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For education entrepreneurs, Chris and Jason stress the value of community building as a long-term commitment and a development strategy. A free community may be a very effective marketing strategy by fostering trust and authority.

A community must, however, be focused on the areas where the target audience currently interacts, whether in person or online, if it is to succeed. They emphasize that social media calls for real interaction and active dialogue in addition to content posting.

A community may feel transactional rather than communal if material is delivered without interaction. Particularly in the beginning, when daily interaction and replying to each message promote involvement, consistency is essential. Support from teammates can help keep the momentum going over time.

Engagement should also extend beyond self-promotion; adding value, responding to inquiries. And taking part in conversations all contribute to the development of credibility and trust. Entrepreneurs may build a vibrant, active community that supports their educational company by striking a balance between content, interaction, and consistency.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Welcome back to the education entrepreneur mentor series. This is a five part series that goes over the five critical hats. That you need to wear or have included in your team’s skillset to be successful as an education entrepreneur. Teaching online, building an education based company. Those five critical hats are becoming the expert, the entrepreneur, the teacher, The technologists and the community builder.

This is the fifth and final part of the series where we go over becoming the community builder. Enjoy this session and be sure to check out all five parts of the series.

In this session, let’s talk about community building, and this is really. I think the least understood, hat, if you will. And a space of courses, coaching, and community. Community, I think, is the least understood, has the highest failure rate yet. In fact, it’s one of the things that’s as old as humanity, this idea of community. But I think we’ve had trouble translating community to the online world in many ways. It’s pretty new to online in terms of building education and really thinking about intentionally and design it. Let’s start before the product.

Let’s think about building free communities is a form of marketing community based marketing. In my opinion, is actually one of the strongest forms of marketing. If you can, in fact use your free community. Or somebody else’s free community to get traction for your ideas, build authority.

But first let’s imagine planting a community, like your own community. You’re committing to this strategy, I want to build a community that I can leverage for marketing. But a community always has more than just being an ends, a means to an ends. It’s something you really have to commit to. And in terms of planting your community. I think the most important thing is to plant the community where your avatar is, predominantly.

And sometimes if you’re an advanced subject matter expert, you may have, quote, graduated to some other kind of community where the professionals hang out. But it’s important to not lose sight of where You know your learners are. I noticed this in the early days of Lifter LMS and building community.

A lot of the WordPress people and the course creators were really strongly in Facebook and in technology. We ended up in like these slack communities and these more geeky, techie communities like Discord and and so on. And just remember where your people are. It’s part of your avatar research.

Where do they hang out? Both online communities and person communities. What conferences do they go to? Where are they socially gathering in the real world and on the internet? When I’m helping people with community design. I often have to go back to first principles and explain what social media is from my perspective.

I think a lot of people get this wrong. So I like to describe social media as really being two words, like there’s social and there’s media. Media, when it comes to building a social media community, a lot of subject matter experts are. Like I’m going to post content like every Monday in my group, I’m going to post this type of content.

I’m going to post links to My new course launch or do other kinds of marketing content. I wrote a new post, I published a new video, but that’s just media. So that’s not an online or that’s not a social media community. Just have a community that you post media to. And then there’s the social part. Which I think a lot of people get wrong where you actually have to be social and. Your community members need to be social for it to not be a dead community or feel like.

a pitch fest. So I think of social as conversation. So it could be commenting on somebody else’s post. It could be posing a question and not just like, all right, cool. I posed a question as my post for the day and walk away. If people start commenting, you want to engage and not just be like broadcasting.

This is a conversation. This is social. Building a community is a really big commitment and it’s important to, especially as the leader to not just do media and not just do social and just like react and stuff, but not post your leadership content, if you will, consistency is the name of the game.

With community. I think the best communities, especially in the beginning, it’s really a daily commitment. So if you actually get somebody who’s excited about joining this group. It’s probably best that they hear from you that day from their first post or when they join, you can send them a private message, welcoming them.

And then do that every day. In my experience I built a 10, 000 person Facebook group of. Course creators and web professionals who serve this market. And that was over the course of 10 years, but in the beginning, I was in there every single day. I had a rule that I would have nobody leave a post and not have a comment no matter what for me or the community.

So I was really committed to every single conversation and being consistent posting. And conversating on a daily basis. And as time goes on, I could scale back a little bit. I had team members get in and help facilitate in the conversations and the content. So I don’t, I’m not in there every single day like. I once was in my free community, but it was a huge commitment that I didn’t take lightly.

Jason Coleman: Yeah, I think some of that I can relate to is. The idea of not just posting in these communities, but also engaging in the social and having replies and. I forget what ratios are good. And I know Gary Vaynerchuk has a formula folks should look up. I think it’s called 8 cents or 10 cents.

Like you spend, you think of it like you’re spending pennies or maybe it’s 80 cents or something like that. He’s got some kind of math of but the basic idea is don’t just post your own stuff. If you’re on Facebook or Reddit or Twitter, when the social media is like engaged with the community, answer questions. It’s important to not just answer questions about your own product or stuff you can sell. But like just be helpful in other ways to build trust and karma and affinity and stuff like that.

And I like your point about. Looking for your community where they already are, rather than trying to build something and bring them in. And I’m I think folks often either want to look for or build like the social network for blank. There are some, there are a few of those that are out there, but for almost every blank, Facebook is the social network for blank.

So you’re like, what’s the social network for car enthusiasts? Facebook, or Instagram owned by Facebook, something like that. It’s if they’re already on Facebook, meet them where they’re at is really useful. So I think when you’re building your own community when I’ve been building communities in the past, this has been the case.

And I think it’s true in some that I’ve, I’ve seen through our customers and stuff. We see that everything is support. People are going to use every communication channel for support, including your community that you built for them to talk to each other. They’re also going to ask support, like questions of you through that channel.

I think we mentioned this in an earlier discussion too. That’s like any way they can get ahold of you through a blog comment or a Twitter DM. Or they find your phone number and call you at two in the morning. Like they’re going to try to get ahold of you. And so that’s true in these communities as well.

And I know that we, so we. We struggle with that to just have our community and discussion forum devolve into another support forum. And what we do to combat that is we engage and redirect. So we don’t try to stop it. It’s going to happen, like it’s very natural and. It’s not every once in a while someone’s I don’t want to go through the official. I think I know better and not get faster support here.

But usually people are just, I’m here now. I have a question. I ask it. So allow people to ask questions and non support channels. Don’t try to like police that aspect of your community too much. And I think another tip there is to give the, once you’ve hit like a certain mass folks in the community. Give them a chance to talk about it amongst themselves before you come in as, the kind of know it all and say, here’s what I think.

And sometimes you’re surprised, like they’ll answer the question better than you would have. You’ll learn new things, like you don’t shut down the community to just make it like a really quick answer. And they feel good communicating amongst themselves. But sometimes it is like a kind of support question that only you can answer or you happen to be the only one watching in that case, like if you can give a short answer, like just a link, just one word answer, just one sentence answer, give it and move on.

Oh, I had a question. Here’s the answer. Cool. If it’s a more technical issue that like you would want to get on a call and coach them through. Or you need to follow up through some other. It means that you’ve set up for a support, just kindly remind people that like what the proper channel is for that.

And we get that, you use these phrases, like the best way to get help with that kind of thing is through this official channel. The fastest way is here. And and you can use this too. If you aren’t using that community for a kind of support. But people are still asking questions on Facebook or other social media, sprinkle in links. Back to your own community or the official community.

Thank you. If you’re in like a Facebook group that’s branded and has other goals, don’t, you gotta be careful about that. But if, push people back to your own community that you own. And then a side note here is to have a code of conduct. This is like a big topic that we could talk about forever too. But it feels related to this is like having a code of conduct.

About how folks should use your community, what they should and shouldn’t talk about. What kind of behavior will get you kicked out and enforce it. It can be tempting to try to have a very lousy fair attitude about things and it’s good to not crush the conversation and let it go. But if you let certain bad behaviors into your community. Like it’s going to be problematic and that’s another one where maybe we can share some examples of our codes of conduct that we use for our communities.

As a personal story the reason I’m thinking about this what happens, your discussion form becomes a support form is we went through that paid memberships pro support was originally like a, through a BB press online forum. Then we had the idea, let’s start a community forum for the folks to talk about like business issues and other things amongst themselves.

We’ll try to start a discussion. And we tried to. Participate every day. We weren’t going where people were like, so we weren’t on Facebook where there already was. We struggled to get the conversation going. And we were working on it, but even when it was going well, like eight out of 10 posts were just. They clicked the wrong button and posted support in the wrong channel.

Like it was very clear, like the support channel is right here and this is for non support things. We tried to enforce it no move here, go here. It was just confusing people. So we were like, we ended up shutting down the discussion community and we waited way too long to start it up again.

We have a version now that’s on Slack and going well. And we were motivated because we found like an unofficial forum on Facebook that we weren’t even part of that had hundreds of people and we’re like, someone else is running community. We should run one too. And now, so we, open that discussion forum and we’re doing a lot of the stuff you were talking about, the building community and being in there and spending the time for the whole team and just tackling the support issues because that’s a very common thing that’s happening with people who are trying to, build businesses and use tools.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I think having the code of conduct. I just want to mention there’s this idea of having a safe space. So the main thing you want to do is protect your people. As a leader of the community, if somebody is, being insensitive or rude. Or any outside of your company values and a really negative way. You can pick them out of the community, particularly.

Any community, but the free community, there’s just no room for it. I see some folks get a little overly restrictive. When you join some Facebook groups, as an example, they’re often like, you can’t promote your own thing. No external links and it’s a, it gets a little restrictive. So I try to find the middle path of if someone like is helping somebody and says by the way. I actually have a business that does this cool, no big deal.

If somebody’s trying to answer somebody’s question and they drop a link to a resource that’s not ours, that’s. I’m not policing that. They’re not picking that out. It’s definitely a balance and something you have to learn by feel and a healthy community is like a, it’s a give and take. So you know, you’re figured this out well, when a solid community member will actually give more than they take.

Kind of like how we talk about email marketing, like value piece, and then maybe you pitch a product. So there’s like this overweight to being giving and helpful some to think about. And just one more pro tip is that. If you have an all star community member who’s doing really well in your community, doesn’t work at your company. You can deputize them and make them a moderator or ask them to do more. Potentially give them free access to your course, your membership, your software, whatever. Because some people just really shine in communities, both online and offline. And that’s a, it can be a real asset to your company.

Jason Coleman: It’s a good place to recruit from, even for more formal roles. And I think something I’ll say about that code of conduct that you touched on was. Making sure you preserve that open space for people to, so they can have discussions. And I think you might feel like if you’re writing code of conduct, don’t think of it as like we’re policing certain kinds of conversations just for the sake of it or because we don’t like it.

If you think there should be a goal for the forum. Have the water cooler random channel where you’re talking about, Netflix shows and stuff. Cool. But in the general section, it’s Hey, we’re all trying to build businesses here. Hey, we’re all trying to launch, courses here.

Hey, we’re all trying to talk about football here. There’s a goal for the community is if you keep that in mind. And then the second one is you want to encourage as much as possible discussion around that goal. That’ll guide you over the types of behaviors that draw away from if certain kinds of.

Yeah. Overly aggressive and, political or, different things that get posted, they discourage people from coming and participating. And that can guide you as you’re not picking I like these people, no, I don’t these people, I like this way of talking, I don’t this way of talking.

It’s I have a goal for the community, and if your discussion is pushing the goal forward, that’s good. And certain types of discussion that, like You know steal the air from the room and cause other people to be quiet. It’s you know, you want to handle that?

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about paid communities as like part of the product.

Like it’s in the pricing, it’s a line item on your features that community is included in your purchase. The big idea here is a concept I call finding the others. So if you’ve ever, and I guarantee that anytime anybody has had the experience of Oh I found my people, for me, I’ve run in like entrepreneur circles, climbing circles.

Dog sledding circles. I like find the others like, Oh, there’s these people that have the same interests and idiosyncrasies as me. That can be like a huge benefit and it happens for free in life, but it can also happen by design as part of a course. And often when you find a really good, kind of customer avatar, there’s actually like some negative emotion there, like loneliness or nobody understands me.

Or, I’m happy in my family or my friend group, but I have this like weird little obsession or hobby or interest or whatever, and then you find those other people that are like really into drones or starting companies or a certain type of fitness workout or yoga or whatever it is, and there’s this like excitement and energy giving experience of finding the others.

There’s a saying in our industry when. You build a great community and it becomes like this real viable business and it’s growing over time. People will often say the subject matter expert will say they came for the content, the courses, the coaching, but they stay for the community.

We’ve talked about recurring revenue in another session and having a functioning community can be a big part of that. Like, how do you do that and create that finding the other’s experience? You can actually look to the offline world in the communities you participate in, whether it’s spiritual or sports or some kind of fitness thing or some kind of food thing.

There’s often this concept of rituals. A group will have their rituals, like at a sporting event, there’s a series of events. If you do religious things, there’s like these series of events that happens. So like creating rituals in your community can be very helpful. I was in a community once where, I think it was once a month there was a post in a group about what are your top three wins?

And the community members, the most engaged members would be like, I accomplished one, two, three, then the other people would do it and then they would comment on everybody else’s thing. And it was a big celebratory thing. That was a really strong ritual. The other thing you can do is in terms of finding the others, there’s going to be like, you’re the leader of your program or whatever, but these other leaders are going to emerge in the community, maybe with like sub subject matter expertise, like some kind of specialty, or they’re particularly good.

And they’ve become so obsessed with your content that they know what you would say. And they’ll answer on behalf of you or Oh, check out. His training on this, or, Jason has a concept around not using exclamation points here. Here’s why you should not use exclamation points too much in your copywriting and stuff like that.

And then you can like, as the like community leader if that, if there’s an untapped resource in your community, a helper, and somebody asks a question and you can be like humble, this is where you’re the guide and not the guru. Which we talked about in another session, is you can be like, Hey, here’s a couple thoughts on that question you just asked, but we actually have this community member, Sally, over here, who really knows this aspect really well, and you tag her, and she comes in and helps, so you’re conducting your community like an orchestra.

And then the other thing that happens when you build a strong community, it’s working, and that’s great, but one of the challenges that presents As part of your, the community aspect of your product is particularly if you have some long time members, they become power users. And they’ve been through all your material.

They love it. They’re here. They’re maybe at the next level of your training or whatever. So you get the graduate students mixed in with the freshman class. And sometimes the new people feel a little overwhelmed and it actually makes their imposter syndrome worse. So they’re like, Oh my God, all these folks in here are already so advanced in mind the right place.

I don’t want to look immature or I don’t know what I’m doing and stuff like that. So design around that, have a process for. Welcoming new members, making sure they feel welcome and seen, and set the expectation, particularly with your advanced users in the community that like, Hey, there’s an expectation to help the new people coming up.

Kind of like that little brother, little sister kind of thing. And I just want to mention that Jason and I are here as business partners because we met at some. Paid and free communities, events, pop up events, and things that happened over the years. We got to know each other by investing in paid and free communities.

It’s amazing. What happens is when you have a strong paid community. I’ve seen it in my free and paid communities where members become like. They do business together, potentially all the way up to business partnerships, so communities can be really powerful and focus on this concept of helping people find the others.

And I just want to spotlight a great book on this topic called The Business of Belonging. I forget the author’s name, but it’s something to check out to, dig deeper into this concept of intentionally designing community.

Jason Coleman: David Spinks.

Yeah. So the author of that business of belonging, how to make community your competitive advantage by David Spinks. So that was the book you were thinking about. I’d like to put a pin in a couple of things. One, like you talked to, we met at an in person event and we do so much work online. The majority of what we’re doing and we’re talking about is online communities.

And we even stressed how that’s amazing. Cause there’s, thousands of people for every niche. Around the world, but if you can get in person, there’s something about even if it’s just with some of those like key people who come up out of your community on a small scale, or you tag along to another conference, let’s all meet up at this other thing.

Like we did through WordPress events. Meeting in person is just obviously like another level and another level of attachment and friendship and, honestly, that, that happens with folks in your community. And then another part of the we talked to how like the free community, you can think of it as marketing.

It can be used as marketing for products. And then you specify like the paid community as a product. I found that’s important. And as we’re building up this community that we have now, which is free, but eventually have a pay component, I think about it like we have a bigger team. So there’s literally like a marketing team and a product team.

And because the marketing folks have communication jobs and. Online communities where you’re talking feels like a communication activity, the same people who do like marketing and sales are like leading the community. They have this like skill set that transfers, but we have to be careful about that.

It’s actually like a different, when the community itself is the product it’s a different skill set. And you’re like, you don’t have to sell anymore. I’m already here. You have to deliver. We, we potentially should have the same way in our, when we develop other products and, sprints or quarters or.

Sessions that we plan, what are we going to do, how are we going to improve it? We’re going to add features. So having that same mindset of we’re building the product itself and it will help you I think, really engage in a community in a constructive way to make it better.

What is the goal of the community? How do we make it better? What do we, we changed? And not that, marketing people are great and obviously like they communicate well, but you’re not just, you’re not marketing to them. They’re already there. Another issue that comes up with these paid communities is I don’t know, you call it like the chicken and egg situation.

So there’s a few tactics to, to help with that. And what’s, I guess a, another big idea to think about the spotlight’s a reason why these paid communities are useful, so that we, you can build content that’s one to one. That’s like coaching, like we’re talking together. Or one to many, that’s like maybe like a paid course and video that they watch and you distribute or through a newsletter.

Or you can have this kind of many to many integration, interaction with your users where they’re talking amongst themselves. And that’s also value that they get. So that’s the main value. That’s one of the values that folks can get out of the community. Maybe it is the main value, like that the people are talking amongst themselves.

And, but that needs a critical mass of people in there talking to make it, but then, and it’s the what is, it’s someone’s number, someone’s law for as the community gets bigger, it gets more valuable. But how do you do that in the beginning when you don’t really have anyone in there if you’re trying to build something new?

So a couple of tactics I’ve seen work are free trials for paid communities. And so either start up and say, everyone’s welcome to come. And at some point you say, Hey, we’re going to be free for the next three months and then we’re going paid. Probably better if you can do it up front as much as possible.

So people know, and it’s like a trial. So perhaps they purchase your course. They do the course, they get dumped into the community in some sense. And you’re like, Hey, you can hang out here for three months and then it’s X dollars per month. And that gives them time and give them some tasks and motivations to participate in the community, send them on a quest rituals.

I love you talked about rituals earlier. It’s so such a powerful psychological thing for humans. And so then they get addicted to the community and it’s not a lot of money or it feels like a good value for them and they stick around. Another thing I’ve seen that’s pretty cool as a way to get people into a pay community is that you can pay to get in or there’s some way to get in for free, either because you’re like a VIP or you seed it with certain people or like the first 200 are free and then you cut off.

One of the more clever things I’ve seen is Ian Castle, who has a community that talks about small cap stock investing. It’s called Micro Cap Club, and I’m not sure if he still does this, but he has like a, it’s quite, it’s investing at a high level. It’s a pretty expensive community to get into.

But folks can get in for free if they provide research. So I, I don’t know if he does it anymore, but it’s very clever. It was like either pay a thousand dollars or whatever the price was. Or if you give us five pages of research on a stock of your choice and we like it, we’ll let you in for free. So it’s Oh, like either you’re paying to get in or you’re volunteering to get in.

You could think of clever variations on that. And I’ll just finish these are some ways to build a paid community from scratch. And like a warning is that I’ve always seen this a couple of times and we have, we should get this guy on the talk about it because it’s wow, you made this work, but I’ve rarely seen at work where someone built a paid community for someone else’s community.

Like they have to be part of that community and also like in a pretty deep way, like already connected. So they know everyone or they’re like the ideal avatar. So they just build it for themselves and then make sense. Usually it’s a very extroverted person who can make all the connections and encourage people to join.

Sometimes you’ll see a community and you’re like, that’s a cool community and they have money and I can build this for them, or it’s adjacent to mine. I’ll build it and try to get people to come and there’s something about that. Like it, it’s just, it’s harder if you’re not building it for yourself.

Chris Badgett: And I know we’ve been talking a lot about consistency and showing up, but you can test this idea by doing a pop up community. Just have a one time event as like a market test. It could be an in person conference. It could be. Like a special workshop that involves working together. I remember Jason and I were at an event together called Cabo Press that our friend Chris Lemma put on.

And I think I went the second year it happened, and then I went, I believe, five more years after that. I enjoyed it so much. It was once a year pop up mastermind retreat in Cabo, Mexico. With a really interesting format. Like the sessions were in pools, half the day was scheduled. Half wasn’t some like lunch group seating assignments or whatever were assigned, other things were free form.

It was a really well done community, but it wasn’t like something that recurred every day or anything like that, it was like an annual event pop up event for a certain type of customer avatar. And that was just a great experience. And I remember when Chris said that. The first time he ran it, he didn’t know if anybody would come and 10 people came and then I went on year two and 20 people came and then on year three there were like 60 people and now he has a, like a application.

He’s always done it by application because he really wanted to protect like the want to make sure the right people were coming. It wasn’t just something that like anybody can come if you pay me, this is for this specific type of person. So he had his screening mechanism. At LFTR LMS one time I brought in a subject matter expert in instructional design and like creating MVPs, minimum viable products, where we they did the workshop.

I just held the space and we were using a software tool called Miro for groups to collaborate together. And we had a couple of people we built, platforms for and help them flesh out their idea as a group over the course of three days. That’s called a bootcamp. And it was a great experience, but it wasn’t like we were committing to doing that every month.

And it was, you’re getting on this treadmill of commitment. So think about you can test community in the same ways as you can pre sell and test other things without the recurring commitment. And let’s talk about community design and management.

Jason Coleman: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: There’s a saying. I like to say about community, which is if you build it, they will not come.

It’s not about getting a community software. Like I signed up for a Facebook group or I use, I have installed the Lifter LMS social learning plugin. I now have a community. It’s true. You do, but you built the house or you’ve scheduled the thing, but are people going to show up or are they going to keep showing up?

I think of it as like holding space, like you really have to, this becomes a part of your life. You have to lead it. And you got to make the space for it. You got to protect it. And in terms of leadership, what I mean by that is you this is one of those lead by example things. And you got to post useful content.

You have to like actually be social. You have to like help and highlight the people that are really outstanding in your community. If, like a spammer comes in or somebody’s behaving inappropriately, you have to kick them out. You have to protect the community. And I think it’s also cool to be human in community.

Like it may be like a professional business related community or athletic advice or health related advice community. Let a little bit of the humanity and sometimes you’ll see community members support each other, if something bad happens or helps, they might celebrate a birthday, even though they’re not, they’ve never met in person or anything like that.

And in terms of community design and management. I’ll talk about Dan Martell’s SaaS Academy community, which was really well done. He had a Facebook group. This was a two year program I was in for software founders. And there was courses and content and stuff, but there were also, the Facebook group was very active.

And like you said, Jason, Dan was very involved. He was in there, he was posting content, he was answering people’s questions. He was being that, doing that humble thing where you know what? We have this community member who’s really the best at subject matter X tag, that person, I think he called that signposting and it was a great experience.

And then the the in person events he ran big cities around the United States and Canada three times a year. We would fly out to that, stay in a hotel together the actual conference room had round tables, not just like chairs in a, auditorium style. And he would intentionally design, or he and his team design who sat with who for all three days.

So he’s trying to help develop relationships this person needs to meet this person, this person is at a similar revenue stage. This person is really good at marketing. This person’s really good at product. This person’s, really good at sales or whatever. And his group, his table groups were like, awesome.

I just remember being like, wow, I had that experience of finding the others. He had scaled his company, beyond his size. And he had a great team that was very much involved, like doing these duties of community design and management. Ultimately he brought in. It wasn’t just him talking from the stage, he had a top expert about pricing who we’ve both studied, Marcos Rivera.

That’s how I met Marcos. And he’s one of the top software pricing experts in the world. So Dan guided us to Marcos and held the space for that, knowledge transfer to happen.

Jason Coleman: Some of the key themes are like. Being intentional about it, being committed continuously working on it. I like how you pointed out being human in the community and especially for those like online, versions of community where it’s hard to remember that or you feel like you’re interacting or in a certain way.

But just remembering there’s a human on the other side of the screen will give you like the grace to work in moments, allow them to have mistakes and get closer. I mentioned outside these people, if you interact with them enough, they become your friends. Like we live like quite a bit of our life online.

And I don’t know, probably a few people like that. They’re just like, Oh, you’re friends with them. Yeah. Hey, when was the last time you saw him? I’ve never seen this person in my whole life. Like they have a frog avatar and I don’t even know what they look like or whatever. But yeah I’m, that’s a fan, that’s a core value of ours about being human that helps guide things.

Yeah, and maybe so something I’d like to talk about around designing your community because I’ve seen folks struggle with it is to make sure that you have a concentration of your discussion or put another way, don’t dilute the discussion. And what I mean by that is minimize the different channels or categories or forums.

Like until absolutely necessary. So if you’re familiar with a forum that can have multiple sub forums or Slack has multiple channels. Or you’re, if you’re using a posting mechanism and you have different categories what I would recommend is start with one channel or as few as possible.

And it’s okay if it’s noisy, you you want it to feel like there’s a lot of people here, it’s bumping, there’s a lot going on. If you spread that out across a bunch of categories too early, it becomes like the wild west and like I see like little dust balls flying by the, it’s like where are we?

And you also, if you have too many categories spread out too thin, too, it confuses people about where to post. They’re like, I have an idea, but I don’t know if that should be in general discussion or special discussion or, news. Is that news or is it discussion? I’m not sure. So let the new channels and forms or categories come up organically.

You’ll, if it’s noisy in that channel and there’s one channel where everyone’s talking, you’ll start, oh, this is a common thing, oh, every day. Or these people like to talk about this. We need a special, place just for this kind of conversation because you want to avoid what’s called like the paralysis of choice when you’re posting.

I mentioned there’s too many options. You don’t know where to put something. Another part of like channel category design that can throw people off as if you use. Like jokey, clever names. And we used to call this like a web design if your menu was like mystery meat. You remember that term?

You, everyone wanted to say what is this called? It’s called like Jason’s Garden. And you’re like, it’s your about page. People know these things are called about pages. Just say about, and that’s what the title of the link should be. It’s the same thing when you’re, labeling your categories and channels.

You want to use descriptive names that explain, what kind of conversation goes there and have a sticky post or some kind of note that’s this is what talks here and lightly police it, if you have a support channel or like a development channel and people start talking about development and you just quietly nudge them Hey, you should talk over here.

Yeah. Minimize the in jokes. You talked about how there’s like these like PhD level, after a while experts who are in your forum, they’ve been there and they start building like a cabal, like this, like force of nature. There are different, those folks who’ve been on your forum for a while are like, they’re, they work in the forums in different way.

And they have these like in jokes that develop. That can be a source of community, but you want to be conscious of like when new folks get onboarded that they don’t just get hurled into this maybe even just have a one pager, here’s all the jokes and terms, but avoid naming your categories after those things.

I guess like a personal story to like nail that home is I’m part of a, like a small investing group on a slack. And I think there’s six folks in there right now, but there’s 12 different channels. So it’s only six people talking, but 12 channels and and a lot of them do have this kind of like mystery meat name.

There’s stuff like the CFO’s office, rat race or big picture. And I’m often like sharing news about something and I’m like, is this big picture news? Or it’s about my job cause I found it while I was working or I take the CFO role in my business. So maybe it’s CFOs, like it’s confusing where they go and it’s confusing then even just literally the user experience of using the Slack app.

I get a notification, I’m like, that looks interesting. And if I click on it and Slack kind of breaks, it doesn’t take me to it. Then I go into the root of the form and I’m like, wait, I don’t know which channel that would have been in. And yet, so like you want to minimize that kind of like hunting and pecking and and this is like a small group of people who know each other, mostly offline anyway, and we’re willing to put in the work to talk to each other.

But if you’re trying to build a community in charge for access and grow it like this kind of friction is, it’s going to be counterproductive.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And just another pro tip. If you just do have one channel, like in Facebook, as an example. You can use, you still have, just have one channel, but you can add a hashtag and you can train members like, Oh, if this is like your wins post, put hashtag wins on it.

Or when you start the thread, put the wins thread on it. So you can create some filtering with hashtags. And another cool thing is some communities are more serious or focused than others. And one cool one that we do is called the water cooler. So for example, in Slack. Whenever you start a Slack instance, it comes with a general channel and a random channel.

So Slack knows this, that like these two will happen no matter what, likely. So

Jason Coleman: When I said one channel, I was thinking the one channel and the water cooler general random channel. Yeah. Yeah. It’s important.

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If you’re like if it’s really serious, you want like the subject matter to really stay focused in the general channel, you can use that random channel or that water cooler is the, not junk drawer, but like everything else over here, personal life over here.

If you’re like really on mission and you want to keep your main channel or main key channels really focused. Let’s talk about online versus offline communities, in my opinion, and experience as both a user or a member of communities and also a creator of communities, I think hybrid is the best where you have some offline and some online, now it’s really hard if you.

Sell training courses and coaching all over the world to create an in person event. But if you can, or at least do it in your home country, or if you’re big enough in your own city or geographic region I highly recommend it. You can all, one thing you can do to add an offline community, if you’re like small and you’re not sure if you can pull it off is you can actually tag on to an existing offline community that.

Your people are already likely going to. There could be like a professional conference that happens for the industry that your people are in, or maybe it’s a sporting event or something, so you can just like, either right before, during, or after, it could be as small as like a two hour let’s meet up at this location.

Grab some drinks or some food and, just get together and chat and meet each other in person. It can be that simple. So there’s ways to hack your way into the momentum of where these people are already hanging out. And that’s why it’s good to be clear on who your customer avatar is.

