720] And that went into a full-blown panic attack, hallucinating, didn't like screaming, screaming bloody murder for like two hours.
[00:13:55.800 --> 00:13:57.960] Had to have EMTs come, thought I was dying.
[00:13:57.960 --> 00:14:00.520] Like they hooked up all the wires, told me I wasn't dying.
[00:14:00.520 --> 00:14:02.600] And that's when it started to kind of go down.
[00:14:02.600 --> 00:14:06.040] But that's what started it all, honestly.
[00:14:06.040 --> 00:14:07.000] Yeah, it sucked.
[00:14:09.000 --> 00:14:10.760] That reminds me of something.
[00:14:11.320 --> 00:14:12.920] You're going to see it here, Justin.
[00:14:12.920 --> 00:14:16.400] But I just bought this book called Stress Without Distress.
[00:14:14.920 --> 00:14:19.360] And it's by a guy named Hans Selye.
[00:14:19.440 --> 00:14:22.800] No one knows who he is, but the word stress comes from him.
[00:14:22.800 --> 00:14:24.800] He's the guy that coined that term.
[00:14:24.800 --> 00:14:36.160] And the other thing that people don't know is he coined actually two terms: distress, which is obviously negative or bad stress, and then you stress, EU stress, which means good stress.
[00:14:36.160 --> 00:14:41.840] And whatever, we have negativity bias, so we've kind of let that second term fall out of use.
[00:14:41.840 --> 00:14:48.480] But he specifically goes into the differences, and like, and it pretty much maps directly onto what you just said.
[00:14:48.480 --> 00:15:03.920] I mean, if you don't feel that you have control, if you don't feel that you have like autonomy over the situation that you're in, then like, I mean, there's a totally different set of like neurotransmitters and stress hormones that go into your nervous system.
[00:15:03.920 --> 00:15:20.320] And if anything, it's so funny because like that's exactly what changes if you start to work for yourself, as opposed to, you know, you find yourself in this situation where you're constantly trying to meet the demands of something outside of yourself that you can't anticipate.
[00:15:20.320 --> 00:15:24.880] You know, you aren't pressing the next challenge button.
[00:15:25.120 --> 00:15:27.520] You're just kind of getting yanked around.
[00:15:27.520 --> 00:15:30.480] Yeah, it culminated in that, right?
[00:15:30.480 --> 00:15:32.960] Like that's that's how my body reacted.
[00:15:32.960 --> 00:15:47.440] And to answer Cortland's question, not to kind of push aside how did this all start and kind of what were some of the steps, but it was that point in time that I realized it was cool that that happened, obviously not because it happened, but I was forced.
[00:15:47.440 --> 00:15:49.040] Like, I didn't have a choice.
[00:15:49.040 --> 00:15:51.280] Like, I couldn't just keep doing it.
[00:15:51.280 --> 00:15:54.000] And I think a lot of people are afraid to like jump into their own thing.
[00:15:54.160 --> 00:15:55.600] I really didn't have a choice.
[00:15:55.600 --> 00:16:01.320] So, like, I got on a program, I saw a therapist, I started eating healthy, drinking.
[00:16:01.320 --> 00:16:03.400] I cut out alcohol for like 90 straight days.
[00:16:03.400 --> 00:16:04.520] I lost like 30 pounds.
[00:15:59.840 --> 00:16:05.480] It was pretty crazy.
[00:16:05.800 --> 00:16:07.880] And, like, I knew that I was leaving my job.
[00:16:07.880 --> 00:16:12.440] I left August 1st of 2019, negotiated that with my CEOs.
[00:16:12.440 --> 00:16:16.680] But this is where all this journey started where I was going to have to go out on my own.
[00:16:16.680 --> 00:16:18.760] And I was like, I don't know how to do that.
[00:16:18.760 --> 00:16:20.440] And I don't know who's going to pay attention to me.
[00:16:20.440 --> 00:16:23.880] And I have a decent network, but like, why don't I get some attention?
[00:16:23.880 --> 00:16:25.640] And I saw everyone using Twitter.
[00:16:25.640 --> 00:16:28.120] And Twitter to me was like how I got my news.
[00:16:28.120 --> 00:16:30.680] I didn't think of it as like a promotional channel.
[00:16:30.680 --> 00:16:39.160] And so I was like, what if I did what everyone does on Twitter, but I do that on LinkedIn, where all of my customers for like a consulting business would be or an advising business would be.
[00:16:39.160 --> 00:16:41.320] And no one used it like that at the time.
[00:16:41.720 --> 00:16:44.760] I like to think that I was one of the first few guys to use it that way.
[00:16:45.000 --> 00:16:47.320] And so I started like writing promotional stories.
[00:16:47.320 --> 00:16:48.280] How do you build a team?
[00:16:48.280 --> 00:16:49.800] How do you build STR programs?
[00:16:49.800 --> 00:16:52.040] How do you, you know, bifurcate your leads?
[00:16:52.040 --> 00:16:55.320] How do you do all these things that I had done at the startup?
[00:16:55.320 --> 00:16:59.240] And because no one was using it like that, I got 20,000 followers right away.
[00:16:59.240 --> 00:17:09.080] And when I announced that I was leaving the business on August 1st, I had a pipeline filled with people who wanted to hire me as a consultant and advisor for their business.
[00:17:09.080 --> 00:17:09.640] That was how I got it.
[00:17:09.800 --> 00:17:10.280] I like that.
[00:17:10.280 --> 00:17:15.400] The idea that you had an exit date for when you were going to quit your job and was set.
[00:17:15.400 --> 00:17:16.760] You know exactly what date it's going to be.
[00:17:16.760 --> 00:17:29.080] But before that, you're already building an audience on LinkedIn because I think a lot of people, when they go into that audience-building phase, people who want to take that step-feel a lot of pressure because they're like, Well, I'm burning a hole in my pocket.
[00:17:29.080 --> 00:17:30.840] I'm like spending money just to survive.
[00:17:30.840 --> 00:17:34.920] I don't have a job because they start audience building like after they've quit.
[00:17:34.920 --> 00:17:37.240] But you had that sort of buffer period, which is really cool.
[00:17:37.240 --> 00:17:40.360] Yeah, I'm fortunate to not come from a product background.
[00:17:40.360 --> 00:17:45.520] Like, I think it comes from a sales background and marketing mentality where it's like, I know my weakness.
[00:17:45.760 --> 00:17:57.120] I know my weakness is like, I don't know how to code and build, but I do know that I'm pretty good at selling and marketing and talking about myself without making it hopefully, you know, too nauseating.
[00:17:57.440 --> 00:18:10.560] So I was like, I'm going to go out and use, use that thing that I do well and start doing that because I knew that I couldn't just rely on like building some great product that everyone was going to suddenly find and start buying.
[00:18:10.560 --> 00:18:11.840] Why did you think this would work?
[00:18:11.840 --> 00:18:14.800] Like, did you have people you looked up to who are inspirational?
[00:18:14.800 --> 00:18:21.040] Did you have some sort of path in your head of like, you know, I'm going to go on LinkedIn and start building an audience and then there's going to be a step two and three and four after that?
[00:18:21.040 --> 00:18:24.160] Like, did you have a master plan?
[00:18:24.160 --> 00:18:25.440] No master plan.
[00:18:25.440 --> 00:18:26.720] I had a short-term plan.
[00:18:26.720 --> 00:18:33.280] My short-term plan was like go work for myself, keep getting back into better shape, get a mental health break, hang out with my wife.
[00:18:33.280 --> 00:18:34.400] Like, we lived in LA.
[00:18:34.400 --> 00:18:35.360] We had a house in LA.
[00:18:35.360 --> 00:18:37.440] So it was like, spend some time in the sun, relax.
[00:18:37.440 --> 00:18:40.160] And then my plan was to go back to work, find another.
[00:18:40.480 --> 00:18:41.840] I love early stage startups.
[00:18:41.840 --> 00:18:43.280] I like seed series A.
[00:18:43.280 --> 00:18:45.040] I hate like Series C, Series D.
[00:18:45.200 --> 00:18:46.320] It's too late for me.
[00:18:46.640 --> 00:18:49.600] So like, I was like, oh, I'll go find another series A.
[00:18:49.600 --> 00:18:52.080] And then I started consulting and advising.
[00:18:52.080 --> 00:18:55.520] And I was like, oh, I'm kind of making the same money that I was making as an executive.
[00:18:55.520 --> 00:18:57.280] And I was like, I don't think I'm charging enough.
[00:18:57.280 --> 00:18:59.920] Maybe I could charge twice as much that I'm charging now.
[00:19:00.080 --> 00:19:06.560] And instead of working the same and making twice as much, what if I just charge twice as much and I worked half?
[00:19:06.880 --> 00:19:10.480] And then I like made the same amount of money, but I had more free time.
[00:19:10.480 --> 00:19:14.080] And this really weird thing happened, which is like I started doing that.
[00:19:14.080 --> 00:19:17.760] And as I had more free time, I started spending more time on social media.
[00:19:17.760 --> 00:19:22.400] And the questions that I got on LinkedIn became different.
[00:19:22.720 --> 00:19:25.040] Instead of being like, How do you build an SDR program?
[00:19:25.040 --> 00:19:26.640] Or what would you do with this outbound lead?
[00:19:26.640 --> 00:19:28.560] Or how do you hire sales managers?
[00:19:28.560 --> 00:19:32.600] I would go through my DMs, and all the questions were like, How do you write?
[00:19:32.600 --> 00:19:33.720] How do you get attention?
[00:19:33.720 --> 00:19:35.720] I see you're getting a lot of engagement.
[00:19:36.040 --> 00:19:37.560] How did you learn how to write copy?
[00:19:37.640 --> 00:19:40.840] Like, all these different, like, interesting questions about LinkedIn.
[00:19:40.840 --> 00:19:43.640] And I didn't want to be like a LinkedIn guy, I still don't.
[00:19:43.640 --> 00:19:48.520] But I was like, oh, what if I put together like a little product that teaches people how to use LinkedIn?
[00:19:48.520 --> 00:19:53.160] So I built a $50 course back in 2019 and sold 75 grand worth of it.
[00:19:53.160 --> 00:19:56.440] And that was like the start of knowledge-based products for me.
[00:19:56.440 --> 00:20:01.720] You obviously had a terrible situation with the job that you were at with burnout and whatnot.
[00:20:01.720 --> 00:20:03.160] So you needed to get out of that.
[00:20:03.160 --> 00:20:11.480] But it still has to be scary jumping out of that and into something else if you don't have a precedent in your mind that that can work or that there are examples.
[00:20:11.480 --> 00:20:18.920] And something that you mentioned that I picked up is you saw something happening on Twitter and you were like, well, maybe I can do that on LinkedIn.
[00:20:18.920 --> 00:20:25.800] And I have to ask, is like, number one, did you see people who were succeeding at whatever it is, right?
[00:20:25.800 --> 00:20:33.000] Like, you know, sort of being copy gurus or marketing gurus on Twitter and then you wanted to sort of replicate that?
[00:20:33.000 --> 00:20:41.880] Because immediately what I think of is the trend over the last couple of years where, you know, there's someone who in their Twitter username has like the copy guy, right?
[00:20:41.880 --> 00:20:44.760] And then there's like the marketing guy, there's the mental models guy.
[00:20:44.760 --> 00:20:47.800] Is that sort of what you were copy-pasting over?
[00:20:48.120 --> 00:20:51.960] No, I think what had happened is two things were happening at once.
[00:20:52.280 --> 00:20:59.800] Someone gave me, and I don't remember who, so I apologize if it was whomever's listening to this, but somebody gave me one of Russell Brunson's books.
[00:20:59.800 --> 00:21:07.480] And I was like, oh, this is like crazy, amazing that you can build all these automated funnels and webinars and like, you know, make money.
[00:21:07.480 --> 00:21:09.240] Like, I thought that was pretty crazy.
[00:21:09.240 --> 00:21:10.280] That, number one.
[00:21:10.280 --> 00:21:18.560] And then, number two, on Twitter, there was a guy named Chris Johnson who was like making it, he goes by like Wealth Squad Chris or something now.
[00:21:14.600 --> 00:21:26.640] And like, I had met with the CEO of Gumroad, Sahil Lavinia, in LA just randomly.
[00:21:26.960 --> 00:21:29.040] He had moved there when I lived there.
[00:21:29.040 --> 00:21:31.520] And I sat down with him and got coffee.
[00:21:31.520 --> 00:21:35.520] And I was like, does this guy make as much money as he says he makes on this platform?
[00:21:35.520 --> 00:21:36.800] Because this is a lot of money.
[00:21:36.800 --> 00:21:39.280] And he was like, yeah, he's like really successful.
[00:21:39.280 --> 00:21:56.160] And I was like, man, between this book that I'm reading and this guy that I'm following, like, I think that I can figure out how to weave that into my consulting business with the idea that someday, like Channing and Courtland, maybe that someday I might have an information product.
[00:21:56.160 --> 00:22:00.000] But doing what I'm doing right now was nowhere in the plan.
[00:22:00.000 --> 00:22:08.000] And so I just started learning about how to translate knowledge into information and then attention into purchases.
[00:22:08.000 --> 00:22:09.280] And that took a really long time.
[00:22:09.280 --> 00:22:12.720] It is still an ongoing sort of education, if you will.
[00:22:13.040 --> 00:22:13.440] Yeah.
[00:22:13.440 --> 00:22:19.440] I like this process that you first started doing where you go to LinkedIn and you're just like sharing as much knowledge as you can.
[00:22:19.440 --> 00:22:24.720] Sort of just like kicking up sand and seeing like if any treasure, any gold coins float out.
[00:22:24.720 --> 00:22:25.920] And if they don't, they don't.
[00:22:25.920 --> 00:22:27.440] But if they do, maybe they do.
[00:22:27.440 --> 00:22:30.720] And I think that contrasts with how a lot of people start.
[00:22:30.720 --> 00:22:33.520] A lot of people start and they say, crap, I'm on a clock.
[00:22:33.520 --> 00:22:35.440] I've got six months to make a profit.
[00:22:35.440 --> 00:22:37.040] I need like a strategy.
[00:22:37.040 --> 00:22:38.000] This is what I'm going to do.
[00:22:38.000 --> 00:22:38.960] And I'm going to build something.
[00:22:38.960 --> 00:22:42.800] And they don't have as much of an exploratory period where they're just playing around.
[00:22:42.800 --> 00:22:48.320] And the good thing about just playing around and just seeing what happens is a lot of opportunities that would never have occurred to you just show up.
[00:22:48.320 --> 00:22:55.680] Like you tweeted about this in your thread about getting to $3 million a year where you said that you created a lot of noise and you looked at attention as kind of your friend.
[00:22:55.760 --> 00:23:00.000] You wrote content every single day on LinkedIn and then you honed in on Salesforce.
[00:23:00.760 --> 00:23:04.760] What were those signals that you found that allowed you to start consulting?
[00:23:04.760 --> 00:23:07.480] Like what kind of strategy did you kick up?
[00:23:07.640 --> 00:23:08.760] Pretty simple ones, right?
[00:23:08.760 --> 00:23:17.800] Like there's this analogy between content creators and farmers where it's like when farmers don't grow good crops, they don't yell at the crops and they're like, these crops suck.
[00:23:17.800 --> 00:23:19.800] It's like, no, you suck as a farmer.
[00:23:19.800 --> 00:23:23.960] And so like when I create content, I would create it.
[00:23:23.960 --> 00:23:29.240] And if it didn't do well, the inclination for most people is, oh, the algorithm, oh, it's not fair.
[00:23:29.400 --> 00:23:29.960] Twitter all sucks.
[00:23:30.040 --> 00:23:30.280] It's not fair.
[00:23:30.600 --> 00:23:31.160] Twitter sucks.
[00:23:31.160 --> 00:23:31.960] LinkedIn sucks.
[00:23:31.960 --> 00:23:32.520] It's all game.
[00:23:32.600 --> 00:23:33.160] Blah, blah, blah, blah.
[00:23:33.240 --> 00:23:34.040] It doesn't work.
[00:23:34.040 --> 00:23:36.920] And so I was like, okay, I'm going to write a bunch of things.
[00:23:36.920 --> 00:23:39.320] And then whatever doesn't work, I'm going to stop writing.
[00:23:39.320 --> 00:23:41.400] And whatever does work, I'm going to write more of that.
[00:23:41.800 --> 00:23:42.840] That was an easy one.
[00:23:42.840 --> 00:23:49.160] So it's like impressions, likes, all those things that are not, people call them vanity metrics.
[00:23:49.160 --> 00:23:55.000] And maybe in some way, shape, and form they are vanity metrics, but they're also indicators of attention and whether or not you're resonating with people.
[00:23:55.000 --> 00:23:57.000] And I don't think we should throw them in the trash.
[00:23:57.000 --> 00:23:57.960] So that's number one.
[00:23:57.960 --> 00:24:15.880] But number two, what was really interesting for me was when CEOs would reach out from my sort of ideal customer profile, early stage, healthcare-specific CEOs would say, like, you wrote something about getting through to a doctor on an outbound phone call, and that is a huge problem that we have in our company.
[00:24:15.880 --> 00:24:20.680] And I'd love to talk to you about coming in and working with our outbound team to start refining our messaging.
[00:24:20.680 --> 00:24:22.120] I'm like, okay, cool.
[00:24:22.120 --> 00:24:29.320] I should expect that if I write something like that, that is a pain point amongst founders of healthcare SaaS companies.
[00:24:29.320 --> 00:24:32.520] So keep writing about that if you like those assignments.
[00:24:32.520 --> 00:24:34.440] Then write about something different and see if that resonates.
[00:24:34.520 --> 00:24:35.640] You get DMs from that.
[00:24:35.640 --> 00:24:38.440] So, it was mostly like impressions, likes, things like that.
[00:24:38.440 --> 00:24:46.160] It was web traffic, and then it was like straight up DMs into my inbox that were the biggest indicator of whether or not I was writing things that resonated.
[00:24:44.920 --> 00:24:49.840] I used to work as sort of a consulting software engineer.
[00:24:49.920 --> 00:24:55.440] I would just write software for companies who needed somebody like me, sort of a specialist, to come in and build a particular app or something.
[00:24:55.440 --> 00:24:58.240] And I had a very similar process, but also very different.
[00:24:58.240 --> 00:25:00.400] I never really wrote content.
[00:25:00.400 --> 00:25:01.520] I wasn't on social media.
[00:25:01.520 --> 00:25:05.520] I would just build things that I liked, and then I would try to get press about the things that I had built.
[00:25:05.520 --> 00:25:08.880] So, I would build these little Gmail widgets and all sorts of things.
[00:25:08.880 --> 00:25:10.400] And reliably, the same thing would happen.
[00:25:10.400 --> 00:25:14.560] I would get emails from CEOs or people who were like, Hey, I saw what you created.
[00:25:14.560 --> 00:25:15.440] That's really cool.
[00:25:15.440 --> 00:25:17.600] We have that same problem in our company.
[00:25:17.600 --> 00:25:20.560] You know, can we talk to you about coming in and building the same thing for us?
[00:25:20.560 --> 00:25:27.840] And then I was able to negotiate like really high rates because they needed like not just anybody, they needed me to do this exact particular job.
[00:25:27.840 --> 00:25:31.040] And that sounds like exactly what happened to you when you got started consulting.
[00:25:31.040 --> 00:25:31.680] Totally.
[00:25:31.680 --> 00:25:40.880] And it's one part you said there is especially true, which is I wasn't like, hey, SaaS is hard.
[00:25:40.880 --> 00:25:42.400] Need help with your SaaS sales.
[00:25:42.400 --> 00:25:47.760] It was like getting through to doctors when you're selling a product like a marketing solution.
[00:25:47.760 --> 00:25:52.000] So it's like folks came to me and said, We also sell to doctors.
[00:25:52.000 --> 00:25:53.600] We also sell like a marketing solution.
[00:25:53.600 --> 00:25:58.800] And you've worked at ZocDoc and PatientPop, two of the biggest sort of giants in this specific niche.
[00:25:58.800 --> 00:26:00.800] So, okay, what are you going to do?
[00:26:00.800 --> 00:26:04.960] Are you going to hire a guy who charges $250 an hour who has general SaaS experience?
[00:26:04.960 --> 00:26:13.280] Or are you going to pay me $2,000 an hour because I know exactly the problems you deal with and exactly how to solve them in a quick amount of time with the right solution?
[00:26:13.280 --> 00:26:19.360] So that's why I targeted part of that tweet thread that you're reading is I whittled down over time.
[00:26:19.360 --> 00:26:21.840] I started with like, hey, SaaS, sales, marketing.
[00:26:21.840 --> 00:26:25.280] And then over time, I got really specific around healthcare customers.
[00:26:25.280 --> 00:26:26.560] I could help them.
[00:26:26.560 --> 00:26:28.080] They wanted my specific help.
[00:26:28.080 --> 00:26:31.240] I could charge a premium and I knew how to do all the work.
[00:26:29.920 --> 00:26:36.280] I loved the intersection of like, I know how to do this, and you very desperately need this specific help.
[00:26:36.600 --> 00:26:40.280] And that was what made my consulting business a high-rate business.
[00:26:40.280 --> 00:26:44.120] I also love the focus you had on just being so consistent with your content.
[00:26:44.120 --> 00:26:49.560] Like, I had a friend the other day who was asking in a group chat, like, hey, he wants to work out, put on some muscle, like, what can he do?
[00:26:49.560 --> 00:26:54.600] And, like, the first thing that me and a couple of other friends said to him is like, are you going to the gym consistently?
[00:26:54.600 --> 00:27:01.720] Because there's a million articles about like, you need to perform this lift and exactly this motion and eat this exact supplement and do all these different like tricks.
[00:27:01.720 --> 00:27:02.600] Same with social media.
[00:27:02.600 --> 00:27:06.200] You need to tweet at this time of day and with using these words and do these types of threads.
[00:27:06.200 --> 00:27:10.840] But like, if you aren't actually doing it daily, then none of these tricks matter.
[00:27:10.840 --> 00:27:11.800] And somehow you knew that.
[00:27:11.800 --> 00:27:20.440] Like, I don't know how that occurred to you, but like the very first thing you did was just start posting consistently and constantly, and then you focused on strategy.
[00:27:20.440 --> 00:27:24.200] Yeah, I'm lucky to come from that background.
[00:27:24.200 --> 00:27:32.280] Like part of being an early stage executive in the sales and marketing side for companies is you try a lot of things.
[00:27:32.600 --> 00:27:37.240] You go out and you have to be, you have to have some framework for experimentation.
[00:27:37.240 --> 00:27:39.800] You have to understand, you know, fail-fast metrics.
[00:27:39.800 --> 00:27:48.200] You got to understand how to try a bunch of experiments without figuring out, without losing sight of which sort of thing that you're doing is actually making the impact.
[00:27:48.200 --> 00:28:01.960] So I took a lot of what I learned at my SaaS companies that I was working at and just applied those to content creation, which to me seems like common sense, but I also recognize that a lot of folks don't come from that same background.
[00:28:01.960 --> 00:28:16.240] So, like, the idea of getting out and creating non-stop and then sort of analyzing what happens, doubling down on what works, cutting what doesn't, may not seem like common sense, but it's the easiest way to do almost anything, right?
[00:28:16.240 --> 00:28:23.680] I always say, like, especially with building knowledge businesses, everyone wants to learn everything they can about knowledge businesses.
[00:28:23.680 --> 00:28:28.240] They'll do anything to learn about a knowledge business other than start one.
[00:28:28.560 --> 00:28:32.000] And so, if you really want to learn how to build one, start one.
[00:28:32.320 --> 00:28:33.360] You learn a lot.
[00:28:33.360 --> 00:28:34.400] Yeah, exactly.
[00:28:34.960 --> 00:28:40.960] This audience, and I mean, Cortland and I specifically have a lot of experience on Twitter.
[00:28:40.960 --> 00:29:03.440] You can just pop open Twitter and look in, look at like, you know, startup Twitter and indie hackers Twitter and see people's formula for writing viral threads or threads that get engagements just looking at the first clue how to do anything and get engagements on on LinkedIn and that seems to be where your mastery is at this point.
[00:29:03.440 --> 00:29:05.280] So, what are some of your learnings from that?
[00:29:05.280 --> 00:29:07.760] Like, what yeah, like teach us how to use LinkedIn.
[00:29:07.760 --> 00:29:09.120] We don't use LinkedIn for indie hackers.
[00:29:09.360 --> 00:29:09.920] It's not that hard.
[00:29:09.920 --> 00:29:11.600] So, I'll teach you how to use it.
[00:29:12.080 --> 00:29:15.760] The first thing that I did was something that a lot of people do, which was I bought a book.
[00:29:15.760 --> 00:29:20.000] I bought a book called The Copywriter's Bible by Josh Fecter.
[00:29:20.080 --> 00:29:24.080] He's commonly referred to as the guy who started like LinkedIn broetry, right?
[00:29:24.080 --> 00:29:25.600] But I didn't know what else to do.
[00:29:25.600 --> 00:29:28.320] So, I just bought a book that someone recommended to me.
[00:29:28.320 --> 00:29:41.760] And instead of buying that book and then 30 other books, I just read it and then did what it said in the book, which is a very uncommon thing to do nowadays, which is like crazy reading and applying versus like, look at me, I read 100 books this year.
[00:29:41.760 --> 00:29:48.000] So, I got the book and I read it and then I started copying how he wrote because I didn't know how to write.
[00:29:48.000 --> 00:29:53.280] And as I did that, some things felt authentic, some things felt inauthentic.
[00:29:53.280 --> 00:29:57.440] And as I started to get a little more traction, I started to become more and more authentic.
[00:29:57.440 --> 00:29:59.880] I was more comfortable being myself.
[00:29:59.880 --> 00:30:03.640] But I figured out that LinkedIn is a little bit different than Twitter.
[00:29:59.360 --> 00:30:06.440] First of all, it is a safer space to write.
[00:30:06.760 --> 00:30:08.360] It's more empathetic.
[00:30:08.360 --> 00:30:12.920] You know, people aren't there trashing one another because it has a professional lean to it, right?
[00:30:12.920 --> 00:30:17.640] Your company name is generally attached to your profile, so it's a safer place to get started.
[00:30:17.640 --> 00:30:24.440] And each post, because there are 3,000 characters in a post, is similar to a Twitter thread.
[00:30:24.440 --> 00:30:31.240] When you go into Twitter, you read a whole, as you scroll your timeline, you read whole tweets, and then you come to a thread, and what do you get?
[00:30:31.240 --> 00:30:35.320] You get the first part of the thread, which is commonly referred to as the hook, right?
[00:30:35.320 --> 00:30:36.600] The thread hook.
[00:30:36.600 --> 00:30:43.800] Every LinkedIn post is like a Twitter thread because there is a certain amount of characters above the fold before the see more button.
[00:30:43.800 --> 00:30:47.640] And then you have to hook them to get them to click the see more button.
[00:30:47.640 --> 00:30:52.840] And when you do, you are rewarded with their attention through the full post.
[00:30:52.840 --> 00:30:56.040] And so I often think about writing posts on LinkedIn.
[00:30:56.040 --> 00:30:59.960] And kind of everyone does this now because I've got 12,000 students in the course.
[00:30:59.960 --> 00:31:02.120] And so it goes across LinkedIn.
[00:31:02.120 --> 00:31:06.360] But I think of the post in three parts.
[00:31:06.360 --> 00:31:10.120] The first part is the meet, which is just like, what do you want to teach someone?
[00:31:10.120 --> 00:31:10.840] What's the stuff?
[00:31:10.840 --> 00:31:12.280] Like, what are you teaching today?
[00:31:12.280 --> 00:31:13.400] What are the steps, right?
[00:31:13.400 --> 00:31:14.360] What's the information?
[00:31:14.360 --> 00:31:15.720] So, like, I always write that first.
[00:31:15.720 --> 00:31:17.560] What's the stuff I want to get across?
[00:31:17.560 --> 00:31:19.000] Then I go and I write the hook.
[00:31:19.000 --> 00:31:23.160] And the hook is generally less than 300 characters, and it's very similar to a Twitter hook.
[00:31:23.160 --> 00:31:25.320] How do I get people into the meet, right?
[00:31:25.320 --> 00:31:29.400] And then the end is just normal CTC call to conversation.
[00:31:29.400 --> 00:31:31.960] Like, why should somebody participate in this?
[00:31:31.960 --> 00:31:43.960] But the easiest way to write a good call to conversation on LinkedIn since posts are longer is instead of just saying participate or what do you think, it's quick recap so they don't have to scroll back up, reread before they can engage.
[00:31:43.960 --> 00:31:46.000] Give them something that they can engage on right away.
[00:31:44.840 --> 00:31:50.160] So it's like hook, meet, call to conversation, summary, engage.
[00:31:50.480 --> 00:31:56.080] And I started doing that, and that worked really, really effectively.
[00:31:56.080 --> 00:31:59.120] And then I started weaving in some other things which are helpful.
[00:31:59.760 --> 00:32:01.600] Typical copywriting formulas.
[00:32:01.600 --> 00:32:05.120] Pain, agitate, solution, right, is a common one.
[00:32:05.360 --> 00:32:10.480] I've edited that to be pain, agitation, intrigue, positive, future, and solution.
[00:32:10.480 --> 00:32:13.760] So I do have some formulas for how I tell stories and things like that.
[00:32:13.760 --> 00:32:16.960] But the real thing is, learn how to write a good Twitter thread.
[00:32:16.960 --> 00:32:20.640] It translates very well to LinkedIn and just show up every day.
[00:32:20.640 --> 00:32:22.640] You're treating it like a job.
[00:32:22.640 --> 00:32:23.440] You're a professional.
[00:32:23.440 --> 00:32:25.440] You're not just like fooling around on LinkedIn.
[00:32:25.440 --> 00:32:31.200] You are reading books about copywriting, reading articles about copywriting, and experimenting and taking it very seriously.
[00:32:31.200 --> 00:32:32.080] It is my job.
[00:32:32.080 --> 00:32:32.400] Yeah.
[00:32:32.400 --> 00:32:33.520] I tell people that all the time.
[00:32:33.520 --> 00:32:35.680] Like, I'm good at it because it's my job.
[00:32:35.680 --> 00:32:41.840] There's something that I want to unpack there, which is, you said, the simple thing called a call to conversation.
[00:32:41.840 --> 00:32:47.040] And anyone who builds a website, has a landing page, or I mean, often even writes like a Twitter thread.
[00:32:47.040 --> 00:32:49.760] You know, about CTA is a call to action.
[00:32:49.760 --> 00:32:51.440] But that's really interesting.
[00:32:51.440 --> 00:32:55.120] It sounds like you're trying to get people to engage with a comment.
[00:32:55.120 --> 00:32:59.040] Do you have like an ultimate place in the funnel that you want them to go?
[00:32:59.200 --> 00:33:03.920] Are you ultimately looking to get them to join a course or to go somewhere else?
[00:33:03.920 --> 00:33:12.160] Or do you see them writing a comment as a fundamental first step that you want to get people to take?
[00:33:12.160 --> 00:33:13.200] Yeah, the latter.
[00:33:13.840 --> 00:33:16.720] I think of LinkedIn and Twitter as discovery.
[00:33:16.720 --> 00:33:18.560] So, my game is moneyball.
[00:33:18.560 --> 00:33:23.680] I want to be out there every single day, same face, same name, same style of content.
[00:33:23.680 --> 00:33:25.520] I want you to see me every day.
[00:33:25.520 --> 00:33:30.120] And I want you to start to get a flavor for or feel for the flavor of my content.
[00:33:30.120 --> 00:33:31.240] What do I talk about every day?
[00:33:31.240 --> 00:33:34.760] What can you come to expect each morning when you see my face?
[00:33:29.840 --> 00:33:37.080] I want it to be relatively predictable.
[00:33:38.680 --> 00:33:48.040] One of my very good friends is an 80-year-old New York Times best-selling author, and he said, People love shows because of the predictable emotional experience they get with the characters.
[00:33:48.040 --> 00:33:51.880] It's not necessarily each episode, it's just a predictable emotional experience.
[00:33:51.880 --> 00:33:58.280] And so, I want to give a predictable emotional experience to my audience every morning, and that's why they come back.
[00:33:58.280 --> 00:34:00.200] And so, that's discovery.
[00:34:00.200 --> 00:34:04.520] And discovery to me does nothing more than widen my top funnel.
[00:34:04.520 --> 00:34:12.680] And then, 20% of the time when I'm normally being discovered, I'm actively deplatforming into trust, authority, and expertise.
[00:34:12.680 --> 00:34:23.560] So, to me, I want people to trust in me, not trust me like I'll watch their house when they're gone, but trust that I know what I'm talking about, that I am going to have expertise and authority in my specific niche.
[00:34:23.560 --> 00:34:27.000] And what I do there is I'll bring them from LinkedIn or Twitter to my website.
[00:34:27.000 --> 00:34:29.480] But I won't ask them to buy a course, I won't ask them to do it.
[00:34:29.480 --> 00:34:31.800] It's just like, here's an issue that you should read.
[00:34:31.800 --> 00:34:34.440] If you want to know more about this, here's a free guide that I wrote.
[00:34:34.440 --> 00:34:40.360] If you want to learn how to stop procrastinating, here's an article that I wrote about it.
[00:34:40.360 --> 00:34:45.160] And I just want to get people in the habit of discovery, trust, discovery, trust.
[00:34:45.160 --> 00:34:46.600] I almost never sell.
[00:34:46.600 --> 00:34:51.640] Scroll through my LinkedIn, scroll through my Twitter, no buy my course, no, here's what someone said about it.
[00:34:51.640 --> 00:34:59.480] To me, after 90 days, there's a big, huge improvement in the number of people who will buy something from you because trust has been built.
[00:34:59.480 --> 00:35:05.720] So, my goal is to get them to come back every day and finally go, oh man, this guy's courses are only $150 bucks.
[00:35:05.720 --> 00:35:07.640] Like, I have enough trust in this guy.
[00:35:07.640 --> 00:35:08.600] I've learned a lot enough.
[00:35:08.600 --> 00:35:13.720] He's shown me enough where I can pull that trigger versus charging $2,500 for something.
[00:35:13.720 --> 00:35:14.360] That's amazing.
[00:35:14.720 --> 00:35:23.280] You're, I mean, directly living up to a couple of ideals that Seth Godin, this marketing guru, frequently talks about.
[00:35:23.280 --> 00:35:28.960] The first one is he says that you want to write content or you want to have a presence that rhymes.
[00:35:28.960 --> 00:35:32.960] And that's kind of what you're mentioning with, you know, sort of you want you want to be recognizable.
[00:35:32.960 --> 00:35:34.640] You want yourself to be familiar.
[00:35:34.640 --> 00:35:41.440] Like, you want your brand to kind of stick in people's minds so that they understand what you're associated with.
[00:35:41.440 --> 00:35:57.040] And then he has something else that he says that what you just said resonates with me, which is you're not like, you know, pulling and like, you don't have like a muscular approach where like every time you see someone, you're trying to like sort of force them into the next step and then force them into the next step.
[00:35:57.040 --> 00:35:58.800] You just, you kind of have all the stuff there.
[00:35:58.800 --> 00:36:05.600] And if you ring the bell with any given person, like they know where to click down and go and find the next thing and they know where to find the course.
[00:36:05.600 --> 00:36:13.440] And the analogy that he uses, Seth Godin uses for that, that I love, is that you're constantly just blowing on a dandelion, right?
[00:36:13.680 --> 00:36:15.440] You're putting stuff out there.
[00:36:15.440 --> 00:36:24.800] And it's just, there's way too much noise and there's way too much complexity with like how you might resonate with any individual person among like the thousands that you're reaching, right?
[00:36:24.800 --> 00:36:33.760] But if again, the content that you're putting out rhymes and it's high quality, you can feel assured by just sticking to the inputs and being consistent with the inputs.
[00:36:33.760 --> 00:36:38.160] Like you're just blowing in the dandelion and the pedals are going to land wherever they land.
[00:36:38.160 --> 00:36:39.280] What does he mean by rhymes?
[00:36:39.280 --> 00:36:40.160] Like not literally rhymes.
[00:36:40.160 --> 00:36:41.760] Like what does it mean to put out content that rhymes?
[00:36:41.840 --> 00:36:43.600] It's just like thematic, right?
[00:36:43.600 --> 00:36:46.800] What we would do to rhyme is we run indie hackers, right?
[00:36:46.800 --> 00:36:55.520] We deal with startup content, people trying to attain their freedom from being tethered to some company that they work for, right?
[00:36:55.520 --> 00:36:58.960] I also, in a second life, I'm working on a novel.
[00:36:58.960 --> 00:37:24.520] And yeah, like if my Twitter feed is like a random idea from a fiction story that I'm writing, and then I write something about like startups over here, and then I like say something about politics on like, you know, Saturdays, then people who come across my content, they're going to be far less likely to see my face, see my name, and think, ah, right, I do have to go pick up that like, you know, good guide on how to get my business started.
[00:37:24.520 --> 00:37:24.920] Yeah.
[00:37:24.920 --> 00:37:31.400] So you're talking about like that predictable emotional experience that Justin was talking about, which it rings so true in like everything.
[00:37:31.400 --> 00:37:32.840] Like, I love anime.
[00:37:33.080 --> 00:37:35.960] There's a predictable emotional experience that I want when I watch anime.
[00:37:35.960 --> 00:37:40.840] I want to see the main character grow from nothing to become a badass and have everybody respect and admire them.
[00:37:40.840 --> 00:37:44.520] And that happens over and over and over and show after show, and I never get tired of it.
[00:37:44.520 --> 00:37:45.960] And I know that's what I want.
[00:37:45.960 --> 00:37:53.000] And so I guess your readers, Justin, have a similar thing they want from you, like a dose of inspiration, a dose of education.
[00:37:53.000 --> 00:37:56.440] Like there's something that they know they can get from you after a while.
[00:37:56.440 --> 00:37:57.000] That's right.
[00:37:57.000 --> 00:38:01.400] And it's never like, hey, here's something you can do if you're building a one-person knowledge business.
[00:38:01.400 --> 00:38:04.200] And then like tomorrow's like, my favorite pizza is margarita.
[00:38:04.840 --> 00:38:05.240] Never.
[00:38:05.400 --> 00:38:06.120] I never.
[00:38:06.120 --> 00:38:08.440] And like some people are like, oh, you're very robotic.
[00:38:08.440 --> 00:38:11.080] Like you don't really show behind the scenes of your life and everything.
[00:38:11.080 --> 00:38:13.400] It's like, it's just not what I do.
[00:38:13.400 --> 00:38:19.320] I just, every day I try and add a little value to somebody who has come for that predictable emotional experience.
[00:38:19.320 --> 00:38:21.880] My favorite creator on the internet is Harry Mack.
[00:38:21.880 --> 00:38:26.120] He's a freestyle rapper on YouTube who I love and like he's got a bazillion followers.
[00:38:26.520 --> 00:38:27.320] I love him.
[00:38:27.320 --> 00:38:40.200] Yeah, every Friday he comes out with a new video, and I like patiently wait for it and I watch it because I know that the people who aren't expecting him to be any good are going to be blown away, and that's a cool experience that I can't stop watching.
[00:38:40.200 --> 00:38:44.760] And so, that's how I think about providing my audience with an experience.
[00:38:45.200 --> 00:38:54.560] So, let's get into the details of like your info products because getting good on social media is a whole skill in itself.
[00:38:54.560 --> 00:38:59.200] But then, like, actually creating something that's valuable to people is not easy to do.
[00:38:59.200 --> 00:39:05.600] And then, like, selling it to them, even if you have a big audience, like that conversion, you said you sort of de-platform people into trust, expertise, and authority.
[00:39:05.600 --> 00:39:12.400] You're sort of a slow drip from your social media into signing up for your newsletter and maybe eventually buying your products.
[00:39:12.400 --> 00:39:19.440] How did you think about that process once you hit on this signal that, like, hey, this is a particular thing that I'm talking about that's a pain point for others?
[00:39:19.440 --> 00:39:20.800] I can write a guide to LinkedIn.
[00:39:20.800 --> 00:39:22.640] I can write a guide to a particular something.
[00:39:22.640 --> 00:39:26.320] How did you strategize going through that and being successful?
[00:39:26.320 --> 00:39:30.560] Because there's a lot of ways to fail if you're trying to build a product and sell it.
[00:39:30.560 --> 00:39:34.080] Yeah, I think I was cognizant about how I buy.
[00:39:34.080 --> 00:39:42.880] So, just because I buy a certain way doesn't mean everyone else does, but I like to think I'm a decent proxy for like how people who are motivated buy on the internet.
[00:39:42.880 --> 00:39:51.520] And I've entered 500-plus email funnels where you download a lead magnet and then you daily drip trying to get you to buy a product.
[00:39:51.520 --> 00:39:55.200] I don't think I've ever bought a single product that way.
[00:39:55.200 --> 00:39:57.440] And so, I didn't want to do that.
[00:39:57.440 --> 00:40:03.360] I didn't want to, like, here's my free guide, and now I'm going to just bang emails in your inbox until you unsubscribe or buy my product.
[00:40:03.360 --> 00:40:04.800] I just didn't think about it that way.
[00:40:04.800 --> 00:40:12.640] I bought a product, one of my first products was from Daniel Vasalo when he did his how to build a Twitter audience course.
[00:40:12.640 --> 00:40:15.280] And I said, Why did I buy that?
[00:40:15.280 --> 00:40:20.800] So, I was like kind of deconstructing why I bought it, and I thought, well, I show up every day, and I like what he writes.
[00:40:20.960 --> 00:40:23.040] I think he has a generally decent viewpoint.
[00:40:23.440 --> 00:40:24.440] I said, Okay, okay.
[00:40:24.440 --> 00:40:26.800] He gives me a predictable emotional experience.
[00:40:26.800 --> 00:40:30.920] He never really wavers from what he talked about, at least not at that point in time.
[00:40:29.680 --> 00:40:36.120] And when he positioned the course, he told me exactly what I'd get, how to grow a Twitter following.
[00:40:36.360 --> 00:40:37.400] He made it affordable.
[00:40:37.400 --> 00:40:38.520] It was like 90 bucks.
[00:40:38.520 --> 00:40:40.920] And it was like, okay, I like his stuff.
[00:40:40.920 --> 00:40:41.640] I trust him.
[00:40:41.640 --> 00:40:42.760] I've read a bunch of his things.
[00:40:42.760 --> 00:40:44.120] I've been following for a long time.
[00:40:44.120 --> 00:40:47.400] He told me what I'm going to get for it, something I want to get, and it was affordable.
[00:40:47.400 --> 00:40:51.880] Those things are like my marketing strategy to a T.
[00:40:51.880 --> 00:40:55.400] So my thought was like, no drips, no email campaigns.
[00:40:55.400 --> 00:40:56.200] I don't do any.
[00:40:56.200 --> 00:40:59.000] No email funnels, no email automations, nothing.
[00:40:59.000 --> 00:41:03.000] It's just like, come to my site and if you want to buy my course, great.
[00:41:03.000 --> 00:41:04.760] And go out there and replicate that.
[00:41:04.760 --> 00:41:10.920] But when you build the course, make it affordable so as many people as possible can buy it because it's a quantity game.
[00:41:10.920 --> 00:41:13.880] I want everyone saying great things about my course every day online.
[00:41:13.880 --> 00:41:18.680] I want people talking about it on Twitter and LinkedIn, so much so that I use purchase power parity.
[00:41:18.680 --> 00:41:21.640] So if you're in India or Pakistan, it's $35, right?
[00:41:21.640 --> 00:41:23.480] If you're in Mexico, it's like $40.
[00:41:23.480 --> 00:41:25.560] So it's like, I want the whole world talking about it.
[00:41:25.560 --> 00:41:28.760] And I want them saying great things about it somewhere online every day.
[00:41:28.760 --> 00:41:33.400] So it's like, make it affordable and then blow their socks off.
[00:41:33.400 --> 00:41:38.360] Like have them boot it up and think $150 course is probably going to be nothing.
[00:41:38.360 --> 00:41:54.600] Give them $15,000 worth of value and have them be so surprised by the value they get inside of it that as part of your install base, they are highly likely down the road to buy something else, even if it's twice as or three times more expensive.
[00:41:54.600 --> 00:41:57.240] It's like give them that 100x experience.
[00:41:57.240 --> 00:41:59.800] And that just comes from being a consumer.
[00:41:59.800 --> 00:42:02.440] I hate when I buy things and they let me down.
[00:42:02.440 --> 00:42:04.680] When I build products, I want them to be perfection.
[00:42:04.680 --> 00:42:10.360] I want them to be so good that people can't give it anything except for a five-star.
[00:42:10.360 --> 00:42:14.440] I know that's not like a really complex model, but it's just how I think about it.
[00:42:14.560 --> 00:42:18.160] There's a really good book written by Rob Fitzpatrick.
[00:42:18.160 --> 00:42:20.480] He's the author of another great book called The Mom Test.
[00:42:20.480 --> 00:42:24.800] He writes these very short books that are like, you know, like 90 pages, 100 pages.
[00:42:24.800 --> 00:42:27.120] And it's like, this is what this book is going to teach you to do.
[00:42:27.120 --> 00:42:27.760] That's it.
[00:42:27.760 --> 00:42:29.840] And it's short and to the point, and they're great.
[00:42:29.840 --> 00:42:32.400] And with the mom test, he basically wrote the book.
[00:42:32.400 --> 00:42:36.080] And most books, like you write them, you do like this sort of media blitz.
[00:42:36.080 --> 00:42:40.400] The sales peak, you know, in the first six months to a year, and then they go down over time.
[00:42:40.400 --> 00:42:42.000] Whereas the mom test has been the opposite.
[00:42:42.000 --> 00:42:43.440] You know, there was no huge peak.
[00:42:43.440 --> 00:42:51.760] And every year, it's made more and more and more and more and more money because people just keep recommending it, kind of the same way that you're talking about you want your courses to be perceived.
[00:42:51.760 --> 00:42:55.280] And so he wrote another book about how he did that called Write Useful Books.
[00:42:55.280 --> 00:42:56.480] And one of his.
[00:42:57.120 --> 00:42:57.840] Have you read through it yet?
[00:42:57.840 --> 00:42:58.080] It's great.
[00:42:58.880 --> 00:43:01.920] It's down on my, on my, literally on my coffee table right now.
[00:43:02.160 --> 00:43:04.240] And I've read through about half of it.
[00:43:04.240 --> 00:43:04.800] It's great.
[00:43:04.800 --> 00:43:05.440] It's awesome.
[00:43:05.440 --> 00:43:08.960] And I love the sort of point he makes early on that's really counterintuitive.
[00:43:08.960 --> 00:43:19.360] It's not how I have thought about things and it's not how I've done things, but I'm trying to get more in this mindset, which is that if you want people to recommend what you do to others, it's not only about the quality.
[00:43:19.600 --> 00:43:20.880] The quality is huge, right?
[00:43:20.880 --> 00:43:22.720] But there's all these psychological factors, right?
[00:43:22.720 --> 00:43:26.640] How are they going to look to their friends when they recommend you to others?
[00:43:26.640 --> 00:43:29.920] How is it going to make them and their friends and their colleagues feel, right?
[00:43:29.920 --> 00:43:35.760] Is it specific enough that there will be problems they encounter where they can recommend what you're saying?
[00:43:35.760 --> 00:43:47.280] And so I think this process of you writing this course with the goal in mind of making sure that not only can people afford it, but they'll talk about it, is its own sort of tricky strategy to sort of think through and like be successful at.
[00:43:47.280 --> 00:43:48.000] And clearly, it's worked.
[00:43:48.000 --> 00:43:53.360] I mean, your courses have been, I think you said you made $75,000 from your very first info product.
[00:43:53.360 --> 00:43:55.680] And I think $10,000 of that was in the first week or two.
[00:43:55.680 --> 00:43:55.920] Yeah.
[00:43:56.000 --> 00:43:57.600] It's a pretty huge reception.
[00:43:57.600 --> 00:44:01.480] Yeah, and that product made maybe $70,000 over like 18 months.
[00:43:59.920 --> 00:44:03.080] So it wasn't like I was going to live off of it.
[00:44:03.320 --> 00:44:08.600] But my newer courses have been growing month over month, every single month.
[00:44:08.600 --> 00:44:11.240] They might have been a drop, maybe one month or so.
[00:44:11.400 --> 00:44:14.040] I don't know, but they're consistently growing.
[00:44:14.040 --> 00:44:23.000] And part of that is everyone online will say, oh, it's just as easy to sell a $2,500 product as it is a $250 product.
[00:44:23.000 --> 00:44:23.720] Bullshit.
[00:44:23.720 --> 00:44:24.520] It's not.
[00:44:26.040 --> 00:44:27.720] It sounds great, but it's not true.
[00:44:27.720 --> 00:44:35.240] And even if it was true, it's a lot harder to recommend a $2,500 product to a friend who's going around to their friends and be like, hey, bud, you should buy this thing.
[00:44:35.240 --> 00:44:36.280] It's $2,500.
[00:44:36.520 --> 00:44:39.480] It's like, no, it's easier to say, hey, you should buy this thing.
[00:44:39.480 --> 00:44:40.520] I got a lot of value out of it.
[00:44:40.520 --> 00:44:42.040] It was $150.
[00:44:42.040 --> 00:44:47.800] Like, still not, I know not everyone can afford that, but it's more affordable.
[00:44:47.800 --> 00:44:50.440] And so that was my thought process: I already created it.
[00:44:50.440 --> 00:44:51.560] I created it 18 months ago.
[00:44:51.560 --> 00:44:52.600] What do I care?
[00:44:52.600 --> 00:44:55.720] Every person who buys it is a win for me.
[00:44:55.720 --> 00:45:08.360] Is there a strategy to how you lay out your product offering on your site so that people are more likely to start by finding the cheaper products that are going to be quick courses?
[00:45:08.360 --> 00:45:10.120] Or do you kind of just have everything there?
[00:45:10.120 --> 00:45:14.440] And then whatever people are interested in, they can go and they can find whatever solves their problem.
[00:45:14.760 --> 00:45:15.560] The latter.
[00:45:15.800 --> 00:45:19.000] I kind of leave it open and say, here are the things that I offer.
[00:45:19.320 --> 00:45:20.920] Now, I could probably do that better.
[00:45:20.920 --> 00:45:31.240] And I think as I rebuild my next website, I'll probably guide people to what I think is the right product based on something they've clicked on or something like that, right?
[00:45:31.480 --> 00:45:32.680] I don't have any of that today.
[00:45:32.680 --> 00:45:34.680] I have no automation like that.
[00:45:34.680 --> 00:45:45.120] The only thing I do is when people buy the course, there is a module in each course that corresponds to a subscription email.
[00:45:43.560 --> 00:45:48.640] So it's most relevant to the value they get in the subscription email.
[00:45:49.520 --> 00:45:58.720] So, for example, when you go into my content operating system, which is just like how do you write a newsletter and 15 pieces of content every week in less than 90 minutes?
[00:45:59.040 --> 00:46:03.120] And so they go through that course and they learn a little bit about basic copywriting.
[00:46:03.120 --> 00:46:07.120] And then at the end of that module, this is the only email automation I have today.
[00:46:07.120 --> 00:46:13.040] They'll just get an email from me after the module is marked as complete that said, Hi, I saw that you completed this module.
[00:46:13.680 --> 00:46:15.680] You just learned a lot about copywriting.
[00:46:15.680 --> 00:46:23.840] Did you know that I also have a subscription email that goes out that shows you how to structure high-quality social media posts using five examples each month?
[00:46:23.840 --> 00:46:26.160] Would you like to sign up for that for $9?
[00:46:26.160 --> 00:46:27.200] That's it.
[00:46:27.200 --> 00:46:34.880] And so I let them come to my site, shop around, buy the course, and the course is the Trojan horse for the subscription business.
[00:46:34.880 --> 00:46:42.640] And since I have about 15,000 or 16,000 students between the two courses, 2,000 of them have opted into the $9 a month subscription.
[00:46:42.640 --> 00:46:46.400] So it's an 18K MRR business of sending one email.
[00:46:46.400 --> 00:46:49.200] How many of these subscription newsletters do you have?
[00:46:49.200 --> 00:46:50.320] Just one.
[00:46:50.320 --> 00:46:51.040] Just the one?
[00:46:51.040 --> 00:46:51.280] Okay.
[00:46:51.280 --> 00:46:51.440] Yeah.
[00:46:51.680 --> 00:46:52.160] Just one.
[00:46:52.160 --> 00:46:54.240] Plus, it corresponds to a module in each.
[00:46:54.320 --> 00:46:56.720] Yeah, it corresponds to a module in each of the courses.
[00:46:56.720 --> 00:46:59.760] And then I have a free newsletter that goes out to about 71,000 people.
[00:46:59.760 --> 00:47:00.880] That's totally free.
[00:47:01.440 --> 00:47:02.160] Right, gotcha.
[00:47:02.320 --> 00:47:04.400] You've got, what, two different video courses?
[00:47:04.400 --> 00:47:06.320] So LinkedIn and about content.
[00:47:06.640 --> 00:47:13.360] You've got four free guides, it looks like, how to choose a profitable niche, how to grow and monetize on LinkedIn, et cetera.
[00:47:13.360 --> 00:47:14.400] Those are awesome.
[00:47:14.400 --> 00:47:17.440] We should put some of those on Indie Hackers, actually, and get that out.
[00:47:17.680 --> 00:47:18.320] Appreciate it.
[00:47:18.560 --> 00:47:19.600] You're doing so many things.
[00:47:20.000 --> 00:47:21.600] What do you like the most about what you're doing?
[00:47:21.600 --> 00:47:22.400] And what do you not like?
[00:47:22.400 --> 00:47:24.000] Is there something that you're like, you know, I can't wait.
[00:47:24.000 --> 00:47:26.480] Like, you stopped consulting and coaching, for example.
[00:47:26.480 --> 00:47:29.280] That was like a sort of temporary step to get you to this other stuff.
[00:47:29.280 --> 00:47:31.080] What's your favorite part of what you're doing?
[00:47:31.400 --> 00:47:34.120] Yeah, well, there are two sides to my favorite part.
[00:47:34.120 --> 00:47:36.840] My favorite part for my customers is access.
[00:47:37.160 --> 00:47:59.000] So, in a world of masterclasses that are generally out of reach for folks who are in developed countries, who don't come from a household that has a lot of extra money, who are in a difficult situation, who have lost their job, I like the fact that they can get what I think is premium information that I think will help their situation at a cost that doesn't break the bank.
[00:47:59.000 --> 00:48:10.440] I was raised by very philanthropic parents, and part of what I love is like, I love to go to Mexico, so I did a lot of mentoring of like Latin American startups through 500 startups.
[00:48:10.440 --> 00:48:13.960] I like hearing from people in small towns, in villages in Mexico.
[00:48:13.960 --> 00:48:15.560] They're like, got your LinkedIn operating course.
[00:48:15.640 --> 00:48:17.320] I'm starting to write LinkedIn content.
[00:48:17.320 --> 00:48:18.360] I'm like, that's super dope.
[00:48:18.360 --> 00:48:20.280] Like, not a lot of people can say that.
[00:48:20.280 --> 00:48:21.160] So, I love that part.
[00:48:21.400 --> 00:48:22.600] That's on the customer side.
[00:48:22.600 --> 00:48:23.720] I think that's a lot of fun.
[00:48:23.720 --> 00:48:26.440] And getting all those messages, because I have so many students is really cool.
[00:48:26.680 --> 00:48:29.000] It's good when you're having a shitty day.
[00:48:29.480 --> 00:48:32.680] And then on my side, I like the fact that it's relatively automated.
[00:48:33.240 --> 00:48:36.200] I'm getting a lot of time to spend with my wife in my 40s, right?
[00:48:36.200 --> 00:48:45.880] I'm 41 years old and I want to use this prime of my life, which I hope it is, to spend time with my family before my parents are here and hanging out with my wife.
[00:48:45.880 --> 00:48:47.480] I love that part of my business.
[00:48:47.480 --> 00:48:50.840] Things I don't like are there are two ways.
[00:48:50.840 --> 00:49:00.840] There are many ways to grow traffic, but two primary ways are social media, which is like up, down, up, down, up, down, and organic, which like grows over time, search engine optimization, things like that.
[00:49:00.840 --> 00:49:03.960] I'm mostly tethered toward the former.
[00:49:03.960 --> 00:49:07.880] So having to always have fresh new content is difficult.
[00:49:07.880 --> 00:49:13.240] And, you know, sometimes you feel like a slave to social media, and that sucks.
[00:49:13.560 --> 00:49:14.440] I know that feeling.
[00:49:14.440 --> 00:49:16.400] So, you know, that sucks sometimes.
[00:49:14.840 --> 00:49:22.320] But every time that I feel that sucking, I try and build a new system that makes it easier.
[00:49:23.200 --> 00:49:24.480] You sound like Channing.
[00:49:24.480 --> 00:49:28.240] Channing's the king of systems to keep himself going, even when the going gets tough.
[00:49:28.240 --> 00:49:28.880] That's how I am.
[00:49:28.880 --> 00:49:30.080] Yeah, totally.
[00:49:30.080 --> 00:49:39.120] Do you have like a roadmap of the next copywriting module that you want to do or the next, you know, is there a long list of