And you can. You can also test communities. So similar to marketing and doing pre selling and things like that. It’s good to run some tests. So you may think that your main community is in a Facebook group, like that’s pretty good guess. But there may be this other opportunity that you don’t know about crypto people are on discord a lot.

Techie people typically are working in Slack for their company, so you could have just like another Slack group. They’re already in Slack, so you’re right there. There’s all kinds of different ways to think about it. I do like the idea of staying focused, but it’s good to test. And one way you can do it is just test yourself as an individual.

Join somebody else’s community that has the same avatar, see how active it is. over there. And sometimes you will find oh wait, I could have two communities, or maybe my community’s migrating over here to this platform. I might want to try that. I might want to try having it on my website and see if I can make it work.

So it’s okay to do some tests, but I definitely recommend not. Just finding as many community platforms as you can and starting them all at once is too much to manage. It’s also not the end of the world to shut down one with heads up like, Hey, we’re, this community is moving here. You mentioned earlier you were on a forum and you, I think shut that down and moved over here.

We actually started at Lister LMS with a BB press forum as well, decided that it was better. Through a support ticket system and our live calls and things like that, our office hours. But I want to tell a story about the Lifter LMS community. Like our main original, customer avatar is a DIY course creator, coach, subject matter expert.

That’s where trying to wear all these five hats we’re talking about in this training. But what I noticed is no matter what I did. This other avatar was always here, which is, I build websites for clients, the, the WordPress professional, the agency, and then within that avatar is also on Facebook.

But within that, the people that were more engineering developer focused, they did not like Facebook. They weren’t that engaged with it. So what we ended up doing was testing out Slack channel, a developer community on Slack for Lifter LMS, and then that became like the developer spot and like the conversations are so different.

What’s happening over in the developers versus in the Facebook community. And to your point earlier about, marketing isn’t always the best to facilitate the product side of community, what is happening is like the marketing folks are better with the Facebook side, but the actual Lifter LMS engineers, the developers are engaging more in the developer community.

So it’s interesting how you get, you can try to control community, but it’s also just going to happen. Like you mentioned, there was a. Community about your product, a Facebook group that you or none of your team were even in and you found it and then you joined the community about your product.

It’s funny.

Jason Coleman: We’re like,

Chris Badgett: this is cool. Can we join?

Jason Coleman: Yeah, that was pretty awesome to discover. It made me feel good. It was like, wow, there’s like hundreds of people working on this thing. I don’t, I still don’t know what the status is though. We’re competing with them, but they’re on Facebook.

We’re on Slack. One thing I liked about your like the Lifter LMS developers community is it had a test or like a form you had to fill out to get in.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Jason Coleman: And Discord does this really well. They have these tools to build these like checkbox mazes. You have to go through to make sure you get it.

And Facebook groups will have questionnaires. You have to fill out an application process. I know I’m paid memberships, pros directory, or we have an approvals. Plug in and there’s ways to do that. That’s that’s an interesting tool and especially for these like online offline community hybrids where and we’ve seen some crazy ones like you have to live in one of these like 12 houses to be in the community.

So you had to prove you live there. We were like talking with someone. Over like the technical challenges of that. But yeah, it’s I find like the honor system goes a long way of just ask, you can ask people, we have an alumni association, Facebook group, and one of the questions is what year did you graduate?

And people like don’t answer or they don’t, it’s like they could, it’s very easy to make something up, just pick a random year. But people don’t do it. And then you’re like, you can filter on that. Like they definitely aren’t alumni if they don’t remember what year they graduated from or chose not to fill it out.

It was like an automatic spammer or something. Yeah. and that’s good enough. And then you police it retroactively if people come in and they’re not actually like for these I’ve seen lots of these communities that are focused on like a physical space or like the, mountain association or homeowners association or something like that.

And you want to make sure, or even on professional associations have applications are you actually a nurse? Are you actually a police officer? Another thing that comes up in my communication with these kinds of offline communities that are coming online for the first time. And I thought we could chat about it a bit is I remember having customer interviews with a bunch of these and the same conversation kept coming up where they would say, what I really want is a place for my members to be able to collaborate.

And I’d be like, Oh, cool. Like collaborate on what? And they often like, couldn’t really answer to Oh no, just like collaborate. I was like what does that mean? And I think a lot of times I. Back then I have a guess, but I was like, I really don’t know, they, a lot of people talk about collaboration, and it depends on the context of the organization, but I’m like, I think I I don’t know what it means, or is it like this weird buzzword that people feel like they have to have?

But one thing I do realize is it’s a kind of, a lot of them are part of an association where there’s one person who does all the work there, it’s a, it’s like a nature preserve and there’s people have membership and some people donate and some people are members because they bought a brick on the path or something.

But there’s really one person who organizes and maintains it all and does all the work and maybe what they mean by collaborate is get more people to help out here. And I was like, and I don’t actually have the answer for that. I was like, I don’t know how to have technology force people to participate more.

That’s a really tough question. I don’t know if you have no tools about that. And the other thing I could come up with then briefly is like in like a board situation, that same kind of thing that comes up sometimes one person is handling the technology and like they want to talk with each other about things.

And that’s almost Oh, I want to train them on how to use Google meet to or like a kind of web conferencing software to talk online and how to use Google docs or some other system to keep track of notes. So these are maybe like ideas for how to productize that, like within our scope for some of our customers when they, but I was curious, like if that came up with you, like what do folks mean by collaborate?

It seems like this fuzzy term people use. And these challenges of like offline communities, like trying to get more participation and like collaborate through online communication.

Chris Badgett: It can be unhealthy when the idea of collaboration is I want more people to work for free for me. Yeah. And I think this comes to that holding space and leading the community, setting expectations around.

All right, I want you to, you’re here, you can ask for help, but, for every ask try to help three people or just try to help one on one, like even the balance in the universe. Yeah. So it doesn’t become like platform. For where everybody’s just trying to take, cause then it’s not a healthy community.

Yeah. Do you remember like early

Jason Coleman: MIR, IRC forums and you would like share files. It was like you were a leech and you had to upload so many files before you could take. I’ve seen that and I’ve definitely seen in codes of conduct for communities. They talk specifically about like how to give back and give them back in certain ways or helping out.

If you’ve been here a while, help out the new folks. Make sure you do that. Like they encourage it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And it’s sound like a Reddit, I believe you can’t do a post until you’ve commented a bunch of times. So they’re like getting you to, help or contribute. Before, posting your own thing, let’s talk about other people’s communities.

If you’re a subject matter expert, yeah, you’re trying to build a thing, but you’re likely not in a vacuum. There’s existing other communities around your idea, either very closely or tangentially related by communities of where people are before they’re ready for your community or where they might go after.

So there’s this idea like in marketing is an example where. You can leverage other people’s audiences. And so that means even if you have zero email lists, as an example, you can go to somebody who does have a big email list, create like a training or a free resource. And you take their stage and contribute to their community and maybe get Some people over to your community or your offer.

The way I think about this is just the general idea of being a helper give before you get, so for example, even in the Lifter LMS space, I’d be in like a general, let’s say WordPress community. And someone’s literally having trouble with one of my competitor’s softwares. And the question they’re asking is not like exactly about their software, but I’m like, okay, this is a website that a competitor has, but I actually know the answer to what this person is asking.

Like, where should I host my videos or whatever? I’m still going to help them. So giving with no expectation of return is super powerful. Joint venture partnerships are a really interesting one. And I’ll tell a story about that in a second, but what a joint venture partnership is in a perfect world is you have an audience or community.

This other person have an audience and community. They may be exactly the same or similar overlapping. And it’s like an exchange, okay, I’ll do a webinar for your community, you do a webinar for my community, we’ll both email our lists we’ll invite the people in, and there can be an offer at the end of the webinar to get the free thing or sign up for the paid thing.

And those can work really well. So an example that I do at Lifter LMS there’s two, the two audiences of the course creator and like kind of the website building professional. There’s some people that I do joint venture partnerships with that have like really just the course creator.

They’re not like techies at all. And I have a bunch of techies that you know, but also course creators. So we’re not, our products are not in competition. This person is selling. Coaching and courses and stuff. I’m more in the software side, but we have a lot of overlap in your audience. So once a year, we basically do an email exchange and email to whatever the the main offer is and some, something like that.

And we’ve, this person I’ve met with, I’ve been, I’ve gone offline and I’ve been to their house and your home. I’ve been to mastermind events that they’ve put on it. And we just developed. Partnership, we’ve become friends, we ask each other for just business help from time to time.

And we have this kind of business relationship where we just do this exchange once a year and it’s, I’ve probably done that for six or seven years at this point. So that’s a joint venture partnership. Then there’s affiliate partnerships, which are a little more straightforward in the sense that you can set up an affiliate program where.

If somebody promotes your course or your membership they get a unique link that’s trackable and there’s automated systems for handling this. So they can promote your program to their community the affiliates, the affiliate system man measures and tracks that link click. And if ultimately within 30 days or whatever, that person ends up buying something.

That person earns an affiliate commission, which in the core space is typically anywhere from 15 to 50 percent of the transaction amount. So that’s a way to introduce an affiliate program to your online education platform. It’s a way for other people to essentially sell for you to their audience. Collaboration point.

Story with LFTR LMS but around the same time as we introduced our Facebook group, there was another popular software called WP Fusion, which connects your website with LFTR on it and other popular software to CRM companies like Salesforce, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, and so on. And we’ve integrated our softwares together.

They work really well together. I help out in the WP fusion Facebook group. Jack, the founder of WP fusion, whenever somebody has like a marketing automation question or whatever, he comes over to our Facebook group, he helps out. So it’s just like this partnership where we’re leveraging each other’s community, but it’s a triple win.

It’s good for, me, it’s good for Jack and most importantly, it’s good for the user. They’re getting the help from that, that outside expert and the outside expert is also now getting exposure, potentially new customers. We recommend each other’s software. We both use each other’s software.

It’s just a strong partnership where two communities are working for the benefit of all.

Jason Coleman: So many good options there for how to think about these other communities. And you talked about adjacent communities that come before, after in the journey. And I think that like a phrase is like, what’s next is.

Is this one that can be used in a sense of if someone takes a course and at the end of it, they’re finished and you don’t have a community, if you don’t have your own, what’s next, it’s what’s next, maybe you pass it off to another community that, and you become an affiliate of theirs. Or you give someone sales leads for an even bigger course, or you could be on the other end of it where you reach out to some of these other products and communities.

That have that kind of what’s next moment, like they finish this thing, they graduate from that, but that person doesn’t serve that user anymore or have an upsell. And but you do, so it’s a good way to through these affiliate relationships. Cross pollinate between products and communities.

Yeah, I’m,

I’m thinking about interacting with community communities like Reddit in the subreddits in social media and places, or if you’re in someone else’s Facebook group and you, he gave some of the polite ideas around how you should interact there, like you should be helpful, you shouldn’t, always be promoting, you help people, even if they’re your competitors.

Another one. Like a way to think about it when you’re interacting in these communities online is to be yourself and very clearly make it clear, like who you are. I think there can be a temptation, for example, when you’re on a subreddit and someone says, what’s the best LMS to almost and you’re like, I have one to just like almost pretend you’re someone else or just answer and not be clear that you’re the owner of the product that you just linked to.

Because it, that feels more potentially more authentic to the moment or it’s like awkward to out yourself, but I think that’s troublesome if you don’t declare your biases and aren’t clear about who you are, these like internet sleuths will go through your history and be like, wait a second, this is Chris Badgett, you like, and they’ll think you’re up to shady stuff, even if you just felt a little awkward, you don’t want to make it awkward.

You just had a good answer for someone. So it’s almost yeah. Be a little obnoxious about it. I have a bias cause I’m Jason Coleman, the owner of this thing, but we have a really good product that answers that are really good blog posts that answers this question. Even on, on some sites, if they allow it in a signature or some point, put it in the footer, use your clear, your real name, stuff like that.

Declare that you’re biased about what you’re, how you’re responding. And I think people appreciate like on something on like Reddit where you can upvote and downvote. I’m always worried when I do this, it’s like, all right, I’m biased because I own this thing, but we have a really good solution.

Here’s how it works. And that, I think I’m worried people would downvote it. Cause yeah, you can’t trust that. There’s this, like in some of these forms, like Reddit knows the bias is there and they’re sensitive to it and they don’t want to talk to you. They want to talk to other people. But if you’re there and you’re like, Hey, I’m biased, but here’s, and you’re just useful.

I’m surprised you don’t get as many downvotes and people who know about your product might upvote it. And so people respect the honesty. So like another case of this is paid memberships pro, we have a bunch of free open source plugins and a lot of them are hosted on wordpress. org and wordpress.

org had their own support forum system and we had ours. And this has always been a little bit of a challenge because you. If you don’t support people in wordpress. org, it actually affects like your ranking, your search ranking, and there’s no way to disable it or just say, we don’t support it here.

We support it over here. They’re like, Hey, if you host on wordpress. org, you have to support on our system too. So actually there’s a support for them and I would pay people to monitor that and answer questions. But it’s still from time to time, as this happened, at least a couple of times, someone would give us a negative review either on wordpress.

org itself, or even on a third party type review site. And they’d be like, Paid memberships pro charges for support and they wouldn’t answer my question, but I went to WordPress and WordPress answered my question and I’m like, Oh, like WordPress didn’t answer your question. Like I paid someone to answer your question.

Like that person works for me, that person is part of, as part of paid memberships pro and it just wasn’t clear because it’s called wordpress. org. The website is a big WordPress logo everywhere and folks who, beginners mindset, they’re interacting with it. They’re confused about how they’re getting support.

So they just, all they saw was. When you go to slash supported payment, just pro we offer paid support. And now we, that forced us that feedback to we should more prominently focus on our free support. And especially now that we’ve moved outside the. org repo, we have to make our free support more prominent.

So we don’t lose people who just think you have to pay. But yeah, but what we did, so that’s one thing we did was like, Hey, made our phone free support through our our email and contact forms more clear. But we also on wordpress. org would put in our signature every time we help someone, Jason Coleman, owner of Paid Memberships Pro or your title at Paid Memberships Pro to try to make it a little more clear Hey, this is a Paid Memberships Pro person interacting with you.

There’s so many benefits to just like. Actually being yourself and being clear about who you are and being one human being per account rather than playing games and trying to, be a character or pretend you’re someone you’re not.

Chris Badgett: And that completes our session on community. And if you enjoyed this, I just want to say I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, Jason, and this has been a great conversation around community.

I’d encourage anybody who listens to this to think about. All the five hats in addition to the community hat, the expert, the entrepreneur, the technologist, the teacher, and the community builder. And if you’re really into this stuff, you’re not alone. So in many ways, Jason and I are really into this stuff.

We’ve been in it for over a decade. And finding the others, like we found each other through the internet. So if this is your niche and you’re feeling the vibe from, of this community you’re not alone. I just want anybody who hears this conversation to really think about that.

And Jason, I appreciate the great discussion we’ve had. Yeah, thanks.

Jason Coleman: Awesome.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast, Chris and Jason talk about how LMS technology has advanced and how LifterLMS revolutionized online learning by fusing course administration and content production in a seamless manner. In the past, educators had to produce structured material using independent e-learning authoring tools, which they then had to export and import into an LMS.

By developing on top of an already-existing content management system, LifterLMS, however, removed this unnecessary step and increased process efficiency. They stress how crucial it is to strike a balance between offering an all-in-one platform and preserving flexibility so that customers can combine LifterLMS with other tools they already use and modify it.

The platform’s inception may be traced back to their agency work, when they observed a notable requirement from customers who required a single solution to handle marketing automation and course management and delivery. Because of this necessity, they created LifterLMS, a system that not only makes creating courses easier but also changes to meet the changing demands of education entrepreneurs.

They also go over the more general trend of technology bundling and unbundling, in which software solutions either specialize in certain tasks or combine several functionalities onto a single platform.

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Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Welcome back to the Education Entrepreneur Mentor Series. Where we go over the five critical hats that you need to wear or find skills within your team members to become a successful education entrepreneur teaching online. Those five hats are becoming the expert, the entrepreneur, the teacher, the technologist, and the community builder.

Today in my conversation with my business partner at LifterLMS, Jason Coleman, we’re going to get into Becoming the technologist. Enjoy this session.

So now we’re going to get into the becoming a technologist and leveraging technology as an education entrepreneur. Let’s start with a conversation around learning management system or LMS technology. The big idea I want to throw out here and how this world has changed with learning management systems. Which technically isn’t a new technology, the internet.

Was created by the United States Defense Department. And then educational institutions started using the internet to share research. So learning and education and research has really been with the internet since the 70s, I believe. But learning management systems sprung up to help people structure content and create learning pathways.

And it’s evolved a lot over the last 40 years where we come into the story is this idea. I actually had a customer at LifterLMS tell me this, who’s been in the e learning space for a long time. He said that, did you know, you don’t have a learning management system, which we call an LMS. He said, you actually have a LCMS and I was like, what is that?

Please educate me about the business. So it’s a learning content management system. So with the old days. What you would do is you would have what was known as a e learning authoring tool. And you would create, your structured content. Your quizzes, and it would at the end be exportable as a package of e learning in a file.

And then you would go look around the world for a learning management system to plug that into. But where we came in with. LifterLMS is we built it on top of an existing content management system. So that the act of creating the content was already baked into the software of the learning management system.

So it took two industries and combined them into one. Which makes our lives easier as technology integrates and becomes a super app of online education. You don’t need as many separate solutions to deliver the end product from idea to. The cool thing about technology, just like with the iPhone, a thousand songs in your pocket. You’ve just simplified a user experience into a more efficiently packaged, better design solution.

So the wild thing about technology is that. You can today there’s been basically over the recent history of technology, a lot of bundling and integration. But also unbundling. If you look at something like marketing software, there’s like these all in one solutions. And then there’s these points solutions like, Oh, this software.

Just does lead capture this software just does this other little piece of a technology stack that you need. So with Lifter LMS as an example at the beginning I was fascinated with this idea of well. Let’s just make it as all in one as we can let’s make it a platform and that’s really what the course creator the educator the entrepreneur wants is. They don’t really want to think about the details of technology. They just want a platform to, take their idea and just plug it into the platform.

But then with Lifter LMS as an example. We wanted it to be all in one. But we also wanted it to be flexible, extendable, customizable and open source. Yes, it’s an all in one, but it’s also exists within the ecosystem of easy other tools.

Technology that you can plug into it so that you can use the tools you’re already using.

So the way this all started back in 2013 as we were building the first version of LifterLMS is. We actually had an agency where we were serving clients and the kind of early days of the online course. The coaching business community at this time, a lot of our agency clients were using a marketing automation software called infusion soft.

And that did a lot of marketing automation stuff, but they actually needed the digital product. They needed a way to deliver the courses, have progress tracking and all that. So we, provided, we kept building actually with open source software, which Infusionsoft wasn’t, but everything else they needed with WordPress.

We kept building these custom early types of learning management systems. And our clients needed it so bad that we’re like, we just need to build a product that meets this need for all of these people to have an integrated learning management system that also included all the tooling you would ever need to create the content as well, all in one place that was both affordable, customizable, and, integrates with tools and technology that people also want to use.

Jason Coleman: Lister LMS is. an awesome platform. Obviously, I think that this one I got involved, I think it strikes that balance of all in one and flexible. It, it hits it in the right spot. It won’t hit it for everybody. I remember being at a conference at the ASAE, the Association of Associations. And it was within reference to the association management software, which is an adjacent type thing.

And but I remember Yeah. Yeah. A few people notice, but one woman in particular is I literally can only, I only want one login and one password and you’re like, Oh, like you still have to have a web host and you’re like, you don’t use it a lot, but you have to log in there once and you still have, or your domain and your email service, like we can automate it, but you still have to log in once it was like our services and one login, but what it is the most important stuff that you work with day to day, That stuff keeps going into the core product and it’s edging.

But if you, it is flexible that you can take out different pieces. If you’re like, I’d rather do email this way, I’d rather do video this way. I’d rather hosted over here. But I don’t know if like how you think about that in terms of where, how do you find the sweet spot or folks, how folks who are thinking about the tools I feel like that when I was like, you’re maybe a little too worried about having logins.

Things like one pass are around now. But yeah, how do you talk people through that? Like thinking about what does all in one really mean?

Chris Badgett: I think about it with if somebody just has an idea and they buy a domain name and a web hosting account. And they want to teach online. If they only had to get one more tool, what would it be?

And but then there’s like these power users, more people who are maybe pretty developed in the technology sector who want all this customizability and flexibility. So there’s this kind of this idea when you create a solution that if you take care of the ends, the middle will take care of your. So if you take care of the person that’s just wants one thing to buy after they get their domain name and their hosting and they’re happy.

And then on the other end, somebody who needs like a developer who has tons of technology and wants to customize the software, it being open source, as long as these two characters are happy we’re the most flexible and good to go.

Jason Coleman: Sometimes folks want the absolute simplest thing. And they’ll go for a fully hosted closed environment.

You can’t take your content with you type place. And it’s hard to tell early on why you need that flexibility. You either have to be creative or like know something. Take our word for it that so often you start out that way. And then when you have traction and success, like there’s going to be something about your, the website or the tool you’re using to host your LMS that you’re going to want to change, tweak, alter.

And if you’re in a closed environment. That may not be the case. And even worse things happen sometimes. I think like medium is like a blogging platform and they changed like their business model. And then all of a sudden you had to think about that with, you can’t have free content on there anymore because they’re trying to make money selling subscriptions and you’re like, wait, I was just using this as a free blogging tool and it’s now it’s not for you anymore.

And that’s like a risky run when you go with a fully hosted service, if they. Think, Oh, we’re going to become like masterclass and only focus on like the top tier celebrities and you’re not there yet. You slowly become less important to them. And, but if you use an open system, like Lifter LMS, on top of WordPress on, general hosting, you have that flexibility of, it’s something, it’s a little more complicated, but if something changes, then you can take your content with you.

Export it and move to something totally different, or more than likely, you can just customize what’s already there, swap in a component that you need.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s there’s this idea of owning versus, versus renting. So on a hosted solution, you’re literally renting space on somebody else’s website.

But when you own it with a tool like Lifter LMS or Pavement Resources Pro, it’s your website, right? That’s a really big difference that people don’t realize they. Perhaps made the wrong decision earlier and they’re like, you know what, I do want to own my website and I want to own my data.

I want more flexibility. I want control over the future and the business decisions made about the software. That’s the power of

Jason Coleman: owning your website. The kind of flip side of using an LMS which has a lot of functionality, we’ve talked about various forms of it you can keep it simple. So I, and I see folks who want to get started and they feel like.

They have to organize it, into modules and courses and lessons and chapters and sections and or they, they need quizzes and assignments and tools and that they don’t have that stuff and they might have something simpler. And I always encourage folks definitely initially go lo fi like you can do something simple.

There’s. A lot of successful courses that made a lot of money and the course is like a single page or post on a website and you just have to pay for access to it, or it’s a single PDFs or like a PowerPoint is really popular. That might be a tool that you’ve already used to like in your, consulting work or like you’re giving a demonstration.

It’s just make that an even better PD PowerPoint or Google docs presentation and sell access that. So I definitely have paid like a hundred dollars for a marketing course. It was literally like a a PowerPoint presentation. That’s an awesome way, like to, you don’t have to use all that technology or a whole platform to get started.

You can sell something simple. And that said, like it’s sometimes it’s a start. So I’ve recommended, a paid memberships pro is a membership platform. And I remember I went to the podcast movement conference cause we had some podcasts as customers and I was talking to those folks and I was like I was thinking of ways of we could, have a premium version of your podcast and pay for the old episodes or the new episodes early or like an extra episode.

I was like, what are you guys trying to do? Let’s make a membership site. And like 99 percent of folks were like, it’s going to be a free podcast and I’m going to monetize through courses. I was like, Oh, so it was like the first time I was like, let’s do courses. And they’re like, how do you do it? And I gave them the spiel of you could be simple, right?

Your course could be a PowerPoint. And and I stayed there for a while, like as a business, like facilitating that and people would integrate paymericious pro with Lifter LMS and other LMS tools. That’s like part of the beauty of an open platform for WordPress. You can even take two platforms and make them work together and use the best parts.

But when I started publishing my own courses in that way, that started out as simple. Like pretty much single posts organized into sections. I realized, Oh, here’s the value of the LMS. I didn’t know if people were finishing the course I wanted to use some of those courses for like certification to make sure. Like I was training development partners to make sure they knew how to use our tool can help our customers.

I probably would want to write a quiz to force them. To both prove that they read the content and then also prove that they understood the content. And like piece by piece, I’m I started learning cause I got into it like, Oh yeah, all these things make sense. This is why we need video as well.

Like it should be multimodal and that kind of thing.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Keeping it simple is it’s a great place to start. Like I see a lot of folks these days, like pre selling a course that doesn’t exist. They create a Google document, like this is what’s going to be in the program. They’re making sure they get people and, but I think it’s important to, I’m a big fan of that.

Super simple, super manual. Hey, here’s my PayPal email address, send us much money if you want access. It starts in a month but also think about your iterative cycle. All right, first I’m just going to deliver it potentially as a live coaching program. All they’re going to get is like a calendar invite to a recurring zoom event for several weeks.

That’s the first version. And then, cool, we’re going to record those videos, and then that’s going to become the first version of the course. The, essentially replays of the coaching session. Then as you go further down the line, I think I’m going to re-shoot those lessons based on all the feedback I’ve gotten from my learners.

Maybe put in some knowledge checks like quizzes. Oh, I think I’m gonna add a certification program So it’s important to think like how far are you willing to go or do you want to go? you always just want to do like a Virtual meeting coaching or do you want to end up with something more robust in the end?

I think about that issue with web hosting a lot It’s great to save money and keep it low tech and get the cheap low cost web hosting But if you really think your thing is going to get traction, at least choose a web host that’s going to be able to scale with you and provide more features without this massive like infrastructure change later.

Let’s talk about e commerce. It’s never been easier to sell digital products and programs on the internet to essentially make money online. One of, one of my favorite stories about you, Jason, is you were one of the first, if not the first person to create an e commerce transaction on a WordPress website.

I’m sure it was a lot harder then than it is now. What’s happened, since that time, like 15 years later, is that your website, there’s there’s like a mindset change and kind of a reality changes. Websites used to just be like. A marketing info content. We call this like web 1.

0. They’re just, it’s like a brochure for a business as an example, but you still had to go to this different thing, like the actual business. And then we added web 2. 0, which introduced interaction, like social media, commenting systems, forums, and so on. And then that’s continued to evolve and we’re on the cusp.

Some might argue we’re at web 3. 0, which is the internet of value, which is like a totally kind of new thing. But e commerce has never been easier. You can create digital products and programs and services on your website. Accepting the money and offloading all the details of how somebody, the computer across the world and there’s a credit card and you get paid into your bank account and they get access to content or events or anything is now quite easy once you have a base level.

understanding of technology. And then the software, not only does it simplify like the actual selling process, but also the access. This is the beauty of like membership software and LMS software is the access. Do they get a free trial, do they get a paid trial? And do they get everything?

Does it drip out over time? What if they miss a payment on a recurring plan? Is this a course cohort that’s only for six months? All that are just, is just settings and software now. So if you can think of it, it’s now easily possible with tools like Lifter LMS and PayMemberships Pro. The other thing you can do is sometimes I think people when it comes to e commerce think a little too small in the sense that like you can, this is what made me fall in love with teaching online and what continues to motivate me today is that this idea that you could publish something on your website and then anybody anywhere in the world with an internet connection and a browser basically on a smartphone, computer or tablet.

Can access your content or, and potentially buy stuff from you. But when it comes to e commerce we love Stripe as an example. But PayPal is a way of also exchanging and buying things on the internet is accepted in more countries in the world, and that may change. So you can actually offer people different ways to pay you through your website.

There’s even crypto payment gateways and all kinds of payment gateways that you can use Stripe and PayPal are probably the most popular. So pro tip is if you’re doing the e commerce offer those two, and you might actually make more money, help more people because you’re. Giving people access to, to buy from you based on the country they live in and so on.

And one thing I just want to acknowledge, and I’ve seen this with every digital entrepreneur I know, is that it never gets old seeing a payment notification, however you get that. Like for me, I have a thing in our company Slack, a channel where I see the payments that have come in and I look at it every day.

And, while I was asleep. These people bought the software, this person paid with PayPal, this person paid with Stripe, and it just never gets old. It literally like, when is this going to get old? It’s been over a decade. And my very first one, just to tell the story I created an online gardening and permaculture course with my wife.

And and I started blogging about that too, like how I built the site, which is how I started, starting to form ideas about Lifter LMS. This, cause this was before it existed, but anyways. That first sale, I, published the course, went to sleep, woke up the next morning, somebody in New Zealand named Ron, who I’ve never met, never heard of had purchased the course overnight and here we are, this is like 12 years or 13 years later from.

Waking up and seeing that purchase notification from New Zealand.

Jason Coleman: I remember I used to get text messages every time there was a sale and we were having like five sales a day. It wasn’t that big a deal, but we ran our first really big sale in like 2017 when we digging in the pay mergers pro and we dropped the price and ran a sale.

And I think we had 150 sales that day. So my, my phone was. Buzzing every few minutes. I remember my son was younger at the time and he asked me he’s what is that? And I explained, sometimes I over communicate to the kids when they were younger and I was like, Oh, we had a sale. So he was like 47.

I just got 47 and we were grocery shopping. And then he wanted to get something at checkout and he’s you just got 47. You can afford this. And I was like, Oh, he’s getting lippy with me. And yeah, I turned the thing off my phone cause it’s too annoying. But yeah it’s awesome.