Prompt 2: Key Takeaways

Now please extract the key takeaways from the transcript content I provided.

Extract the most important key takeaways from this part of the conversation. Use a single sentence statement (the key takeaway) rather than milquetoast descriptions like "the hosts discuss...". 

Limit the key takeaways to a maximum of 3. The key takeaways should be insightful and knowledge-additive. 

IMPORTANT: Return ONLY valid JSON, no explanations or markdown. Ensure:
- All strings are properly quoted and escaped
- No trailing commas
- All braces and brackets are balanced
Format: {"key_takeaways": ["takeaway 1", "takeaway 2"]}

Prompt 3: Segments

Now identify 2-4 distinct topical segments from this part of the conversation.

For each segment, identify:
- Descriptive title (3-6 words)  
- START timestamp when this topic begins (HH:MM:SS format)
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Most important Key takeaway from that segment. Key takeaway must be specific and knowledge-additive.
- Brief summary of the discussion

IMPORTANT: The timestamp should mark when the topic/segment STARTS, not a range. Look for topic transitions and conversation shifts.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted, no trailing commas:
{
  "segments": [
    {
      "segment_title": "Topic Discussion", 
      "timestamp": "01:15:30",
      "key_takeaway": "main point from this segment",
      "segment_summary": "brief description of what was discussed"
    }
  ]
}

Timestamp format: HH:MM:SS (e.g., 00:05:30, 01:22:45) marking the START of each segment.

Prompt 4: Media Mentions

Now scan the transcript content I provided for ACTUAL mentions of specific media titles:

Find explicit mentions of:
- Books (with specific titles)
- Movies (with specific titles)  
- TV Shows (with specific titles)
- Music/Songs (with specific titles)

DO NOT include:
- Websites, URLs, or web services
- Other podcasts or podcast names

IMPORTANT: 
- Only include items explicitly mentioned by name. Do not invent titles.
- Valid categories are: "Book", "Movie", "TV Show", "Music"
- Include the exact phrase where each item was mentioned
- Find the nearest proximate timestamp where it appears in the conversation
- THE TIMESTAMP OF THE MEDIA MENTION IS IMPORTANT - DO NOT INVENT TIMESTAMPS AND DO NOT MISATTRIBUTE TIMESTAMPS
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Timestamps are given as ranges, e.g. 01:13:42.520 --> 01:13:46.720. Use the EARLIER of the 2 timestamps in the range.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted and escaped, no trailing commas:
{
  "media_mentions": [
    {
      "title": "Exact Title as Mentioned",
      "category": "Book",
      "author_artist": "N/A",
      "context": "Brief context of why it was mentioned",
      "context_phrase": "The exact sentence or phrase where it was mentioned",
      "timestamp": "estimated time like 01:15:30"
    }
  ]
}

If no media is mentioned, return: {"media_mentions": []}

Prompt 5: Context Setup

You are an expert data extractor tasked with analyzing a podcast transcript. 
I will provide you with part 2 of 2 from a podcast transcript. 
I will then ask you to extract different types of information from this content in subsequent messages. Please confirm you have received and understood the transcript content.