And I think of the person on the other end, it’s like, it’s a whole human being doing something awesome and launching something, building stuff and trusting. Yeah. Yeah. It’s amazing. And you thought about like all around the world. Yeah. So it’s this is related to e commerce. But I want to touch on that point.

To help motivate folks. That the internet is so huge. Like our user base is around the world. And I think of I forget exact statistics, but like every McDonald’s has like serves 20, 000 people or maybe it’s 40, 000 people in the United States. And you can think of like the McDonald’s and roughly only the people near it can go and get served by that McDonald’s.

But if you’re building, so if you built course content and people had to come get it from you in person, you can only serve the people like that you can touch on the, and no matter how niche your subject matter is I think you have. One of your early customers or successful customer teaches folks how to make balloon animals and stuff.

Yeah. And you’re like, it’s there’s a few balloon animal clowns and service folks. And there’s but it’s in the, the 20 mile radius that the McDonald’s serves here. There’s maybe one or two, like you can’t make a lot of money selling that course by hand. But on the internet, there’s thousands and thousands of these folks.

So that’s the same story for every single niche. And that gets me excited about like we serve folks in that same way through software and education we do, but every topic, no matter how small, has like a worldwide audience. And it’s pretty awesome.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And just to put a number to the balloon artist guy, his name is Ziv Raviv.

In his first year, I think he sold over, I think it was like 237, 000 for his balloon artists Academy. And a micro niche, this isn’t a major niche. I just want to add, there’s this social science concept called Dunbar’s number, which if you think before internet, before social media, just regular old flesh and blood human, we can only keep in contact.

Or keep up relationships with 140 people. Otherwise our brain just can’t handle that many relationships. So when you think about if you can do something at scale with an online education program, you get past that human limit. Like you said, like a teacher typically has 20, 30 kids in the classroom, but you can now have 3000, 300, 000 and it’s just wild, but the human mind isn’t really designed to even comprehend the scale of the internet.

It’s just too big. It’s like the number of stars in the sky. Like usually you can’t comprehend it.

Jason Coleman: We also, we’re talking about gateways for e commerce. So the gateway is that. Service that helps you collect credit card payments or crypto payments or bank ACH payments sometimes. And I think the big idea and my advice here is to use the very best payment gateway.

It’s such a core important piece of your business. I’ve been working in e commerce for 20 years now and early with WordPress e commerce, like you said, and did it myself and watched the tooling get better and better. Have watched some of these gateways come and go and popularity and service and deal with the changing tide of different rules and taxing across the world.

Stripe does it best, like ever since they launched until now, they’ve done it best and without calling out other gateways, like they’re so good that the other gateways are partnering with Stripe to use Stripe technology and their own platforms or like part, be hosted on by Stripe or bundled up with Stripe’s tools.

And you mentioned like offering multiple payment solutions. I think Stripe itself will do that in particular. There’s a few different ways to use Stripe, but if you use it, they’re offsite, they call it Stripe Checkout, so that when someone clicks the pay, they actually go to the Stripe window where it pops up on the screen, and the checkout experience is on the Stripe website, especially if you do that, you can enable all kinds of payment methods, and I think there’s literally like 150 across the world for your customers that way, and they’re, experimenting with crypto now, and some places are even wrapping PayPal through that method, but it’s weird business.

Thanks. I think so allow as many payment methods as possible also make use of their tax services and subscription services if you can they, if you’re only using stripe, it makes taxes a little bit easier because then you you have one source to send to your, your accountant of where the money goes and how to do it.

And they also can calculate sales tax with every rule around the world. And their subscription services like. Because at the scale they’re at, they have relationships with banks. This is a good thing and a bad thing. Sometimes people get surprised by it. When someone’s credit card expires, Stripe somehow automatically has relationships with the banks, where they’re like, oh, I got your new number, and you didn’t even have to update.

And it’s almost like a weird privacy thing. I think some people, when they get a new card, they assume hey, this is cool, all my subscriptions are gonna cancel. But Stripe is no, I got you, I already gave them your new number. So you gotta be careful as a consumer if you think, just cause you got a new number stuff isn’t gonna charge you.

But that’s the kind of thing that like other gateways and at the software level, we don’t have relationships with the banks to automatically get someone’s credit card number and update it. So using their tooling and their services around it are all really good. And, they increase sales, they reduce friction and the checkout in particular.

So got sold on the Kool Aid at the Stripe conference last year, Stripe sessions. Also because I deal with this right as a developer who builds the tooling around these things. I firsthand feel the challenge of handling credit cards and spam. Privacy and subscriptions with and even something as simple as. It’s called a zip code here, it’s called a post code and postal code in the UK or something. The whole country of India, I forget the exact details, I’m probably misrepresenting it, but they outlawed subscription recurring payments. And they’re like, oh, what do we do now?

So like, all these different rules, and Stripe had a presentation or slide where they showed all those, and then they demoed their offsite Stripe checkout. Automatically adjust. So if you’re buying from a certain country and Stripe knows you, this is how you usually pay. You usually, they remember, cause there’s at such a big scale, they call it link.

Some like I used you, even people may have run into it. You’re on a website, you say bye. And it’s I sent you a number. Is this it? Does your phone cool? I got you. And so the checkout is really fast. So all these tools make it easy to like both, serve to as much of the world that Stripe supports.

And also like they’re a huge company that’s optimizing and using like artificial intelligence to optimize the checkout form. And so some folks when they build a website and in many ways, including the checkout, like they, they want, like the experience to be part of their brand and the feel unique and special.

I think checkout, there are ways to like make, get your colors and your logo and make sure it’s clear this is your website, that branding is important. But the kind of feeling unique, you don’t want your checkout to be unique. You want your checkout to be as common as possible. Like they do this all the time as fast as possible.

You can do that with Stripe. There’s that’s my Stripe commercial.

Chris Badgett: And on that note, I think it’s really important not to overcomplicate it. For example, if you’re using Lifter LMS to power your learning management system, you don’t need to become a developer and learn about. The PHP and react code and everything that makes it work e commerce with all its nuance, like PCI compliance and fraud and everything, you get to a level where the software is so good that you just have to trust it.

Literally like with Lyft or LMS, install the Lyft or LMS Stripe connector plugin, press connect to Stripe, let it know which bank account you want the money to go in, and you’re good to go. But if you really want to learn the nuances of e commerce, you can, but the tools have never been easier and more approachable.

And you mentioned recurring payments and challenges in India. It just got me thinking about recurring payments in general. There’s this idea that a lot of us want. Recurring revenue wouldn’t it be nice to have recurring revenue? Of course it would be, but if you’re going to do that, you really need to have recurring value.

So just to, take a look back to what’s the easiest way to get recurring value in a topic we discussed in the last session. Is you may have a self study DIY online course, but if you just add one monthly office hours hour where you interact with people in a virtual meeting and support them, now you have recurring value.

That’s probably the easiest way to do that. So just think about that with your pricing and if you can do recurring revenue or not. Let’s look at kind of design technology. So in this world of online education, there’s three, three layers, I like to think about it. There is software, hardware, and what I call wetware, which is like human beings.

And we’re going to talk about that in the community aspect that’s coming in a little bit. But in terms of. Some people are really good at software, but then there’s also all this hardware, like your computer itself cameras, microphones, like we’re in a pro setup right now making this with some of the best hardware, but this can all be overwhelming. If you’re going to create multimedia content, what are the essentials? And the way I think about it is if you’re going to become an online education entrepreneur, you do need to become essentially a personal media company. And this is, has gone mainstream. What’s the number one thing a kid says they want to be when they grow up?

It’s a YouTuber. Yeah. A YouTuber. So video producer. And you used to have to be in Hollywood and have the set and the crew and all the stuff to make that happen. But now everybody can do it from their phone or their computer. So mastering, I say mastering, but just getting started with video production, editing, and publishing.

That the video content is a skill that every creator needs to have. I’ve coached many video content creators in the LMS niche. And if somebody is like super beginner, like what’s the absolute easiest solution, the place to start is you open up a virtual meeting, like zoom with yourself by yourself.

You hit the record button in zoom. You do your presentation, talking head or slides, slideshow and all that. Do zero editing and then take the video file and publish it to your video hosting. And you’ve got it. So that’s like the simple entry into video editing. And it’s an infinite well that you just work on upgrading your video over time.

I’ve been working with video. I’m 46 years old. I started working with video probably around the age of 16 and even still like we’re in a professional video studio that can do way better than what I could do as my own personal media company. High quality audio also matters. If I had to pick one, I would go for good audio before I went for good video.

And often, what’s the level one of that. is use earbuds that have a mic on it. If you’re recording, let’s say on your phone or on your computer so that you’re not using the stock computer microphone, which is typically not as good quality, although that’s also getting better and better.

There’s also so many great USB microphones that are higher quality, let’s say in the 50 to 200 price range that you just plug it into your computer. You’re good to go with like superior than most audio or audio quality. Then when it comes to visual communication, one of the things you want to think about too is branding and consistency.

So like when you’re creating images or you’re getting fancy on your videos and you’re putting your name under your talking head, it’s called your lower thirds or whatever. You got to develop your brand, like use the same colors, your brand colors, use the same font, don’t change the font, use the same typography, like just be consistent and nobody’s great at branding on day one.

I often recommend hiring a some branding service to help you come up with your brand guide to get you started, particularly if you’re not a strong designer. But designers are design is funny because everybody has an opinion and kind of thinks they’re above average, but it’s not the case. Even the LifterLMS logo, which you can see on the screen here, that was outsourced to a company called 99 designs.

That was about 300 or as a design competition. We picked the one we liked the most. And they came up with our typography and we’ve continued to iterate on our brand and you can always do a rebrand over time, but. And in terms of your visual presentation, consistency is really important.

Also being consistent with your quality of video and audio, but you can always upgrade and experiment with upgrading over time. Just get on the train, get the fundamentals and get started.

Jason Coleman: I didn’t realize that it was a 99 designs logo. That’s one of the best 99 designs logos. Yeah. And it’s in logo tournament and some of those, I don’t know what the popular ones are now.

You can get good stuff out of there. And, you often can take that and then take that to a designer, like they, the process is useful. They help you think about your brand and your logo. That’s a really cool tool. I I also, like you were talking about uploading video kind of rough edits on doing the zoom webinar and then just uploading as is.

I, it’s funny we’ve been doing some YouTube content for the past few years and I found we’ve been trying to produce and sometimes we’re just like, whatever, just record it live and push it. And it’s like a longer piece. And sometimes that content does better. So I don’t know what it is about the YouTube algorithm or like the YouTube viewer that, they appreciate that long form content.

And then another tool suggestion for someone like me who thinks more like a writer and also just a good video editor itself and has other useful features is Descript and we use that lifter and paid memberships pro and Descript basically what they do is you import the video and they create a real time transcription.

It can do cool things like remove ums and ahs and likes for you automatically and automatically edit. But that same process, then you can rewrite the transcript or delete things from the transcript and it will automatically delete parts of the video. Video editing is like splicing and you gotta find the spot and figure out, I’m like, was I really talking about this and play, pause and scrub?

But if you see the transcript, you’re just like, I don’t want to say that you delete the sentence and the video that corresponds to that sentence disappears and they have all this awesome technology to make it still sound natural and they have a good they also have a good studio sound which is like a filter on your voice, which is this kind of magic filter that makes bad microphone sound better.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, we’re in a, we’re in a professional studio right now. I, but I’ve been blown away with my amateur setup at home. And I just clicked the studio sound button, wait 30 seconds. It’s sounds similar to this. I tend to do a lot of ums and ahs and it it just cleans it right up. And it’s important to think about like the pace of technology change.

When I first started editing videos, I was using iMovie and this is back in around 2006 to even cut a clip, cut a piece out and then move it. It would then need 30 seconds to process and now they’re, it just, everything has gotten exponentially faster and it’s just getting easier and easier. You just need to start. It’s all about starting.

Jason Coleman: So we also can talk about some of the, design aspects of writing. I think it’s very useful to develop what we call like content briefs, a template every time you write something and publish something, try to stick to this format. We also have a writing guide, and that’s especially important if you have a team. Where you want to keep a consistent voice across all the content that you’re doing.

But it’s also important as a reminder for yourself if you’re small. I think I’ll find the ones we use at Paid Memberships Pro and open them up and share them somehow with this. But like the important aspects of the content brief. So it’s before you start writing you actually like before I say, if you like have a a moment of clarity and it’s like the writing is pouring out of you or the video is pouring out of you, lean into that.

That’s like number one, like you’re the, you’ve become an expert. And now you’re using technology to deliver stuff to the world don’t slow yourself down or if you typically operate like a faucet, and even if you don’t people have these bursts of inspiration, so lean into that when you have it, but a lot of the time you’ll have writer’s block, you won’t have inspiration, you’ll be like, I know I have to write about this, but I don’t know where to begin, I don’t know where to start, and having the content brief helps, we do them for blog posts, and it has reminders, so before you start to write, you’re like, who is the audience of this?

What are you telling them? What’s like the basic information? We have a sales funnel, so sales funnel is a huge topic we could talk about a lot, but basically at the top, you’re like reaching new people and getting their attention. And at the bottom you’re converting them into a sale.

And and in the middle there’s a couple steps depending on which kind of sales funnel you’re using. Knowing which part of the funnel they’re at changes the writing. Cause if The, you’re writing something that’s near the conversion stage of the funnel, that it’s like the bottom of your, what you’re writing should be like now buy it, or you should talk more about buying and the features.

And if you’re writing something at the top where you’re just trying to get attention you can’t, you need, you want to be more current topical, there’s a different form format and think different way that you’ll go about writing. We also talk about use case and we also think about SEO. Here, I’ll talk a little bit about SEO too, but in our brief, we say that keywords that we’re targeting and then we also have a writing guide, which is a separate document that just talks about style and I’ll find that so we can share it.

But basically parts of our writing guide is to be shorter, clear sentences like no contractions. So instead of saying doesn’t say does not and this is right, cause we’re a technical writing often and we have an international audience. We found that. Stuff that’s clear, fewer contractions translates easier, or if you’re a non native speaker, it’s easier to read.

 It’s weird like that, something as simple as a contraction, which like is meant to speed up how you type and speak, it actually slows down how you read. If you take doesn’t and turn it into does not. I think typically the typical reader, especially non native English reader, like reads it faster.

And so it’s this weird counterintuitive thing. And then another rule we have is like no exclamation points or as few as possible. It’s I think maybe I used to say no. And the marketing team has said can we have one? And you’re like, that’s it. Like per post per email, you get one. Cause it loses its effectiveness after the first one.

If everything is exciting and oh my God and Russian free save ship click. It doesn’t work. And I think you’ll find about exclamation points. Oftentimes you write them with the exclamation point. Cool. You were excited when you wrote that down. If you take it out, like periods are strong too. It’s like a stronger statement.

You’re not like, we’re running a sale. It’s you take it out of we’re running a sale period. Gotcha. And another point on search engine optimization, SEO, people often think about this when writing. There’s all agencies that write and they’re like SEO focused. They’re like, Oh, we do it like, they start with SEO.

That’s how they think about the writing process that can be useful. Some of them do good work, but I think it’s better to just the tactics and search engine optimization are always changing. There was a Google update yesterday and we’re waiting to see how does our search engine ranking change now that Google updated things, but what’s always true.

And Google says this, and you just have to trust them that they’re actually trying to get the best content in front of their users is just be as useful as possible. And a very clear way to make sure you’re doing that is to search for something that you would like to land on. We’re talking about, yeah, I don’t know, how to write a content brief and you want to teach people how to write content briefs, search for how to write a content brief, find the top result, maybe go past the ads, or maybe there’s a weird Reddit thread that’s not a real page, find that.

The first real piece of content, that’s a result and then copy what they did or copy it and make it better. Like you want to do everything they did. You want to make a better version of that resource. It’s if I was searching for this, what would I need? And we’ve found success that way.

So there’s a lot of like tactics and SEO strategy and there’s little things that you should do. It’s, and I won’t get into it. It’s it’s easy and you should just do it. If you’re actually like, I’m trying to rank for this, the best way I’ve seen to do that is to just find the number one result and make a better version of that page.

They have a video, you need a video, they have an outline, you need an outline. And they have this, you probably need that. But a better one, and sometimes you can do it it can feel overwhelming, but, you’re exceptional, and they’re probably sitting on their laurels And maybe not necessarily focused on your market or your target, niche.

Chris Badgett: That’s great. There’s so much in here. I have three three things to tie in here. One is that when it comes to templates, there’s this idea of thinking in systems. And we talked earlier in another session about having a teaching framework. Like key ideas, strategies, tactics, action items, case studies.

There’s lots of different teaching frameworks, but templates make your life so much easier. A content brief gives you a templated structure on how to approach a writing project. If you use a tool like Canva and you do designs, let’s say you’re doing YouTube thumbnails or video thumbnails for inside your course or whatever.

Do you have a template in Canva that’s on brand that you can modify and make different? Think about creating these systems that makes your life so much better. And then instead of always improving individual pieces, improve your system. And then the future just gets better faster. You mentioned funnels and we could probably have a whole section on that, but we’ve talked a lot in this, these sessions that about thinking through time and not delivering.

Just, Hey, here’s my knowledge. Here’s my library. Good luck. Now you can know what I know, but actually thinking about a user journey through time. So once I learned this concept, it really changed how I thought about education and marketing and helping customers and clients get the result that they want.

So I’m just going to lay out what a funnel is in the, from the stages standpoint. Whatever your course is about, I’ll use an example to make it so I’ll use a case study or an example to make the concepts more useful. So let’s say I was teaching people how to create their first online course.

The first stage is called unaware. So this is where someone doesn’t know the problem they have. This is the hardest stage to market to, but you can, if you think about it. So let’s say somebody’s in a job, they don’t like it. They feel creative, they don’t know what, what’s missing. And they feel like there’s something more, they want to make more money, but they’re unaware of what the core problem is.

But then the next stage is problem where it’s like, you know what? I want to work on line or I want to create a digital product. So they’ve become problem aware of I want to quit my job, I want to do this other thing, or I want to get a side hustle going in the experiment over here.

And then they become solution aware, where alright, there’s a lot of different ways to do online businesses. Maybe I think I want to do a course. So now they’re aware of a particular solution. And then they become product aware. Okay, what is, what are the tools, how can I create an online course?

And they come up with five or 10, Oh, there’s this company and that company and this company and that company. And then they become most aware, like they’ve made a selection. I want to move forward with this tool. And this is where like sales starts kicking in. You’re getting close to that conversion point.

And the conversion happens. So that’s like the top of the funnel all the way down to the conversion point. And then what a lot of people miss is like the inverse other side that happens, which is okay. In my hypothetical example of I want to create an online course. I’ve got the software, I’ve got somebody who’s going to coach me through it, help me through it and everything.

Then the other side, or the customer success side happens, which is onboarding. Alright, welcome to my program about how to build an online course. Here’s the community, go introduce yourself here’s how to get started with the tool that you’re using and so on that’s the onboarding to keep your learner, like the orientation, if you will.

And then there’s what’s called activation, which is, what’s that level that if I can just get them past here, they’re going to stick, and they’re, they’re making good progress, and they’re definitely not going to refund or have remorse for choosing this training. And then there’s retention, like what if it’s an annual program and we’re getting up to you’ve been with us a year, what’s it going to take to stay with us another year?

Or a lot of things are monthly. You have those monthly like retention and if they don’t stay, that’s called churn. And then there’s expansion where, okay, they’ve stayed, they’re staying. And now you have premium offers. Maybe it’s like private coaching. It’s an upsell. So there’s a whole timeline that, that happened right there.

So that’s the marketing funnel and the customer success funnel.

Jason Coleman: I think we need like one of those animated, of course things. Yeah, we’ll fund that.

Chris Badgett: They might upsell us at this recording studio to put that together. It might be a service they have here. And then SEO is also cool. I just wanted to throw in a quick pro tip.

I’ve been a student of SEO for a long time. Stands for search engine optimization. Like doing actual work to get your webpage, your content to rank at the number one for a search term. And I had a particular piece of content that I really wanted to rank number one. It was ranked 27 for a phrase. I worked with a great team that helped put together another piece.

It got to 23 or 17 in the search result. It was very competitive. And then I got some coaching, which we talked about earlier about being a lifelong learner about so I could study SEO and get better. And the coach made one comment, which was like, there’s this one article that if you just go read it and do everything in the article, I’m 99 percent sure you’ll get to number one.

So I did that. I went to that article, it’s by Brian Dean, the website is called Backlinko, and it’s called Google’s 200 ranking factors, the complete list. Then over the course of six months, I slowly implemented everything in that article. Now for the past year, this piece that I was trying to rank stays at number one.

It’s almost always at number one. I still continuously improve and tweak it. But just wanted to give a pro tip out there and that’s advanced SEO to like, go do all these 200 things. And like I said, I’ve been in it for a while, but it’s a, it’s definitely a nice skill to learn, or at least learn how to think that way.

So

Let’s turn the page in technology to one of the coolest parts, which is automation. So if you think about it one of the things that makes us human is our ability to use tools, right? Helped us invent. Agriculture, the industrial revolution, the information age, and it just keeps going on and on.

And now we have these tools that allow us to automate repetitive tasks or one off tasks that we no longer have to deal with our own inputs or reduce the amount of inputs. Automation is how you get leverage. So not only can you publish a course or membership. Online and reach the whole world. You can automate a lot of the processes involved in running that kind of initiative or business.

In the early days of LifterLMS, we had a saying that we wanted to scale the human touch with robotics. So what that means is use automation, use technology, but don’t forget about the human in the system. There’s this idea that, Oh, I make my online business, my course, and I’m on the beach and my, with my laptop for our work week, you can get there, but there’s nothing there’s passive income is a myth in my opinion.

But there’s so much you can do to do the work of five people, 10 people, a hundred people through automation and, reduce that demand on your. Individual human contribution. So I like to think about email automation as a good place to start. You can run an entire online business with just like a Gmail account, just manually reaching out to people, responding to people, sending them things that they asked for, but you can automate all of that, which the place to start, like we’ve talked in these sessions about.

Seeing patterns and frequently asked questions. So there’s two main places to start when you see those frequently asked questions, tying that this into the sales funnel or the customer success funnel side of the funnel. If you’re getting repetitive questions that like a lot of people have, you can create an email automation campaign.

Let’s say there they haven’t bought yet. So they’re in the prospect part of your funnel. Where you’re addressing this question in advance, even if they haven’t asked and email automations, you spread out over hours or days or weeks. So it’s like this drip campaign that just keeps running.

And same with onboarding Oh, anytime somebody starts this program, they always ask us. So after they buy maybe four hours later or the next day, there’s this email. Welcome to the program. Here are the next three things you should do next. Introduce yourself in the community, start with the intro course, and reply to this email with your biggest challenge so we can point you to the resource that would be most helpful for you.

That’s an example, by the way, of scaling the human touch with robotics, that last piece. Cause I didn’t try to automate that interaction away. I also said, reply to this email, which means a human is going to personal moment and like help that person in a unique way. So I definitely don’t recommend automating everything.

And then when it comes to e learning, the learning management system actually automates a ton of stuff like progress, tracking curriculum, delivery. You can get advanced with certifications, gamification, like achievement badges. Think about all the grading that teachers do in a traditional classroom, like on paper, like when we were kids, multiple choice quiz or test.

You can now have that be 100 percent automated. Just the website will do all the grading to instantly deliver the result. And the last thing I’ll just say tactically about not never is to never stop automating. It’s not that I’m obsessed with it, but I’m always looking for new opportunities to automate and get a little more leverage, a little more time back.

And when I have more time back, then I can be the human in the machine and be like, how can I create more value than anybody else for my avatar and deliver that really unique human aspect? And one of my favorite forms of automation, I’ve always been really big into video. When I was a high schooler, I was that guy in the friend group who had the video camera and take it with us, like rock climbing or hanging out and just filming stuff.

So I’ve been around video for a long time. I fell in love with the idea of video marketing. And so I see video as automation. I think of when you put yourself on YouTube as an example. And you’re just being authentically you and you’re just trying to help people. Maybe you’re marketing, content marketing.

Maybe you’re trying to help your customers, whatever you’re trying to do. You’re literally creating a digital twin of yourself that multiple people can be watching at once. So as Lifter LMS started to grow, as an example, I look at our YouTube channel as like multiple team members.

There’s a metric I follow called watch time. Not, likes and views are cool, but the actual amount of time somebody spent consuming your video content has far surpassed what I could do in real time without ever sleeping. So there’s like these, this group of team members are just constantly talking and created.

Over a thousand videos. And that’s how you get leverage.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. Yeah, every 40 hours of watch time is like a full time job, full time person. Yeah. Like just selling your stuff. It’s awesome. A couple of points on, when you’re, you said automate everything, which I agree with, and I think it’s related to a topic we talked about earlier about standard operating procedures and systems documentation for building a business.

And I always feel like an early version of like full automation, where like a human isn’t involved at all, it handles it, is like you write down the steps for a human to do that. And so these things are very related to me where you, I like starting with you write the SOP, here’s how I, as a human, do this thing, and now you have the guide, and are there steps in there that you can just automate a step, or you can, you learn how you can automate the whole thing.

But all you could also automate by outsourcing. So like another human can do this so you can hand over that SOP to someone and it’s as good as automated. So yeah it’s interesting thing how those two things are related. And then, we talked about email marketing and different kinds of sending emails in different forms and specifically answering like FAQ type questions by email.

I know when we do this in what we call email series of certain aspects. I generally tend folks as I’m working with them to email more than they feel comfortable with. It’s it’s almost always there because I spent like the FAQ is a great example because. If you say you had five really big questions people are thinking about before they convert about your course.

So that’s really five emails is probably best. It’s not, do you have any questions? Cause everybody just ignores it. But if the subject line is like, are you worried about X? You’re like, yeah, I am. Click and read. So each of those FAQs has to be a separate email. Say everyone only has one of those issues.

Those emails have a 20 percent open rate, which may or may not be good. But four out of those five emails won’t get opened. For the other one. And so if people are metric minded and they’re looking, they’re like, we send these five females, it feels inefficient. Most people aren’t even reading them.

It’s oh, but everyone who reads the one, focus on the conversions, and I think that’s good in general for a lot of the even YouTube stats is if you’re comparing yourself to like Mr. Beast, you’re like, you want like millions and millions of views. You’re like, nah, like hundreds of views, hundreds thinking of it and watch time.

But by email and most, anyway, so back to email, emailing, you should email more than you really feel comfortable with. People will get off your list. And Jared, I like to say, if someone’s like seeing your content and they want to get off the list, like they probably weren’t like a customer or they weren’t in your target market.

You, you can overdo it and be open to that feedback when you feel it and feel out if they’re actually a customer when they say you’re emailing too much. And you’re like, wait, is this like a real customer or my target market? Maybe I can combine some emails. But yeah, probably email more than you’re comfortable with.

Something else that, so when I think about automation, another thing I think about is artificial intelligence, AI, and that’s a big movement, it’s a big way. The end game of that is it’s automating almost everything a human can do. The tooling like the large language model chat, GPT, like tools are so good right now that you really have to be using these tools.

And I know some folks have like ethical concerns about the tools and how they scrape data from, artists and musicians and writers and. Who owns that content. I think there’s issues. It’s just like the MP3s where like it becomes so easy to share music that it’s just going to happen.

And you’re like, how do you, the world has to change to do this. It’s I think it was like if a robot is reading the internet faster than I can and learning, it’s just if I read the internet to learn too, it just does it way better than me. But anyway, so I think these tools aren’t going to go away.

So the best performers are people who are doing, doing the best and performing even in educating folks and getting the word out and running businesses are going to be using these tools. And so you should make sure that you, the people who work with the tools are going to benefit. So I think you should strategies to augment yourself with AI.

And so again, I’m talking about chat, GPT cloud, by anthropic perplexity is a good one for research, but these tools, you basically talk to the AI and they help you do things. And for writing in particular a method that you can use with chat, GPT, what I like to do is. This is an example of a good way to use this tool if you’ve only interacted with them sparsely.

So if I’m going to write a course, what I’ll do is I’ll write up my rough notes, really rough. Just dump out of my brain, don’t worry about punctuation, just space. I’ll take random notes from here, random notes from here. A conversation with someone else, so some of it’s my own words. I’ll put links in.

I’m like, I want the feel of this. So it’s very rough and it’s scattered and you almost have to fight it. And now I’m a writer, right? So I almost have to fight it, but the tendency to want to actually start writing and putting the thoughts together at this point, but if you dump that into something like chat GPT and you ask it, Hey, can you write a first draft?

And you even can update that content brief and that writing guide. And it’ll take that into account as well. It’ll write like a decent first draft and depending on what you’re talking about By decent, like it’s legible, it’s real English, and we’ve worked with some of these there’s good writing agencies, and there’s subpar ones, and it’s it’s funny sometimes you have a human write something before these, it’s like it’s it sounds like a robot wrote it, even though it’s a human who’s not actually engaging in the writing process doesn’t do as good of a job as these AI tools do at writing stuff.

So you get a first, a good first draft, then you edit the draft. And make sure and key point here is that you have to double check everything. I say, we also use AI tools for programming and we use AI tools for writing, and I would say every single line has to be checked and made sure it’s truthful.

It’s, if it’s code, it actually runs, it actually does what it says it’s supposed to do. Instead of writing you really have to. Go through and edit that draft a lot. You don’t want to just fix a couple things. Then, actually, after then, when you have a second draft that you wrote based on that first draft, you can ask ChatGPT for advice.