Transcript section:
00] That's on the customer side.
[00:48:22.600 --> 00:48:23.720] I think that's a lot of fun.
[00:48:23.720 --> 00:48:26.440] And getting all those messages, because I have so many students is really cool.
[00:48:26.680 --> 00:48:29.000] It's good when you're having a shitty day.
[00:48:29.480 --> 00:48:32.680] And then on my side, I like the fact that it's relatively automated.
[00:48:33.240 --> 00:48:36.200] I'm getting a lot of time to spend with my wife in my 40s, right?
[00:48:36.200 --> 00:48:45.880] I'm 41 years old and I want to use this prime of my life, which I hope it is, to spend time with my family before my parents are here and hanging out with my wife.
[00:48:45.880 --> 00:48:47.480] I love that part of my business.
[00:48:47.480 --> 00:48:50.840] Things I don't like are there are two ways.
[00:48:50.840 --> 00:49:00.840] There are many ways to grow traffic, but two primary ways are social media, which is like up, down, up, down, up, down, and organic, which like grows over time, search engine optimization, things like that.
[00:49:00.840 --> 00:49:03.960] I'm mostly tethered toward the former.
[00:49:03.960 --> 00:49:07.880] So having to always have fresh new content is difficult.
[00:49:07.880 --> 00:49:13.240] And, you know, sometimes you feel like a slave to social media, and that sucks.
[00:49:13.560 --> 00:49:14.440] I know that feeling.
[00:49:14.440 --> 00:49:16.400] So, you know, that sucks sometimes.
[00:49:14.840 --> 00:49:22.320] But every time that I feel that sucking, I try and build a new system that makes it easier.
[00:49:23.200 --> 00:49:24.480] You sound like Channing.
[00:49:24.480 --> 00:49:28.240] Channing's the king of systems to keep himself going, even when the going gets tough.
[00:49:28.240 --> 00:49:28.880] That's how I am.
[00:49:28.880 --> 00:49:30.080] Yeah, totally.
[00:49:30.080 --> 00:49:39.120] Do you have like a roadmap of the next copywriting module that you want to do or the next, you know, is there a long list of like all the topics you want to cover?
[00:49:39.120 --> 00:49:41.440] Or do you kind of have to go back to the drawing board?
[00:49:41.440 --> 00:49:43.280] And more broadly, how do you grow from here?
[00:49:43.280 --> 00:49:43.440] Right?
[00:49:43.440 --> 00:49:44.960] You've got these courses that are killing it.
[00:49:44.960 --> 00:49:46.800] Do you just charge ever more money for those courses?
[00:49:46.800 --> 00:49:47.760] Do you make new courses?
[00:49:47.760 --> 00:49:49.680] Like, what's next?
[00:49:49.680 --> 00:49:52.560] I think if anything, no, I'll never charge more money for those courses.
[00:49:52.560 --> 00:49:53.840] I won't raise the prices.
[00:49:53.840 --> 00:49:55.920] I used to consider it and I had thought about it.
[00:49:55.920 --> 00:49:58.400] And I even wrote an email saying I might do that.
[00:49:59.040 --> 00:50:01.440] So I hope it didn't come across as some urgency grab.
[00:50:01.440 --> 00:50:04.720] But I had thought about that at one point, but I don't think I will.
[00:50:04.960 --> 00:50:07.120] If anything, I'll reduce them in price.
[00:50:07.520 --> 00:50:12.000] I think for me, it's starting to build more specific courses.
[00:50:12.000 --> 00:50:17.760] One thing that I've learned over time is people don't want to learn everything about a specific topic generally.
[00:50:17.760 --> 00:50:20.000] They want to learn to get from point A to point B.
[00:50:20.000 --> 00:50:28.960] And so it's really starting to hone in on what those point A's are across my audience and ecosystem and say, who's struggling to get to point B where?
[00:50:28.960 --> 00:50:33.200] And how can I solve that problem in a fast and efficient and affordable way?
[00:50:33.200 --> 00:50:40.160] So I think it's almost building like a marketplace of information products could be a step in the right direction for me.
[00:50:40.160 --> 00:50:46.960] But I also like have this theme in my life where at about five years, I stop doing whatever I do.
[00:50:46.960 --> 00:50:49.680] So, like, five years at ZocDoc, five years at Patient Pop.
[00:50:49.680 --> 00:50:51.760] I'm going on my fourth year here as a creator.
[00:50:51.760 --> 00:50:57.040] Like, I might burn the boats and, you know, build like an air, like a bed and breakfast.
[00:50:57.040 --> 00:50:58.160] Like, I have no idea, right?
[00:50:58.160 --> 00:51:00.120] Like, I think it's really fun.
[00:51:00.120 --> 00:51:02.040] I have a lot of confidence in myself.
[00:50:59.680 --> 00:51:07.160] And I think one of the most fun things in life is like doing things you don't know how to do.
[00:51:08.360 --> 00:51:09.720] And so, who knows?
[00:51:09.720 --> 00:51:17.240] But I don't have like a really good long-term plan other than I woke up yesterday morning and had a really cool idea for a new micro business.
[00:51:17.240 --> 00:51:19.960] So, I started building it yesterday, and like, I'll test that out.
[00:51:19.960 --> 00:51:22.440] And if that works, maybe I go down that rabbit hole.
[00:51:22.440 --> 00:51:32.520] As someone who has lived a life doing sort of tech stuff online and running, you know, being a solopreneur and then transitioned a little bit and started an Airbnb, I could highly recommend it.
[00:51:32.520 --> 00:51:33.320] It's really fun.
[00:51:33.320 --> 00:51:33.960] It's really cool.
[00:51:33.960 --> 00:51:35.640] It's a totally different business.
[00:51:35.640 --> 00:51:41.640] And I think with your mind, you would absolutely crush it because you're going to be competing mostly locally with people who aren't going to be that thoughtful.
[00:51:41.640 --> 00:51:42.440] And it's very different.
[00:51:42.440 --> 00:51:45.720] So, I like the variety approach to doing things.
[00:51:45.720 --> 00:51:48.040] Just to wrap up here for a bit, and we'll let you go.
[00:51:48.040 --> 00:51:50.760] Obviously, there's a ton of indie hackers listening to this.
[00:51:50.760 --> 00:51:58.600] A lot of aspiring indie hackers who haven't done anything yet, who have trouble, you know, taking the leap from wanting to do this to actually doing it.
[00:51:58.600 --> 00:52:06.440] And here you are, you know, just divulging a ton of knowledge and stuff that's like helpful in theory, but not necessarily helpful until people get to a certain point.
[00:52:06.440 --> 00:52:10.360] What do you think people who are listening and who are in that situation can take away from your journey?
[00:52:10.360 --> 00:52:16.920] Is there anything you've learned, any helpful advice that can help people get going who are kind of stuck and kind of just waiting to get started?
[00:52:16.920 --> 00:52:20.200] Yeah, I'll kind of paint this picture, a very true picture.
[00:52:20.840 --> 00:52:23.400] I've been reading indie hackers for a long time.
[00:52:23.400 --> 00:52:26.440] Like, I come on and browse the articles.
[00:52:26.440 --> 00:52:31.240] I've read like all my favorite heroes are on the website, right?
[00:52:31.240 --> 00:52:34.840] Like, and I'm very envious of people who can build things using code.
[00:52:34.840 --> 00:52:38.360] So, those are like my heroes, the guys and gals that I want to be like.
[00:52:38.360 --> 00:52:51.200] And so, for many years, I've been sort of somebody who just read from afar and looked up at indie hackers and in other forums and thought, never ever will I be featured on something like that.
[00:52:51.200 --> 00:52:58.720] In four years of just like doing small incremental steps every day, the aggregate total of that action, now I'm on the podcast.
[00:52:58.720 --> 00:53:00.720] Like, that's that's cool.
[00:53:00.720 --> 00:53:09.520] And what I would tell them is the easiest way to get started is just putting their thoughts into the ecosystem on a regular basis.
[00:53:09.520 --> 00:53:13.440] When I started writing in 2018, I sucked.
[00:53:13.440 --> 00:53:17.680] I cringe at everything that I look at from 2018, 2019, and 2020.
[00:53:17.680 --> 00:53:23.760] And so, like, if you can get started anyway, if you're like me and you have knowledge, just talk about it.
[00:53:23.760 --> 00:53:29.760] If you want, here are three steps: improve yourself, take notes, share them.
[00:53:29.760 --> 00:53:30.720] That's it.
[00:53:31.520 --> 00:53:34.720] If you do those three things, you're off to a good start.
[00:53:34.720 --> 00:53:35.360] Love it.
[00:53:35.360 --> 00:53:37.360] Improve yourself, take notes, and share the notes.
[00:53:37.360 --> 00:53:40.800] Justin Welsh, thanks a ton for coming on the Indie Hackers podcast.
[00:53:40.800 --> 00:53:44.240] I'm glad you finally got here after years of reading about your heroes.
[00:53:44.560 --> 00:53:49.360] Where can people go to find you online and to find out about your courses and your writings and your guides?
[00:53:49.360 --> 00:53:53.280] Yep, they can go and look around at my website, which is justinwelsh.me.
[00:53:53.280 --> 00:53:56.960] It's justinwsh.m-e.
[00:53:56.960 --> 00:53:57.520] Awesome.
[00:53:57.520 --> 00:53:57.840] All right.
[00:53:57.840 --> 00:53:59.600] Thanks again, Justin, for coming on the show.
[00:53:59.600 --> 00:54:00.160] Thanks, guys.
[00:54:00.160 --> 00:54:01.600] I appreciate it.

Prompt 6: Key Takeaways

Now please extract the key takeaways from the transcript content I provided.

Extract the most important key takeaways from this part of the conversation. Use a single sentence statement (the key takeaway) rather than milquetoast descriptions like "the hosts discuss...". 

Limit the key takeaways to a maximum of 3. The key takeaways should be insightful and knowledge-additive. 

IMPORTANT: Return ONLY valid JSON, no explanations or markdown. Ensure:
- All strings are properly quoted and escaped
- No trailing commas
- All braces and brackets are balanced
Format: {"key_takeaways": ["takeaway 1", "takeaway 2"]}

Prompt 7: Segments

Now identify 2-4 distinct topical segments from this part of the conversation.

For each segment, identify:
- Descriptive title (3-6 words)  
- START timestamp when this topic begins (HH:MM:SS format)
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Most important Key takeaway from that segment. Key takeaway must be specific and knowledge-additive.
- Brief summary of the discussion

IMPORTANT: The timestamp should mark when the topic/segment STARTS, not a range. Look for topic transitions and conversation shifts.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted, no trailing commas:
{
  "segments": [
    {
      "segment_title": "Topic Discussion", 
      "timestamp": "01:15:30",
      "key_takeaway": "main point from this segment",
      "segment_summary": "brief description of what was discussed"
    }
  ]
}

Timestamp format: HH:MM:SS (e.g., 00:05:30, 01:22:45) marking the START of each segment.

Prompt 8: Media Mentions

Now scan the transcript content I provided for ACTUAL mentions of specific media titles:

Find explicit mentions of:
- Books (with specific titles)
- Movies (with specific titles)  
- TV Shows (with specific titles)
- Music/Songs (with specific titles)

DO NOT include:
- Websites, URLs, or web services
- Other podcasts or podcast names

IMPORTANT: 
- Only include items explicitly mentioned by name. Do not invent titles.
- Valid categories are: "Book", "Movie", "TV Show", "Music"
- Include the exact phrase where each item was mentioned
- Find the nearest proximate timestamp where it appears in the conversation
- THE TIMESTAMP OF THE MEDIA MENTION IS IMPORTANT - DO NOT INVENT TIMESTAMPS AND DO NOT MISATTRIBUTE TIMESTAMPS
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Timestamps are given as ranges, e.g. 01:13:42.520 --> 01:13:46.720. Use the EARLIER of the 2 timestamps in the range.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted and escaped, no trailing commas:
{
  "media_mentions": [
    {
      "title": "Exact Title as Mentioned",
      "category": "Book",
      "author_artist": "N/A",
      "context": "Brief context of why it was mentioned",
      "context_phrase": "The exact sentence or phrase where it was mentioned",
      "timestamp": "estimated time like 01:15:30"
    }
  ]
}