What I try to do is not just give it and say, hey, make it better, but say give it the thing you’ve written and say, can you give me some recommendations? And use your content brief for how I can do this better. Tell me what I should change. And it’ll say, it’ll give you like the advice and also make suggestions and then you can apply the suggestions because if you dump something in and just ask it to make it better it it can make changes you’re not aware of it, like does what’s called a hallucination or if you change things, it was, it gets confused.

But if you just ask it for advice and then you apply the advice at that stage of writing, it’s a good thing to do. And like another example of like how great AI is and like how it’s useful. I really try to, I use it in almost everything I’m doing to help me think. And used AI to help myself write the notes that we’re reading off of and using to guide this video.

So Chris has like a great outline. He went through it in one of the earlier sessions. And you had your talking points in a lot of these ahead of me. And so then I said, Hey, this is what the general topic is. This is the bigger overarching topic. Here’s what Chris said. And then ChachiPD knows about me.

There’s like a system prompt and it has this thing called memory where oh, okay. You run paid memberships pro. Now I know that you’re Jason Coleman. This is and then I can dump a little, and I would, we had, there’s a story part to this and I would write the story and be like, I want to talk about this.

And I’m like, I don’t really know, like what’s the right term for this. What’s this called? Did anyone else talk about this? I forget which website I heard this from first. And then chat GPT would take a stab at those notes. Here’s the topic points. Here’s the tactics. And here’s some information about other people who have talked about this.

And sometimes I’d be like, I actually don’t know anything about what you’re talking about. That’s actually not me. You’re, that’s something else. But sometimes it’ll nail it. It’s Oh yeah, that’s exactly how I operate. I know all about this. And thanks for helping me remember who, where I got that point from.

And it gave me a starting point for the, what is the strategy called? I was like, what’s the best way to phrase this? And I’m rambling about it. Like AI is good about. The zeitgeist and how people phrase things. So a lot of stuff we do, and that’s another way it’s useful for learning is there’s different ways to talk about this.

People use different terms, but that the AI is. Like literally programmed to be like the general, synthesis of everything on the internet. So it’s really good at pulling out this is how most people talk about this. So I used it to write these own notes.

Chris Badgett: We talked in an earlier session about the expert’s curse and not, being really advanced in the subject matter and needing to keep beginner’s mind in mind.

And that would be an excellent use of AI. Hey, I’m PhD in this topic, I’m making a course for beginners, help me, go back to the fundamentals and make sure I don’t get too advanced too quickly. Can you help me like focus? This is the outline I’m thinking, keep in mind is for beginners.

Can you help me like make sure I don’t gloss over any important fundamental information? That would be a great tool or a great way to use AI as an assistant. I also wanted to mention in our course plan challenge. Which kind of helps you figure out what course to make and come up with your course outline.

We use a concept called Ikigai, which is a Japanese term and way of figuring out your reason for being in the world, which is deep, but it essentially combines what you love, which is your passion, what you’re good at, which is your skills. What you can be paid for, like the marketability or financial possibility of this topic and what the world actually needs.

And we actually, Jason developed AI to help you in part of that training, some AI powered tooling to help you find your icky guy, which can then help you pick your course topic, which you can then outline with it. So use AI, just get started. It’s not a replacement. It’s a It’s a co pilot, it’s an assistant.

Let’s talk about productivity. AI makes you more productive, but productivity is an infinite well. I’m a fan of productivity. There is you can actually get too productive and burnout and there is some magic and like open space in your calendar or not having every, minute of your day planned out and stuff like that.

But, when you wear so many hats, it’s important to optimize and get more productive in the world, which we naturally do as humans as we move along in life. And, like for example, if you’re, if you become a parent, all of a sudden you have an entire new job that’s even more than full time and we tend to figure it out, but there’s productivity things that happen within that.

So I like to just continually invest in improving my productivity. I recommend people do the same. But also don’t over optimize there, leave some magic and space in your life. But with course creation and building these types of online businesses, the global theme I think about in terms of productivity is don’t let your brain.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at Lifter LMS. com forward slash gift. Go to Lifter LMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Jason Coleman and Chris Badgett discuss teaching tactics for online courses, with an emphasis on how to interact with novices.

They discuss the value of comprehending the “beginner’s mindset” and the difficulties associated with being an expert. One important issue they raise is that it might be challenging for specialists to relate to novice students, which can result in too complex course content.

They suggest simplifying the material and employing “spiral learning,” in which students gradually go over subjects in more detail.

They also discuss the need to streamline your courses to concentrate on the most important 5% of the required information. As well as the benefits of iterating and improving course material based on student comments and experiences. This method facilitates pupils’ comprehension and retention of material. The episode emphasizes how important it is for instructors to assume their students’ roles to ensure that the material is understandable. Accessible, and pertinent to their requirements.

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Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: Welcome back to the education entrepreneur mentor series. This is a five part series where we go over the five critical hats. that you need to wear or have the skills contained within your team to find success as an education entrepreneur. Somebody who’s teaching online, building an online education company, coaching, or building an education based business.

Those five hats that need to be worn to cover the bases are becoming the expert. the entrepreneur, the teacher, the technologist, and the community builder. This is part three. We’re going to be getting into becoming the teacher. Enjoy this session with my business partner at Lifter LMS, Jason Coleman, and make sure you check out all five parts of this series.

Enjoy.

In this session, we’re going to talk about becoming the teacher or instructional designer, as it’s known in the e learning space. It’s one thing to be an expert in some kind of subject matter, but the ability to teach, to coach, to design curriculum is an important part of being an education entrepreneur.

Let’s start our conversation around Beginner’s Mind, which is a concept that comes from Zen Buddhism. And digging into that, I just want to touch on the idea that it’s easy to lose touch with the learner, particularly if you’ve been in your subject matter expertise for a really long time. We’ve all talked to somebody who’s an expert in something.

And it’s just going in one ear and out the other, it’s just too advanced. One of the strategies I learned around how to work with this, I learned from an instructional designer named Julie Dirksen. She has this concept called shelf space. So as we learn and master our subject matter, our shelf space and our ability to hold concepts, frameworks, you know, strategies, tactics, it just gets bigger.

Where as a beginner has a really small amount of shelf space because they’re new to the subject matter and when, if you don’t accommodate for that, the, the learner just kind of gets overwhelmed or there’s too much jargon in. So some of the ways to kind of get past that, and it’s also by the way called the expert’s curse.

So the expert just can’t get out of their own head and they’ve got their library of Alexandria with lots of shelf space. But one way to think about it is imagine talking to a previous version of yourself. What would that look like? Like you’re really advanced in investing, but if you were talking to you know, the investor that you were 15 years ago, you probably would kind of streamline it down a little bit.

And this is where this concept of minimum effective dose comes in. So it’s not about like. Let me pack my library of Alexandria of knowledge into this content. Just kind of give them everything. It’s more like, what’s the least amount that I could teach, explain, concepts. Potentially assignments, activities, and things to get them moving.

In the direction of expanding their shelf space. Julie also taught me the concept of spiral learning. Which is the idea that you don’t have to teach everything. You know, about a piece of a subject matter in one go. It’s actually a lot better to let’s say there’s like 10 key areas of a subject matter to do kind of a spiral across those 10 key areas on like fundamental ideas.

And then when you get back to, you know, that first area, then you can expand on that a little bit. So instead of trying to go deep on like one aspect and take them from, you know, elementary school to PhD, let’s go elementary all the way around and start building and it’s kind of how the traditional grade system works.

So at Lifter LMS as an example, one of our top performing lead generation tools, and also new customer or user onboarding tools is our quick start course, which has somewhere around 30, 000 people in it. And the concept behind that course is the idea that if I can only show people 5 percent of the most important aspects of the software, how to use it, how to set up the website, how to collect payments, create content and all that, what would I teach in that 5%?

So the course content is in total probably about 30 minutes. Even though if I were to teach everything that left your LMS does. I might need like five hours to kind of go over everything. But that would be completely overwhelming. Yeah,

Jason Coleman: I feel that. I think about that with my children too. And I always had trouble with that.

I have these very lofty ideas that I want to instill in them. But there’s like a framework, like that shelf that’s needed. He can’t talk about this complicated subject until you build the. You know, you have to meet the person where they’re at. When you’re teaching them.

I think a tactic I’ve. I’ve tried in some of the investing material. I’ve done is like I want to be able to have someone watch me as I’m researching a stock and I’m taking all the notes and writing all the very complicated things I’m doing.

And and actually benefit from that, like go along on that journey with me. But there’s like a list of like 20 things they have to know. So I actually like started with the end point and said, I want my students to be here. Like they understand they can watch this whole video and they know everything that’s going on.

And I can’t share that video with them yet. But that gives me like the syllabus for you know, all the aspects. I love the spiral thing. I think there’s other versions of that too, where you, you learn something and then. You, learn more and more and then.

It’s like good to relearn that thing. It was like a different context.

Like that was the easy version. There’s all these videos on YouTube. Does Fox media do them or something? And there it’s whatever. It’s like a symphony and five levels of difficulty or like.

You know that series is really good at like hammering that point of like, Here’s one way to understand it, and then there’s another level of understanding it, another level of understanding, the same thing.

That idea of like, going back to the basics. It’s good to, to realize that like your students aren’t as bored with like the basic information as, as you are. Like I was talking about the, you know, the stock research, like that’s what I do actually. And it’s easy for me. I’m like, I do it anyway. I could just put the camera on and then share it.

And it feels fun and I would love to talk to people and engage on that level. But if I was really trying to enter educate folks. That’s not gonna work. Like they need to know the basics. So it’s good to keep teaching the basics and getting better at it. And some of the best teachers that we know I think like Seth Godin, I think of Gary Vaynerchuk and Warren Buffett’s kind of like his, his annual letters, like would often hammer home the same points.

And if you follow these folks for a long time. You almost get bored of it too. You’re like, this guy has like three, you know, tricks or three things that he teaches. It was, is that like what do you call that? Like the mid twit mind. So it’s like, this guy only has three things he teaches or, and it’s like, that’s so exciting.

Then in the middle, it’s like. I have three things he teaches. Like, that’s nothing. Then the expert is like, actually only have like one or three things that you teach. And so, yeah, I, I think if you really dig into that, trying to educate folks, like. Educate the basics. Like give the same talk over and over.

I used to do more conferences and talks and I would feel almost like a comedian. Like I did my set. It’s recorded. Peace out. Now I’m working on my next one. Like, and there’s some part of me that felt bad if I gave the same talk more than once. But it doesn’t really make sense because if you’re in a different conference, 10 percent is like folks who’ve seen it before.

But also if you give the same talk over and over again, you can make it better and better and get good at delivering it. And so I’ve seen that also like on the conference circuit, like folks give the same talk. And then I think another tactic is to take intro courses for things, things that you think you know, really well already.

So I think folks are surprised if I think I understand investing really well, and I’d be, you know, if I. I bought a course because I thought it was interesting. I would want to skip to like the later sections where the meat is and it’s like, nah, slow down and just see how they explain the basics. And every once in a while you see something, you’re like, Oh, I didn’t actually realize that.

I didn’t know that the origin of that was here. Or I didn’t know that was pulled from this. You know, where that came from. And I guess a personal story, you know, that helped me understand some of these concepts of like focusing on the basics and going back to the basics. I was at a conference and actually it was interesting.

I was going to do a 40 minute talk and about a week before they said, can you instead do like a four hour workshop? And I was like, I guess let’s go, you know? So I took my talk and I turned it into a workshop and I had an early slide. It was a business one on one workshop. So it was like folks starting out building a business from scratch.

And I talked about some of the stuff that we talked like in the operation section. And I had a slide early on that was like, Hey, let’s review the stuff you guys already know, like in business, you want to make money. What is that? That’s revenue minus expenses equals profit. Everyone’s on board. Cool.

Next slide. And when I said next slide, like half the audience was like, wait, wait, wait, what, what go back? Can I write that down? And I was like, Whoa, like these folks, like they’re, they were good photographers. They were good at selling the things they sold. They were good at tinting windshields. Like the result, it was like a really interesting Collect a group of people with like small businesses as, but they had never really thought of this stuff and it, it actually, you know they didn’t consciously think about even something as, it seems as basic to me as like profit and revenue and expenses.

And so I was like, slow down and I went back and, you know, spent some time on that slide.

Chris Badgett: I remember there’s this football coach. I can’t remember which one, like some of the great coaches, but he had this thing where the very first day of the very first practice, his very first kind of teaching to the football team was this is how you tie your shoes.

Jason Coleman: Like

Chris Badgett: going literally to the very first step. And if you look at the offline world, like a great teacher, let’s say in a university, a professor. They may get like a new class of freshmen every year. So they’re like kind of physically forced to be reminded, okay, these are freshmen. They’re just getting started and then they can perfect it over time.

And also just want to note that the beginner’s market is often the biggest market. So if you look at YouTube videos and You know, or if you look at like course sales on Udemy and stuff, like the, whatever subject matter 101, like these courses often have the best sales. So if you need motivation to like keep it simple, just remember there’s often a lot of revenue potential by not forgetting about the beginners.

Let’s talk about instructional design. What is it? Why is it important? Cause sometimes like a beginner might think, Oh, I just need to get on camera, talk about my subject matter expertise. But what you’re designing is not just content, you’re designing a learning journey. It’s, it’s not a content dump.

We’re not putting the library of Alexandria like in video format and crossing our fingers and hope they figure it out. So it’s, it’s all about designing a transformational path. So the main ones we see in online education in terms of transformational paths are like, you know, incremental improvements or.

Like big result, big transformation, and some of the top, you know, highest value courses and memberships and communities actually help somebody create a new identity. So, think about that. What is the end result? Design for the end result. Do the chunking and work backwards from that end result and create the milestones like we talked about in a previous session.

But also, think about Getting your learners taking action to make the progress, because people need more than just content to learn and make a change. And some of the ways to think about that are, yes, they need some content, they need some core ideas, concepts, strategies. But this is why I’m a big fan of assignments, particularly if you’re helping somebody go from A to B.

Giving them like, okay, we’ve learned this concepts, now do X. And also maintain beginner’s mind and remember this may be the first time they’re doing that. So get them taking action. Potentially, we’ll talk about community later, but perhaps, you know, getting involved in like a social learning aspect like learning together can add more richness to the experience.

And then as a side note, it is good. They’ll also be entertaining. So like a boring teacher, that’s just blah, blah, blah. Here’s the, here’s your homework. Make it fun and entertaining. If you look at some of the top performing YouTube channels, they’re entertaining as well. It’s, there’s a term for that.

It’s called edutainment. We recently about a year or two ago at Lifter LMS designed. We wanted to focus on a problem of, okay, sometimes people are buying our softwares, but they’re not ready. They don’t have their course idea. They’re kind of doing things out of order, which is a challenge. Like maybe they’re buying software, maybe they’re studying ads or.

Trying to build an affiliate program, but they don’t actually have their course figured out yet. Like, what’s it called? Who’s it for? What’s the syllabus? Maybe start creating that content. So we designed a free mini course called the Course Plan Challenge to help people figure out, A, what topic that they sh would be best for them to focus on.

How to really define their avatar, which we’ve talked about in a previous session. How to start doing the curriculum design. And so we’re Kind of getting people ready for the software through training and really just mastering that beginner’s mind. So if you think about, this is why fourth dimensional thinking is really important.

You’re not just providing content in an isolated bubble of time. These people are on a journey, you’re hooking into a pain point or an opportunity for a particular person, all the way to them being successful with your program and what do they need throughout that, like content, ideas, worksheets, you know, there’s a lot of multimedia, which we’ll talk about a little bit that you can do to kind of make your experience even richer, but yeah, plant, think through time, not just like it’s an isolated, isolated package that they need to know about.

Jason Coleman: That course plan challenge course is awesome. Like, so here’s a plug for that. I, I think I definitely have like, I, I Helped implement it on the website in certain ways. So I had to like, look at it too. That was my first exposure to it was kind of not taking the course, but just like doing stuff.

But then afterwards I referred back to it when I was planning a course on myself, my own. And I bet you probably do too. You almost like go back to your own course.

Chris Badgett: That’s the same planning.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. Yeah. So it’s awesome when you have like a piece of content like that. Yeah. Yeah. A few posts and things that I reference the, you know, in the, the book I wrote about WordPress is one of those two where it’s like, Oh, I don’t remember this, but I wrote about it in the book.

It’s funny. Yeah. So yeah, plug for the course plan challenge. That’s awesome content. I yeah, you talked about like being entertaining and turning it on that’s tough for me. I remember, I think of like the teacher’s voice, like my kids in elementary school, all the good teachers, like they, you know, you’re talking to them, like they have a normal voice and then when they’re talking to students, man, I would like mimic it now, you know, but it’s like higher pitch and you’re like, Oh yeah. And like, you know, energetic and you get it, making it sound exciting. You’re talking about the boring stammer, but it’s like, this is awesome. It’s funny you said that. Then it like triggers in my head now, like I should turn that on for this.

And I, I don’t practice it enough. I think to have it natural. And I remember thinking about that when I was homeschooling my kids for about a year in COVID, I was like, I think the content is good. But like, I really think like, the teacher. I don’t have like, the energy they need right now, and I like that they’ve taken action too and I thought I could ask you, cause I, I feel like I struggle with this when I’m consuming content, I like, I like to read books, and sometimes reading books at like, 11 at night, before you, before you go to bed, or like, early in the morning, no one’s around, and and it’s a business book and I’m like, that’s really good ideas.

And it’s like, okay, now take action and do these things before you read the next chapter. And I’m like yeah, no, no, actually later. So I don’t know if you have tips for like encouraging that or making folks more likely to take those action and those next steps.

Chris Badgett: I think just to answer that real quick, that’s one of the cool things about learning management system is you can use things like required assignments.

Prerequisites, like you can’t move on to the next section to fill or drip content. You can’t, the next one isn’t coming for another week. So to create the space. So I

Jason Coleman: think like the course plan challenge has like a very clear, there was like six part layout of start to finish some of the stuff we’re talking about, you know, how to develop the outline and plan for your course.

Another method I’ve seen work with folks is to design a course through like content accumulation and then later strategically curate it. So, you know, the idea here is to produce content, useful content, continuously. And I talked before about like eBomb as a method of that, whenever you answer a question for someone.

As an expert, other people have that question, write it down, share it somehow, put it somewhere. It’s good to publish it if possible, but if, even if not, just kind of write, write down all this content. And force yourself to do that, and get good, and then at the end, you, you can or, organize it into, you know, a structured learning path.

You could build it into a course, some other versions of this Are like, so you have, say like blog posts once a week for a year, you got 52 blog posts. Then you can build these hubs around common concepts or use cases. Or it’s often called pillar content from like a marketing perspective. So like, cool, you talked about you know, once we’ve done in the past, so I’m thinking we have membership software.

And so we’re answering all these questions about the different problems of setting up a membership site and running a site and thinking about pricing and things like that, and then. We build content hubs around common use cases. So we have a hub for course people who are building like a course, like memberships and people who are building associations and people who are building video sites and we aggregate all the content into those hubs.

And then what’s good when you’re building those hubs is you’ll realize there’s gaps in the content. So when you do that practice of curating the content into a course or a hub or a pillar. You’re like, Oh, you know what we don’t have is, you know, we’re trying to All the content from A to B on this topic, we’re actually missing some of the key questions we don’t answer, or we link out to someone else’s website for that, or we often refer some other tool, and it’s like, oh, that’s a missing piece that we should write ourselves.

So yeah, we did that for Penguin Research Pro with the use cases. It was awesome because we’ve been writing content for years and years and years. When we put together the hubs, we kind of did almost for ourselves as like a practice to help us focus on the use cases. It was something that we could deliver to folks when they sign up, Hey, what use case are you?

And then we give them the hub. It’s like, here’s a better way to like browse through our content. And when, when we put it together, we were like, we were given that as like a freebie add on to the full membership. And we’re like, this is valuable in itself. This feels like. More valuable than the software, like the ideas that we’ve been talking about.

So you might find content you’re building for some other reason when you package it together, it becomes valuable and you can put a price tag on it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I think one of the things is like this presentation, these sessions are all about really identifies an aspect of this, where when you put your customer at the center of your business and not your product.

Like you mentioned, Oh, this, this other thing may be more valuable than the software. What that, in my view, what that comes from is, okay, this, this particular type of customer in this case, they need technology, which we’re going to talk about in another session. And that’s what we do. That’s what our business is.

And we incorporate a lot of the other things we’re talking about here, but they need help with all these other things like becoming a teacher you know, being a subject matter expert, building community and so on. So you can expand outside of the scope of your core business and just provide more resources to help people even further.

And that’s just a helpful way to think about it. And like you said, you can sometimes signpost other resources like, Oh, well, they really need to figure out this other thing. There’s this other expert over here and just introduce them to another body of work. There’s a saying, just because you’re on the train, it doesn’t mean you have to carry the luggage.

So sometimes you can use. Your depth of knowledge and connections to point people in other areas that are going to support them. That ultimately supports your core business as well. Let’s talk about lesson design. People are not robots and there’s variation in personality types, culture you know, predispositions and learning, it often comes up and there’s like multiple learning styles.

So how do you design for that? And there’s also consumption styles. Like how do people like to consume content or engage in community or get support? Kind of the classic learning style thing is, well, there’s visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Visual people are they like watching videos. They like seeing, like, pictures and graphics.

Auditory people like to listen. If you listen to podcasts, and like a lot, like me, you’re probably an auditory person. There, there’s a few you know, really nerd out on YouTube. You’re probably a visual person. There’s also the, the readers, like people who like to read, you know, I know lots of people who they really dislike video and they, they prefer to read.

Kinesthetic people they don’t like reading, watching videos or listening. They just, they’re actually really into like the assignment, the get moving, like get action. I just want to start like playing with this software or this movement technique or these art implements and just start, I, I learn by doing is what kinesthetic is.

And then there’s the it’s not really a tension span, but it’s the idea that some people like rip through content and they’re just like scanning and then other people are deep divers like they read every word, they watch the video really slowly, they’ll like email you and be like, Hey, you have a typo here on line 736 about whatever, like they’re very detailed.

So when I’m creating content either for marketing or as part of training, I think about that sort of a classic example of that. If I’m doing a video lesson and there’s like a big idea and concept and thing, I’ll kind of spotlight at the beginning for the scanner people who are going to move really fast and maybe not watch the whole thing just to kind of give them their, their quick hit.

But then of course I’ll go into detail and do the whole deep dive for the deep divers. And then the quizzing and assignments aspect. This really helps the, particularly the assignments help the kinesthetic learners. So like, cool, we’re actually, we have a project here. We’re going to do something.

So not just creating content for consumption, but think about action. And I, I really learned about this different learning style, content consumption style, making sure we’re taking action and not just consuming information. At Lifter LMS as an example with our support, I lean more, and many of us, by the way, are we do all these things like we scan, we deep dive, we watch, we read but you’re often stronger in one area.

Like, I think you’re more of a reader, I’m more of a, you know, video audio guy, but I also know you like video and I also read, but you probably have a primary, it’s kind of like a personality type, but when doing support for software like Lifter LMS. I realize the biggest mistake we can make is to assume the world is as we are, particularly in a teaching role.

If you happen to love videos and all you do is make videos and have a YouTube channel and have video lessons, you’re kind of ignoring a large percentage of the population. So we’ve made a commitment to make technical documentation with a lot of words, a lot of screenshots. And we do YouTube tutorials for the video learning folks.

We do courses that have more assignments and just mix all the multimedia styles. We do live calls. Some people, like, really like to learn in community. You get into that and, like, people have different types of conversation preferences. Like, oh, I just want to send an email. I want to jump on Zoom. I want to watch your live stream and not have the pressure of being live on a call with you, but I’ll be in the comments and you’ll notice people cluster, you’ll start seeing the same names in different places.

So thinking about that is, is, is one way to do that. And, and like even something like a refund policy for a course or membership. That’s really for the kinesthetic people. Like I don’t want to read your sales page. I’m just going to buy the thing. And then if I don’t like it, I’m going to ask for a refund.

We also do trials as a conversion tool. So that’s for the. I don’t want to read your sales page. Let me test it out before I buy it. And and even in the software itself, like there’s places as an example that like, oh, here’s a video tutorial, here’s a link to technical documentation. The way the course builder works, it, it kind of encourages people to create different.

You know, types of learning content and resources. So it’s a, it’s like personalities, you know, so many personalities in the world at the same thing applies to what the different types of learners, and they may, they may be exactly your same avatar, but they’re going to have all that variation and personality.

Jason Coleman: With the different learning styles and the kind of content types, modalities of making content. I know it puts pressure on folks that they feel like, Oh, I have to be a good writer and a good video person and make podcasts. And I have to build, you know, visual displays of this information. But what’s good is there’s lots of tooling and help you can get with those stages.

So I, I always recommend like starting with the modality that you’re most comfortable with. And then using that to build things. So an example for myself, like, I think I I’m a reader, I’m a writer. So when I was doing video and trying to do it off the cuff, it’s not coming across as well. And it got easier for me when I scripted it, basically like wrote a blog post and then like, you know, kind of sort of read it as I was doing the video.

But that helped me like organize my thoughts and figure out what was important to talk about. And, and some people go in the, and actually I’ve gone in the opposite direction. Sometimes there’s like a very complicated topic and I don’t actually understand it. I started recording and I ramble with someone on my marketing team and they just ask me questions and they dig deep.

Then they get a bunch of content and they’re like, okay, I’m going to turn this into a blog post, a written blog post. There’s tooling, like if you made the video, you made a bunch of videos and now you want to make blog posts, you can get the transcripts.

And run it through something like ChatGPT and say, here’s my transcript, write me like a blog post, and it you don’t want to paste, you know, post that directly, but it gives you like a really good first draft if you’re good at making video and not so good at making, you know, writing stuff from scratch.

And, and I yeah, just, so. Yeah, just, it is so important. I know like on my team, we’ve had a lot of written content over the years and we try to do more video and you the best version of a YouTube video is like thinking specifically about the YouTube market and how they consume content and how long it is, and it should be visual and not just words, not just a talking head, like the ideal, most Produce videos on YouTube.

The ones that do really well are very well thought out. There’s kind of an 80, 20 there where they’re like, I have the blog post. If I film myself talking head, reading the blog post, that’s better than no video at all. And so, and it’s a good starting point. And then you can see if you gain traction, you know, like, Oh, there’s a little bit of traction in this video.

We should probably make a better one. So that’s encouraged folks start with the modality that, that you’re best with use that to kind of go into the other media realm. And then, you know, allow yourself to 80, 20, like just put something out there. It’s not perfect. People still appreciate it because they want to listen to it while they’re washing their dishes.

They can’t, you know, read it on the laptop, whatever.

So another thing that, you know, when I think about building courses and educational material it’s important to focus on a single path learning journey. So you’re going from A to B, but there’s a bunch of options in the middle. There’s a, he said. You know, use different tools and, and so it’s, it helps, especially with the first version of things to simplify by addressing like one clear path from start to finish.

And so an example of that that, you know, notoriously it was hard for me was I’ve tried, I don’t think we even have something on our website called the membership handbook. But with our membership site handbook, we’ve been doing this for like over 15 years. And it’s like, day one, I was like, we should have a quote unquote handbook for how to set up a membership site.

We have these content hubs and other things, but there’s probably seven drafts of the membership site handbook. The thing that killed it every time early on was that there’s so many options for like, where do you host your website? You know, which tool do you use? Our tool, of course. Okay, cool.

That’s an easy decision. But then it’s like, which email tool do you use? Which You know, how do you build your course if you’re building it? And, and I found the membership handbook that’s gone on. I’m never going to make it, but I’ve made similar content. It helps to simplify. It’s one path. It’s like, so I, I note the choices, but then make one choice for them.

That’s the default choice. And it helps to remember your customer avatar when you’re doing that. Cause you’re like, Oh, who am I talking to? I’m Oh, Chris Badgett. You know, as my avatar, you have like this very specific person you’re talking to, you can kind of guess which tool they already have or that they’re going to know about and just pick that one, pick the obvious one or the default one or the one that you have a partnership with.

And yeah, like the, the path that the folks are learning is like membership site handbook. Another problem with that is it’s like a vague concept. It’s not like, you know launch your membership site or get your first membership sale or find your first member. Or it’s even, we have six different use cases.

So a handbook for each use case would probably be good. It’s too vague. It’s good to, Hey, you’re taking Crispadget, your avatar from A to B to a very specific outcome, like we talked about and yeah, eliminating those what ifs. That’s the other thing too. So there’s options of tooling and ways you could go about things, but there’s also like almost FAQ style, like, what do you do if this happens?

What do you do if this happens? What if. You, you know, your customer you’re selling to doesn’t have a lot of money, so you probably, what if this, what if that and take note of those, maybe you even have FAQ sections, but don’t let it derail you when you’re writing the first draft from A to B, just, you know, log those what ifs for later, and assume it, you know, the ideal situation.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I think one way you can kind of litmus test yourself. If you’re at the handbook idea, it’s getting a little out of hand, getting hard to like figure out what to do next, how to structure. I call this problem in the course industry, creating a giant course. So if you find yourself like, Oh, this is expanding.

This is like 50 or a hundred lessons. It’s probably getting a little long in the tooth and it can be really liberating to think about many courses. So. Like with Paid Memberships Pro as an example, like, a handbook for associations sounds easier to create as a separate thing from like a handbook for course creators a handbook for communities, and so you, you kind of Can separate those out.

And if the same trainings are relevant to your avatar, just not all jumbled together, then a membership or course bundle can be used to offer access to that. So you allow a bit of it, a little bit of that choose your own adventure while also like kind of simplifying the learning experience in each of the many courses.