If no media is mentioned, return: {"media_mentions": []}

Full Transcript

[00:00:07.280 --> 00:00:08.720] What's new with you?
[00:00:08.720 --> 00:00:14.880] I got this gigantic omnidirectional treadmill for my MetaQuest.
[00:00:14.880 --> 00:00:20.640] Like this virtual reality treadmill, like that shit.
[00:00:21.040 --> 00:00:24.800] So you like walk on it and then you walk in whatever game you're playing, too.
[00:00:24.960 --> 00:00:27.360] Yeah, you basically, people should look it up.
[00:00:27.840 --> 00:00:30.400] It's called Catwalk C2 Plus.
[00:00:30.400 --> 00:00:33.680] I mean, it's like, what's that Ready Player One movie?
[00:00:33.680 --> 00:00:38.000] I've never actually seen it, but apparently people say that it's like the Ready Player One.
[00:00:38.640 --> 00:00:39.840] Hey, what's up, Justin?
[00:00:39.840 --> 00:00:40.320] Hey, guys.
[00:00:40.320 --> 00:00:46.720] Channing is just telling me about his omnidirectional VR treadmill that he just bought.
[00:00:47.040 --> 00:00:48.320] It takes up half of my room.
[00:00:48.480 --> 00:00:51.520] I have a gym, and basically, I can't use anything in my gym.
[00:00:51.520 --> 00:00:52.400] You put it down.
[00:00:52.400 --> 00:00:57.360] It's like this 360-degree tiny little bowl.
[00:00:57.360 --> 00:01:03.120] And it's got these shoes that you wear, these special shoes that are effectively mouse pads on your shoes.
[00:01:03.120 --> 00:01:13.200] And it connects to your MetaQuest, like the VR headset, in a way where when you walk on it, it's basically like moving the joystick forward and back.
[00:01:13.200 --> 00:01:20.640] So when you're in games, the whole idea is, if you want to do VR, is like to be in this immersive situation.
[00:01:20.640 --> 00:01:26.800] But it's obviously not very immersive if you have the glasses on, you have the visuals around, you have the settings.
[00:01:26.880 --> 00:01:27.920] So you're just standing there.
[00:01:27.920 --> 00:01:30.720] And yet, to like move, you have to move your thumb up and down, right?
[00:01:31.120 --> 00:01:31.680] So how is it?
[00:01:31.680 --> 00:01:32.480] Like, how does it feel?
[00:01:32.480 --> 00:01:34.560] Like, what's your review of this treadmill thing?
[00:01:34.560 --> 00:01:35.680] I've done it like twice.
[00:01:35.920 --> 00:01:39.520] All the reviews say your brain has to adjust to it.
[00:01:39.520 --> 00:01:42.880] So for me, it's extremely difficult.
[00:01:42.880 --> 00:01:44.640] You instantly start sweating.
[00:01:44.640 --> 00:01:48.000] Like, everyone's like, you got to have like three big fans pointing at you.
[00:01:48.160 --> 00:01:51.440] It sucks, but it's also crazy and interesting and good.
[00:01:51.440 --> 00:02:03.960] But the one interesting thing I'll say about VR, and like part of the reason why I would buy some crazy shit like this, is for the most part, people that get virtual reality headsets get them to play games.
[00:01:59.680 --> 00:02:05.000] Like it's like this fun.
[00:02:05.240 --> 00:02:09.800] Oh, I want to go and like do a shoot-em-up or I want to do like a role-playing game.
[00:02:09.800 --> 00:02:19.320] But for me, the reason why I'm really interested in it is because I'm really interested in like the innovative grown-up shit that VR can help me do.
[00:02:19.320 --> 00:02:26.520] So for example, I had an idea and I was like, well, it would be really cool if there was some VR app that helps you with public speaking.
[00:02:26.840 --> 00:02:30.280] I know a lot of people, before they give speeches, they go and stand in front of a mirror.
[00:02:30.360 --> 00:02:32.120] They go and talk into a closet and they rehearse.
[00:02:32.120 --> 00:02:36.280] But that's like super, you know, separated from what the actual experience is like.
[00:02:36.280 --> 00:02:42.920] I'm like, it would be cool if you could stand on a VR stage and have like a VR audience and then practice your speech or whatever it is there.
[00:02:43.000 --> 00:02:44.040] Turns out that exists.
[00:02:44.040 --> 00:02:45.720] It's called virtual speech.
[00:02:46.120 --> 00:02:46.600] That's cool.
[00:02:46.600 --> 00:02:47.480] There's other stuff too.
[00:02:47.480 --> 00:02:48.760] I'm not going to get too much into it.
[00:02:48.920 --> 00:02:50.360] I'm into meditation.
[00:02:50.360 --> 00:02:59.560] They have this app called Trip, which just completely immerses you into this weird, basically sort of made-for-meditation app that's really dope.
[00:02:59.800 --> 00:03:09.000] They have, like, I'm into these things called memory palaces, where you sort of mentally simulate walking through an environment and it helps you to remember things better.
[00:03:09.000 --> 00:03:14.040] I think there's some show where that was kind of popularized, and I'm kind of into it.
[00:03:14.120 --> 00:03:14.600] Sherlock Holmes.
[00:03:14.760 --> 00:03:16.040] They had a Sherlock Holmes.
[00:03:18.040 --> 00:03:22.520] There's an app called Librarium, and it's literally a memory palace game for VR.
[00:03:22.520 --> 00:03:25.800] So there's all these kind of things, and that's kind of like what I use it for for the most part.
[00:03:25.880 --> 00:03:27.240] Yeah, I play ping pong.
[00:03:27.880 --> 00:03:29.000] Oh, I love ping pong.
[00:03:29.720 --> 00:03:30.840] I play table tennis.
[00:03:30.840 --> 00:03:33.320] I play regular tennis.
[00:03:33.320 --> 00:03:39.640] I'm like, I got one last year, and I haven't figured out all of its capabilities yet.
[00:03:39.640 --> 00:03:47.200] I was spending a lot of time playing it just as like, we have a gym in our house, so I go to the gym here, and we have a gym that we belong to where we live.
[00:03:47.440 --> 00:03:53.120] So I don't need any more exercise stuff, but I do like the Sabre game that gets you moving around, and that's a lot of fun.
[00:03:53.680 --> 00:04:00.800] Yeah, I'm like the most simplistic user of VR, but I can't wait to see how I learn to use it more in the coming, I guess, months and years.
[00:04:00.800 --> 00:04:02.000] So I'm glad I have one.
[00:04:02.160 --> 00:04:02.880] Tell you that much.
[00:04:02.880 --> 00:04:05.840] I'm going to get your username and we can ping pong it up.
[00:04:06.080 --> 00:04:07.600] I'm a game.
[00:04:08.720 --> 00:04:09.200] So shit.
[00:04:09.200 --> 00:04:09.440] Thank you.
[00:04:09.440 --> 00:04:10.080] I want to see you guys.
[00:04:10.160 --> 00:04:10.480] All right, cool.
[00:04:12.480 --> 00:04:13.520] I should probably introduce you.
[00:04:13.520 --> 00:04:15.040] We're already live and recording.
[00:04:15.520 --> 00:04:17.360] You are Justin Welsh.
[00:04:17.360 --> 00:04:21.600] You are a very popular solopreneur, very inspirational as well.
[00:04:21.760 --> 00:04:32.480] On your Twitter bio, actually, you say that you're tweeting about the process of building a portfolio of one-person businesses to $5 million, which is an awesome goal.
[00:04:32.480 --> 00:04:34.240] And you're not just tweeting about it, but you're doing it.
[00:04:34.240 --> 00:04:37.760] Like last November, I think you cross lined the $3 million mark.
[00:04:37.760 --> 00:04:39.520] So I have a ton of questions about this.
[00:04:39.520 --> 00:04:41.680] First, why $5 million?
[00:04:41.680 --> 00:04:43.760] Like, how did you pick that number?
[00:04:43.760 --> 00:04:45.520] Yeah, it's a really great question.
[00:04:45.680 --> 00:04:53.440] I have a really poor answer, which was just like, when I got started, it seemed very out of reach.
[00:04:53.440 --> 00:04:58.400] It seemed like extremely improbable to me at the time that I decided on that.
[00:04:58.400 --> 00:05:01.280] And I sort of come from the SaaS world.
[00:05:01.280 --> 00:05:06.800] I was a former executive at a SaaS company, a couple of SaaS companies, and did 16 years, I think, in technology.
[00:05:06.800 --> 00:05:09.120] And so I was used to creating OKRs.
[00:05:09.120 --> 00:05:12.400] And so I was used to saying, okay, you know, shoot for a big goal.
[00:05:12.400 --> 00:05:16.560] And if you get 70% of the way there as an OKR, you've done well.
[00:05:16.560 --> 00:05:20.160] And so I thought, well, if I do 5 million, that's probably never going to happen.
[00:05:20.160 --> 00:05:22.560] So 70% of the way there would be 3.5 million.
[00:05:22.560 --> 00:05:23.680] That would be pretty cool.
[00:05:24.560 --> 00:05:27.520] So that was like the science behind picking that.
[00:05:27.520 --> 00:05:31.720] And I feel like, you know, it's more achievable than I thought.
[00:05:31.720 --> 00:05:32.200] Yeah.
[00:05:32.200 --> 00:05:33.000] Aim for the stars.
[00:05:33.000 --> 00:05:34.760] And if you fall short, you'll hit the moon at least.
[00:05:29.680 --> 00:05:36.760] Sort of whatever, whichever order that goes in.
[00:05:36.840 --> 00:05:38.680] I can never remember which one's further away.
[00:05:38.680 --> 00:05:39.960] So yeah, exactly.
[00:05:39.960 --> 00:05:42.920] Aim for the moon, and if you miss, you'll be lost among the stars.
[00:05:43.080 --> 00:05:44.120] Is that $5 million?
[00:05:44.120 --> 00:05:46.040] Like, do you imagine that as being cumulative?
[00:05:46.040 --> 00:05:47.320] Like in total, you want to hit that?
[00:05:47.320 --> 00:05:49.800] Or is that like you want that every year?
[00:05:49.800 --> 00:05:54.440] And no, when I started, it was cumulative.
[00:05:54.680 --> 00:05:56.280] That's how I was thinking about it.
[00:05:56.280 --> 00:06:00.040] Because when I started, I never had the intention of working for myself forever.
[00:06:00.040 --> 00:06:03.320] I thought of it as like a cool proving ground.
[00:06:03.320 --> 00:06:07.320] Because unlike a lot of people that do this, I don't know how to code.
[00:06:07.320 --> 00:06:13.720] And I don't know how to build products in the traditional sense of how you might think about products.
[00:06:13.720 --> 00:06:17.480] So I thought that this was not going to be something that I would do for a long time.
[00:06:17.480 --> 00:06:27.080] So I was like, if I can go out and just cumulatively earn this money, again, money doesn't mean everything, but it's like, it's a good indicator that I'm doing something right.
[00:06:27.480 --> 00:06:34.440] But as my business is growing, I think there's an opportunity for me to do that on an annual basis based on some of the things that I'm doing.
[00:06:35.160 --> 00:06:37.640] I don't really want to shoot for a monetary goal.
[00:06:37.960 --> 00:06:46.040] My goals are more like a work to income ratio that I'm trying to achieve is a much more important goal than I think total income or revenue.
[00:06:46.040 --> 00:06:51.800] Yeah, I think most people, when they're thinking about making money, are really thinking about like making time for themselves.
[00:06:51.800 --> 00:06:52.600] Yes, totally.
[00:06:52.600 --> 00:06:59.320] It's some degree of like, I want my financial freedom, which means I want to have enough money to support me doing whatever the hell I want in life.
[00:06:59.320 --> 00:07:05.000] If that's hanging out with my family eat more or going on vacations or even just making more time to do other work that's more interesting.
[00:07:05.000 --> 00:07:06.840] I think that's a pretty common approach.
[00:07:06.840 --> 00:07:15.120] And so, if you have like this ratio in your mind of like work to income, you know, and it's high enough, income to work, then I think that's pretty awesome.
[00:07:14.760 --> 00:07:19.040] What the public often sees is someone putting a revenue number up.
[00:07:19.360 --> 00:07:25.520] There's a guy who's really, I'm not going to mention his name, but he's making a killing financially.
[00:07:25.520 --> 00:07:32.160] He does some consulting work, but he works like 24-7 around the clock, high stress.
[00:07:32.160 --> 00:07:38.800] In the situation where you see the number, you see the revenue, and a lot of people are like, you know, they go wide-eyed and they go, I want that too.
[00:07:38.800 --> 00:07:42.080] But if they saw what that was attached to, they would be like, hell no.
[00:07:42.080 --> 00:07:44.160] Are you talking about Brett from DesignJoy?
[00:07:44.160 --> 00:07:45.840] I had him on the podcast last year.
[00:07:45.840 --> 00:07:50.000] And he's like, I'm doing two million a year in revenue with my, you know, my agency.
[00:07:50.000 --> 00:07:55.360] And it was like, I'm also working 18 hours a day, seven days a week, drive myself insane.
[00:07:55.360 --> 00:08:02.080] I have friends like that, and their businesses are booming, $3 million businesses, $4 million businesses, mostly service-based.
[00:08:02.080 --> 00:08:08.960] So tons of time, tons of projects, like marriages are suffering, physical and mental health are suffering.
[00:08:08.960 --> 00:08:11.760] And like, I get this thing, and I wrote about this the other day.
[00:08:11.760 --> 00:08:14.480] You know, a traditional word is shiny object syndrome.
[00:08:14.480 --> 00:08:20.320] I get like shiny outcome syndrome where I see like the outcomes of other people and immediately I get wide-eyed.
[00:08:20.320 --> 00:08:22.880] I'm like, oh, if that guy can do it, I can do it.
[00:08:22.880 --> 00:08:24.720] And then it's like, wait a minute, hold on.
[00:08:24.720 --> 00:08:29.920] What is that person sacrificing and doing to get that thing?
[00:08:29.920 --> 00:08:33.200] And if I don't want to do that, then don't make that the outcome that you're shooting for.
[00:08:33.200 --> 00:08:35.280] Like you can't get tied into that.
[00:08:35.280 --> 00:08:36.000] It's super hard to do.
[00:08:36.640 --> 00:08:39.920] People don't broadcast what they're paying to get the revenue numbers they're getting.
[00:08:39.920 --> 00:08:43.040] No one's like, I made $6 million this year and also got a divorce.
[00:08:43.040 --> 00:08:45.680] You know, they should say the first part.
[00:08:45.680 --> 00:08:46.960] Yeah, yeah, totally.
[00:08:46.960 --> 00:08:47.520] Totally.
[00:08:47.520 --> 00:08:50.320] So, you're doing a lot of things, right?
[00:08:50.320 --> 00:08:53.840] You've got a huge email list of 70,000 people on it.
[00:08:53.840 --> 00:09:03.800] You do coaching, you do consulting, and you've got product businesses that are generating recurring revenue, which is really cool because you're not a software engineer, so it's pretty rare to have that.
[00:09:04.040 --> 00:09:05.880] What's like your breakdown in terms of revenue?
[00:09:05.880 --> 00:09:08.040] Like, how much of that is coming from different sources?
[00:09:08.280 --> 00:09:12.600] Yeah, I have two sort of flagship products that are information products.
[00:09:12.600 --> 00:09:14.920] So, I'm like, I'm a knowledge entrepreneur.
[00:09:14.920 --> 00:09:15.480] That's what I am.
[00:09:15.480 --> 00:09:17.960] Like, I have knowledge-based products.
[00:09:18.360 --> 00:09:20.440] 70% of my revenue comes from those products.
[00:09:20.440 --> 00:09:26.440] Another 15% comes from recurring revenue from what I would call a subscription email that you pay for.
[00:09:26.840 --> 00:09:34.280] And then there's a smattering of coaching and consulting, which I've stopped doing completely actually as of about three months ago.
[00:09:34.600 --> 00:09:34.920] Cool.
[00:09:36.120 --> 00:09:36.440] Thank you.
[00:09:36.440 --> 00:09:38.280] I wanted to reinvest that time into something else.
[00:09:38.280 --> 00:09:43.080] There's newsletter sponsorships, there's affiliates, there's all these other little things.
[00:09:43.080 --> 00:09:47.960] But the bulk of my business comes from my information products.
[00:09:47.960 --> 00:09:53.480] And the way that my subscriptions work is I think of my information products as Trojan horses for subscriptions.
[00:09:53.480 --> 00:10:04.680] So it's, you know, get a lower cost, high-quality information product, put it in front of people that want to learn how to do something, get them into the product, and use the product to sell the subscription.
[00:10:04.680 --> 00:10:10.280] So put them through modules that are interesting and then say, hey, like, we can go advanced on this module.
[00:10:10.280 --> 00:10:21.080] I actually send a monthly email that'll take you a little bit deeper and then roll those folks into a recurring revenue email subscription, which is like, doesn't matter if one person subscribes to it or 20,000 people subscribe to it.
[00:10:21.080 --> 00:10:22.440] I just write one email.
[00:10:22.440 --> 00:10:31.480] It's just the same amount of work and it scales pretty well, just like a SaaS product without all the exact concept of the ladders of wealth creation.
[00:10:31.480 --> 00:10:33.240] It's this blog post written by Nathan Berry.
[00:10:33.240 --> 00:10:34.200] Have you read it?
[00:10:34.440 --> 00:10:37.720] I have not read it, even though I know Nathan quite well, but I should.
[00:10:37.720 --> 00:10:38.200] Yeah.
[00:10:39.000 --> 00:10:39.960] It's a good one.
[00:10:40.200 --> 00:10:45.520] You're kind of doing exactly what he talks about in that post, where you sort of start off trading time for money, right?
[00:10:45.520 --> 00:10:48.800] You were an exec at a couple of high-growth startups.
[00:10:48.800 --> 00:10:53.120] I think one of them you helped take from like zero to $50 million in annual recurring revenue.
[00:10:53.120 --> 00:10:54.320] But that's your time.
[00:10:54.320 --> 00:10:55.520] You go to work every day.
[00:10:55.520 --> 00:10:59.840] If you stop going to work, you get fired and you're no longer making any money.
[00:10:59.840 --> 00:11:06.560] And then you eventually build up to like the higher and higher ladders where you're selling a service business, like you did consulting and coaching.
[00:11:06.560 --> 00:11:09.440] It's still time for money, but at least you're not working for somebody else.
[00:11:09.440 --> 00:11:17.760] And now you've stopped doing that and used the money and the connections you got through that to basically sell these info products and sell a newsletter, which is much more scalable.
[00:11:17.760 --> 00:11:22.560] I want to walk through all these steps because I think a lot of other people want to emulate what you've done.
[00:11:22.560 --> 00:11:23.920] Maybe we start at the very beginning.
[00:11:23.920 --> 00:11:25.840] You had this awesome job.
[00:11:26.240 --> 00:11:27.440] It was going well.
[00:11:27.760 --> 00:11:36.480] At the end of it, you were burned out so badly that you had a massive panic attack, I think is the way you described it on the Andy Hackers Forum when you wrote about this.
[00:11:36.480 --> 00:11:38.480] And you had to call 911.
[00:11:38.480 --> 00:11:40.160] What led to that level of burnout?
[00:11:41.280 --> 00:11:43.840] How do you even get to that place?
[00:11:43.840 --> 00:11:47.760] I think a lot of people think that's like my founder story and a load of crap.
[00:11:47.760 --> 00:11:49.440] It's actually like the most true story.
[00:11:50.240 --> 00:12:00.720] I'll kind of give you the background, which was when I got hired at Patient Pop, I had done a five-year stint at Zock Doc, which was a big New York City company kind of back 2009, 2014.
[00:12:00.720 --> 00:12:04.560] I was a real early hire there, ended up working for the CEO over five years.
[00:12:04.560 --> 00:12:06.080] And that was a tough place to work.
[00:12:06.080 --> 00:12:09.360] And so you kind of forged a good work ethic and high performance.
[00:12:09.360 --> 00:12:11.920] And I turned that into my first executive job at 32.
[00:12:11.920 --> 00:12:18.160] I was the VP of sales at a company called Patient Pop in LA, pre-revenue, got them zero to 50.
[00:12:18.160 --> 00:12:25.040] And what happened was: someone wrote a tweet about this, and I can never remember who, but I always remember what he wrote.
[00:12:25.040 --> 00:12:34.440] What happened was every day, like I thought I was going to be there for $1 million, $3 million, $5 million in recurring revenue, and then they'd go get somebody older, more experienced, better, and higher over me.
[00:12:29.840 --> 00:12:36.600] And I'd like to happen.
[00:12:36.920 --> 00:12:38.920] I kept going and going and going and going.
[00:12:38.920 --> 00:12:42.440] And I got to a point where like every day was a new dollar.
[00:12:42.440 --> 00:12:45.320] Every day was a new employee number that was like unforeseen.
[00:12:45.320 --> 00:12:46.360] I had never done it before.
[00:12:46.600 --> 00:12:49.160] So every day was a new challenge.
[00:12:49.160 --> 00:12:53.880] And burnout doesn't come from working really hard because I can work really hard forever.
[00:12:54.200 --> 00:12:56.840] At least less so as I get older.
[00:12:56.840 --> 00:13:05.560] But what burnout comes from, in my opinion, is loss of control, where it's like this stacking of problems that I could not figure out.
[00:13:05.560 --> 00:13:06.920] I didn't know how to solve them.
[00:13:06.920 --> 00:13:09.720] I didn't know how to solve the problems that were happening at the business.
[00:13:09.720 --> 00:13:19.080] And when you start to work on one problem and then another one stacks and then another one stacks and then another one stacks, pretty soon you start coping in ways that are pretty common, right?
[00:13:19.240 --> 00:13:19.960] And that's what I did.
[00:13:20.200 --> 00:13:26.280] I coped in ways such as overeating, overdrinking, no sleep, lack of exercise.
[00:13:26.280 --> 00:13:34.600] I was 225 or 230 pounds drinking a bottle of wine every night, eating a ton of, you know, Halal Brothers takeout in LA.
[00:13:34.600 --> 00:13:37.960] And like everything just came crashing down at one point.
[00:13:37.960 --> 00:13:40.280] It was December 16th, 2018.
[00:13:40.280 --> 00:13:43.320] I woke up, my fingers got real numb.
[00:13:43.320 --> 00:13:45.000] We were going to get some food, me and my wife.
[00:13:45.000 --> 00:13:48.120] My fingers got real numb, and I started having this really weird feeling.
[00:13:48.120 --> 00:13:55.720] And that went into a full-blown panic attack, hallucinating, didn't like screaming, screaming bloody murder for like two hours.
[00:13:55.800 --> 00:13:57.960] Had to have EMTs come, thought I was dying.
[00:13:57.960 --> 00:14:00.520] Like they hooked up all the wires, told me I wasn't dying.
[00:14:00.520 --> 00:14:02.600] And that's when it started to kind of go down.
[00:14:02.600 --> 00:14:06.040] But that's what started it all, honestly.
[00:14:06.040 --> 00:14:07.000] Yeah, it sucked.
[00:14:09.000 --> 00:14:10.760] That reminds me of something.
[00:14:11.320 --> 00:14:12.920] You're going to see it here, Justin.
[00:14:12.920 --> 00:14:16.400] But I just bought this book called Stress Without Distress.
[00:14:14.920 --> 00:14:19.360] And it's by a guy named Hans Selye.
[00:14:19.440 --> 00:14:22.800] No one knows who he is, but the word stress comes from him.
[00:14:22.800 --> 00:14:24.800] He's the guy that coined that term.
[00:14:24.800 --> 00:14:36.160] And the other thing that people don't know is he coined actually two terms: distress, which is obviously negative or bad stress, and then you stress, EU stress, which means good stress.
[00:14:36.160 --> 00:14:41.840] And whatever, we have negativity bias, so we've kind of let that second term fall out of use.
[00:14:41.840 --> 00:14:48.480] But he specifically goes into the differences, and like, and it pretty much maps directly onto what you just said.
[00:14:48.480 --> 00:15:03.920] I mean, if you don't feel that you have control, if you don't feel that you have like autonomy over the situation that you're in, then like, I mean, there's a totally different set of like neurotransmitters and stress hormones that go into your nervous system.
[00:15:03.920 --> 00:15:20.320] And if anything, it's so funny because like that's exactly what changes if you start to work for yourself, as opposed to, you know, you find yourself in this situation where you're constantly trying to meet the demands of something outside of yourself that you can't anticipate.
[00:15:20.320 --> 00:15:24.880] You know, you aren't pressing the next challenge button.
[00:15:25.120 --> 00:15:27.520] You're just kind of getting yanked around.
[00:15:27.520 --> 00:15:30.480] Yeah, it culminated in that, right?
[00:15:30.480 --> 00:15:32.960] Like that's that's how my body reacted.
[00:15:32.960 --> 00:15:47.440] And to answer Cortland's question, not to kind of push aside how did this all start and kind of what were some of the steps, but it was that point in time that I realized it was cool that that happened, obviously not because it happened, but I was forced.
[00:15:47.440 --> 00:15:49.040] Like, I didn't have a choice.
[00:15:49.040 --> 00:15:51.280] Like, I couldn't just keep doing it.
[00:15:51.280 --> 00:15:54.000] And I think a lot of people are afraid to like jump into their own thing.
[00:15:54.160 --> 00:15:55.600] I really didn't have a choice.
[00:15:55.600 --> 00:16:01.320] So, like, I got on a program, I saw a therapist, I started eating healthy, drinking.
[00:16:01.320 --> 00:16:03.400] I cut out alcohol for like 90 straight days.
[00:16:03.400 --> 00:16:04.520] I lost like 30 pounds.
[00:15:59.840 --> 00:16:05.480] It was pretty crazy.
[00:16:05.800 --> 00:16:07.880] And, like, I knew that I was leaving my job.
[00:16:07.880 --> 00:16:12.440] I left August 1st of 2019, negotiated that with my CEOs.
[00:16:12.440 --> 00:16:16.680] But this is where all this journey started where I was going to have to go out on my own.
[00:16:16.680 --> 00:16:18.760] And I was like, I don't know how to do that.
[00:16:18.760 --> 00:16:20.440] And I don't know who's going to pay attention to me.
[00:16:20.440 --> 00:16:23.880] And I have a decent network, but like, why don't I get some attention?
[00:16:23.880 --> 00:16:25.640] And I saw everyone using Twitter.
[00:16:25.640 --> 00:16:28.120] And Twitter to me was like how I got my news.
[00:16:28.120 --> 00:16:30.680] I didn't think of it as like a promotional channel.
[00:16:30.680 --> 00:16:39.160] And so I was like, what if I did what everyone does on Twitter, but I do that on LinkedIn, where all of my customers for like a consulting business would be or an advising business would be.
[00:16:39.160 --> 00:16:41.320] And no one used it like that at the time.
[00:16:41.720 --> 00:16:44.760] I like to think that I was one of the first few guys to use it that way.
[00:16:45.000 --> 00:16:47.320] And so I started like writing promotional stories.
[00:16:47.320 --> 00:16:48.280] How do you build a team?
[00:16:48.280 --> 00:16:49.800] How do you build STR programs?
[00:16:49.800 --> 00:16:52.040] How do you, you know, bifurcate your leads?
[00:16:52.040 --> 00:16:55.320] How do you do all these things that I had done at the startup?
[00:16:55.320 --> 00:16:59.240] And because no one was using it like that, I got 20,000 followers right away.
[00:16:59.240 --> 00:17:09.080] And when I announced that I was leaving the business on August 1st, I had a pipeline filled with people who wanted to hire me as a consultant and advisor for their business.
[00:17:09.080 --> 00:17:09.640] That was how I got it.
[00:17:09.800 --> 00:17:10.280] I like that.
[00:17:10.280 --> 00:17:15.400] The idea that you had an exit date for when you were going to quit your job and was set.
[00:17:15.400 --> 00:17:16.760] You know exactly what date it's going to be.
[00:17:16.760 --> 00:17:29.080] But before that, you're already building an audience on LinkedIn because I think a lot of people, when they go into that audience-building phase, people who want to take that step-feel a lot of pressure because they're like, Well, I'm burning a hole in my pocket.
[00:17:29.080 --> 00:17:30.840] I'm like spending money just to survive.
[00:17:30.840 --> 00:17:34.920] I don't have a job because they start audience building like after they've quit.
[00:17:34.920 --> 00:17:37.240] But you had that sort of buffer period, which is really cool.
[00:17:37.240 --> 00:17:40.360] Yeah, I'm fortunate to not come from a product background.
[00:17:40.360 --> 00:17:45.520] Like, I think it comes from a sales background and marketing mentality where it's like, I know my weakness.
[00:17:45.760 --> 00:17:57.120] I know my weakness is like, I don't know how to code and build, but I do know that I'm pretty good at selling and marketing and talking about myself without making it hopefully, you know, too nauseating.
[00:17:57.440 --> 00:18:10.560] So I was like, I'm going to go out and use, use that thing that I do well and start doing that because I knew that I couldn't just rely on like building some great product that everyone was going to suddenly find and start buying.
[00:18:10.560 --> 00:18:11.840] Why did you think this would work?
[00:18:11.840 --> 00:18:14.800] Like, did you have people you looked up to who are inspirational?
[00:18:14.800 --> 00:18:21.040] Did you have some sort of path in your head of like, you know, I'm going to go on LinkedIn and start building an audience and then there's going to be a step two and three and four after that?
[00:18:21.040 --> 00:18:24.160] Like, did you have a master plan?
[00:18:24.160 --> 00:18:25.440] No master plan.
[00:18:25.440 --> 00:18:26.720] I had a short-term plan.
[00:18:26.720 --> 00:18:33.280] My short-term plan was like go work for myself, keep getting back into better shape, get a mental health break, hang out with my wife.
[00:18:33.280 --> 00:18:34.400] Like, we lived in LA.
[00:18:34.400 --> 00:18:35.360] We had a house in LA.
[00:18:35.360 --> 00:18:37.440] So it was like, spend some time in the sun, relax.
[00:18:37.440 --> 00:18:40.160] And then my plan was to go back to work, find another.
[00:18:40.480 --> 00:18:41.840] I love early stage startups.
[00:18:41.840 --> 00:18:43.280] I like seed series A.
[00:18:43.280 --> 00:18:45.040] I hate like Series C, Series D.
[00:18:45.200 --> 00:18:46.320] It's too late for me.
[00:18:46.640 --> 00:18:49.600] So like, I was like, oh, I'll go find another series A.
[00:18:49.600 --> 00:18:52.080] And then I started consulting and advising.
[00:18:52.080 --> 00:18:55.520] And I was like, oh, I'm kind of making the same money that I was making as an executive.
[00:18:55.520 --> 00:18:57.280] And I was like, I don't think I'm charging enough.
[00:18:57.280 --> 00:18:59.920] Maybe I could charge twice as much that I'm charging now.
[00:19:00.080 --> 00:19:06.560] And instead of working the same and making twice as much, what if I just charge twice as much and I worked half?
[00:19:06.880 --> 00:19:10.480] And then I like made the same amount of money, but I had more free time.
[00:19:10.480 --> 00:19:14.080] And this really weird thing happened, which is like I started doing that.
[00:19:14.080 --> 00:19:17.760] And as I had more free time, I started spending more time on social media.
[00:19:17.760 --> 00:19:22.400] And the questions that I got on LinkedIn became different.
[00:19:22.720 --> 00:19:25.040] Instead of being like, How do you build an SDR program?
[00:19:25.040 --> 00:19:26.640] Or what would you do with this outbound lead?
[00:19:26.640 --> 00:19:28.560] Or how do you hire sales managers?
[00:19:28.560 --> 00:19:32.600] I would go through my DMs, and all the questions were like, How do you write?
[00:19:32.600 --> 00:19:33.720] How do you get attention?
[00:19:33.720 --> 00:19:35.720] I see you're getting a lot of engagement.
[00:19:36.040 --> 00:19:37.560] How did you learn how to write copy?
[00:19:37.640 --> 00:19:40.840] Like, all these different, like, interesting questions about LinkedIn.
[00:19:40.840 --> 00:19:43.640] And I didn't want to be like a LinkedIn guy, I still don't.
[00:19:43.640 --> 00:19:48.520] But I was like, oh, what if I put together like a little product that teaches people how to use LinkedIn?
[00:19:48.520 --> 00:19:53.160] So I built a $50 course back in 2019 and sold 75 grand worth of it.
[00:19:53.160 --> 00:19:56.440] And that was like the start of knowledge-based products for me.
[00:19:56.440 --> 00:20:01.720] You obviously had a terrible situation with the job that you were at with burnout and whatnot.
[00:20:01.720 --> 00:20:03.160] So you needed to get out of that.
[00:20:03.160 --> 00:20:11.480] But it still has to be scary jumping out of that and into something else if you don't have a precedent in your mind that that can work or that there are examples.
[00:20:11.480 --> 00:20:18.920] And something that you mentioned that I picked up is you saw something happening on Twitter and you were like, well, maybe I can do that on LinkedIn.
[00:20:18.920 --> 00:20:25.800] And I have to ask, is like, number one, did you see people who were succeeding at whatever it is, right?
[00:20:25.800 --> 00:20:33.000] Like, you know, sort of being copy gurus or marketing gurus on Twitter and then you wanted to sort of replicate that?
[00:20:33.000 --> 00:20:41.880] Because immediately what I think of is the trend over the last couple of years where, you know, there's someone who in their Twitter username has like the copy guy, right?
[00:20:41.880 --> 00:20:44.760] And then there's like the marketing guy, there's the mental models guy.
[00:20:44.760 --> 00:20:47.800] Is that sort of what you were copy-pasting over?
[00:20:48.120 --> 00:20:51.960] No, I think what had happened is two things were happening at once.
[00:20:52.280 --> 00:20:59.800] Someone gave me, and I don't remember who, so I apologize if it was whomever's listening to this, but somebody gave me one of Russell Brunson's books.
[00:20:59.800 --> 00:21:07.480] And I was like, oh, this is like crazy, amazing that you can build all these automated funnels and webinars and like, you know, make money.
[00:21:07.480 --> 00:21:09.240] Like, I thought that was pretty crazy.
[00:21:09.240 --> 00:21:10.280] That, number one.
[00:21:10.280 --> 00:21:18.560] And then, number two, on Twitter, there was a guy named Chris Johnson who was like making it, he goes by like Wealth Squad Chris or something now.
[00:21:14.600 --> 00:21:26.640] And like, I had met with the CEO of Gumroad, Sahil Lavinia, in LA just randomly.
[00:21:26.960 --> 00:21:29.040] He had moved there when I lived there.
[00:21:29.040 --> 00:21:31.520] And I sat down with him and got coffee.
[00:21:31.520 --> 00:21:35.520] And I was like, does this guy make as much money as he says he makes on this platform?
[00:21:35.520 --> 00:21:36.800] Because this is a lot of money.
[00:21:36.800 --> 00:21:39.280] And he was like, yeah, he's like really successful.
[00:21:39.280 --> 00:21:56.160] And I was like, man, between this book that I'm reading and this guy that I'm following, like, I think that I can figure out how to weave that into my consulting business with the idea that someday, like Channing and Courtland, maybe that someday I might have an information product.
[00:21:56.160 --> 00:22:00.000] But doing what I'm doing right now was nowhere in the plan.
[00:22:00.000 --> 00:22:08.000] And so I just started learning about how to translate knowledge into information and then attention into purchases.
[00:22:08.000 --> 00:22:09.280] And that took a really long time.
[00:22:09.280 --> 00:22:12.720] It is still an ongoing sort of education, if you will.
[00:22:13.040 --> 00:22:13.440] Yeah.
[00:22:13.440 --> 00:22:19.440] I like this process that you first started doing where you go to LinkedIn and you're just like sharing as much knowledge as you can.
[00:22:19.440 --> 00:22:24.720] Sort of just like kicking up sand and seeing like if any treasure, any gold coins float out.
[00:22:24.720 --> 00:22:25.920] And if they don't, they don't.
[00:22:25.920 --> 00:22:27.440] But if they do, maybe they do.
[00:22:27.440 --> 00:22:30.720] And I think that contrasts with how a lot of people start.
[00:22:30.720 --> 00:22:33.520] A lot of people start and they say, crap, I'm on a clock.
[00:22:33.520 --> 00:22:35.440] I've got six months to make a profit.
[00:22:35.440 --> 00:22:37.040] I need like a strategy.
[00:22:37.040 --> 00:22:38.000] This is what I'm going to do.
[00:22:38.000 --> 00:22:38.960] And I'm going to build something.
[00:22:38.960 --> 00:22:42.800] And they don't have as much of an exploratory period where they're just playing around.
[00:22:42.800 --> 00:22:48.320] And the good thing about just playing around and just seeing what happens is a lot of opportunities that would never have occurred to you just show up.
[00:22:48.320 --> 00:22:55.680] Like you tweeted about this in your thread about getting to $3 million a year where you said that you created a lot of noise and you looked at attention as kind of your friend.
[00:22:55.760 --> 00:23:00.000] You wrote content every single day on LinkedIn and then you honed in on Salesforce.
[00:23:00.760 --> 00:23:04.760] What were those signals that you found that allowed you to start consulting?
[00:23:04.760 --> 00:23:07.480] Like what kind of strategy did you kick up?
[00:23:07.640 --> 00:23:08.760] Pretty simple ones, right?
[00:23:08.760 --> 00:23:17.800] Like there's this analogy between content creators and farmers where it's like when farmers don't grow good crops, they don't yell at the crops and they're like, these crops suck.
[00:23:17.800 --> 00:23:19.800] It's like, no, you suck as a farmer.
[00:23:19.800 --> 00:23:23.960] And so like when I create content, I would create it.
[00:23:23.960 --> 00:23:29.240] And if it didn't do well, the inclination for most people is, oh, the algorithm, oh, it's not fair.
[00:23:29.400 --> 00:23:29.960] Twitter all sucks.
[00:23:30.040 --> 00:23:30.280] It's not fair.
[00:23:30.600 --> 00:23:31.160] Twitter sucks.
[00:23:31.160 --> 00:23:31.960] LinkedIn sucks.
[00:23:31.960 --> 00:23:32.520] It's all game.
[00:23:32.600 --> 00:23:33.160] Blah, blah, blah, blah.
[00:23:33.240 --> 00:23:34.040] It doesn't work.
[00:23:34.040 --> 00:23:36.920] And so I was like, okay, I'm going to write a bunch of things.
[00:23:36.920 --> 00:23:39.320] And then whatever doesn't work, I'm going to stop writing.
[00:23:39.320 --> 00:23:41.400] And whatever does work, I'm going to write more of that.
[00:23:41.800 --> 00:23:42.840] That was an easy one.
[00:23:42.840 --> 00:23:49.160] So it's like impressions, likes, all those things that are not, people call them vanity metrics.
[00:23:49.160 --> 00:23:55.000] And maybe in some way, shape, and form they are vanity metrics, but they're also indicators of attention and whether or not you're resonating with people.
[00:23:55.000 --> 00:23:57.000] And I don't think we should throw them in the trash.
[00:23:57.000 --> 00:23:57.960] So that's number one.
[00:23:57.960 --> 00:24:15.880] But number two, what was really interesting for me was when CEOs would reach out from my sort of ideal customer profile, early stage, healthcare-specific CEOs would say, like, you wrote something about getting through to a doctor on an outbound phone call, and that is a huge problem that we have in our company.
[00:24:15.880 --> 00:24:20.680] And I'd love to talk to you about coming in and working with our outbound team to start refining our messaging.
[00:24:20.680 --> 00:24:22.120] I'm like, okay, cool.
[00:24:22.120 --> 00:24:29.320] I should expect that if I write something like that, that is a pain point amongst founders of healthcare SaaS companies.
[00:24:29.320 --> 00:24:32.520] So keep writing about that if you like those assignments.
[00:24:32.520 --> 00:24:34.440] Then write about something different and see if that resonates.
[00:24:34.520 --> 00:24:35.640] You get DMs from that.
[00:24:35.640 --> 00:24:38.440] So, it was mostly like impressions, likes, things like that.
[00:24:38.440 --> 00:24:46.160] It was web traffic, and then it was like straight up DMs into my inbox that were the biggest indicator of whether or not I was writing things that resonated.
[00:24:44.920 --> 00:24:49.840] I used to work as sort of a consulting software engineer.
[00:24:49.920 --> 00:24:55.440] I would just write software for companies who needed somebody like me, sort of a specialist, to come in and build a particular app or something.
[00:24:55.440 --> 00:24:58.240] And I had a very similar process, but also very different.
[00:24:58.240 --> 00:25:00.400] I never really wrote content.
[00:25:00.400 --> 00:25:01.520] I wasn't on social media.
[00:25:01.520 --> 00:25:05.520] I would just build things that I liked, and then I would try to get press about the things that I had built.
[00:25:05.520 --> 00:25:08.880] So, I would build these little Gmail widgets and all sorts of things.
[00:25:08.880 --> 00:25:10.400] And reliably, the same thing would happen.
[00:25:10.400 --> 00:25:14.560] I would get emails from CEOs or people who were like, Hey, I saw what you created.
[00:25:14.560 --> 00:25:15.440] That's really cool.
[00:25:15.440 --> 00:25:17.600] We have that same problem in our company.
[00:25:17.600 --> 00:25:20.560] You know, can we talk to you about coming in and building the same thing for us?
[00:25:20.560 --> 00:25:27.840] And then I was able to negotiate like really high rates because they needed like not just anybody, they needed me to do this exact particular job.
[00:25:27.840 --> 00:25:31.040] And that sounds like exactly what happened to you when you got started consulting.
[00:25:31.040 --> 00:25:31.680] Totally.
[00:25:31.680 --> 00:25:40.880] And it's one part you said there is especially true, which is I wasn't like, hey, SaaS is hard.
[00:25:40.880 --> 00:25:42.400] Need help with your SaaS sales.
[00:25:42.400 --> 00:25:47.760] It was like getting through to doctors when you're selling a product like a marketing solution.
[00:25:47.760 --> 00:25:52.000] So it's like folks came to me and said, We also sell to doctors.
[00:25:52.000 --> 00:25:53.600] We also sell like a marketing solution.
[00:25:53.600 --> 00:25:58.800] And you've worked at ZocDoc and PatientPop, two of the biggest sort of giants in this specific niche.
[00:25:58.800 --> 00:26:00.800] So, okay, what are you going to do?
[00:26:00.800 --> 00:26:04.960] Are you going to hire a guy who charges $250 an hour who has general SaaS experience?
[00:26:04.960 --> 00:26:13.280] Or are you going to pay me $2,000 an hour because I know exactly the problems you deal with and exactly how to solve them in a quick amount of time with the right solution?
[00:26:13.280 --> 00:26:19.360] So that's why I targeted part of that tweet thread that you're reading is I whittled down over time.
[00:26:19.360 --> 00:26:21.840] I started with like, hey, SaaS, sales, marketing.
[00:26:21.840 --> 00:26:25.280] And then over time, I got really specific around healthcare customers.
[00:26:25.280 --> 00:26:26.560] I could help them.
[00:26:26.560 --> 00:26:28.080] They wanted my specific help.
[00:26:28.080 --> 00:26:31.240] I could charge a premium and I knew how to do all the work.
[00:26:29.920 --> 00:26:36.280] I loved the intersection of like, I know how to do this, and you very desperately need this specific help.
[00:26:36.600 --> 00:26:40.280] And that was what made my consulting business a high-rate business.
[00:26:40.280 --> 00:26:44.120] I also love the focus you had on just being so consistent with your content.
[00:26:44.120 --> 00:26:49.560] Like, I had a friend the other day who was asking in a group chat, like, hey, he wants to work out, put on some muscle, like, what can he do?
[00:26:49.560 --> 00:26:54.600] And, like, the first thing that me and a couple of other friends said to him is like, are you going to the gym consistently?