Let’s talk about user experience design. We’ve talked about learning journeys, but It’s, it’s really important to think about designing that as like a total user experience and how people learn through time. So, you know, traditional school system starts elementary all the way up to higher education, and that’s a process that can take you know, years, decades.

But so like you kind of get the macro view, but if you really zoom in on the micro view, like just take it one step at a time and when you kind of chunk things down to lessons it’s good to come up with your, your own instructional design framework. So here as an example, we’re talking through like topic area.

Like a big idea slash strategy. Then we get into some tactics and then we’re using story as a way to do like case study, learning with examples through story. And then we’re also adding in a little conversation, which people learn from. I found it really interesting. The Google’s notebook, LLM, I think it’s called like, you can give it a resource.

And the way you learn is you have this option to turn it into a car, an AI generated conversation, people learn by that. And that’s what we’re doing here. We’re having a conversation react and so on. But one of the easiest ways like to come up with your instructional design framework is to think of concepts.

So like, what are the big ideas? What are the strategies? What are the tactics? And then give people specific actions to take to move forward. And we have a lot more options besides quizzing. Like I’m just going to check, some people call that a knowledge check to make sure like you got, you got the core ideas.

But getting people involved in projects, there’s things, there’s a type of learning called project based learning. It’s not just about theory. This goes back to that idea of different learning styles. Some people do really good with theory and they can kind of extrapolate and figure out how to put it into practice.

Other people do better with like, let’s get moving in a project and kind of back in and back and reinforce like what the core concepts are. The other thing is designing for what happens when people get stuck when they fall down. This is the same thing that happens in traditional education where, you know, you have your all stars.

You have your people that are kind of getting left behind and you have like the average performance. So design through time what kind of resources and support you want to have. That could be like office hours. It could be a contact form, like right next to syllabus. So a student could like privately reach out to the instructor.

It could be some community aspect. Which we’ll talk about in a little bit. I heard this phrase once, like surround yourself with help. That’s what you want your people to feel like. There’s a whole, And there’s this great training, but there’s also like all these resources and there’s like a menu of them that can appeal to different personality types and consumption styles.

And I was in a training or a coaching program called SAS Academy, and I, I thought it was a really cool implementation. There was probably 300 courses in there. There was live. Coaching, training, and coaching calls. There were in person events in big cities around the U S three times a year. There’s a Facebook group.

There was you could just like email the company and get help. So like, it was just like a full featured robust user experience that had like tons of resources and people could really choose their own adventure through it. All while driving to the same outcome.

Jason Coleman: When I think about. Resources and support and like additional help around like a core, you know, course or learning experience.

Sometimes there’s a lot of different options and you can kind of copy what you’ve seen elsewhere or kind of what’s been recommended or some things might seem obvious. But a lot of times it’s good to, you know, get the core material out there. And as long as you have a way for your, you know, your users to get back to you through like a, you know, send them an email, ask for feedback.

Have a contact form have, you know, if there’s a support or you dump them into a community where people can chat, like, it’s, it’s important to get that feedback and that feedback is kind of, they’re going to tell you what they needed. There’s this kind of trick where you could almost do this too. I actually, I thought of this, I do this with my kids.

I’ve never done it with in the context of business, but someone’s birthday is coming up and you don’t know what to get them. You can pretend like I just got you like the best thing for your birthday and you’ll never guess what it is. And you’re like, actually, try it. Like, do you think you know what it is?

And they’ll guess and if you keep track of the guesses, you’re like, all right, well, here’s three things that Chris wants for his birthday. So it feels like that kind of thing where if you kind of it’d be interesting to like do that in advance. Working on bonuses, like you’ll never guess what they are.

Actually try to guess. And then what people say is like that they’re telling you what they want. And you’re like, okay, cool. That’s they, you know. This person used a core resource, but they need, you know, extra documentation support or video, or they want something else and you can figure it out. And so, yeah, it’s interesting.

Like, I think you, you mentioned designing like the total user experience and there’s different modalities and having these extra things you know, tagged onto your content and that really helps reinforce and, and get the outcomes that you want and it’s really important. I feel like a lot of times I’m, I’m like the keep it simple guy or, or I see the importance of that.

And I also remember all the conversations I’ve had with folks who feel slowed down by that or paralyzed by that, or like, I’m never going to be able to do all that. So I talked about like, Hey, there’s different media and modalities that you can produce your content as like, pick the one you do the best and focus on that and make that the core of what you’re doing and make sure you ship that at least.

So if you write well, right. And if you’re good on camera, do videos. And as always, like, I think it’s good to start small and try to, you know, we’ve talked in different ways of trying to not make it too complicated, bite off, you know, something you can chew, work on that, do it really well publishing early is important when I talked about earlier in sessions, how there’s a difference between like putting the content together and just having it ready for publish and actually publishing it and putting it out there.

You get feedback. There’s folks who I forget the fellow has a writing course and he loves Twitter. He’s like, I tweet a bunch of random stuff and whenever tweets get engagement, that’s the core idea. I should make sure when I write my book, I actually focus on that. So he wants to write books and share books, but you know, he tweets because he gets a sense of like, which of the ideas are kind of, are hitting his audience the best.

So that’s a form of publishing and, you know, early, like small forms, teasers you wrote the first lesson, push that out there, see if you can get attention. There’s lots of ways to do that. And also not just publish early, but get paid early. If you’re trying to make money on these things, there is always a difference of the audience who’s willing to consume this, but not pay for it.

Or the person who’s paying for it is a different type of customer or user reader learner. And so getting money involved in the system, like makes it real for, for yourself and also for the person learning. And you said to one thing at a time, like step by step. So focus. I think, like, I think about paid memberships pro and off the lift our own messes this way too, where there’s so many features in the core product, there’s so many add ons, there’s so many other plugins, third party plugins, you can tie in other services.

And a lot of people come to the software and they see it on, they get excited and it’s like funner for them to like. Add a form, add a community, add an email list, it should be drip feed, right? I guess everyone’s doing that and they, they get overwhelmed and it’s kind of like, well, like remember you’re trying to help your learner get from point A to point B, focus on the core, you know, experience and educational content you’re producing, make sure you nail that, and then these things are accessories, they’re helpers, they’re additional, and definitely it is better to have them, but it’s also good to do one at a time so that folks don’t feel overwhelmed.

Dispersed. It’s kind of like if you start at the same time, like a slack, a Facebook group and an online community, like they don’t know where to go. You know, it’s like only one of those at a time.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Even like what we’re, what we’re doing here is we’re kind of expanding the shelf space to be like, Hey, there’s all these personality types.

There’s all these different content types. There’s all these consumption styles. And so you still, like as an expert can, you know, kind of research and we’re, we’re expanding your mind here you don’t have to implement everything right away, but the first step is just like kind of awareness that. Oh, wow.

This, this is more rich and nuanced and detailed and there’s all these options, but then like you said, shrink it back one step at a time and don’t forget beginner’s mind. And some of the most successful people I see with softwares like ours are, you know, they take consistent and perfect action, but they also continuously improve.

So this is why, you know, doing a signature course, like one main thing might be a good idea. Cause it’s like. When you podcast or you become a YouTuber, there’s a saying that your first video is your worst video. So if you’re continuously improving, I’m like, all right, it’s been a year or whatever. I’m gonna remake that course or I found that I could better train my learners using this method of like concept, activity, community conversation, whatever it is.

I need to retool or supplement that old lesson. So It’s not about just moving on or doing too many things at once. I wanted to double click on support systems. Cause I think this is how it holds a lot of potential and it’s poorly understood. And I like to tell a story with this. There’s a popular online education platform called masterclass.

I think it’s about. 19 a month or something like that. And they did, they build a great product there. You can learn from the best in the world and like what amounts to about of hour of training per course. And you can learn how to tell jokes from Steve Martin. You can learn a business from Sarah Blakely and how to be an entrepreneur and stuff like that.

But if you get stuck and you fall down. Or you have questions, they’re not there to interact with you. There’s literally zero support and that’s why it’s 19 a month. But if you want, there may be somebody who’s not as far along as as Steve Martin is a comedian, but there may be this other person who.

Teaches stand up comedy who you can talk to one on one who will review your bits or your jokes and like give you feedback So like you may be able to charge that that comedy educator may be able to charge 2000 for the course, for the signature course called zero to like, you know, improv comedy success or whatever, because they’re like really supporting you and support systems similar to consumption styles and learning styles.

There’s two layers to this. One layer is what do you like to do? This is your world. This is your creation. Do you like doing one on one coaching? Do you like moderating and holding space for a community? You like doing office hours, like, there’s all these different ways. Do you like email? Do you like text message?

Like, some people do support, like, hey, unlimited instant message. And there’s, there’s two vectors of this. And this is actually really detailed out in detail in the course plan challenge to help you think through this. But there’s two kinds of support. There’s synchronous and asynchronous. So synchronous means I’m helping you in real time together.

So that could be a one on one call could be instant messenger. It could be like a group training that you do live. It could be a in person event and then asynchronous. Some people prefer like, Hey, I need time freedom. I don’t want my calendar filled up when I’m doing things kind of in my own speed.

Email support may be better for that. And you have to set expectations. So people are like, Hey, I haven’t heard from you in five minutes. Like you need to set like what your expectations are. Then the other vector is private versus group. So if you do offer one on one like synchronous private coaching support.

Or you offer one on one email support. That takes more time, but it’s more valuable. So you can charge a lot more. And you can even have plans on your course or your membership where like, you know, it’s like course only, 200 bucks. Course plus group coaching, 1, 000. Course plus private coaching, 5, 000. So it, it affects like the value and just anchoring that to this idea of like masterclass where it’s 20 bucks a month or it’s here and I have your back and we’re going to be working together privately.

It’s 2, 000 a month. So figure out both what you want as an individual, cause this is your creation and two, what would be most helpful for your customer avatar? Cause. You know, for example, if I was helping somebody or an avatar that had a certain health concern or, or medical challenge, they may not want any kind of group, anything, it’s a private thing and they just, so my, it would not be appropriate to even explore the group options, but maybe it is, it just depends on your avatar and my pro tip for you is the easiest way to add this to do it and support your people better, but also to make more money is to offer what I call a group.

Ask me anything, office hours. So this is a group coaching call. You could do it on you know, like a webinar platform. And you could do it on a YouTube live stream with comments. You could even do it not by face, like, Hey, there’s a time of day. I’ll be in this Slack channel. You see people do this on Twitter sometimes like, Hey, I’m waiting at the airport, like ask me anything for the next hour, but the cool thing about the office hours is it’s time boxed.

Like, let’s say it’s an hour every week or every two weeks or once a month, so you’re only committing as a creator to, you know, that time box. It’s also scalable. You could have two people show up. You could have 201st come, first serve, or you take the questions in advance and kind of choreo graph it a little bit.

But that’s the quickest way to go from the $20 a month. Do DIY self-study training to actually having some high fidelity support system that doesn’t eat your lunch for time. Provides a lot of value. Also actually creates a little bit of community aspect. ’cause people will be at the office hours and I’m like, oh, that’s a great question, even though they didn’t come up with it.

And then they’re, they’re learning. So and that, that’s what we did at Lifter LMS too. I realized. You know, selling software, there’s a lot of this like automate everything, have a passive, you know, business, but like there was so much demand, you know, you see it in emails and stuff, can I just get on a call with you?

I’m like, well, we don’t charge like an arm and a leg for the software. In fact, a lot of it’s free. How can I, but how can I meet this need? Oh, so we introduced the office hours, which happens once a week and it continues to, we’ve been running it for about five years.

Jason Coleman: We used to have consultation calls, so it’s like for 300, you could talk to us for an hour about anything.

And then some folks are like, I can’t afford 300. Then I tried a couple times to be like, all right. I’ll help you out, just let me record it, and I can use it for content. They’re like, that’s weird, what is the way I want to do it? But then you’re like, that’s exactly what the open office hours are, like they ask me anything, and it’s just a reframing of that you know, it’s such a multiplier on, force multiplier on your time.

So we have a version of that now too, it’s, it’s great. And it’s also a good source of, you know, for content. I think I love it. Like all the different, you know, ways you can support someone. And I think something that’s important to remember when you’re kind of presenting these options and kind of writing sales pages for them and things like that is to.

Explain like what, what the common experience is like when, when you submit a ticket, this is what’s going to happen when you get on the call. This is exactly what’s going to happen. And even better yet, like testimonials that are like, I had this issue. I talked to Chris for 30 minutes and totally solved my issue.

So that, that can be like, it’s easy to forget that you kind of like, Hey, we do this, this and this. And people have like an expectation or some kind of pretense or like, like you said You’re in a marketplace of other people solving the same solution, and you’re trying to stand out by like delivering a superior support experience.

You’re like, you got to tell people up front that it’s superior and kind of own it. So we had an exercise too, where we revamped our support page, where it’s like, we’re actually better than everyone, but we’re not telling them. So like, let’s tell them tell the person, you know, about to enter our funnel.

There’s different ways to deliver support. And what you’ll find, even if your intention is not to have a channel, a new channel for support, everything is support. Any way that someone can talk to you, they will. Use it for support. I mean, we turned off blog comments on our blog posts a while ago because 90 percent of them were random support.

So it’s like, here’s a blog post about how to do this thing. And it’s like, my comment’s not about what you wrote about, but I was wondering how to do this. And I was like, did you not see the like click for support link in the upper right of the page? So yeah, yeah, every method is going to be support.

You should decide up front the best way that you support your, your users and your learners and how you, your preferred methods of communication and then stick to it. So, but it is good still to like allow the support to originate from anywhere organically, cause you, you kind of can’t fight it. But funnel it proactively into the channels.

So some, for example. Like another funny example, like to support comes out, I would do these customer conference surveys, so I am going to call you and I’ll ask you some questions for my benefit to learn more about my customer. And when I coach my team, he’s doing this too, is like at least half of them.

They’re only taking the call cause they, that’s the way they know to talk to you on the phone and they have a support question they’re going to ask you. So it’s like, try to answer the support thing and then be like, Hey, I helped you. Can you help me answer these questions now? But we also you know.

When folks are DMing you on Twitter or contacting you you know, if it’s a quick answer, answer it, but always, even if you answer it quickly, say the best way to get help is to go through the proper channel. The fastest way to get help is to go through the proper channel. Something I use now, because I have a team, is like, I’m not actually the best person to answer this question.

I know I seem like it is because I’m kind of the face of the company, but the team is experts, or experts, and they know this better than I do. So, every time you redirect support, kind of include that. And yeah, the other thing, you know, about this when, you know, doing support is that exceptions become the expectations.

So an example of that is we do technical support through our ticketing system on the website, and we don’t do support on the weekends because our teams working Monday through Friday. And sometimes the team is like. I’m not doing anything. I really care about this person’s project. I’m going to go above and beyond and help them on the weekends, like, cause they just can’t help it.

They’re like, Oh, it’s a problem in my head. And and so they give the feedback on the weekend and that’s okay to do in extreme cases or sometimes every time you do that, that person just learned, Oh, actually they do do support on the weekends. Or they do do support through Twitter. I mean, this is like a cliche Twitter is like, you call the phone system.

How do I, can you help me with my purchase? I want a refund. No, you can’t do a blah, blah, blah. And then you just yell on Twitter and then they DM you and say, how can I help you? And then all of a sudden you’re magically like talking to the C suite and they’re going to reverse everything for you. So yeah, if you make these exceptions, like people learn about them.

Chris Badgett: 90 or like, let’s say 80, 20, 80%. Like, yes, you do need to reinforce boundaries. And actually, but on the other side, sometimes if they do get through, or you make an exception, I learned this concept from you. I was already kind of doing it, but I didn’t have a name for it. You call it a make my day? So every now and then, someone will reach out to you through the wrong channel, or even you might see them struggling.

Like in a social community or wherever and you’re like, man, I can really help this person. They’re being so nice you know, they’ve already like sent in a testimonial or whatever and Either you you help them off channel like and just over deliver and then or like you actually seek them out and you’re like Hey, I saw in this group is happening, you know, we don’t normally do this But you know I really appreciate what you’ve done in our community and we really want to help you and then you you call it a make my day So that’s something you find you can do as a creator.

And the crazy thing with that kind of thing is sometimes then that person, you know, will upgrade to your bigger offer or if they haven’t read a testimonial, they will, you know, they tell your friends, they become an affiliate or whatever. So it’s this weird. Dichotomy of like maintain boundaries, but also like, break the rules.

Yeah, yeah. And over deliver. And

Jason Coleman: the important part of that is to do it consciously instead of reactively. And forget where I got that from is ’cause it’s funny. Maybe it wasn’t that good for, but I think the company went outta business. It was like a department story. Either like Neiman Marcus or of those types, you know, like a, a big department store.

And they used to give their sales team a budget of like a thousand dollars a month. To like make the day so you’d be in the buy shoes and it’s an expensive high value department store, but you buy like 200 worth of shoes. And if you said you were hungry, the person could like tap into their budget and like go buy you food so you could eat the food while you’re trying on shoes or something like crazy.

That doesn’t usually happen in an apartment store and sometimes you would get they would spend more like taking care of you than they would. And that was part of like their core values and how they did some, but it also was probably like a marketing budget item. Like that money didn’t come out of the support budget.

It came out like this is marketing and we hope that person goes on to say things. And I feel like like Scrooge McDuck or like the Scrooge over here, like bah humbug don’t help people. But in reality, if you you know, you scale a product, you have hundreds of folks, you can’t give this level of care to every customer.

So it’s good to do it selectively and when we do that, kind of make, make your day. We have time. It’s a customer that’s interesting or like matches our values or we have some idea that they’re a sneezer who’s going to talk about it or, or, or be nice. It can be a good story and that kind of thing. Or, or sometimes it’s a technical challenge.

Like we actually have this challenge where I’m curious to figure out like, cool. I’ve never used that email marketing tool. Let’s figure it out for them. Yeah, so that’s great. Yeah. When to bend the rules.

Chris Badgett: And the last thing I’ll say on this support thing is you may be. You may just have a pricing problem.

It’s notorious in our industry that people under price, you know, this is part of the expert’s curse. You’re so close to it. You know, all the stuff you’ve kind of undervalued what you do, or maybe you have some imposter syndrome going. So if you’re kind of like, well, I don’t want to do. You know, unlimited email support, cause my courses is 200.

It’s really well done. They should just follow the steps and do the exercises. Yeah. But if you, if it was 1, 000, would you answer an email from them twice a week and give them that access? And there will be some people that like, quote, abuse that you’re getting like five emails a day. But there’ll also be like tons of people who are like, I don’t really need help.

It’s included as a benefit of the bundle. And then there’ll be kind of like the average, which is how I kind of get to like that two emails a week. Is that worth an extra 800 a month to you? So always think about pricing when it comes to support and it might change your mind on what type of support you want to do and how much and

Jason Coleman: all that.

Yeah, it’s going to be flexible cause like, like, Hey, this is how we do things. People keep trying to do support on Facebook or whatever. Every time that happens, that’s an indication that people really want to communicate that way and you should consider, or they want a phone call and every time they ask and you say, we don’t do phone calls.

It’s like a mental note. Maybe we should figure out how we can do phone calls. We can make money off this.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And you don’t have to necessarily change your pricing. You could just add one more plan that has that level that where the cost benefit analysis makes sense.

Jason Coleman: So many options. Just carry it.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

The post Part 3/5: Becoming the Teacher, Education Entrepreneur Mentor Series appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett and Jason Coleman explore the various responsibilities that successful education entrepreneurs must juggle in this discussion.

They emphasize sales and marketing in particular, as well as the role of the entrepreneur. Chris explains a straightforward technique for figuring out what the pain points of customers are. Entrepreneurs may leverage these pain areas to produce useful content, deals. Also marketing materials by breaking them down into smaller problems.

Finding client problems, for instance, might serve as inspiration for blog entries, emails. Or social media postings, which facilitates audience connection and trust-building. Jason continues, “It’s important to address pain points directly. And clearly because people are more likely to act when they feel that their particular issues are understood.”

Chris and Jason together highlight how crucial it is to be genuine and unambiguous. Education entrepreneurs may create enduring firms by comprehending the demands of their customers and coming up with answers.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Welcome back to the education entrepreneur series. This is a five part series where we go over the five critical hats. That you need to wear as an education entrepreneur. Or within the skill set of your team based on what we’ve seen with success. With education, entrepreneurship, teaching online, coaching, building education based businesses.

Those five hats are being the expert, the entrepreneur, the teacher, the technologist, and the community builder. Today, my business partner, Jason Coleman and I are going to be talking about becoming the entrepreneur. Enjoy this session.

All right, let’s talk about becoming the entrepreneur. This is a topic we could go for weeks or years on. But we’ve, you know, kind of thought about some of the most important things. Let’s start with sales and marketing. You know, there’s a saying in business that nothing ever happens until a sale is made. Just kind of going into sales and marketing.

The big idea here to make this process easier. is to map the pain. Which we’ve talked about in our expert series, and then how to think about actually making the sale. And there’s a concept I have called conversion tools. That helps make selling both easier from a process standpoint and as something you can scale.

So for me, My strength in marketing is content and then my strength in sales is creating conversion tools. So to get into what that means at a tactical level. Content marketing is really built around this idea of pain. If you look at your target audience or your customer avatar. What are their like chief top five pain point areas?

And when you identify those, you can then find sub pain points underneath that kind of pillar. Category cluster of pain and those become like individual pieces of content. So if you’ve forced yourself to come up with what are the five primary pain points. Then maybe 10 to 12 like sub more specific nuances or variations of that pain point. That is 50 pieces of content.

It’s like a year’s worth of content ideas. And you can create blog posts, you can create YouTube videos, you can create podcasts. You can create a social media strategy, you can do email marketing and ideally your product, your course, your membership. Whatever it is really helps with all of that. That’s kind of the content marketing, you know, sort of top of the funnel that flows into your business offer.

And I’ll give you an example of that in a little bit. But then once you have these like content ideas that basically stem from the five primary pain points. You can come up with a content framework. We’re actually using a content framework in this conversation we’re having right now. So that, okay, well there’s this, I’m an expert.

I, I have all these ideas. How do I like, kind of consistently deliver value in a way that’s not overwhelming in. In the form of content. So like a content framework like we’re using here is we have like a topic area like sales and marketing. We have like a big idea. A strategy, like I’m talking about content and conversion tools.

Right now I’m giving you three or so tactics. Then I’m going to tell a story about, you know, what’s going on there. So that’s a content framework and that’s a way of teaching like strategy tactics, story. Also known as like a case study in a way. And then we’re also having a conversation, which is also a form of education.

So the content framework is awesome. I just wrote a book. I’m in the editing process with that. Every chapter similar to this has like. A set series of things like tactics and strategies and stories to create a content framework. That actually made writing a book as a subject matter expert in this topic easier for me. Because then it was like, okay, well, what’s a, what’s, what’s a story related to this and so on.

So it makes content creation easier. Now conversion tools there’s a lot of different ways to think about that. I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding around sales and marketing and how they’re different. But sales is actually, let’s say somebody enjoyed your content and then they find out about your offer.

The process of actually creating the sale or the quote conversion event. How do you do that? In the offline world, people do that with a conversation. Like if I walk onto a car lot and I meet the salesperson. You know, I get in a conversation and I get the sales pitch, they handle my objections and then. I take it for a test drive and then I buy the car or I don’t buy the car.

I try a different car. That’s kind of the sales choreography or sales motion as it’s called. But when you look at information products and online products, digital products. Courses, coaching, membership communities, there’s sort of four main ways to create a conversion tool. One is a trial that can be a free trial.

Like, Hey, first month’s free. It could be a paid trial. Like it’s a dollar for a month or a week. The other way to do it is to do a demo. So you could have like, Hey, here’s a sample. You know, training or come to this one for free and let me like demo you. Or let me take you on a tour of like what’s inside the program. I’m going to kind of demo how people use it and so on.

And then there’s a webinar, which is like a sales presentation at scale. Where you kind of make the pitch to like a group. You can even automate that and create like an automated webinar that just runs. And then you can also do old school traditional sales, which is one on one conversations, book a call.

Here’s a Calendly link schedule a meeting. You can call it a strategy call and not a sales call to take. You know, take some of the resistance down. But once you figure out, you know, sort of your, your marketing mix. And there’s other types besides content. There’s also outbound marketing. There’s you know, paid ads.

There’s a lot of different ways to do marketing, but for me, content is the primary. And just to show you an example of mapping the five pain points. Which really ties into our avatar training we did earlier, which is what we’re doing here after over a decade in this industry. I noticed in. The users of LifterLMS and broadly in this category of treating, of serving course creators, coaches, experts, community builders. And so on, that the ones that were successful had within themselves. They had to wear these five, having an, being an entrepreneur is hard.

They, we all talk about wearing multiple hats.ut in online education, there’s these five hats that I can see in every single program that is successful, that. The founder is either like a unicorn and can do all five of these hats successfully at a satisfactory level, or they build a team to fill in the gaps.

So, and if somebody’s failing, that’s the first thing I do is I diagnose like across these five hats. And this is part of this whole training. We’re doing the series, you know, the five hats are being the expert, being the entrepreneur, being the teacher, instructional designer. Being a technologist and then the fifth hat is being a community builder.

So we’re literally using that, you know, these are the five pain points and. There’s a lot of challenges within those that. You know, becomes a foundation for this content and why if you’re somebody who’s watching this. They’re thinking if this is. All of this is really resonating, you know, they’re in the target market, they’re an education entrepreneur and we’re just here trying to help people.

So that’s how I kind of think about if I could give you one idea. About improving or starting your sales and marketing program, map the pain. Create that, that map to make content out of, and then choreograph your sales process and try to package that in a conversion tool. And the best place to start is just book a call and do one on one sales.

And then once you see something that’s repeatable. Then you can start doing some of these other scalable, even automated models.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. I think something that’s amazing about. Like the current day and online sales and marketing is that that pain point is so immediate. So and I think it’s helpful to think of it in a very literal way when you’re writing sales copy or developing these conversion tools that like literally this person is feeling this pain right now because a lot of times it is so immediate you’re like God damn.

And I wish there was a way to, and you’re like literally Googling exactly the pain point. And you’re hoping like, you know. If you’re doing marketing through, you know, search engines, you’re trying to like have up a, have a result there. So that’s what’s amazing. And even if it’s not immediate. Like some of the skill and copywriting then is like, you know you know, press on the pain point a little like, Hey, remember that?

Don’t you, you hate this. But. moment. Yeah. It’s like that. That’s so immediate for folks. I also like, yeah, that we talked about frameworks making things easier. That’s so good. Cause I think in sales and marketing, a lot of, Times early on before you, you, you catch like a groove and, and how to do things.

You feel like you’re just trying to get things to stick thrown out the wall. And I’ve had this with sales and marketing people that we like train up. Like for example, we write like a weekly email to our, you know, our customers, people on the mailing list, the customers. And I think for some folks when you give them that task, it feels like.

like term paper. It’s like, I’m writing a book every week and it has to be like different and awesome and clever and everyone has to be amazing and over the top and perfect. And it’s, you know, that, you know, it’s what I developed as a framework. It’s like, no, like, Hey, just answer these questions in this order and that’s the first draft and then make it good and ship.

And it’s like, it doesn’t have to be creative. And there is room for like that super over the top iterated, perfect email that you send everyone in your funnel. But that’s not what that exercise of like writing a weekly newsletter was in the moment. So yeah, recognizing where like the frameworks can be used.

Like when you feel A little lost about what am I supposed to be doing here? I kind of don’t know what I’m doing. Try to find a framework. And there’s so many for so many sales and merchants things, and they share a lot. And it’s almost like, just pick one, right. And maybe pick a different one if you feel like you’re getting tired of one.

And over time you’ll kind of like start to understand, understand the underlying psychology of how they work. So I think along that vein, like, Okay. there’s lots of different frameworks and methods of doing sales and marketing. Something that I find really useful is to keep it simple. And just so I think of marketing in this way is like, I’m just finding the people who need my thing and I’m telling them about my thing.

And it’s, so it’s like, if you’re looking at, you know, a sales funnel or the forget the funnel, it’s a milestone map. It’s a journey. It’s a customer journey. You can get overwhelmed a little bit. And if you’re overwhelmed by the marketing strategies, like just think in that framework of like simpler terms that Like you make something that people need.

You need to find the people who need that thing. So finding where they are as part of marketing, and then you need to tell them about your thing and there’s different, you know, is it a story, is there a framework for the stories? It’s like, just make sure you’re telling them about your thing and you’re not tricking them into buying.

You know, I, ideally, if you chose to write customer avatar, like we talked about last time you know, it should be an easy sell. It should write it if you really, and that’s what I said before I was talking about customer avatars. If you know exactly who you’re talking to, it’s just a conversation. Like it’s not too clever.

And this has happened before you know, in our marketing team, where They’re trying to figure out how to write sales copy and stuff and and I often try to simplify it I’m like, hey, like we have a thing they they want our thing. We’re not fooling them We have a really good thing and they want it.

We just have to tell them about it and it simplifies things It makes it less high You know It’s like it’s not So contentious and it’s not the it’s not the most critical thing that does email be absolutely perfect. It’s like now you just tell them

Chris Badgett: In terms of keeping it simple I love this quote. I heard that you get tired of your marketing before your market ever does.

So as you become more of an advanced marketer and salesperson, it’s like, okay, now I got to do a B testing and I’m going to do paid ads. I’m going to do them over here too. And. And there’s sort of like one main channel, like when people drive onto the car lot or then you put up a billboard, like you kind of figure out the main channel and it’s easy to think you always got to do something new, but actually just keep it simple.