[00:26:54.600 --> 00:27:01.720] Because there's a million articles about like, you need to perform this lift and exactly this motion and eat this exact supplement and do all these different like tricks.
[00:27:01.720 --> 00:27:02.600] Same with social media.
[00:27:02.600 --> 00:27:06.200] You need to tweet at this time of day and with using these words and do these types of threads.
[00:27:06.200 --> 00:27:10.840] But like, if you aren't actually doing it daily, then none of these tricks matter.
[00:27:10.840 --> 00:27:11.800] And somehow you knew that.
[00:27:11.800 --> 00:27:20.440] Like, I don't know how that occurred to you, but like the very first thing you did was just start posting consistently and constantly, and then you focused on strategy.
[00:27:20.440 --> 00:27:24.200] Yeah, I'm lucky to come from that background.
[00:27:24.200 --> 00:27:32.280] Like part of being an early stage executive in the sales and marketing side for companies is you try a lot of things.
[00:27:32.600 --> 00:27:37.240] You go out and you have to be, you have to have some framework for experimentation.
[00:27:37.240 --> 00:27:39.800] You have to understand, you know, fail-fast metrics.
[00:27:39.800 --> 00:27:48.200] You got to understand how to try a bunch of experiments without figuring out, without losing sight of which sort of thing that you're doing is actually making the impact.
[00:27:48.200 --> 00:28:01.960] So I took a lot of what I learned at my SaaS companies that I was working at and just applied those to content creation, which to me seems like common sense, but I also recognize that a lot of folks don't come from that same background.
[00:28:01.960 --> 00:28:16.240] So, like, the idea of getting out and creating non-stop and then sort of analyzing what happens, doubling down on what works, cutting what doesn't, may not seem like common sense, but it's the easiest way to do almost anything, right?
[00:28:16.240 --> 00:28:23.680] I always say, like, especially with building knowledge businesses, everyone wants to learn everything they can about knowledge businesses.
[00:28:23.680 --> 00:28:28.240] They'll do anything to learn about a knowledge business other than start one.
[00:28:28.560 --> 00:28:32.000] And so, if you really want to learn how to build one, start one.
[00:28:32.320 --> 00:28:33.360] You learn a lot.
[00:28:33.360 --> 00:28:34.400] Yeah, exactly.
[00:28:34.960 --> 00:28:40.960] This audience, and I mean, Cortland and I specifically have a lot of experience on Twitter.
[00:28:40.960 --> 00:29:03.440] You can just pop open Twitter and look in, look at like, you know, startup Twitter and indie hackers Twitter and see people's formula for writing viral threads or threads that get engagements just looking at the first clue how to do anything and get engagements on on LinkedIn and that seems to be where your mastery is at this point.
[00:29:03.440 --> 00:29:05.280] So, what are some of your learnings from that?
[00:29:05.280 --> 00:29:07.760] Like, what yeah, like teach us how to use LinkedIn.
[00:29:07.760 --> 00:29:09.120] We don't use LinkedIn for indie hackers.
[00:29:09.360 --> 00:29:09.920] It's not that hard.
[00:29:09.920 --> 00:29:11.600] So, I'll teach you how to use it.
[00:29:12.080 --> 00:29:15.760] The first thing that I did was something that a lot of people do, which was I bought a book.
[00:29:15.760 --> 00:29:20.000] I bought a book called The Copywriter's Bible by Josh Fecter.
[00:29:20.080 --> 00:29:24.080] He's commonly referred to as the guy who started like LinkedIn broetry, right?
[00:29:24.080 --> 00:29:25.600] But I didn't know what else to do.
[00:29:25.600 --> 00:29:28.320] So, I just bought a book that someone recommended to me.
[00:29:28.320 --> 00:29:41.760] And instead of buying that book and then 30 other books, I just read it and then did what it said in the book, which is a very uncommon thing to do nowadays, which is like crazy reading and applying versus like, look at me, I read 100 books this year.
[00:29:41.760 --> 00:29:48.000] So, I got the book and I read it and then I started copying how he wrote because I didn't know how to write.
[00:29:48.000 --> 00:29:53.280] And as I did that, some things felt authentic, some things felt inauthentic.
[00:29:53.280 --> 00:29:57.440] And as I started to get a little more traction, I started to become more and more authentic.
[00:29:57.440 --> 00:29:59.880] I was more comfortable being myself.
[00:29:59.880 --> 00:30:03.640] But I figured out that LinkedIn is a little bit different than Twitter.
[00:29:59.360 --> 00:30:06.440] First of all, it is a safer space to write.
[00:30:06.760 --> 00:30:08.360] It's more empathetic.
[00:30:08.360 --> 00:30:12.920] You know, people aren't there trashing one another because it has a professional lean to it, right?
[00:30:12.920 --> 00:30:17.640] Your company name is generally attached to your profile, so it's a safer place to get started.
[00:30:17.640 --> 00:30:24.440] And each post, because there are 3,000 characters in a post, is similar to a Twitter thread.
[00:30:24.440 --> 00:30:31.240] When you go into Twitter, you read a whole, as you scroll your timeline, you read whole tweets, and then you come to a thread, and what do you get?
[00:30:31.240 --> 00:30:35.320] You get the first part of the thread, which is commonly referred to as the hook, right?
[00:30:35.320 --> 00:30:36.600] The thread hook.
[00:30:36.600 --> 00:30:43.800] Every LinkedIn post is like a Twitter thread because there is a certain amount of characters above the fold before the see more button.
[00:30:43.800 --> 00:30:47.640] And then you have to hook them to get them to click the see more button.
[00:30:47.640 --> 00:30:52.840] And when you do, you are rewarded with their attention through the full post.
[00:30:52.840 --> 00:30:56.040] And so I often think about writing posts on LinkedIn.
[00:30:56.040 --> 00:30:59.960] And kind of everyone does this now because I've got 12,000 students in the course.
[00:30:59.960 --> 00:31:02.120] And so it goes across LinkedIn.
[00:31:02.120 --> 00:31:06.360] But I think of the post in three parts.
[00:31:06.360 --> 00:31:10.120] The first part is the meet, which is just like, what do you want to teach someone?
[00:31:10.120 --> 00:31:10.840] What's the stuff?
[00:31:10.840 --> 00:31:12.280] Like, what are you teaching today?
[00:31:12.280 --> 00:31:13.400] What are the steps, right?
[00:31:13.400 --> 00:31:14.360] What's the information?
[00:31:14.360 --> 00:31:15.720] So, like, I always write that first.
[00:31:15.720 --> 00:31:17.560] What's the stuff I want to get across?
[00:31:17.560 --> 00:31:19.000] Then I go and I write the hook.
[00:31:19.000 --> 00:31:23.160] And the hook is generally less than 300 characters, and it's very similar to a Twitter hook.
[00:31:23.160 --> 00:31:25.320] How do I get people into the meet, right?
[00:31:25.320 --> 00:31:29.400] And then the end is just normal CTC call to conversation.
[00:31:29.400 --> 00:31:31.960] Like, why should somebody participate in this?
[00:31:31.960 --> 00:31:43.960] But the easiest way to write a good call to conversation on LinkedIn since posts are longer is instead of just saying participate or what do you think, it's quick recap so they don't have to scroll back up, reread before they can engage.
[00:31:43.960 --> 00:31:46.000] Give them something that they can engage on right away.
[00:31:44.840 --> 00:31:50.160] So it's like hook, meet, call to conversation, summary, engage.
[00:31:50.480 --> 00:31:56.080] And I started doing that, and that worked really, really effectively.
[00:31:56.080 --> 00:31:59.120] And then I started weaving in some other things which are helpful.
[00:31:59.760 --> 00:32:01.600] Typical copywriting formulas.
[00:32:01.600 --> 00:32:05.120] Pain, agitate, solution, right, is a common one.
[00:32:05.360 --> 00:32:10.480] I've edited that to be pain, agitation, intrigue, positive, future, and solution.
[00:32:10.480 --> 00:32:13.760] So I do have some formulas for how I tell stories and things like that.
[00:32:13.760 --> 00:32:16.960] But the real thing is, learn how to write a good Twitter thread.
[00:32:16.960 --> 00:32:20.640] It translates very well to LinkedIn and just show up every day.
[00:32:20.640 --> 00:32:22.640] You're treating it like a job.
[00:32:22.640 --> 00:32:23.440] You're a professional.
[00:32:23.440 --> 00:32:25.440] You're not just like fooling around on LinkedIn.
[00:32:25.440 --> 00:32:31.200] You are reading books about copywriting, reading articles about copywriting, and experimenting and taking it very seriously.
[00:32:31.200 --> 00:32:32.080] It is my job.
[00:32:32.080 --> 00:32:32.400] Yeah.
[00:32:32.400 --> 00:32:33.520] I tell people that all the time.
[00:32:33.520 --> 00:32:35.680] Like, I'm good at it because it's my job.
[00:32:35.680 --> 00:32:41.840] There's something that I want to unpack there, which is, you said, the simple thing called a call to conversation.
[00:32:41.840 --> 00:32:47.040] And anyone who builds a website, has a landing page, or I mean, often even writes like a Twitter thread.
[00:32:47.040 --> 00:32:49.760] You know, about CTA is a call to action.
[00:32:49.760 --> 00:32:51.440] But that's really interesting.
[00:32:51.440 --> 00:32:55.120] It sounds like you're trying to get people to engage with a comment.
[00:32:55.120 --> 00:32:59.040] Do you have like an ultimate place in the funnel that you want them to go?
[00:32:59.200 --> 00:33:03.920] Are you ultimately looking to get them to join a course or to go somewhere else?
[00:33:03.920 --> 00:33:12.160] Or do you see them writing a comment as a fundamental first step that you want to get people to take?
[00:33:12.160 --> 00:33:13.200] Yeah, the latter.
[00:33:13.840 --> 00:33:16.720] I think of LinkedIn and Twitter as discovery.
[00:33:16.720 --> 00:33:18.560] So, my game is moneyball.
[00:33:18.560 --> 00:33:23.680] I want to be out there every single day, same face, same name, same style of content.
[00:33:23.680 --> 00:33:25.520] I want you to see me every day.
[00:33:25.520 --> 00:33:30.120] And I want you to start to get a flavor for or feel for the flavor of my content.
[00:33:30.120 --> 00:33:31.240] What do I talk about every day?
[00:33:31.240 --> 00:33:34.760] What can you come to expect each morning when you see my face?
[00:33:29.840 --> 00:33:37.080] I want it to be relatively predictable.
[00:33:38.680 --> 00:33:48.040] One of my very good friends is an 80-year-old New York Times best-selling author, and he said, People love shows because of the predictable emotional experience they get with the characters.
[00:33:48.040 --> 00:33:51.880] It's not necessarily each episode, it's just a predictable emotional experience.
[00:33:51.880 --> 00:33:58.280] And so, I want to give a predictable emotional experience to my audience every morning, and that's why they come back.
[00:33:58.280 --> 00:34:00.200] And so, that's discovery.
[00:34:00.200 --> 00:34:04.520] And discovery to me does nothing more than widen my top funnel.
[00:34:04.520 --> 00:34:12.680] And then, 20% of the time when I'm normally being discovered, I'm actively deplatforming into trust, authority, and expertise.
[00:34:12.680 --> 00:34:23.560] So, to me, I want people to trust in me, not trust me like I'll watch their house when they're gone, but trust that I know what I'm talking about, that I am going to have expertise and authority in my specific niche.
[00:34:23.560 --> 00:34:27.000] And what I do there is I'll bring them from LinkedIn or Twitter to my website.
[00:34:27.000 --> 00:34:29.480] But I won't ask them to buy a course, I won't ask them to do it.
[00:34:29.480 --> 00:34:31.800] It's just like, here's an issue that you should read.
[00:34:31.800 --> 00:34:34.440] If you want to know more about this, here's a free guide that I wrote.
[00:34:34.440 --> 00:34:40.360] If you want to learn how to stop procrastinating, here's an article that I wrote about it.
[00:34:40.360 --> 00:34:45.160] And I just want to get people in the habit of discovery, trust, discovery, trust.
[00:34:45.160 --> 00:34:46.600] I almost never sell.
[00:34:46.600 --> 00:34:51.640] Scroll through my LinkedIn, scroll through my Twitter, no buy my course, no, here's what someone said about it.
[00:34:51.640 --> 00:34:59.480] To me, after 90 days, there's a big, huge improvement in the number of people who will buy something from you because trust has been built.
[00:34:59.480 --> 00:35:05.720] So, my goal is to get them to come back every day and finally go, oh man, this guy's courses are only $150 bucks.
[00:35:05.720 --> 00:35:07.640] Like, I have enough trust in this guy.
[00:35:07.640 --> 00:35:08.600] I've learned a lot enough.
[00:35:08.600 --> 00:35:13.720] He's shown me enough where I can pull that trigger versus charging $2,500 for something.
[00:35:13.720 --> 00:35:14.360] That's amazing.
[00:35:14.720 --> 00:35:23.280] You're, I mean, directly living up to a couple of ideals that Seth Godin, this marketing guru, frequently talks about.
[00:35:23.280 --> 00:35:28.960] The first one is he says that you want to write content or you want to have a presence that rhymes.
[00:35:28.960 --> 00:35:32.960] And that's kind of what you're mentioning with, you know, sort of you want you want to be recognizable.
[00:35:32.960 --> 00:35:34.640] You want yourself to be familiar.
[00:35:34.640 --> 00:35:41.440] Like, you want your brand to kind of stick in people's minds so that they understand what you're associated with.
[00:35:41.440 --> 00:35:57.040] And then he has something else that he says that what you just said resonates with me, which is you're not like, you know, pulling and like, you don't have like a muscular approach where like every time you see someone, you're trying to like sort of force them into the next step and then force them into the next step.
[00:35:57.040 --> 00:35:58.800] You just, you kind of have all the stuff there.
[00:35:58.800 --> 00:36:05.600] And if you ring the bell with any given person, like they know where to click down and go and find the next thing and they know where to find the course.
[00:36:05.600 --> 00:36:13.440] And the analogy that he uses, Seth Godin uses for that, that I love, is that you're constantly just blowing on a dandelion, right?
[00:36:13.680 --> 00:36:15.440] You're putting stuff out there.
[00:36:15.440 --> 00:36:24.800] And it's just, there's way too much noise and there's way too much complexity with like how you might resonate with any individual person among like the thousands that you're reaching, right?
[00:36:24.800 --> 00:36:33.760] But if again, the content that you're putting out rhymes and it's high quality, you can feel assured by just sticking to the inputs and being consistent with the inputs.
[00:36:33.760 --> 00:36:38.160] Like you're just blowing in the dandelion and the pedals are going to land wherever they land.
[00:36:38.160 --> 00:36:39.280] What does he mean by rhymes?
[00:36:39.280 --> 00:36:40.160] Like not literally rhymes.
[00:36:40.160 --> 00:36:41.760] Like what does it mean to put out content that rhymes?
[00:36:41.840 --> 00:36:43.600] It's just like thematic, right?
[00:36:43.600 --> 00:36:46.800] What we would do to rhyme is we run indie hackers, right?
[00:36:46.800 --> 00:36:55.520] We deal with startup content, people trying to attain their freedom from being tethered to some company that they work for, right?
[00:36:55.520 --> 00:36:58.960] I also, in a second life, I'm working on a novel.
[00:36:58.960 --> 00:37:24.520] And yeah, like if my Twitter feed is like a random idea from a fiction story that I'm writing, and then I write something about like startups over here, and then I like say something about politics on like, you know, Saturdays, then people who come across my content, they're going to be far less likely to see my face, see my name, and think, ah, right, I do have to go pick up that like, you know, good guide on how to get my business started.
[00:37:24.520 --> 00:37:24.920] Yeah.
[00:37:24.920 --> 00:37:31.400] So you're talking about like that predictable emotional experience that Justin was talking about, which it rings so true in like everything.
[00:37:31.400 --> 00:37:32.840] Like, I love anime.
[00:37:33.080 --> 00:37:35.960] There's a predictable emotional experience that I want when I watch anime.
[00:37:35.960 --> 00:37:40.840] I want to see the main character grow from nothing to become a badass and have everybody respect and admire them.
[00:37:40.840 --> 00:37:44.520] And that happens over and over and over and show after show, and I never get tired of it.
[00:37:44.520 --> 00:37:45.960] And I know that's what I want.
[00:37:45.960 --> 00:37:53.000] And so I guess your readers, Justin, have a similar thing they want from you, like a dose of inspiration, a dose of education.
[00:37:53.000 --> 00:37:56.440] Like there's something that they know they can get from you after a while.
[00:37:56.440 --> 00:37:57.000] That's right.
[00:37:57.000 --> 00:38:01.400] And it's never like, hey, here's something you can do if you're building a one-person knowledge business.
[00:38:01.400 --> 00:38:04.200] And then like tomorrow's like, my favorite pizza is margarita.
[00:38:04.840 --> 00:38:05.240] Never.
[00:38:05.400 --> 00:38:06.120] I never.
[00:38:06.120 --> 00:38:08.440] And like some people are like, oh, you're very robotic.
[00:38:08.440 --> 00:38:11.080] Like you don't really show behind the scenes of your life and everything.
[00:38:11.080 --> 00:38:13.400] It's like, it's just not what I do.
[00:38:13.400 --> 00:38:19.320] I just, every day I try and add a little value to somebody who has come for that predictable emotional experience.
[00:38:19.320 --> 00:38:21.880] My favorite creator on the internet is Harry Mack.
[00:38:21.880 --> 00:38:26.120] He's a freestyle rapper on YouTube who I love and like he's got a bazillion followers.
[00:38:26.520 --> 00:38:27.320] I love him.
[00:38:27.320 --> 00:38:40.200] Yeah, every Friday he comes out with a new video, and I like patiently wait for it and I watch it because I know that the people who aren't expecting him to be any good are going to be blown away, and that's a cool experience that I can't stop watching.
[00:38:40.200 --> 00:38:44.760] And so, that's how I think about providing my audience with an experience.
[00:38:45.200 --> 00:38:54.560] So, let's get into the details of like your info products because getting good on social media is a whole skill in itself.
[00:38:54.560 --> 00:38:59.200] But then, like, actually creating something that's valuable to people is not easy to do.
[00:38:59.200 --> 00:39:05.600] And then, like, selling it to them, even if you have a big audience, like that conversion, you said you sort of de-platform people into trust, expertise, and authority.
[00:39:05.600 --> 00:39:12.400] You're sort of a slow drip from your social media into signing up for your newsletter and maybe eventually buying your products.
[00:39:12.400 --> 00:39:19.440] How did you think about that process once you hit on this signal that, like, hey, this is a particular thing that I'm talking about that's a pain point for others?
[00:39:19.440 --> 00:39:20.800] I can write a guide to LinkedIn.
[00:39:20.800 --> 00:39:22.640] I can write a guide to a particular something.
[00:39:22.640 --> 00:39:26.320] How did you strategize going through that and being successful?
[00:39:26.320 --> 00:39:30.560] Because there's a lot of ways to fail if you're trying to build a product and sell it.
[00:39:30.560 --> 00:39:34.080] Yeah, I think I was cognizant about how I buy.
[00:39:34.080 --> 00:39:42.880] So, just because I buy a certain way doesn't mean everyone else does, but I like to think I'm a decent proxy for like how people who are motivated buy on the internet.
[00:39:42.880 --> 00:39:51.520] And I've entered 500-plus email funnels where you download a lead magnet and then you daily drip trying to get you to buy a product.
[00:39:51.520 --> 00:39:55.200] I don't think I've ever bought a single product that way.
[00:39:55.200 --> 00:39:57.440] And so, I didn't want to do that.
[00:39:57.440 --> 00:40:03.360] I didn't want to, like, here's my free guide, and now I'm going to just bang emails in your inbox until you unsubscribe or buy my product.
[00:40:03.360 --> 00:40:04.800] I just didn't think about it that way.
[00:40:04.800 --> 00:40:12.640] I bought a product, one of my first products was from Daniel Vasalo when he did his how to build a Twitter audience course.
[00:40:12.640 --> 00:40:15.280] And I said, Why did I buy that?
[00:40:15.280 --> 00:40:20.800] So, I was like kind of deconstructing why I bought it, and I thought, well, I show up every day, and I like what he writes.
[00:40:20.960 --> 00:40:23.040] I think he has a generally decent viewpoint.
[00:40:23.440 --> 00:40:24.440] I said, Okay, okay.
[00:40:24.440 --> 00:40:26.800] He gives me a predictable emotional experience.
[00:40:26.800 --> 00:40:30.920] He never really wavers from what he talked about, at least not at that point in time.
[00:40:29.680 --> 00:40:36.120] And when he positioned the course, he told me exactly what I'd get, how to grow a Twitter following.
[00:40:36.360 --> 00:40:37.400] He made it affordable.
[00:40:37.400 --> 00:40:38.520] It was like 90 bucks.
[00:40:38.520 --> 00:40:40.920] And it was like, okay, I like his stuff.
[00:40:40.920 --> 00:40:41.640] I trust him.
[00:40:41.640 --> 00:40:42.760] I've read a bunch of his things.
[00:40:42.760 --> 00:40:44.120] I've been following for a long time.
[00:40:44.120 --> 00:40:47.400] He told me what I'm going to get for it, something I want to get, and it was affordable.
[00:40:47.400 --> 00:40:51.880] Those things are like my marketing strategy to a T.