Just stay focused on the avatar, what they need, how they usually come in, how they like to be sold to and how to over deliver on the value. It’s not complicated.

Jason Coleman: Yeah, yeah, and I think that’s useful to even if you’re like outsourcing marketing or if you’re hiring someone to bring them on You There might be a mismatch of like their career path and their goals to like try something new or force like a channel or strategy and, and your need to like just find the people and tell them about the thing.

So early on there is like, you do want to experiment and iterate and try a bunch of things to figure out like which of these channels is working. But once one works, like just dig into it and then it gets boring and you might find like the marketer that you hired. Is very bored or like the marketing company you hired is very bored.

And that’s something to like, look out for. And are they pushing you into another channel a little too early before you really optimize the first one? So

Chris Badgett: I think it is good to move to also once you master a channel to move on. But. And like, all right, let’s see if we can get ads working or whatever, but don’t just forget and stop doing that other thing and come back to it and keep, keep doing that thing that was working and improve on that.

I like this idea when you’re thinking about improving your sales and marketing to, if you’re going to do something new, like in a quarter, say, do two more things that you’re already doing better, like take them to the next level. So it’s, it doesn’t become this new to new to new to new thing and your, your focus just gets totally scattered.

Jason Coleman: Yeah, I’m sure there’s a clever name for it, where there’s like a bias towards like different and new when like sometimes the thing you have to do is refresh your old content, refresh your old funnels and conversion tools and update them. And that’s more high value for you than, you know, trying something different.

Chris Badgett: I think that is a cognitive bias. It’s, I think it’s called novelty bias. Okay, novelty bias, good name. Being an entrepreneur is actually creating a company and forming a business. And a lot of people get stuck here. I’ve been stuck here. And you overthink it. So like the classic thing at the beginning, at least in the United States, that people get stuck on is, well, should I form an LLC or an S corp?

And then they’re like, do I need to pay thousands of dollars to a lawyer? And so on. I think it’s, it’s really all about just getting started and, and like, just do a if you’re having trouble, like, I don’t know what I’m gonna name my company. I don’t want to name my product. Just pick something and start and see if you can make a sale.

And it’s not fun to rebrand later, but like when I first started my web design agency, I’m like, I don’t know what to call it. I’m just going to call it Badget Media. That’s my last name. And if I do products later. it’ll just be sold through badger media. And I didn’t have to like, think about it a lot. And the way to think about just actually putting the infrastructure you need in place is like, you need the ability to accept money over the internet, sell a product and not go to jail and do your taxes.

Right. So what, what’s, what’s involved in that is it’s just, I think about it like, okay, pick a name. Once you have a name You can buy a domain name. Once you have a domain name, you can have a website. You can create an email address. Once you have a separate email address and a business name, you know, register, go to your town office and register the, the business name.

Once you have that, then you can open a bank account. Once you have a bank account, you can open a PayPal account or Stripe account to accept money through the internet. Now you have a website. Now you can put an offer up. Now you’re good to go. And at tax time, you know, you’re, you’ve kind of got all those fundamentals in place.

And if you’re just doing a personal brand, I do recommend like keeping the funds separate and like your business kind of becomes its own identity, different email, different bank accounts. And there’s just, it’s just the basics, but some people get all caught up in the details of that, of like, what do I name it?

And how do I figure out e commerce? But it’s really not that complicated.

Jason Coleman: I feel like. We should probably try to write up a framework of all these things and share it as a handout for this of like. These are the steps, like it’s a, they’re pretty simple, but like each one feels super critical and irreversible.

And while it is like a pain in the butt to change your logo or your brand or some of these things later on it’s not too hard. It’s like, it’s not, yeah. Like if it’s, if it’s necessary, it’s, it’s kind of better to get in the habit and, Get it running and actually make something and sell it and make some money and put it in a business bank account.

It’s kind of like, Oh, cool. Now you like completed the loop. Now pick a part to make better. And maybe you realize early on, like branding will be important and you narrow in, but. It’s just like

Chris Badgett: with paid memberships pro, like it’s actually stranger studios, which is an agency. Yeah. There was Lifter LMS was Badget Media and then code box.

And now there’s this brand. It’s fine.

Jason Coleman: That name stranger studios. Like I thought I would make video games and that sounds like a really good video game. And then when I started doing I built websites for school, I had a job. And then when I started getting con, you know contracts on the side, I already had this website, stranger studios, and this name.

So I started using it. I didn’t even have the business at the time. Like you can go pretty far just on like filing personal returns. But then it stuck. And then I come up with the reason it was like, Oh, we’re strangers. Like everyone’s strangers on the internet, but like, let’s not be strangers. I forget like what our pitch was back when we did consulting.

Yeah. It was good to just get into it. And our thing comes up a lot of times, it’s like forming a business is partnerships. Like either you know, you, you have a partner. Like I build my business with my wife. I’m very lucky that like you could just be lucky like me and have a life partner that you marry into.

They have all the skills you don’t have and help you in every way to run a business. And being married, like we run it 50, 50 and it works out. And I think because We’re married. We’re forced to get through it. Like, like we but in general, that 50, 50 percentage doesn’t often work. I’ve seen it cases where it doesn’t work.

And, and even in my, my own history where it didn’t work, I can get to. So it’s like But before you figure out the details of how to split up the partnership, like that’s confusing too. It’s like, I think it is good to try to find a partner and you can’t go really far alone. There’s, there’s, you know, lots of tools and AI will help you.

And. I think it’s good to get started and probably in the space of content marketing you know, like learning educational content, there’s probably a higher percentage of solo preneurs than partners. But if you, so get started, but when you start building something like, it’s so good to have a partner they help out in so many ways.

And it’s, it’s kind of like, and there are risks, but it’s kind of like love in that, you know there’s There’s a lot of potential pain if it doesn’t work out for unraveling a business relationship, but it’s, it’s worth it for like the rewards of like going through this together because when there’s hard times and when you run into issues and when you’re learning things, there’s, it’s great to have someone to like be excited with and help you out and talk through and second guess everything you’re doing.

So there’s different forms, but so if you’re literally going to have like a partner. Like share a business and you’re incorporating. I think what I, what I found that work out is if you can find one of the partners to have more than 50%, like 60, 40 split instead of 50, 50, cause that deadlock, if you have two partners or like in our case with investor geeks, we had a business and it wasn’t even incorporated, but we like on paper agreed like, Hey, this is all third.

We were making ad revenue and we would split it. What happened was like it was only one we only got one third of the output from the business And so we had other things going on. We weren’t motivated to work on that We this other thing we had a hundred percent of we got and then also there wasn’t any one person who had more than the others That was motivated to make it work.

You know, like, Hey, like if it’s more than 50%, if you own more than 50%, like there’s one person who’s ultimately going to be responsible for the business. And sometimes the business needs that. Cause if you run into you bump heads, you’re like, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. Dissolve.

Whereas like if it’s 60, 40, one of you is like, it’s your job to know what to do. You’re like ultimately responsible for his business. And so. If you can get into that relation, that kind of situation, I’ve, I’ve seen it work out better and to have a tiebreaker for those kinds of things works out. And even if you don’t like Kim and I are 50, 50, we it was like a tactic to, if you have like a business with your, your spouse or even just a, like one other partner.

We would in the consulting days, we always had a tiebreaker. So in the consulting days, whoever found the project was like the head. So when they decision on the project or like what to do about it, or if we’re firing that client or, or who’s in charge, who makes the decisions as it goes, whoever found the client, you know, was the one who like broke the ties on that.

And so that helps where we were 50, 50, but for every project someone was in charge. And so we weren’t getting stuck. And later on when we went to products, we had an agreement where like, I was like, Hey, we’re 50, 50, but I’m the CEO. So like the tiebreakers I’ll, I’ll make the tiebreakers and it

Chris Badgett: helps. I think partnerships are great because entrepreneurship’s lonely.

It’s like, it can be super lonely, especially online. If you’re not interacting with people in person is as much as a quote, normal person. So having partners is, is great just from a loneliness perspective, but also coming back to like this idea of having to wear multiple hats. I mentioned like you kind of need a base level of efficiency across being an expert, being an entrepreneur, being a teacher, being a technologist.

And being a community builder, it’s really nice to share those hats with a partner. And some of the most successful Lifter LMS sites I see as an example, there’s like this partnership between a techie and a talent. So like the face of the business and everything, and then there’s somebody else who like does the website, does marketing and other things.

So it’s, it’s, it’s much easier to do it together than. A solo act though, you can definitely do it. Yeah.

Jason Coleman: And sometimes there’s like support groups or masterminds or communities that you can take part in that help fill that gap. If you, if you’re kind of feel all alone,

Chris Badgett: let’s talk about product. Like we said earlier, a sales, nothing ever happens till something is sold, but you have to have something to sell.

So I’m a big fan of product. And a product really should be like. the solution to a problem as efficiently as possible. And I learned this framework from a guy named Dane Maxwell. He said, the Holy grail of business is just three things, a customer, a result, and a mechanism. And a lot of us get really focused on the mechanism, like how we solve it, what’s in the course, the VIT, making the videos.

And even when we’re selling, we keep talking about the mechanism. But like really good sales is like, Oh, I will help you achieve X result in Y number of days through Z mechanism. And what, what’s primary there is the result. It’s the improvement offer or the transformation. And so really design your product around solving a problem, not your body of knowledge.

This goes back to like the library of Alexandria thing we talked about in terms of what people actually want to buy. And you know, once you have that result, that solution to a problem to create a mechanism or a transformation there’s this concept in instructional design called chunking. So like, if I’m going to, you know, help somebody find the love of their life, if I was a dating coach, you know, the end result is finding your love of the love of your life.

Right. So that’s like a huge result. But like you can do it. It’s probably easiest to like reverse engineer instead of being like starting at zero and be like, all right, I have somebody who’s frustrated. They haven’t found a partner. What do they do first? You can often work back from the end and be like, what happens right before they found the love of life?

Well, there’s this kind of this milestone where these people decide that they’re going to go from short term to long term relationship. So how could I coach somebody or create training around that concept? And if you go back from this there’s sort of like a dating process and then you go back from that.

There’s a first date. And then, before that, there’s like learning how to approach and be comfortable, comfortable around the type of person you’re going after. And before that, there’s kind of this phase where you really need to kind of become the best version of yourself or do some of your inner work and like kind of get ready to like go out into the world and do this thing.

I’m not even a dating coach, but like, I’m kind of like finding these milestones or these chunks that need to happen to get this result. And by doing that, you’re actually creating. your unique mechanism of how you help people. So that’s, that’s kind of the customer result mechanism. And then the other thing is as if we use our dating coach example your program should work for your avatar in challenging circumstances.

So if they have setbacks or maybe it’s not like your actual avatar and this there’s a lot of this other type of person in your program, which is also fine. But like, maybe they have this other challenge that not everybody has, like, how can I improve my training or my coaching so that it still works, let’s say, even if the per, they’re trying to date and they’re, they speak a different language, as an example, I’m just thinking of something like, how would this program still work if there was a language barrier or a culture barrier or a geographic barrier?

Like they met online and they really think that like, there’s all these like challenging circumstances. So. Don’t just think like in a perfect world, this is how it would work. It still should work under pressure in the same way, like a good vehicle can like drive in the snow or in the rain, it’ll still get you from a to B.

One of the biggest parts about product is pricing. And this is something you know, we’re both fans of a guy named Patrick Campbell and his, one of his hooks, he’s all about pricing, particularly in subscription businesses. He ended up selling his company for a couple of hundred million dollars, but hit one of his hooks about pricing is face it.

You just guessed. And when he says that, like his avatar, like people like us with subscription software business are like, yeah, you’re right. You know, like they all, so he like understands the avatar or whatever. But pricing is key. We could do a whole thing on pricing, but just to throw some quick ideas out there there’s different there’s like value based pricing or like if you were going to do this like one on one with somebody, how much would that cost?

How valuable is the result that you’re promising? So if you can, if you truly are a matchmaker and help people find the love of their life, what’s that worth to a person? It’s priceless. And so if you really want to go for something that’s really lucrative, find priceless things I’m sure there’s all kinds of like, if you’re a health coach and you specialize in some challenge that you can help people overcome this, it’s kind of priceless where somebody goes from a permanent chronic condition to like exactly where they want.

Whereas like if you’re like, like if I was doing business coaching, I might, I could be like, I’ll help you grow by 10 percent every year, whatever. Like that’s an incremental improvement. That’s still valuable, but that’s not as valuable as like, I’m going to help you scale from like small business to mid market.

And I think about it in terms of return on investment. I could talk about pricing forever, but I’ll leave it with this one thing, which is Whatever you do, price it, try to price it at 10 to a hundred X ROI for your end customer return on investment. So. If I think helping somebody find the love of their life and in their mind, they think like I would pay 20, 000 to find the love of my life, maybe charge two grand for that.

Or if you want to go broader,

Jason Coleman: it should feel like 10 times as much value for what they paid.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s like, yeah. Cause they should not feel like price gouge. If you’re going to help a business grow. And they invest like 10 grand in you, your training should deliver at least a hundred grand worth of value for them.

And then they’ll keep coming back. They’ll tell their friends that’s good pricing.

Jason Coleman: That makes the math easy. You’re kind of like, if I do this thing that sometimes people coach businesses to make more money. So it’s like literally money. So it’s like, at the end of this, you will make an extra a hundred thousand dollars a year, would you be willing to pay?

20, 000 for that. It’s like a no brainer. Right. And if it feels like it feels like a good investment when it has that kind of ROI,

Chris Badgett: I think business is actually the easiest because you can use money. So when you have your, your chief problem or these five pain points, there’s often metrics like business metrics.

It’s easy. I think it’s a little harder. Like what’s the value of finding the love of your life? It’s a little different. And just a quick story about Lifter LMS. We decided we started out as paid. We wanted to make sure people would buy it. It was 150. We sold 42 copies in the first week of the launch.

We said we were going to shut down the business if we didn’t sell more than a hundred. We were bullheaded and decided to keep going anyways. But then later We made the decision to make the core product free and have add ons and bundles and stuff Which is how we made made the money, but so like you can test your pricing So even if you think just test it, like pre sell it or work with an early group of people and just get going.

Jason Coleman: The market is more flexible and like you can change your prices and people don’t really notice. And, and often, especially in the beginning, it’s like, don’t feel. Attached to the 50 people who just bought at a certain price. It is like, if they notice you make it free or raise your price, they may get upset in some direction, but you’re like, think about the 50, 000 people you’re eventually going to serve.

So it’s like, that sometimes helps. It’s like, it’s, it’s difficult to make those changes, but you can, yeah. Change your pricing. If it didn’t work out, you can launch something again. If the launch didn’t go well, like apparently no one noticed, they won’t notice the second time either, but you’re trying to do it better.

Yeah. There’s so much to like to dig into here. The, as another resource for folks, when you were talking about results and chunking, that sounded a lot like there’s this book called badass by making users awesome by Kathy Sierra. And I I think it’s a book about product and touches marketing, but but it’s like a, the, the analogy they use in that book over and over is you’re not telling someone how to use a camera.

You’re telling them how to become a photographer. That’s like the result, you know? And so it’s like the documentation, you know, isn’t just how to do it. It’s kind of like how to get to the result. And the, and you’re going to be more successful if you build your products that way. And I think Yeah, we, on pricing really quick, it’s like, yeah, the guest is good.

I think like trust your guests too. People downplay the guests and their systems. I have a couple of things like about pricing that. Or maybe newish to like everything that’s out there you could find. One is like do all the methods that everyone, all the methods are really good. So do all of them and then kind of like take the average or what your gut is telling you after you do the exercise.

Like you kind of learn the exercise of like time and materials plus a margin, like make sure you’re making money. That’s really important in doing that exercise. Is like, can I price this product in a way that I’ll still make money? That’s really important to like go through the exercise and the number you get out is, is an indicator of what might be the price.

And then if you trust your gut, what’s everyone else charging? That’s another method. But I forget the, like the, you, you, you threw out a couple other methods for figuring out pricing. And so it’s like, do all that. And then kind of like, you know, the process of going through that a number of different ways, then you’d be like, Oh, actually it feels like the price should be about this.

And the other thing on pricing I think about is like the timing of the pricing. So we think about that too. I think we talked earlier about we, like you had a paid, you went paid and then free or like you could charge monthly or annually. And it, the, When you ask for money should match like when you’re delivering the value.

So an example to drill at home is there was a course I saw where it was, you know, quit drinking in a month and It was amazing. I think it was priced at like a hundred bucks and this person was making money selling that course, it was transforming people’s lives. And he was building like a little free community.

And he’s like, how can I make recurring revenue off the community? Like how can I deliver more value to them and keep making money? And it’s like, this problem is tough. Cause if. Your product does what it really says. Everyone loses 20 pounds. They save a bunch of money than I spending on alcohol. They repair the relationship with their mother and their spouse and their kids, like their whole life changes in month one.

And you already anchored that price of a hundred dollars. So like I’ll change your life for a hundred bucks. And then it’s like, I’m going to sell you a gym membership for 200. Like it doesn’t work. Like so in reality, what I think that person had to do in that case is like, if you have a product that delivers a ton of value upfront, like charge upfront And then, you know, you deliver ongoing value, charge a smaller amount ongoing.

But I think that exercise, it’s not talked about too much of thinking about the timing of the product, of the pricing. We can also get into like, we were talking about product. Now we were talking about marketing earlier, kind of an old school marketing idea that I think sometimes gets lost when your head’s deep.

And what you’re doing is that product is marketing. And so what you want to do is use customer insights to guide your product development. And your positioning of your product. And so it’s, you’re not, not just like how to sell to them. Like, so as you’re talking with customers and you should always be talking with customers, it’s like either do consulting.

So you’re doing your type with them or take calls or find a way to like, always be talking with your customers. Cause you’re going to learn from them. And as you learn from them, you might think I’m learning how to like market to them better. We talked about that. That is true. But. The real market is like, maybe the product should kind of sell itself.

And if you improve the product using what you’ve learned from the marketing, you know, all that stuff will flow more easily. There’s like a positioning is this term to figure out early, like, which is really important and we could dive into, but it’s basically. There’s other products that solve the thing my course or my product also solves How is mine positioned verse those and I think you talked to some points Of like is it?

You know, what’s the mechanism is it or I think we’re talking about like speed insight Yeah. And certainty. So it’s kind of like, which, which of those am I like levering, leveraging most first, like the other solutions out there you know, like a gym is like, you come here three times a week and then you get healthy, or if it’s kind of like a diet has a different pace but it’s kind of solving the same.

Problem. So figuring out, you know, your, your course, how do you position it? And I think positioning like pay memberships pro also made the decision to be a freemium product. And part of that was positioning of like, let’s be the best free membership plugin. So there’s like a paid one and let’s be the free one that has the widest distribution.

Let’s be the biggest free one was, you know, and that, that’s how we would differentiate between with the others. And there’s another term here is like called product market fit, which is you know, when you are developing a product early on, you’re building a course, you’re, you know, you coach someone through something and then you tried to build a course around your coaching, but it didn’t hit for the masses like it did for that one person.

And you’re like, why, what’s wrong? And you go back and reiterate. And it’s crucial that you, One of the reasons to be a hundred percent focused is it takes a certain amount of grit when you try something like that and it doesn’t work to not give up and be like, ah, the product doesn’t make any sense.

No one will ever get it. And like actually dig in and be like, I have to make this work. What could I do to make it work? And that iterative process is like product market fit. So I so an example of this and What we’ve done, we have a membership platform. We built this tool to run Black Friday sales called Sitewide Sales, and we used it ourself, we dog fooded, and then we used it for a subset of our customers.

And I think we had like a few hundred, maybe like a thousand people using this on a membership platform to run Black Friday sales. And then we’re like, everyone should use this to run every Black Friday sale. So we tried to build like a general purpose version. And it was like how to run a sitewide sale on like any e commerce site was the goal.

And it wasn’t getting traction. People weren’t, it wasn’t obvious to people what the need was. And we built like a really good tool that works. But then when we were talking to folks, There was a couple insights that did stick. Like, so I’m like getting market feedback here. And one of them was like, Oh, like one of the killer features to be going to have is that they could schedule a sale.

So a pain point was like, Hey, do you ever run a sale? And you have to like wake up at midnight to like. Put the banner on your website and update the coupon code and set it live. You’re like, that’s so annoying. I hate that. And you’re like, yeah. So like, what if you could set it up in advance? And like, okay, that’s a feature.

And that was a feature we had, but it was like buried in the settings. It needed to be like the feature. And. And I was talking to you earlier, you’re like, it also had to like change the name. It’s not site wide sales. It’s like timed sales, scheduled sales. It’s like, that’s like the core thing that people get excited about.

That needs to be like the name of the product, the focus of the product. And, and technically if you do that in this case, like there’s like a, Obscure technical reason why that’s hard, like to run multiple sales at the same time and have them all scheduled at an advance and overlap and automate.

There’s like a hard, it’s a hard technical challenge based on how we already built the product to do that after the fact. So what happened actually is like, we got that key insight and we’re like, shit, we should have from the beginning built it like this with, this is the focus with this technical architecture.

And then it would. So serve the killer app that like, it seems to be clicking with people when we’re trying to sell it. And that’s like, it, it needed another iteration. We didn’t give it cause it was a side project. And maybe that’s another story, like, you know, how to handle side projects. But yeah, I remember like product is like, yeah, product market fit, iterate through it, figuring out your positioning, always talking to customers.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Product is marketing. I love it. And sometimes if you’re thinking. Well, I don’t know what to do in my marketing. Just move the free line and give away a little bit of your product or use it. And two examples, like at Lifter LMS, our top performing lead generation the way we get email addresses and, and it kind of also works as a conversion tool is we use our software to make a free course about how to use our software that we give away for free.

And so like the product is literally marketing itself. And I think as of now, we’ve probably had somewhere around 35, 000 people come into that and it just works. But just to give a different example, like with the dating coach example, we kind of talked about the end result, you know, they’re getting married or whatever.

But that first step was about working on yourself and getting ready to like go out into the market and approach people or whatever. So maybe make step one free, just move it over the free line and give that away for free. That’s your, your main marketing tool. And at the end of it, there’s just a call to action to be, by the way, this is step one in a six step process about how to find the love of your life.

And now you have this like really strong marketing, which is actually a piece of your product. In terms of the mechanism of delivery, here’s step one. You can have that for free. So, so you, you don’t have to like overcomplicate it. And in terms of, um, marketing and just a pro tip out there, if you’re ever thinking about just, you’re already got this working, let’s say as a dating coach, like, well, just go out past your end result of you know, finding the love of your life, maybe the next thing is something about.

A parenting thing or something like what’s going to happen next. So always think about people. If you put people at the center of your business, not your product, decisions get much easier. You’re like, Hey, I’m trying to expand my company. Well, like what do they need after they find a love of your life?

And just stay with that same avatar and, and go with them.

Jason Coleman: That’s awesome. Sometimes like successful pivots are. I had the right audience, but they weren’t willing to pay for this thing, but they are willing to pay for this other thing and this other format or this other version and keeping your eye open, eyes open for that kind of thing.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Being flexible is so key. Let’s talk about operations and you know, part of, even if you’re a solopreneur, there’s all this, these functions that are going on inside the business. And if you’re doing everything, you still kind of have to do everything if you’re doing it by yourself. So it comes from corporate culture, but having an organizational chart, even if it’s just you, I recommend making the organization organizational chart, like you’re the CEO of the business name

Jason Coleman: over and over and every column

Chris Badgett: who’s doing operations, who’s doing sales, who’s doing marketing, who’s doing product, who’s doing support, who’s doing design.

You can slice and dice the org, however you want. But like map it out and that’ll also, you’re, you’re, you’re going to be stronger somewhere. Like a lot of people really love product and like the coaching or the courses and the, all that, but they hate marketing. Well, somebody has got to do marketing and somebody needs to sell people.

So map it out and. One of the ways I like to think about that is you put your name everywhere and when you’re like, oh, maybe this is working, what’s the first thing I would do? If I could hire somebody, where do I want to delegate? Typically the first answer particularly if you don’t have a partner and you’re not already like dividing and conquering is perhaps getting a virtual assistant to help you in some of these processes or even take over something like customer success and Or even marketing if you really don’t like marketing, but your assistant is really good at writing and could take your ideas for from a content Spreadsheet or calendar that you make and help execute that that’s fantastic Partnering Is good like for your business, but you can also partner with outsource agencies to help Fill in the org chart.

So for example, if you want, if you don’t want to learn to run paid ads yourself, you can partner with an ad agency to do it. You could potentially even negotiate instead of, you know, just paying whatever the rate is, like giving them a percentage of sales that are tracked through their generation. So like being creative about partnerships is helpful because it is overwhelming to wear all these hats.

And particularly if you’re early on. And can’t if you can’t afford to like go big, you could get creative in the partnerships. Like one of my first courses where I brought in other expert instructors in the platform, I didn’t pay them anything until their stuff started selling. So they got a percentage of sales.

I was able to partner to help create product within the org that wasn’t all on me and that business was with my wife as well. So yeah, typically a virtual assistant is a good first hire just to try to unload and delegate some of the things you’re either not good at or just can’t find time for that you can build a process around.

And then also there’s this idea when you do start to get a team to have like a singly responsible individual on each part of the business. And that’s all, that’s you everywhere when you’re a solopreneur, but. It’s really nice. What, what happens is sometimes entrepreneurs can be a little bit of control freaks and not, not like fully delegate.

It doesn’t mean you’re not involved. You’re not, you’re still need to manage and coach and stuff like that. But having different singly responsible individuals and like empowering them, like from a management philosophy, the way I look at that is particularly at a high level position in the org chart is.

If you’re the CEO, like you’re still like setting the goal and the vision and stuff, but give them freedom on how to get there. Cause they’re a different person. Hopefully they’re better at you at the thing. And just, but think about the org chart. Like when I see an entrepreneur who’s just stressed out, like there’s so much going on, you kind of got to slow down and like, what is, how is this ecosystem working?

And, and you know, it’s something that’s never perfect. Like you kind of have to refine it over time. So yeah.

Jason Coleman: It’s a good activity. It’s like business plans. It’s like, you know, you make the business plan and that’s not worth so much cause things change so rapidly that it, but the planning process of writing the business plan helps you figure things out.

I feel that way about org charts. Like very quickly after we settle an org chart in a business, it goes out of date and you’re like, Oh, we just hired some. So they’re not an org chart. And you’re like, yeah, okay, we’ll get to it. And I could totally relate to that. The first time I put that together yeah.

I think I got, you know, maybe it was like, that also has talked about an e myth revisited of doing an org chart, even if you’re a small team and you put your name on every spot and maybe like a tactic if you’re in that phase where you’re doing everything. Is to pick days of the week and like Friday is the day when I’m CEO and I do CEO stuff and like Wednesday is the day I do marketing and I do marketing stuff and to kind of make sure that you don’t, you don’t forget to work on critical areas of the business when you’re at, you know, until you figure out a way to either automate some of those aspects, outsource some of them or hire people to work on them.

But it’s good to be, if you’re thinking about what you’re doing as a business, you’re going to write down all these roles. And then yes, I think I said like the E Myth Revisited, that, that was like a transformational book for me thinking about business. And you know, it made me think of business as building systems and there’s other folks who talk about stuff like that, but in like maybe like the main.

you know take away from that book is like, right. Standard operating procedures for everything. And like that, that is building the business. And it’s an interesting book if I reread it and the, it’s like half story, like a fictional story. He’s talking to a woman about her business and half kind of prescriptive, like here’s what you got to do.

And I remember like I devoured that book the first time I read it and that the story really helped hammer at home. But then as, I had already been in business for a while rereading it. I was skipping over the fiction and like, just tell me what to do, man. I’m trying to remember like exactly how to do this thing.

But yeah, so. you have org chart, these are the roles. And then the different roles, like they, they do things. I call them standard operating procedures. There’s different names for these things, but it’s basically like write down instructions for everything you do or record yourself as you’re doing something.

That’s all, you know, you can hand off a recording of yourself doing it, but also write down what you’re doing and why and how you’re thinking about it. And. Especially when you’re hiring folks, but you can do it for yourself when you’re not. Cause it’s just, I still run the SOPs in my own business. Cause it reminds you what to do.

I’m doing all kinds of stuff. And I’m like, how do you do this again? And make sure you don’t miss steps and the goal for a good SOP. And don’t tell this to the people that you hire, but you want the most mediocre workers to be able to run, execute the SOPs. And I forget, I think that’s, It’s kind of the phrasing that Michael Gerber uses in the e myth book.

So it’s like right up to SOP for the lowest. You shouldn’t have to like, like early on in a business, you’re, you’re, you’re an exceptional person and you’re the one who makes everything work and you’re like a great, you know, sales person or a great developer or a great content writer, and eventually then you hire out those roles.

And like, maybe you’re lucky and you hire someone who’s even better than you are, but probably they’re expensive and you’re not actually hiring at that. So you don’t want your business to only work because awesome people are running it. You know, there’s definitely parts of your business where it’s like, write the SOP for the lowest common denominator, mediocre person who could execute that task.

And if you, you keep that in mind, you make them as simple as possible. And then another kind of tip related tip to that, when you, you start thinking in terms of systems in your business is that you can fudge it early on and automate things later. So you know, in the short term, you can use human power and time to do things and kind of make a mental note.

I’m either going to ditch this cause I can’t scale it or when I scale it, we’re going to have to automate this. So like a real good example is if you’re, you’re selling a course. And it leads to, there’s a kind of like coaching or consultation aspect. It’s like do it yourself and you’re, you do it really well.