[00:40:51.880 --> 00:40:55.400] So my thought was like, no drips, no email campaigns.
[00:40:55.400 --> 00:40:56.200] I don't do any.
[00:40:56.200 --> 00:40:59.000] No email funnels, no email automations, nothing.
[00:40:59.000 --> 00:41:03.000] It's just like, come to my site and if you want to buy my course, great.
[00:41:03.000 --> 00:41:04.760] And go out there and replicate that.
[00:41:04.760 --> 00:41:10.920] But when you build the course, make it affordable so as many people as possible can buy it because it's a quantity game.
[00:41:10.920 --> 00:41:13.880] I want everyone saying great things about my course every day online.
[00:41:13.880 --> 00:41:18.680] I want people talking about it on Twitter and LinkedIn, so much so that I use purchase power parity.
[00:41:18.680 --> 00:41:21.640] So if you're in India or Pakistan, it's $35, right?
[00:41:21.640 --> 00:41:23.480] If you're in Mexico, it's like $40.
[00:41:23.480 --> 00:41:25.560] So it's like, I want the whole world talking about it.
[00:41:25.560 --> 00:41:28.760] And I want them saying great things about it somewhere online every day.
[00:41:28.760 --> 00:41:33.400] So it's like, make it affordable and then blow their socks off.
[00:41:33.400 --> 00:41:38.360] Like have them boot it up and think $150 course is probably going to be nothing.
[00:41:38.360 --> 00:41:54.600] Give them $15,000 worth of value and have them be so surprised by the value they get inside of it that as part of your install base, they are highly likely down the road to buy something else, even if it's twice as or three times more expensive.
[00:41:54.600 --> 00:41:57.240] It's like give them that 100x experience.
[00:41:57.240 --> 00:41:59.800] And that just comes from being a consumer.
[00:41:59.800 --> 00:42:02.440] I hate when I buy things and they let me down.
[00:42:02.440 --> 00:42:04.680] When I build products, I want them to be perfection.
[00:42:04.680 --> 00:42:10.360] I want them to be so good that people can't give it anything except for a five-star.
[00:42:10.360 --> 00:42:14.440] I know that's not like a really complex model, but it's just how I think about it.
[00:42:14.560 --> 00:42:18.160] There's a really good book written by Rob Fitzpatrick.
[00:42:18.160 --> 00:42:20.480] He's the author of another great book called The Mom Test.
[00:42:20.480 --> 00:42:24.800] He writes these very short books that are like, you know, like 90 pages, 100 pages.
[00:42:24.800 --> 00:42:27.120] And it's like, this is what this book is going to teach you to do.
[00:42:27.120 --> 00:42:27.760] That's it.
[00:42:27.760 --> 00:42:29.840] And it's short and to the point, and they're great.
[00:42:29.840 --> 00:42:32.400] And with the mom test, he basically wrote the book.
[00:42:32.400 --> 00:42:36.080] And most books, like you write them, you do like this sort of media blitz.
[00:42:36.080 --> 00:42:40.400] The sales peak, you know, in the first six months to a year, and then they go down over time.
[00:42:40.400 --> 00:42:42.000] Whereas the mom test has been the opposite.
[00:42:42.000 --> 00:42:43.440] You know, there was no huge peak.
[00:42:43.440 --> 00:42:51.760] And every year, it's made more and more and more and more and more money because people just keep recommending it, kind of the same way that you're talking about you want your courses to be perceived.
[00:42:51.760 --> 00:42:55.280] And so he wrote another book about how he did that called Write Useful Books.
[00:42:55.280 --> 00:42:56.480] And one of his.
[00:42:57.120 --> 00:42:57.840] Have you read through it yet?
[00:42:57.840 --> 00:42:58.080] It's great.
[00:42:58.880 --> 00:43:01.920] It's down on my, on my, literally on my coffee table right now.
[00:43:02.160 --> 00:43:04.240] And I've read through about half of it.
[00:43:04.240 --> 00:43:04.800] It's great.
[00:43:04.800 --> 00:43:05.440] It's awesome.
[00:43:05.440 --> 00:43:08.960] And I love the sort of point he makes early on that's really counterintuitive.
[00:43:08.960 --> 00:43:19.360] It's not how I have thought about things and it's not how I've done things, but I'm trying to get more in this mindset, which is that if you want people to recommend what you do to others, it's not only about the quality.
[00:43:19.600 --> 00:43:20.880] The quality is huge, right?
[00:43:20.880 --> 00:43:22.720] But there's all these psychological factors, right?
[00:43:22.720 --> 00:43:26.640] How are they going to look to their friends when they recommend you to others?
[00:43:26.640 --> 00:43:29.920] How is it going to make them and their friends and their colleagues feel, right?
[00:43:29.920 --> 00:43:35.760] Is it specific enough that there will be problems they encounter where they can recommend what you're saying?
[00:43:35.760 --> 00:43:47.280] And so I think this process of you writing this course with the goal in mind of making sure that not only can people afford it, but they'll talk about it, is its own sort of tricky strategy to sort of think through and like be successful at.
[00:43:47.280 --> 00:43:48.000] And clearly, it's worked.
[00:43:48.000 --> 00:43:53.360] I mean, your courses have been, I think you said you made $75,000 from your very first info product.
[00:43:53.360 --> 00:43:55.680] And I think $10,000 of that was in the first week or two.
[00:43:55.680 --> 00:43:55.920] Yeah.
[00:43:56.000 --> 00:43:57.600] It's a pretty huge reception.
[00:43:57.600 --> 00:44:01.480] Yeah, and that product made maybe $70,000 over like 18 months.
[00:43:59.920 --> 00:44:03.080] So it wasn't like I was going to live off of it.
[00:44:03.320 --> 00:44:08.600] But my newer courses have been growing month over month, every single month.
[00:44:08.600 --> 00:44:11.240] They might have been a drop, maybe one month or so.
[00:44:11.400 --> 00:44:14.040] I don't know, but they're consistently growing.
[00:44:14.040 --> 00:44:23.000] And part of that is everyone online will say, oh, it's just as easy to sell a $2,500 product as it is a $250 product.
[00:44:23.000 --> 00:44:23.720] Bullshit.
[00:44:23.720 --> 00:44:24.520] It's not.
[00:44:26.040 --> 00:44:27.720] It sounds great, but it's not true.
[00:44:27.720 --> 00:44:35.240] And even if it was true, it's a lot harder to recommend a $2,500 product to a friend who's going around to their friends and be like, hey, bud, you should buy this thing.
[00:44:35.240 --> 00:44:36.280] It's $2,500.
[00:44:36.520 --> 00:44:39.480] It's like, no, it's easier to say, hey, you should buy this thing.
[00:44:39.480 --> 00:44:40.520] I got a lot of value out of it.
[00:44:40.520 --> 00:44:42.040] It was $150.
[00:44:42.040 --> 00:44:47.800] Like, still not, I know not everyone can afford that, but it's more affordable.
[00:44:47.800 --> 00:44:50.440] And so that was my thought process: I already created it.
[00:44:50.440 --> 00:44:51.560] I created it 18 months ago.
[00:44:51.560 --> 00:44:52.600] What do I care?
[00:44:52.600 --> 00:44:55.720] Every person who buys it is a win for me.
[00:44:55.720 --> 00:45:08.360] Is there a strategy to how you lay out your product offering on your site so that people are more likely to start by finding the cheaper products that are going to be quick courses?
[00:45:08.360 --> 00:45:10.120] Or do you kind of just have everything there?
[00:45:10.120 --> 00:45:14.440] And then whatever people are interested in, they can go and they can find whatever solves their problem.
[00:45:14.760 --> 00:45:15.560] The latter.
[00:45:15.800 --> 00:45:19.000] I kind of leave it open and say, here are the things that I offer.
[00:45:19.320 --> 00:45:20.920] Now, I could probably do that better.
[00:45:20.920 --> 00:45:31.240] And I think as I rebuild my next website, I'll probably guide people to what I think is the right product based on something they've clicked on or something like that, right?
[00:45:31.480 --> 00:45:32.680] I don't have any of that today.
[00:45:32.680 --> 00:45:34.680] I have no automation like that.
[00:45:34.680 --> 00:45:45.120] The only thing I do is when people buy the course, there is a module in each course that corresponds to a subscription email.
[00:45:43.560 --> 00:45:48.640] So it's most relevant to the value they get in the subscription email.
[00:45:49.520 --> 00:45:58.720] So, for example, when you go into my content operating system, which is just like how do you write a newsletter and 15 pieces of content every week in less than 90 minutes?
[00:45:59.040 --> 00:46:03.120] And so they go through that course and they learn a little bit about basic copywriting.
[00:46:03.120 --> 00:46:07.120] And then at the end of that module, this is the only email automation I have today.
[00:46:07.120 --> 00:46:13.040] They'll just get an email from me after the module is marked as complete that said, Hi, I saw that you completed this module.
[00:46:13.680 --> 00:46:15.680] You just learned a lot about copywriting.
[00:46:15.680 --> 00:46:23.840] Did you know that I also have a subscription email that goes out that shows you how to structure high-quality social media posts using five examples each month?
[00:46:23.840 --> 00:46:26.160] Would you like to sign up for that for $9?
[00:46:26.160 --> 00:46:27.200] That's it.
[00:46:27.200 --> 00:46:34.880] And so I let them come to my site, shop around, buy the course, and the course is the Trojan horse for the subscription business.
[00:46:34.880 --> 00:46:42.640] And since I have about 15,000 or 16,000 students between the two courses, 2,000 of them have opted into the $9 a month subscription.
[00:46:42.640 --> 00:46:46.400] So it's an 18K MRR business of sending one email.
[00:46:46.400 --> 00:46:49.200] How many of these subscription newsletters do you have?
[00:46:49.200 --> 00:46:50.320] Just one.
[00:46:50.320 --> 00:46:51.040] Just the one?
[00:46:51.040 --> 00:46:51.280] Okay.
[00:46:51.280 --> 00:46:51.440] Yeah.
[00:46:51.680 --> 00:46:52.160] Just one.
[00:46:52.160 --> 00:46:54.240] Plus, it corresponds to a module in each.
[00:46:54.320 --> 00:46:56.720] Yeah, it corresponds to a module in each of the courses.
[00:46:56.720 --> 00:46:59.760] And then I have a free newsletter that goes out to about 71,000 people.
[00:46:59.760 --> 00:47:00.880] That's totally free.
[00:47:01.440 --> 00:47:02.160] Right, gotcha.
[00:47:02.320 --> 00:47:04.400] You've got, what, two different video courses?
[00:47:04.400 --> 00:47:06.320] So LinkedIn and about content.
[00:47:06.640 --> 00:47:13.360] You've got four free guides, it looks like, how to choose a profitable niche, how to grow and monetize on LinkedIn, et cetera.
[00:47:13.360 --> 00:47:14.400] Those are awesome.
[00:47:14.400 --> 00:47:17.440] We should put some of those on Indie Hackers, actually, and get that out.
[00:47:17.680 --> 00:47:18.320] Appreciate it.
[00:47:18.560 --> 00:47:19.600] You're doing so many things.
[00:47:20.000 --> 00:47:21.600] What do you like the most about what you're doing?
[00:47:21.600 --> 00:47:22.400] And what do you not like?
[00:47:22.400 --> 00:47:24.000] Is there something that you're like, you know, I can't wait.
[00:47:24.000 --> 00:47:26.480] Like, you stopped consulting and coaching, for example.
[00:47:26.480 --> 00:47:29.280] That was like a sort of temporary step to get you to this other stuff.
[00:47:29.280 --> 00:47:31.080] What's your favorite part of what you're doing?
[00:47:31.400 --> 00:47:34.120] Yeah, well, there are two sides to my favorite part.
[00:47:34.120 --> 00:47:36.840] My favorite part for my customers is access.
[00:47:37.160 --> 00:47:59.000] So, in a world of masterclasses that are generally out of reach for folks who are in developed countries, who don't come from a household that has a lot of extra money, who are in a difficult situation, who have lost their job, I like the fact that they can get what I think is premium information that I think will help their situation at a cost that doesn't break the bank.
[00:47:59.000 --> 00:48:10.440] I was raised by very philanthropic parents, and part of what I love is like, I love to go to Mexico, so I did a lot of mentoring of like Latin American startups through 500 startups.
[00:48:10.440 --> 00:48:13.960] I like hearing from people in small towns, in villages in Mexico.
[00:48:13.960 --> 00:48:15.560] They're like, got your LinkedIn operating course.
[00:48:15.640 --> 00:48:17.320] I'm starting to write LinkedIn content.
[00:48:17.320 --> 00:48:18.360] I'm like, that's super dope.
[00:48:18.360 --> 00:48:20.280] Like, not a lot of people can say that.
[00:48:20.280 --> 00:48:21.160] So, I love that part.
[00:48:21.400 --> 00:48:22.600] That's on the customer side.
[00:48:22.600 --> 00:48:23.720] I think that's a lot of fun.
[00:48:23.720 --> 00:48:26.440] And getting all those messages, because I have so many students is really cool.
[00:48:26.680 --> 00:48:29.000] It's good when you're having a shitty day.
[00:48:29.480 --> 00:48:32.680] And then on my side, I like the fact that it's relatively automated.
[00:48:33.240 --> 00:48:36.200] I'm getting a lot of time to spend with my wife in my 40s, right?
[00:48:36.200 --> 00:48:45.880] I'm 41 years old and I want to use this prime of my life, which I hope it is, to spend time with my family before my parents are here and hanging out with my wife.
[00:48:45.880 --> 00:48:47.480] I love that part of my business.
[00:48:47.480 --> 00:48:50.840] Things I don't like are there are two ways.
[00:48:50.840 --> 00:49:00.840] There are many ways to grow traffic, but two primary ways are social media, which is like up, down, up, down, up, down, and organic, which like grows over time, search engine optimization, things like that.
[00:49:00.840 --> 00:49:03.960] I'm mostly tethered toward the former.
[00:49:03.960 --> 00:49:07.880] So having to always have fresh new content is difficult.
[00:49:07.880 --> 00:49:13.240] And, you know, sometimes you feel like a slave to social media, and that sucks.
[00:49:13.560 --> 00:49:14.440] I know that feeling.
[00:49:14.440 --> 00:49:16.400] So, you know, that sucks sometimes.
[00:49:14.840 --> 00:49:22.320] But every time that I feel that sucking, I try and build a new system that makes it easier.
[00:49:23.200 --> 00:49:24.480] You sound like Channing.
[00:49:24.480 --> 00:49:28.240] Channing's the king of systems to keep himself going, even when the going gets tough.
[00:49:28.240 --> 00:49:28.880] That's how I am.
[00:49:28.880 --> 00:49:30.080] Yeah, totally.
[00:49:30.080 --> 00:49:39.120] Do you have like a roadmap of the next copywriting module that you want to do or the next, you know, is there a long list of like all the topics you want to cover?
[00:49:39.120 --> 00:49:41.440] Or do you kind of have to go back to the drawing board?
[00:49:41.440 --> 00:49:43.280] And more broadly, how do you grow from here?
[00:49:43.280 --> 00:49:43.440] Right?
[00:49:43.440 --> 00:49:44.960] You've got these courses that are killing it.
[00:49:44.960 --> 00:49:46.800] Do you just charge ever more money for those courses?
[00:49:46.800 --> 00:49:47.760] Do you make new courses?
[00:49:47.760 --> 00:49:49.680] Like, what's next?
[00:49:49.680 --> 00:49:52.560] I think if anything, no, I'll never charge more money for those courses.
[00:49:52.560 --> 00:49:53.840] I won't raise the prices.
[00:49:53.840 --> 00:49:55.920] I used to consider it and I had thought about it.
[00:49:55.920 --> 00:49:58.400] And I even wrote an email saying I might do that.
[00:49:59.040 --> 00:50:01.440] So I hope it didn't come across as some urgency grab.
[00:50:01.440 --> 00:50:04.720] But I had thought about that at one point, but I don't think I will.
[00:50:04.960 --> 00:50:07.120] If anything, I'll reduce them in price.
[00:50:07.520 --> 00:50:12.000] I think for me, it's starting to build more specific courses.
[00:50:12.000 --> 00:50:17.760] One thing that I've learned over time is people don't want to learn everything about a specific topic generally.
[00:50:17.760 --> 00:50:20.000] They want to learn to get from point A to point B.
[00:50:20.000 --> 00:50:28.960] And so it's really starting to hone in on what those point A's are across my audience and ecosystem and say, who's struggling to get to point B where?
[00:50:28.960 --> 00:50:33.200] And how can I solve that problem in a fast and efficient and affordable way?
[00:50:33.200 --> 00:50:40.160] So I think it's almost building like a marketplace of information products could be a step in the right direction for me.
[00:50:40.160 --> 00:50:46.960] But I also like have this theme in my life where at about five years, I stop doing whatever I do.
[00:50:46.960 --> 00:50:49.680] So, like, five years at ZocDoc, five years at Patient Pop.
[00:50:49.680 --> 00:50:51.760] I'm going on my fourth year here as a creator.
[00:50:51.760 --> 00:50:57.040] Like, I might burn the boats and, you know, build like an air, like a bed and breakfast.
[00:50:57.040 --> 00:50:58.160] Like, I have no idea, right?
[00:50:58.160 --> 00:51:00.120] Like, I think it's really fun.
[00:51:00.120 --> 00:51:02.040] I have a lot of confidence in myself.
[00:50:59.680 --> 00:51:07.160] And I think one of the most fun things in life is like doing things you don't know how to do.
[00:51:08.360 --> 00:51:09.720] And so, who knows?
[00:51:09.720 --> 00:51:17.240] But I don't have like a really good long-term plan other than I woke up yesterday morning and had a really cool idea for a new micro business.
[00:51:17.240 --> 00:51:19.960] So, I started building it yesterday, and like, I'll test that out.
[00:51:19.960 --> 00:51:22.440] And if that works, maybe I go down that rabbit hole.
[00:51:22.440 --> 00:51:32.520] As someone who has lived a life doing sort of tech stuff online and running, you know, being a solopreneur and then transitioned a little bit and started an Airbnb, I could highly recommend it.
[00:51:32.520 --> 00:51:33.320] It's really fun.
[00:51:33.320 --> 00:51:33.960] It's really cool.
[00:51:33.960 --> 00:51:35.640] It's a totally different business.
[00:51:35.640 --> 00:51:41.640] And I think with your mind, you would absolutely crush it because you're going to be competing mostly locally with people who aren't going to be that thoughtful.
[00:51:41.640 --> 00:51:42.440] And it's very different.
[00:51:42.440 --> 00:51:45.720] So, I like the variety approach to doing things.
[00:51:45.720 --> 00:51:48.040] Just to wrap up here for a bit, and we'll let you go.
[00:51:48.040 --> 00:51:50.760] Obviously, there's a ton of indie hackers listening to this.
[00:51:50.760 --> 00:51:58.600] A lot of aspiring indie hackers who haven't done anything yet, who have trouble, you know, taking the leap from wanting to do this to actually doing it.
[00:51:58.600 --> 00:52:06.440] And here you are, you know, just divulging a ton of knowledge and stuff that's like helpful in theory, but not necessarily helpful until people get to a certain point.
[00:52:06.440 --> 00:52:10.360] What do you think people who are listening and who are in that situation can take away from your journey?
[00:52:10.360 --> 00:52:16.920] Is there anything you've learned, any helpful advice that can help people get going who are kind of stuck and kind of just waiting to get started?
[00:52:16.920 --> 00:52:20.200] Yeah, I'll kind of paint this picture, a very true picture.
[00:52:20.840 --> 00:52:23.400] I've been reading indie hackers for a long time.
[00:52:23.400 --> 00:52:26.440] Like, I come on and browse the articles.
[00:52:26.440 --> 00:52:31.240] I've read like all my favorite heroes are on the website, right?
[00:52:31.240 --> 00:52:34.840] Like, and I'm very envious of people who can build things using code.
[00:52:34.840 --> 00:52:38.360] So, those are like my heroes, the guys and gals that I want to be like.
[00:52:38.360 --> 00:52:51.200] And so, for many years, I've been sort of somebody who just read from afar and looked up at indie hackers and in other forums and thought, never ever will I be featured on something like that.
[00:52:51.200 --> 00:52:58.720] In four years of just like doing small incremental steps every day, the aggregate total of that action, now I'm on the podcast.
[00:52:58.720 --> 00:53:00.720] Like, that's that's cool.
[00:53:00.720 --> 00:53:09.520] And what I would tell them is the easiest way to get started is just putting their thoughts into the ecosystem on a regular basis.
[00:53:09.520 --> 00:53:13.440] When I started writing in 2018, I sucked.
[00:53:13.440 --> 00:53:17.680] I cringe at everything that I look at from 2018, 2019, and 2020.
[00:53:17.680 --> 00:53:23.760] And so, like, if you can get started anyway, if you're like me and you have knowledge, just talk about it.
[00:53:23.760 --> 00:53:29.760] If you want, here are three steps: improve yourself, take notes, share them.
[00:53:29.760 --> 00:53:30.720] That's it.
[00:53:31.520 --> 00:53:34.720] If you do those three things, you're off to a good start.
[00:53:34.720 --> 00:53:35.360] Love it.
[00:53:35.360 --> 00:53:37.360] Improve yourself, take notes, and share the notes.
[00:53:37.360 --> 00:53:40.800] Justin Welsh, thanks a ton for coming on the Indie Hackers podcast.
[00:53:40.800 --> 00:53:44.240] I'm glad you finally got here after years of reading about your heroes.
[00:53:44.560 --> 00:53:49.360] Where can people go to find you online and to find out about your courses and your writings and your guides?
[00:53:49.360 --> 00:53:53.280] Yep, they can go and look around at my website, which is justinwelsh.me.
[00:53:53.280 --> 00:53:56.960] It's justinwsh.m-e.
[00:53:56.960 --> 00:53:57.520] Awesome.
[00:53:57.520 --> 00:53:57.840] All right.
[00:53:57.840 --> 00:53:59.600] Thanks again, Justin, for coming on the show.
[00:53:59.600 --> 00:54:00.160] Thanks, guys.
[00:54:00.160 --> 00:54:01.600] I appreciate it.