But your time as the CEO of this business is really valuable, but like be willing to do it early on yourself. And it just takes time. And then in the future, you can automate aspects of that or subcontract it to someone else. Or even sometimes it’s like, even as simple as like, we need to send an email this many days after they do, and I don’t know how to like actually program the thing to send the email.

It’s like, just take notes. Like you’re, especially in the early days, you’re watching every single cell anyway, like send the email yourself, do it manually. So don’t be scared to do things manually or things that take time. And if it works out, you can automate it later.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. For standard operating procedures or SOPs, I think one just a pro tip out there is at the top of it you kind of got to sell the idea to the team member a little bit.

Like, why is this important? Instead of them opening, I’d be like, like, let’s say we’re a coach or a course creator and we have somebody helping us with new onboarding, new clients. If we want them to. The new client to receive like a personalized email and maybe some branded swag in the mail or something like that.

Before step one, like open your email, step two, use this templated message. Like before getting into all that, you know, saying something like we want all our customers to feel special, valued and welcome to this community. It’s part of our brand because of X, Y, and Z. You’re kind of like providing context and like company culture and

Jason Coleman: the values.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. So there’s something to do. Let’s talk about team and leadership. One idea I want to dig into here is sometimes leadership and management kind of get lumped into the same thing. Just like sales and marketing where they’re, they’re actually different, but there is overlap and the same thing like leadership and management are not the same, but there is overlap.

So I wanted to talk about more of the leadership side. Like the management side is sort of like in the operations of like, okay, we have these standard operating procedures. This is the process. This is how we do things, you know, quality control and, you know, performance and things like that. Leadership is more higher level And, and I find that people tend to gravitate towards like, there’s like layers of leadership, like the top being like a transformational, super inspiring leader at the bottom of the leadership hierarchy is like, I have to listen to this person cause they send me a paycheck or whatever.

And we all want to like move up and become higher levels of leaders. And the crazy thing within leadership is that when you have a team, Not everybody will see you as the same. Like some may see you as like transfer, transformational, inspirational, and others may see you as like, I’m just working here cause I need the money.

I need the paycheck. And it’s not bad or good. But like it’s good to kind of move up and tactically one of the ways to kind of get clearer on your leadership is to actually get clear on your, your vision, your mission, your values, your strategies, your tactics, and actual projects. So whenever somebody’s like feeling like crazy busy, they’re often like in the weeds of projects, which you should be, or tactically executing some kind of campaign.

But particularly at the top of that figuring out your vision and mission to use our dating coach example, like, why do I care about helping people find the love of their life? Maybe it has something to do with a lot of like loneliness or depression in society. Maybe you have a personal story from a friend or family member that, you know, inspired you to start this thing.

Like what’s the story, what’s your vision? What wrong do you want to write in the world? Mission’s a little more goal oriented. Like I want to help a hundred people find the love of their life in 2026. So they’re like, And then you put this stuff on your website, like on your about page of what you’re, what you’re doing.

It’s easy just to be get really busy in the projects. Like I’m creating content, I’m, I’m doing marketing, I’m building this site. I’m figuring all this stuff out, but whenever you get stuck or you’re not sure what to do or not sure what to prioritize by going back to that leadership, you did leadership work you did earlier on what’s your vision and mission.

It can often settle things down, help you prioritize. I’m also a big fan of leading by example. If you have a team so, you know, demonstrate the work ethic. You want to see others do in our example of like helping new customers on board and you like have as a part of your company culture that you actually do really care about your customers.

You’re not just trying to separate. money from their wallet. You got to show that like it’s good for your team to see you like over deliver to somebody or if a customer was getting challenged, like even breaking process and being like, this has happened to me in a coaching program where like it didn’t include private coaching, but the coach, like I just emailed him, I’m like, I’m this challenge.

He’s like, let’s jump on a call. I’ll be glad to talk through that with you for like 30 minutes. And that like demonstrate his team sees that. Yeah. And that like demonstrates that Hey, this is how we treat our customers here. It sets company culture. Then the other thing about leadership that’s really important, I think, is to take good care of the people, not just below you, but above and beside you as well.

I, there’s a framework for this. I’d give credit if I could remember the person’s name, but it’s called plus minus equal. So when you really want to grow and you really want to develop your leadership. You want to lead your team, you know, they’re kind of below you. Or your customers the equals you want to like connect with other leaders in your industry and just try to help each other.

Some people call that masterminding. You and I both do that as well. Then look up above you, like reach out for mentoring, get help, treat those people well try to add value and give back to them and stuff like that. And it just kind of develops this leadership momentum. And just as a personal story, I always think about this.

I had a boss once tell me a long time ago that. He promoted me up to being a manager of the company and this was in Alaska and there’s a lot of like dying crazy stuff that happened, whether in situations and all kinds of stuff. He’s like, man, you’re so calm under pressure and level. And when I remember him saying that, I’m like, I’m not, I just must not show it.

 I am like common or pressure. So whenever something kicks off you know, I try to just be calm and be like stable because it helps your team is sort of, you’re kind of like a lightning rod and your team will feed off that energy. And I think being on time is an important one too. Like, If you’re a leader and you’re like cracking down on people for being late or not keeping commitments, but you’re also like never on time, it’s a little contradictory.

So if you want to have a culture of like timeliness and respecting other people’s calendars and schedules and stuff like that, it’s really important to like practice what you preach and have congruency there. And I’ve always appreciated that. And of course things come up and like, Hey, I’m late. Sorry, I’m late.

This thing happened or whatever. But that’s how I, Those are some tips on leadership.

Jason Coleman: All that resonates with me around like leading from the inside and by example, and try to do that as much as possible of getting side by side with them. I feel like sometimes when I’m training managers early on, they think When you’re managing someone, they do stuff for the manager.

Like all the work trickles up and it’s like, I don’t know exactly what the percentage breakdowns you were kind of referring to some of the things related, but it’s about like third. So like a third of your time as a manager is like, you’re doing your own stuff. A third of the time your employees are like helping you do that thing.

And then a third of the time you’re helping them do their thing too. Like, don’t forget that last one. Like you should be like And I think that helps. Yeah. Like the glue that holds everything together and like keeps the respect of everyone. But then there are those times when, you know, you’re in the trench with folks. But then as the leader of the business, you, you know, you are doing these high level CEO things and you are. You’re there’s a, like solving the big business decisions.

That’s why they’re an employee. They just want a job, you know, and like, you. Handling the risk and some of the pressures and I think of it like an umbrella. I’m like Preserving these folks from thinking about these things that are just gonna that don’t concern them. I’m like a micromanager way of like trying to hide the information. It’s really just kind of if this thing is just worrisome for people you know, let’s Let’s insulate them from that.

I, we I, I start to like really micromanage the, like you’re in a Slack with me. I think when we started working together, a lot of my first kind of feedback of like. How I do business for how you do business was around like the communication. And Slack and kind of like the management channel. Like the channel is marketing, but some of the discussion goes in the management channel.

Cause you don’t want the marketers to see you fighting, you know, it’s like fight over here amongst, and then. You know, show yourself as a solid front. Like, you know, we’re all doing this together. And then it like, Oh, they’re really smart. They know exactly what we’re doing. Like they gave us like the one directive.

They didn’t see the indecision. We’re like, I don’t know if we should be doing this. They’re like, I’m thinking of one of three things. I don’t know. Let’s do the first thing. Cool. And I, I think that’s not like, I don’t think of it from, I hope, like from like a micromanaged, like control everyone’s, and I make fun of it all the time.

I’m like, the idea of police, like Jason is like trying to police everyone’s ideas. I’m not coming from that standpoint. I’m coming from kind of like a caring standpoint of like nurturing and trying to give people the space to do their job outside of the distractions and, and really just kind of managing the flow down.

And, and I think. If you do that, like there’s a lot of respect that like it makes folks jobs more enjoyable. I think a lot of the stuff that people hate about jobs is like the bureaucracy and the politics and the confusion and, and that, and you kind of insulate that. So we’re talking about team and leadership and you were just talking about having a vision, building a mission and setting your core values.

You know, as a business and using those to guide you. And in particular, I think. That’s useful in all kinds of contexts, but in particular in hiring, it’s been super useful for us. And so the suggestion here is to like define your core values early and use them to hire folks. And I think where I’ve seen this idea written most clearly is in a book called traction by Gina Wickman.

And that’s like the entrepreneurial operating system EOS. There’s like a whole, like, you know, group and a lot of kind of midsize businesses use this framework for everything, but it has a really good chapter about defining core values. And what I loved about it was it wasn’t like an abstract exercise.

And you could do it at any time. Like it really was. So if you, at this point I already had some employees and it’s kind of like, think about your ideal employees, the ones you like, what do you like about them? You know, and like takes you through the steps. You write down all these things. All right, which of your employees are problematic?

What don’t you like about them? Kind of figure out and, and, you know, you can go through process and we have core values, both our businesses and they overlap, you know, kind of well. And so once you have these, you’re like, Oh, like everyone who works here and is great is like a hundred a plus on all these core values and people who have problems are failing at one or more of the values.

And so you can start reviewing people internally about that. But then when you’re hiring, was the kind of the big ah ha for me, was I used to hire, say I was hiring someone in marketing, I would ask them questions about how they’ve marketed before and try to judge if they have the skill set to do the job they’re gonna do.

And instead now when I’m hiring people, every question I’m trying to drill into, do they have the values of everyone else who works here. Cause that’s, Turns out more important than the skill set because if we work together for six months and you have all the skills But you don’t have the values. I found it’s almost impossible to kind of for some of these values or so And maybe to make it more clear like There’s one value in particular we have at stranger studios, which is you know, taking responsibility for your own work.

And we’ve found that that’s probably the most important of all the values we have, because it’s the one that you use to fix things when they’re broken. So if I sit down with someone and we have another value, which is like you know heifers or you know, have a commitment to open source and transparency.

And maybe something’s out of line there if they don’t take responsibility for, you know, why they’re not meeting that value. Like there’s not even like a tool to lever to make it better. And I mean, I could go on advice like that, taking responsibility, like an example of that is when, when there’s problems and why it’s so important, like when, you know, Something’s not getting done.

Like an employee you have messed up. They sent out like a blog post and it was poorly worded. It was undrafted. It looks like they might’ve plagiarized like the worst thing you could imagine. And then you’re like, Hey, that’s a problem. You definitely need to talk to that employee. They’re probably breaking some core values while they did the sloppy work.

So having those core values to talk it through. But As a manager, having responsibility for this work means that I have to take responsibility. Like, how did this happen on my watch? What did I do wrong? Why didn’t I explain to this person that this, why did they think this work would fly? What, you know, why did they think they could get away with this?

Why didn’t they know how to do this? And so we’re always doing that. So it’s like at every level, it’s kind of like, you know, taking responsibility for what you did for the work that you do. So I’m diving into like one specific value. We have, you know, five of them, but it’s once we know these things and it’s like, man, these things really, we developed them based on the people that we worked with and we wanted to work with and what we liked about them.

And these were the traits. Then we you know, definitely tested the people who, you know, thought about these with the people who are working at the business and whenever we hire, we test on those first. And then definitely the skills are important too. I’ve, I’ve realized. You know, basically we have to trial everyone like it’s when we hire someone to do a job It’s nearly impossible to know if they can actually do that job well until you actually work together Even if you see stuff in their portfolio There’s sometimes there’s cases like oh, they were working with someone else and the person who really can do it is that other person you didn’t hire or but It’s it’s hard to to judge people.

Some people really get it interviewing and not just get it doing the job and but you can train people on skills and and Things but it’s hard to train them on values. So looking out for that early is key.

Chris Badgett: I Think one thing when creating your values is they don’t have to be cheesy You So like you might think like trust, integrity, work hard, but you can actually have fun with it and they can be kind of creative.

And like the first things you think of of like, of course you want to work at a company that has integrity. Like that should be every company. It’s not really that unique. So like spend some time on it, like at least a week, like thinking about it, talking to team about it, just introspection. I just also just want to iterate that like terminating or firing people is one of the hardest things you do as an entrepreneur.

And when it’s about the values, it becomes easier because it’s not about, Oh, I feel this way or you made me feel this way. It’s more about, this is the culture. These are like kind of the rules here of how we operate. And oftentimes, you know, this person has been given, like clearly communicated that like, Like, for example, at LFTR LMS, one of our company values is clear communication.

So if I were ever to let somebody go for communication, I would have tried to coach them, help them level up, get on the same page, understand expectations with communications more, and then, you know, give them a path to improve and look out for it and revisit. So then when it does come time to a termination conversation, if that’s going to happen, It’s not about how I feel.

It’s just protecting the values of the company and we’re not seeing change and it becomes easier to do.

Jason Coleman: And that’s key. You said like protecting the values of the company. Cause it’s, it’s like, if you let folks in who don’t have those same values, it kind of poisons the well and you know, people, if work ethic is important and that’s built into the values, people come in without it, then other people are like, Oh, he’s not working hard.

Why do I have to work hard? Or you know, they’re not communicating well. Why do I have to communicate well? So yeah,

Chris Badgett: and one more thing just to add on that is To make your life easier if your personal values and your business values overlap pretty good or even are the same It’s so easy just to show up because this is like, this is who I am at work.

This is who I am at home. And it’s just like the same, you’re not like a different person at work. And when we talked about the customer avatar before, if the person you’re targeting is also in this values group, there’s just so much congruency. That it’s not hard or forced or like that’s where I’m talking about one day Like you don’t want to necessarily serve everybody because this other group that doesn’t have these values at all Probably aren’t going to be that fun to work with or support or whatever So it’s it sounds quick like oh write down the six most important values But like really think about it and think about it and who you hire and who you want to work with as customers and so on Let’s talk about thinking in spreadsheets and building models.

The thing I love about spreadsheets is I’m kind of on the, I’m like, if there’s like the right brain, who’s like artists left brain hardcore analytical spreadsheets, more on the analytical side. I’m probably Right of center in terms of my creative, like way of abstract thinking. But I love working in spreadsheets because it removes abstraction.

Like I do a lot of mind maps. I mean, looking at one of my notes right here, like here’s a mind map of things I want to talk about values. But if I was actually going to like codify my values and like get more specific and make sure they fit, I’d move off the mind map and move into a spreadsheet.

Because this cell needs to have a data point in it. And then once I have that data, or that word, or those numbers, I can build formulas and do stuff. So I just love the idea of removing abstraction and forcing yourself to work in spreadsheets. Like, even as like a course creator, if you’re gonna create like a resource to go with a training, like a worksheet, this is how I create worksheets.

I would be like, well, how do I support this person? I start mind mapping on my paper, but then ultimately I’m going to build that spreadsheet and put boxes on there and give this box a name and that’s going to become PDF worksheet. So I moved from abstract, you know, brainstorming into concrete, valuable resource.

You can do that for course outlining too. So like, okay, I’m a, to use our dating coach example, I was just brainstorming when I came up with those like milestones of like what needs to happen on the way to finding the love of your life. So that’s kind of a brainstorm, but eventually we want to put that in a spreadsheet and start thinking about you know, the order of things, what’s missing.

Is there anything that goes between this and so on? Marketing content is the same. Where if we find our five pain points and then we got our mind map going and then we can create like a spreadsheet that gives us like categories and filters and columns for like, Oh, for this pain point, here’s the 12 topics.

And then, you know, it could just keep expanding because there’s only so much we can carry in our working memory. So moving off of like journals and scribbles to like spreadsheets and tabs is really powerful. And then on the more business side, like business planning, using our dating coach example again, like if I was going to get into adding a line of business for like, okay, they found their soul mate.

Now we’re going to do like how to do the family thing or whatever. Be like, well, how many customers do I have? Like what percentage of people like want to have kids? And I could start forecasting numbers and stuff, which is something you’re really good at. Your forecasts are awesome of like kind of validating ideas.

And what if that grows at 10 percent every year? And now we have these two products, the love of your life and then awesome family product. And what’s it, what does that look like in 10 years? There’s only so much of that you can calculate in your brain. So that’s, that’s really helpful. And just a personal story, like you’ve done that.

Like when you look at things like growth, like at Lifter LMS, like, okay, if we set these goals and this is where we want to be in five years, you said something to me the other day, like, Oh, if you grow, if you want to double the business, if you grow 15 percent every year, in three years, you’ve doubled the business.

I don’t know if it’s 25%, but yeah, but that’s like, Instead of being like. I want to grow, like, let’s double the business. That’s like the abstract thought and let’s do it next year. It’s like, well, but if we do it this way and this compounds and let’s model that out in math, it really starts making sense.

And you get it a more concrete plan.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. Yeah. I call that like another aspect of that, doing that spreadsheet, I call it like positive visualization through spreadsheets. It’s like you, you kind of model your business and how it works and you’re like, what if I grow 25 percent per year? Click and drag, you know, it doesn’t like 25 percent is pretty big.

Like we don’t like the power of compounding. You drag out 10, 20 years. You’re like, Oh my God, this is huge. And there’s something about like putting that number in there 25 percent and like committing to it to like, you find a way to do it. And if you have a good spreadsheet model, it’s like, you’ll have cells like a really simple model.

I’m selling courses to people at a certain price. And it’s like how many How many people times what price is how much I make and if you want to make more money You either have more courses more people or higher price. There’s like no other way to make more money Like so which of those dials needs to turn so if you’re like, I’m gonna go 25% Am I trying to get 25 percent more users?

Am I raising my prices 25 percent and hoping that people will buy it? Am I, you know, going to expand. You know, horizontally through new courses and sell them to the same people where other products and things. Yeah. So, I mean, I love it. It’s funny. I’m like on the left side of the right brain, left brain thing.

And so I do love these spreadsheets, especially like early on to model the business. It feels almost irresponsible to like start. spending money on a business before you realize like how that spending that money turns into the money you’re going to make back, like to have a rough idea. This is how we make money.

And I, so it’s good to get out of your, so for folks who are maybe right brained, I see folks like we’re, we’re gushing over spreadsheets and I see some folks are just like, I don’t like numbers. I don’t, I don’t get it. I don’t know how they work. And so they avoid that completely. And I, I think it’s like good to try to get out of your comfort zone and, and, and dig into that.

Then more specifically, like when you’re doing these kind of like modeling forecast type sheets. You know, that could be as simple as I said, how many customers times what price it’s like the numbers are going to be imprecise and to be okay with having the spreadsheet isn’t, and I think that’s another hangup some folks have is they’re like, Why do that?

I’m like, just drag 25%. Doesn’t mean you grow 25%. You’re like, yes, but the product, like, okay, now dig into it. You have to figure out how to grow 25 percent or like, it has to make sense. There’s a, you know, don’t be scared of the spread, spreadsheets or the fact that you, you can’t really know. That’s it.

Yeah. So yeah, in investing sometimes. And you see if it makes sense. Like you know, you have to tell a story then to justify those numbers. This happens in like stock investing too, where you’re like, they’re growing at 30 percent per year. And then you’re kind of like, it’s a, they’re a company that sells cars for example.

And you’re like, you drag that out five, 10 years and you’re like, that’s more cars than there are in the whole entire world. So you’re like, they have to do something other than sell cars if they’re going to keep growing at 30 percent and like that. So that’s like the numbers in the spreadsheet lead to the story that you have to tell to figure out like the next move you got to make in your business.

Yeah. And so, yeah, like, don’t be scared of spreadsheets. Use rough estimates to get an idea and you can always update your sheet as you, you learn more. So if you realize you know, the, the assumptions you made about pricing, about how many people would stick around if you raise prices, assumptions about, you know, like you blow up and you’re on Oprah and now like that users goes off the chain.

It’s like, okay, now you need to, that’s a good thing. You got to adjust your spreadsheet to account for that. Yeah. And I think. I’ve seen, I see this a lot on, I do I’m treasurer on a, like a private school board. And I, part of that, I build a forecast just like we do for lifter. And like, it’s kind of, we don’t set a budget per se, but we do a forecast that is like a rep, like stay within these numbers.

But not like every domain has a budget, but that’s how we figure out, you know, is, is the school making money or losing money? And I, other people on the board just have, I see like that just maybe they’re You know, they have, they struggle with either like the spreadsheets scare them or they’re like, it’s not exact.

And it’s like, it’s just a forecast and you do your best and you adjust. If I’m wrong, then we adjust. And actually, you know, oh my God, we overshot. The school lost money. That is bad to lose money. But hopefully mid year you can check in and be like, shoot, we’re going to end up, you know, and kind of adjust if you can.

Or if you have like a cushion of money, like, okay, last year we lost money cause we didn’t have a good forecast. Why? Okay. It changed these adjustments. Next year’s forecast is going to be better.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. One of my favorite business spreadsheets, and this was a trick I learned from Dan Martell. It’s called a precision scorecard.

And this is something I recommend everybody do who has a business, which is Create a spreadsheet that has like the main functions. So like for a course creator business as an example, you’ve got sales, you have marketing, you have like customer satisfaction or just customer results metrics, and maybe you have some operation stuff just for the actual running of the business.

And then pick three metrics. so that you can be more scientific about it and you can see things and you report it every week. So three metrics per department. So to give an example, like marketing as an example, if you have an online business, you’re going to want, you might want to look at traffic, like how many in your Google analytics, how many, how many people visited the website this week, you know, and sales, you might have whatever your conversion tool, if it’s a one on one call, you might have like meetings booked.

Meetings, show up rate, sales conversion rate, so that would be like three there. And then you just, you fill it out every week. I actually like actually going and tracking down the numbers myself. I often think like, oh, that’s something an assistant can do. But the very act of me like digging in, getting the data, putting in the sheet, looking at it, looking at it last week, looking at it the same week a year ago.

I start like seeing patterns and I get ideas and, and, and it’s great to celebrate where you’re winning. Like, Oh my gosh, our traffic doubled this week. It tells you like, Oh, that marketing thing we did worked or, or you’ll find a problem. Like if you do ongoing monthly coaching and you have like a really high churn rate of people not renewing or canceling, there’s something to dig in there.

So it’s sort of like a, when you go to the doctor. And they run labs and they’re looking at all these markers that helps like figure out what to do,

Jason Coleman: diagnose the health of the business.

Chris Badgett: Let’s look at kind of being an entrepreneur and like, it’s sort of this thing I’ve heard. Um, I’m trying to remember the guy’s name.

I heard this from, but like, there’s this one quality of entrepreneurs that they can’t turn it off. It’s like a thing. So they’re like always kind of in business, you know, They’re always looking at through the lens of business or entrepreneurship wherever they go like If you’re picking up your kids at school and like man, this pickup process is really inefficient like at my kids school I had to like You had to like go against traffic make a u turn in the back of the parking lot to get in line It was just it was always like chaos but you can learn from any domain.

And the big idea is really just pattern recognition. So if you can’t turn it off, if you’re always just grinding on like seeing systems and wanting to optimize and fix everything and start new companies, cause you see like something new working, you can, you start identifying patterns. So pattern recognition is.

a big part of being an entrepreneur. And when you study either different types of businesses or even different disciplines entirely, you can see patterns that you could apply over to your company. And then when you see pattern, then you can start, okay, I see a pattern here that’s sort of like, For me, it’s kind of like right brain and then it’s like, let’s push it over to the left brain and start building it.

Like what is the actual mechanism and system here? How does this work? And then you can, can I apply that system in my business? And for marketing specifically, like everything is marketing. As of recording this, we just watched a presidential election process. It played out over years and months and it’s a giant marketing campaign.

So when I’m looking at that, I’m like, okay, this is the this text message I’m getting on my phone. Let’s look at the candidates websites. You know, what is like, what’s happening on social media? Like it’s all marketing is everywhere. Communication’s everywhere. So you might learn something that you see in like a presidential campaign or let’s say a Black Friday retail ad for like clothing, but you sell courses and coaching, but like, was there something in that brand of clothing the way they did it?

They were like, I think I can try that over in mine, but kind of format it differently for what I offer. And we mentioned earlier about Robert Cialdini’s book Influence. The people that read that book are kind of business and marketing nerds like myself and Jason. Yeah. But what he did is he actually studied like cults, which is more of like a social science, social thing.

He was like, how do these cult leaders like develop all this influence? So he took something from sort of a social science world and brought it over to business and marketing. And so there’s all these Chowdhury nerds in business. So that’s just a great example of taking it from over here and applying it to a completely different industry.

Jason Coleman: This reminds me of a tactic I heard from Alex Ormazi, who’s on YouTube about exposing yourself to these other things. He recommends like not turning off ads or paying to get rid of ads on YouTube. Like if you’re ever going to make a YouTube ad, you want to expose yourself to all these ads and kind of see what seems to be working.

Or when something grabs your attention, you’re like, wait, why did that grab my attention? Why did I react to that text message or that email or that phone call or, you know and take mental notes and be like, Oh, we could, we could do it that way. That’s awesome. And I think, you know, I, I definitely have this in my life where I’m, I’m always thinking about business.

We’re here in this space. I think we’ve both been done and we’re like, what’s it cost to lease this? How much did these lights cost? And it’s like, you just can’t turn it off. You can’t do it. Whenever I’m at a restaurant and it’s kind of like, how many tables? Am I like, how did the turnover? You know, Kim and I, Kim, Kim started making dog treats for our dogs.

And we’re immediately like, how could you scale this up and make that? She’s like, no, dude, you just, you have a hobby, keep it as a hobby sometimes. But I’m always thinking about that. And I guess one thing that’s useful about that is that you know, you can pull things from our industries, apply it to your business.

You can also use that same mindset to analyze your own business. So if you can tap into that and find that kind of beginner’s mindset of you know. Trying to experience. What do I offer? What do I give away? What do I sell? If I, you know, how would I think about that? And and you can kind of consider other You know big changes like we get caught in our ways like it’s a free man product.

This is how we sell it We sell this thing. Let’s not, you know, tweak the business model But I have that thing. I mean, that’s always analyzing, come up with business models on the fly. Like turn that on my own business. Don’t be afraid to like entertain big changes. And there’s a really good blog post by Jason Cohen of a smart bear and WP engine where I forget what is this?

It’s some crazy numbers, like 20 or more like thought experiments to like push you outside your comfort zone and consider different business models. Like if you sell something for 500, what if you sold it for 50, 000, what would you have to do in your business? To like justify a 50, 000 price point. And what’s really amazing is if you go through that exercise, maybe you’ll be like, I should be in the business of selling 50, 000 things.

That could be cool. But you might realize like, wait, I have this thing to justify a 50, 000 price point. And it doesn’t actually cost me any money. I can record it once and give it away for free, basically. And deliver more value to my people who are paying 500. So you like, you push yourself. And if you’re, you constantly have that.

So. Don’t be stuck in, in a way about you know, your, your business model and consider things. And even if you’re not gonna, we’ve changed slightly our business model over time, but we’ve done things, you know you know, like is offering lifetime deals or not. And we have like a mutual friend in the same space who I think is more defensive on this.

Like he, he has, I think he’s struggling to grow. He runs a very similar business and he wants to push the same levers he’s been pushing. But it’s kind of not going to work. Like I, I think of this analogy, which is silly. Cause I don’t go to the gym that often, but like when I used to work out when I was younger, you’re like, you do a bench press and you’re like, cool.

I go from like 150 to like 200 pounds bench press and you hit a wall. And at that point, like just doing the bench press over and over again, it’s not going to push you. You need to exercise other muscles that contribute. And, you know, shake it up a little bit and try something different. And so I think this mutual friend, like, I think is hitting a wall and trying to do the same exercises.

And it’s like, consider this thing that you give away for free. You could charge for it. And you’re like, how do you do that? Like you really could like nothing sacred. And that’s part of it too. If you’re like, nothing’s really sacred, we’re just thinking, we’re just exploring opportunities. Go with me here.

Like, you’re like, come along on this journey and see what it feels like. If you made this big change in your business, you don’t have to do it. We’re just talking. But sometimes you get insights that way.

Chris Badgett: I think one of the coolest ways to always be businessing that can be a lot of fun is to flip the script.

Like, In sales and marketing it used to be called like the mark or the prospect, like who’s the target, right? In sales, direct sales. So I actually really enjoy when it’s flipped. Like if I’m going to buy a car, I’m the mark, like I’m semi, but I am fully aware I’m like looking at everything and I actually enjoy it because I know what’s going on.

I know what good sales looks like. I know what not great sales looks like. And it’s fun just to be on the other side. So if you want to create a course, flip it, take somebody’s course. That’s something you’re interested in. If you want to become a coach, like get coached, see what they’re doing in their business.

If you want to run a services agency, hire a services agency. And if you do those things that are in alignment with your business, there’s a lot of synergy. So. You know, for example, I hired a coach for I mentioned the Dan Martell several times and he has a program called SAS Academy for SAS founders.

While it’s extra time, I also wanted to go in there and see what it was like to be on the other side and be the client and how does this coach do his thing? And it’s really informed things like that. And if you’re starting to delegate in your org chart And you’re, you’re, you’re have a service offering or an agency.

Like you can hire an agency to run ads for you and see how it goes. What can you learn from their process? And so I’m not just get the service and the result.

Jason Coleman: When you’re building a product or pricing something, you’re like, you’re, you know, you’re pricing a course. You’re like, what courses have you taken recently?

What did you like about them? What were they priced? What things have you spent money on personally? Why, how? Never stop learning. Yeah, it’s always on.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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The post Part 2: Becoming the Entrepreneur, Education Entrepreneur Mentor Series appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett and Jason Coleman explore the importance of developing subject matter expertise as an education entrepreneur, highlighting important tactics and procedures.

By comparing this path to handicrafts, they highlight how mastery necessitates a strong, lifetime dedication to education and ongoing development. This dedication goes beyond first-time interest and necessitates constant interaction with business advancements, continuous learning, and an openness to change and try new things.

Chris Badgett has spent more than 15 years working in the online education and course development sector, constantly changing jobs as a software entrepreneur, agency owner, and course producer. A key component of developing competence is creating a deliberate “media diet.” This is consciously consuming materials that are in line with particular objectives, whether they are books, blogs, YouTube channels, podcasts, or newsletters.

Jason Coleman emphasizes how crucial it is to modify this diet in accordance with present goals, such as emphasizing business-related items when an entrepreneur is starting out. In order to establish a learning and collaboration ecosystem, tools such as YouTube’s “Watch Later” feature, carefully chosen subreddits, and resource sharing via Slack are essential.

Writing becomes a fundamental component of the professional journey, acting as a means of elucidating and expanding comprehension. Drawing from the Feynman Technique, Chris and Jason stress that true comprehension comes from the ability to explain complex concepts simply.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome to the education entrepreneur mentor series where we unpack the five critical hats that you as an education entrepreneur yourself or with a team need to wear to be successful teaching online, potentially building a business around your knowledge, skills, and experience. Those five hats are being an expert, being an entrepreneur, being a teacher, being a technologist, and being a community builder.

Today, Jason and I are going to be talking about becoming the expert. So we’re going to be talking about the expert hat. Enjoy this session.

All right, today we’re talking about becoming the expert, and the first idea we want to dig into is developing subject matter expertise. And I have this idea around craftsmanship and what does it mean to be a craftsperson or a craftsman. And really I think the main strategy here is it’s all about lifelong learning.

It’s a huge commitment. And once you commit, you really have to commit. ’cause you can do a project in school and learn in shop class, how to build a wooden toolbox. But if you really wanna become like a finished carpenter, you’re gonna need to spend years in that industry. And so there’s a big commitment, but it takes continuous improvement and lifelong learning.

And some of the ways I do that is once you commit, like I committed to online courses as an example. First it was just a fascination, but I really committed about 15 years ago. I just fell in love with the industry. And once I decided to do business in this area, both as a course creator and later with an agency and later with software.

It’s just a commitment that I’ve kept up with and once you commit as a crafts person It’s really important to keep up with your industry and not rest on your laurels And one of the ways I keep up with the industry of online education, influencer marketing, online coaching industry, course creator into industry is through YouTube podcasts, newsletters, books, and blogs.

Like it’s almost like entertainment for me to spend a big chunk of time on that. And the other part of lifelong learning is just not stopping and asking for help. Whether that’s coaches, mentors, community, peer masterminds, that’s part of being a craftsperson is that continuous learning.

So for example, a couple of years ago, I joined Dan Martell’s SAS Academy, which is designed for software founders. I spent two years in the program. It was a coaching program community that are like 300 training courses in there. I looked at that like my nontraditional master’s degree. When I signed up, I committed for two years and the other piece, which is really fun is making time for experimentation.

We’ve been doing that lately in our businesses with AI tools. I was recently trying to create a course with all AI and I’m making a course about that from our community, but it’s not just about studying. It’s also about experimentation and. For me, I’m just constantly experimenting, constantly studying my industry and my fascination, looking at competitors.

Seeing what influencers are coming up in the space, what’s new with the tech. And I’ve just, I feel like I have my pulse on it, like an obsession.

Jason Coleman: Something that stands out to me is that I think we both do is curate this media diet consciously. And I go through phases in my life where something is different, isn’t focused.

Am I like being a developer? Or like a father or like working on the business and when I’m working on the business, I’ll update my YouTube subscriptions and put different things on my watch later, like on Reddit. If you’re on Reddit as a site and you just look at what they show you, it’s all like dogs doing backflips and people breaking their legs and like whatever hilarious things.

But if you actually subscribe to the subreddits that are related to business and your topic, you start getting that as like a newsfeed. So like I hide all the like poker. Parenting, politics, unsubscribe from all that stuff, subscribe to all the business stuff and immerse myself. I’m reading books.

So it’s Oh, like the book I’m reading, fiction start, I have these business books I want to read. I’m in a business mindset. I’ll start reading the business books while I’m, so I changed my media diet. across all the different forms. And that helps me like stay in the zone.

So even when I’m relaxing and going for a walk and listen to a podcast, it could be, if I’m working on the business, it’s like a business podcast instead of a comedy podcast or whatever might, also be in there.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And I just to piggyback on that, I like to, when I am walking, it’s learning time for me or when I’m exercising.

If I hear something like I need to implement that, I like literally email myself on out just like a note to jog my memory. And also I appreciate, like I, you mentioned watch later on YouTube. I also like Slack myself all the time using our instant messenger and also have trusted.

People like if Jason sends me a slack message with Hey, check out this video. Like I, I highly value it. It’s like the human feed of like curators that, that have similar interests.

Jason Coleman: Some, I want to talk about like, how do you develop subject matter expertise and really dive in and learn something like one of the big ideas I have is around writing to learn.

And it’s not my idea. I think there’s a name like called the Feynman technique Richard Feynman, the physicist. So the basic idea is you don’t really understand something until you can explain it well in the simplest terms and forcing yourself to write about it forces you to do that. And so more recently, like folks like David Perel, James Clear and Anne Lamott, like all talk about this, like power of writing to help you organize your thoughts.

I think writing is unique. Some folks aren’t good writers. So maybe it’s, making videos forces you, or like doing audio if there’s some other medium that kind of works for you, drawing diagrams, but I think writing in particular is special about organizing your thoughts. And tactically, I would, recommend blogging like you’re trying to learn about something you feel like you have what I don’t know anything yet.

What do I have to write about it? It’s write about your experience learning about this thing. A tactic for that, if you feel like. Jason says, write something, but I don’t know what to write about is this concept called an e bomb, which I take from the 30 by 500 course by Alex Hillman and Amy Hoy.

And that’s basically like when someone asks you a question or sends the E stands for email, when someone sends you an email and you answer it, that’s content. It’s oh, other people have that same question. Put it on your blog. And answer it, maybe a little bit better, a little bit longer, long form, go into it more deeply.

And so that’s that’s where you can find these content. Or if you have a question and you answer it, and then the other one is publishing it so don’t just write it down and put it away in your journal. There’s something about putting it online and other people can read it that like forces you to really nail it.

So often I have an idea and it’s in my notes. Then when I’m like, I’m going to write this and publish it, I’m like, I don’t actually understand that as well as. Or I thought I knew the history, but I don’t, let me read and get it more clear. I always thought like in, in college, like everyone struggles to write and you’re like, I’m trying to get like a hundred percent.

That means I like followed, like the best practices of writing. It’s so artificial. I didn’t really learn to write well until I started publishing for other people to read. And it’s there’s an audience and you have to explain something to them and transfer knowledge.

It forces you to really do that well. And so like in our, my career, like where this came up was the investor geeks blog, which was like my first kind of WordPress project online. Me and two other friends had just come out of college and we had decent jobs and we had four or one case for the first time.

And that literally was probably like one of the first blog posts is like, What is a 401k? And as we learned about it, we wrote about it like, Oh, this is what it is. There’s different kinds and here’s how you should think about it. So every time we learn something about investing, we would blog about it there.

And it really forced us to understand what we were talking about. And we had an audience and, we built an audience from that, but also probably the biggest value we got from that was just learning all those things and how to manage money. So now later in life. Yeah. When business is going well I know all these things.

Chris Badgett: I think writing is critical and it’s almost like it’s going out of fashion. Like what a kids want to be when they grow up, they want to be a YouTuber. It’s about video, visual, the rise of Instagram and everything. But writing it literally, it’s not just blogging, like social media is writing a script for a video is writing emails, writing, writing a business plan is writing, communicating to your team or your friends is writing text messaging.

It’s all writing. So it’s like the super skill. And you mentioned blogging. I think. There’s a misconception that like, Oh, is blogging dead? Everything’s on social media. Now that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t blog. And, really owning your library of content, especially while building in public and what you’re learning, it just sharpens you so much.

And it’s all about putting in the reps. Yeah, nobody’s a great writer at the beginning or, graphic designer or teacher, but just putting in the reps as a subject matter expert, all of a sudden it’s that whole thing about you overestimate what you can do in a day, but underestimate what you can do in a year.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. And I think on that point of, Is blogging out of fashion. There probably was a moment where on the internet content wise, you could learn something, become an expert, write a blog and kind of become famous as a blogger. And now it feels like you said, YouTube, social media, it’s different. It’s all, it’s like in the moment it’s shorter attention.

It’s, it has to be outraged, not just look how smart I am. And that’s like chat GPT knows everything anyway. Like I don’t have to like search for a blog on what a 401k is. Like Google just tells me when I. Search it. It’s still a good method to organize your thoughts. And then once you have that content, you can repurpose it and you like, okay, I wrote the blog post now, you want to, record yourself talking about it and share that on social media 10 times.

So if as part of a bigger marketing strategy, like you said, it’s you still write a script often before you video record, you write a draft before you talk to your team, sending emails and stuff. So it’s still a good skill as a baseline for, even if the As a marketing engine, it’s not as strong as it used to be.

Chris Badgett: I think just one more point on that, that I call it a news item. So if you’re going to do a marketing campaign about a new product launch or a sale or something important, the first thing I do is write a blog post about it or a page of content on the site. And that becomes the hub of all that other stuff, like social media, building a course about it, sending emails, all this other types of writing, but that blog.

Post the news item is the core of everything. We’re talking about

Jason Coleman: educational content. If you have ideas for courses and lessons and things like writing a blog post about one core aspect of it and sharing it around and trying to see how it sticks, see what’s interesting to people, that’s really useful for helping you in the early stages of, figuring out the content.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Let’s talk about inner game. As a subject matter expert looking to teach online or just being an entrepreneur, there’s a lot of inner work that has to happen. The biggest thing I see is imposter syndrome, like who am I to do X or I’m not ready, perfectionism creeps in. And what I’ve learned over probably 15 plus years being an entrepreneur is that Entrepreneurship is personal development.

It’s like the, in my opinion, one of the highest and most useful ways to improve yourself. And, but these things creep up like imposter syndrome and self belief issues. We hear about things like fear of failure, but actually fear of success is a bigger problem. Like not what if I fail, but what if it works?

And now my high school friends are going to see me and I have this like new identity and Oh, I remember when that guy was doing XYZ and now he’s like teaching business or doing whatever. Like it, you get all this, get in your head and creates this imposter syndrome thing.

Everybody deals with this. Yeah. I would say even like presidential candidates as an example, like deal with that. Like in the highest job positions. If you don’t have imposter syndrome. You might be a psychopath, but one of the ways that I work on that, that I’ve learned over the years is shifting the focus.

Don’t make it about you and the perception of you just focus on helping people. Cause as soon as you transition the focus from I need to be perfect to how can I best help these people? Some of the weight of imposter syndrome just melts away. And the other thing is, I’ve noticed this at Lifter LMS as an example.

It’s been going for over 10 years, and I’ve, pattern recognition is something that entrepreneurs do, which we’ll talk about later. But one of the things I’ve noticed with the projects that are successful, the people that, make the million dollars, or get 300 enrollments on their first sale or the first time they offer their course or their membership or whatever, Is that people have, these people all have this mode of consistent, imperfect action.

So they’re okay with like little micro failures along the way, or, I’m like 80 percent happy with this course. Let’s just ship it. Like they, they overcome. Is that the

Jason Coleman: same as I’ve heard of like a bias towards action as like a skill? Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And it’s, and I add the word imperfect, a bias towards imperfect action, but it’s forward.

Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing that really helps, and I think this is like writing you have to put in the reps, is just developing a thick skin because when you go on the internet as a public expert or entrepreneur, there are quote haters or you get judged. You’re on stage. And the reality is there’s a lot of mental illness in society, a lot of negative energy you get.

Online is really more of a reflection of the person who’s given that out. And of course, nobody’s perfect. If you can admit mistakes, if you do make a mistake and you get some negative blowback, but just having a thick skin, it just comes with time. I think we’ve both seen that in our companies at lifter LMS and paid memberships pro that like when you’re doing customer support and working with people.

Sometimes people are like frustrated, they’re angry, maybe the tone’s not great. But after you do it for a decade, you’re just trying to help these people. You understand their project’s really important to them, understand there’s all these cultural differences and people are in different emotional states.

It’s not that you get immune, but your skin thickens. Yeah, you take

Jason Coleman: it a little less personally. It’s like you said, it’s not about you. It’s about them. Exactly. It’s like the mental switch.

Chris Badgett: Exactly. And if we’re all coming from a frame of we’re just trying to help. Yeah. Yeah. The whole business is just a business of helping.

And if you’re coming to us for support or coaching or content, it’s just a frame of helping. One of the things I wanted to talk about in terms of a story related to this an imposter syndrome. One of my first course projects I did with my wife, and we did it in the organic gardening and permaculture niche.

And I wanted to get other course creators, like more famous people. So like here’s imposter syndrome, like who are the best organic gardening and permaculture experts in the world? And there’s a guy who had the bestselling book on Amazon and the topic of permaculture named Toby Hemingway. He was, I was living in Montana at the time he was doing a talk over in Idaho or Washington state.

And I was just dreaming a little bit with my wife. We could just go over to that talk, film it, talk to him about it, get him to become an expert on our platform. All he has to do is say, yes we’ll just make the pitch. I was like, to my wife, Sam, that’s her name. And I said, just send him an email, tell him all that stuff I just said, and just ask him. I was joking when I said this, but she didn’t really see it as a joke. She emailed him. I just said, finish the email with just saying, where do you want us to send the check?

Jason Coleman: And

Chris Badgett: she literally wrote him that. And he said, yes. And a week later we filmed it and then he put it on his website and then we got a bunch of traffic.

We did more stuff with him. But that’s, sometimes you just got to be a little bold to get past the imposter syndrome. And there’s just P people are just people. Yeah. And yeah, we made a good offer. He said yes. And we did a partnership.

Jason Coleman: And imposter syndrome is everywhere. And like you said, if you don’t have it, that’s almost something that’s wrong.

And the people who don’t have it to me, anyway, they’re annoying. The opposite is what, a know it all. Yeah. And those folks, I guess have a different path where they can fake it to you and make it. But I think. I start to see in others if you dive deep and build relationships with folks, you see how other people are imperfect and you’re like, Oh I’m as smart as them.

I should be able to do this too. And I guess it’s just something you build up over time. The other thing you talked about was like dealing with the haters, the hate you get. That’s the negativity from stuff. If you’re putting content out online, building courses and putting it, making yourself a public figure, exposing yourself to that.

You just open up to it on a scale and we know as humans I forget what it is like I think it’s humans process negative things like four times as much as positive. So that it’s like a, an investing, there’s I forget what they call it, like negativity bias. So if someone says something bad about you, like that hits you like four times as hard as if someone says, Hey, your hair looks nice.

You’re gonna be like, sure, that’s good. And I have a post about this, tons of things to deal with that. But I think, One thing that’s important early on that helps is to seek out that positive and ask for it and be open about it. So sometimes like example that we got negative reviews that were hitting us on like the paid memberships pro product.

And we had an emailing list and it was like, let’s just email them and say Hey, could you say something nice about us and give us a review? We really appreciate it. Boom. And then a bunch of customers came back and gave us some reviews and then we could dive into that. And yeah, it’s good to process that stuff too.

Cause there is. underlying the whatever the negativity that’s in there. It’s there’s a point. So you’re like, Hey, is there a point to this? Is there a way that I can learn from this? Cool. Take that out and then, try to deal with it. So another thing about intergame related to that maybe is I see a lot of folks who who give up too early sometimes and they have big dreams They want to make a million dollars and then they only make a little bit of money and it feels like insurmountable and so a concept that helps there is to think about getting just one percent better every day And this is a concept that’s james out to share talks about in his book choose yourself And there’s other flavors of this but it’s like a focus on incremental growth.

And so it’s You know, when you’re shooting for some big goal, this many members, this many subscribers, this much money. You could get upset on the, on that path when you handle setbacks and you talked about having thick skin helps with that. Another thing that helps with that is starting small.

So there’s this tactic. So it’s Hey, I want to make a million dollars a year. I wish I could credit this. We’ll find it. Who talks about this, but it’s a, okay, you want to make a million dollars a year and that seems hard. What would make that easy? And you’re like, if I had this, it’d be real easy to make a million dollars.

So oh, if I had a million email subscribers, I just need a dollar for my rhythm and I could do that. Oh, cool. Okay. How do you make a million email subscribers? Okay. I don’t know. What would make it easy to have a million email subscribers? It’s I don’t know if some other guy with a mailing list with 10 million promoted my email list.

And I’m making something up, but it’s, that’s that kind of thing. You can scale back from your big goal. And come up with the small goal. That’s this is the next step. What’s the next good step for this. So I think thinking about that and focusing on those small steps and also like always be learning.

So this is like a trick is like of handling setbacks. If you set out to make a course and sell it, it’s the first time you’ve ever done it and you like to be successful. I want people to learn from this and make money off it. That could happen, but it might not. But one thing you can control is you can learn from the process.

At the end of it, you’ll know how to create a course and promote it and sell it and put it out there. And so some, I always try to have that with every new project. It feels like a little risky or brand new is like, how can I always be learning? How can I like, even if I fail, still pull something from this, like a version of all these things I’m thinking about.

That come, this comes up often in like the, maybe like the indie hacker space or people who are trying to build a business on the side. They set a goal I need $10,000 a month, and that will replace my like, nice cushy job, and then I can do this full time. And they build up a system, they get attention, they start selling stuff.

They create a way to sell money or sell money, had to get to sell things to make money. And like after six months or a year of work, they’re making like a thousand dollars a month. And they’re like, I failed. I’m only making a thousand dollars a month. I need 10, 000 a month. And they feel like they’re 10 percent of the way there.

But in reality, like an experience of watching people do this and our own experience going through it is they’re really halfway to 10, 000. Like that first step is so hard. Just getting any money is like a big deal. And of course there could be like problems with the market or the product that you’re building that kind of limit its potential.

To that it might not grow to 10,000, but the effort part of it is you’ve done half the effort to get, if you’re at a thousand dollars a month, you’ve done half the effort to get to $10,000 a month. And I think people don’t think of things that way. So it’s that message sometimes helps people like keep pushing when they’re ready to give up.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Failure is feedback. That’s how I think about it. And that’s, it’s like a reframe. Like I heard a really cool reframe that stuck with me as soon as I heard it. This is like inner game stuff. You know how a lot of people say, man, I’m crazy busy. I heard this guy on a podcast being interviewed and he never said that.

He said, I’m active. It’s I’m not busy. I’m active. Like he would reframe what the interviewer was saying to put a positive spin on it or a productive spin on it. Yeah. And in terms of 1 percent better every day. I don’t know the math behind that you, you might know, but if you do get 1 percent better every day, you’re like a thousand percent better at the end of a year or something like that.

It compounds. It’s crazy. Yeah. And then one way I noticed that which kind of ties into the imposter syndrome thing is I went. The first time I started getting out from behind my computer and going to industry events and things, nobody knew who I was or is not very well known. And only a couple of years later, I’d show up at similar events and like a lot of people knew who I was, but I was writing, I was publishing and put myself out there as being authentic.

And then, but it didn’t feel like it at the time, but every day I was just shipping a little bit, shipping a little bit, trying to help people, making imperfect content, and that just compound to becoming a micro celebrity in a niche.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. It’s nice to have a buddy in that process that can help. For me, I need a buddy to do this.

I don’t know. Maybe some people just on their own to like really when those moments come up. Celebrate them as wins. I’m always like moving on to the next thing, but it’s nice when someone’s Oh my God, that’s crazy. Everyone knows you here. That’s a big deal. You’re like, Oh, okay. Felt normal or like a thousand dollars a month on the side.

That’s crazy. That’s awesome.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And getting off zero, like you were saying Oh, you’ve made a thousand dollars. It’s a failure. Like I see it all the time. I’ll talk to a course creator who is man, I only got three sales. I’m like, yeah, but that’s not zero sales. Yeah. It’s like a big deal.

And I can. Be very different in a couple of years. Let’s talk about creating influence. Yeah. And I’ve actually never been comfortable or a fan of the phrase like influencer is probably my own limiting beliefs or imposter syndrome or whatever. What came before influencer? Was it guru or. They all have their challenges, right?

Even what we’re talking about today, being an expert. Okay, subject matter expert. And it’s a little counterintuitive, is sometimes I’m a really strong introvert, so it was hard for me to take the stage and just put myself out there on the internet, but eventually I just said, okay, I guess I’m doing this, and over time I got comfortable with it.

The other thing I found with that when you do take the stage, that’s the big idea is like at some point you got to get out of your head and onto the web and, be public. And I think it’s a lot of work to try to manufacture a persona or a brand. So just being yourself authentically and you can be like the professional version of yourself.

So for example, if you have a bad day or something bad’s going on in your life, it’s going to the doctor. The doctor still shows up for work, puts on the white coat and gets the job done, but they might be having a bad day. There’s some little bit of professionalism that you just show up, but you got to take the stage.

And I see a lot of, I’ve heard this in another community. They have a name for this person. They call it good idea, Glenn, like a person with a lot of ideas that like nothing ever happens or there’s never visible work. And if you don’t do it, you’re never going to create. influence. And one of the things, if you are going to create influence, I’m a big fan of this idea that your vibe attracts your tribe.

So the more you act like yourself when you take the stage and the vibe you put out there, you’re going to attract people like that. I noticed that for example, in Dan Martell’s SAS Academy that I joined, like Dan’s like a smart entrepreneur dude. And he had a bunch of software companies, but he’s also like into fitness and like lifestyle and make sure relationships are good and stuff.

So I think of him as like full stack. So when I get in there, I’m like, Oh, there’s other people in there that, yes, they care about business and growing software companies. But they’re also like, care about lifestyle and a lot of bootstrappers in there and stuff. And I was like, cool. Yeah.

Like the vibe he was putting out there attracted a great community and a couple of tactical things about creating influence. The first one is if you haven’t done it yet, you need to read Robert Cialdini’s book called influence. And he even has a second book called. Pre fluence, I believe that’s what it is about what to do before you try to influence.

But Cialdini goes over the seven things, which are reciprocity, social proof, authority, liking, and I think there’s one more I’m missing. And once you really get all that stuff, It helps give you a roadmap of what to do. I think reciprocity is one of the easiest ones to understand, which is if you want to create influence, give something away for free.

So tying into what we were talking about earlier, like when you write a useful, valuable blog posts that somebody finds value in, that’s like a form of influence. You’re giving away something for free. If you like stay committed as a craftsperson to a subject matter. Like I’m a total online course nerd.

That’s like consistency. That’s another part of influences is that and then just being authentic as you do that, it’s, it works. And the crazy thing about Cialdini is. A lot of his research was around cults, like how to cults create influence like cult leaders. So when you’re reading the book, you’re like, man, this is a little gross.

Like I’m not trying to become a guru or manipulate people. I think the difference between positive influence and manipulation is intent. Are you just trying to help these people and influence them in a positive way? Or are you trying to take their money, get them in a cold and pull them away from their family or whatever your, that is.

And then I think it’s really important. I think a lot of people miss this step. If you are going to create influence is to choose your audience wisely. So sometimes when you create a business, you think that, Oh, it’s for everybody. Is it really though? Does it, do you want to work with every type of person out there?

And so make a choice about a lot of, it’s just, and we’ll talk about this more later about. Your customer avatar and niching and things like that. But I had an aha moment, of course, as a human and a idealist, I do want to help everybody. I want to save the world. But I think you do your best job as a expert really picking a tribe or community to help.

And that whole community thing, the tribal thing is real. From my story, I’ve moved through several tribes. Like I was anthropology guy in college. I was after that climber Mountaineer guy, then I was a dog musher guy in Alaska. Now I’m a software guy, a tech entrepreneur guy.

And I move in these tribes and I think there’s a lot of loneliness out there. And if you’ve, if you’re vibe attracts your tribe and you want to help these people, you like these people, that creates a lot of sustainability in your project.

Jason Coleman: Chad Dini’s book is awesome. It feels influence, feels like this magical thing that just happens.

And then he just lays it out and very clear left brain. This is the reality of it. And you’re like, oh, it’s the playbook. And there is that risk, like when there’s other things like this. When you know the playbook, it feels like manipulation, and you’re like, it might be inauthentic.

It’s really hard to find that line. But I think like in marketing in particular, it can feel like sleazy at times you’re using these tactics and you remind yourself we actually make this thing that they want we’re actually helping them if they actually complete my course, it’s good for them.

And so if you believe that in the core, then it can help you use some of these tactics and under understanding that you pick up from like a book like that. You were talking about choosing your audience wisely. And I, yeah, I guess like the customer avatars about that. I’m reminded of the who’s the guy with the pumping patch video.

Chris Badgett: Oh, I know what you’re talking about. It’s a personal finance thing

Jason Coleman: or

Chris Badgett: it’s about finance.

Jason Coleman: I think it’s on business, but that he’s every so often you take a list of all your customers and you think of which customers do I hate and they cause the most stress, and it’s okay, how can I, and which customers do I like and they’re the most awesome and I love working with them.

And it’s of course, after that, then you should like, okay how can I rearrange my business? So then I’m serving these people I like and not serving these people I don’t like, and it could be as simple as like on your copy, be like, this isn’t the product for these whiny assholes that end up in my

Chris Badgett: customer chain.

I recommend that by the way, for when you’re writing a sales page and having a section who it’s for three bullet points who it’s not for three bullet points. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like good exercise. Yeah.

Jason Coleman: Every bad customer to bounces off your sales page is a good outcome as well, including this is really for you.

Come on in. But if you’re the kinds of folks who get into this business, like we solve pro we’re good at solving problems. We like helping people and you just do it reflexively when you’re in the weeds. And then you find out you’re like, it’s, you got to take a step back and be like, what are we doing?

Am I doing, am I actually doing the thing I really want to do and helping the people I really want to help? Am I in, in the tribe I want to be in. I think you touched on this too, of, building influence through trust. You said about like giving stuff away for free. And that’s almost like a core value that we have.

We build this free software, just solving problems for people, delivering value that You’ll naturally build up a reputation for being someone who gets something done and delivers And I think a lot of folks maybe if you in the content space you’re building like a course or education I think very rarely do you have that top secret?

These are the five ingredients that make the thing and I have to hold, you know Don’t share that unless people give me the money a lot of people feel that way but more often You probably should switch your mindset and it’s give away your best stuff for free And it’s like just put it out there for free on your blog send it to them If all you want to do is hook them to sell a thing like what’s gonna do it best But the big idea the nugget the most useful tactic the you know The clearest description of like how you go from you know Where you are, to where you want to be and get your outcome.

So like the clearest way you can do that, the best content you have is always good to put out for free. And then people will pay for access to you for having it in a clear, organized way. A tactic like that, that I often recommend for people want to build courses is like, so I talked about blogging as a way to learn.

You blog, just blog, keep blogging, write the thing, give it away for free. And when you’re done, like if you did that once a week for a year and I have 52 decent articles and you’re like, all right, cool. Take that content and now build it into a different format that you can sell. And you’d be surprised, you feel like, Oh, they can just get my stuff for free. So why would they pay for it? But the real interaction, typical interaction on this website is someone searches for something. They see your one good article and then your post like promotes, here’s the book that explains everything. And you’re like, Oh, I, you got me.

Let me get the book that explains everything. There’s also a speak with your actions instead of your words. And so it’s like actually do it, talk about yourself. And your journey, instead of theorizing I felt that way when I was like writing notes for this, sometimes it’s I so that pumpkin patch, I wish I could remember that guy’s name.

That’s a story I heard that’s useful and I could share useful stories. Like we’re in the space, we have lots of useful stories, but that’s actually when I did and worked. So I actually went through that process a couple of times and I try to go back to it every time. So I’m, I can give, I’m really talking about something that is authentic to like.

I operate. And maybe it’s just another rephrasing of this. Gary Vaynerchuk has a book called jab, right hook. And he’s thinking about if you have emails, if you have a four email series, don’t always be selling. I think that’s like always be selling is probably something someone says, but actually.

I think you might have a better outcome if you’re like give, and then you deliver value and now they’re on your side. And then you’re like, Hey, by the way, I sell this thing and it could help you too. And that’s like a mode that I use both. So it’s it’s funny, I’m talking about like selling, but it’s like this, these concepts build influence towards the sale.

So it’s these If you think about it in that way, a story also related to Gary Vaynerchuk. That’s like the antithesis of this. I have a lot of, some of the stories I have in here are like you said, like learning from your failures early on. I had this website, wine log. net. It was like a social site for wine and you could keep track of the wine you’re drinking.

And there was a couple of other websites in the space. Cellar tracker is the one that was like the old school one. That’s still around. So they, they won. So shout out to sell a tracker. I keep track of your wine with cell tracker. It’s a really good app. But at the time they were like this old windows 95 slow, not really web to a website.

We built like the modern version of it. There’s another site called court. And there’s all these wine websites were coming up and Gary had a wine podcast and he was advertising on all our websites. I remember he, Hbought an ad on our site and I had twelve hundred dollars for an ad placement for a month or something and he’s like you should give it to me for I forget how you tried to talk me down to 600 bucks or something like that and I stuck to 1200 and he was like, alright Jason He’s like I’m gonna give you 1200 bucks, but like you should know like you Probably should have took the 600 deal and just had me had the goodwill towards you.

It was great. He gave me like this little business nugget. And at the time I was like I was like, I don’t know. I didn’t want to give up the money, I was like, that’s what I think it’s worth. It should be worth it. I don’t care who you are. It was my attitude at the time. And fast forward for a bunch of other reasons, like Gary Vaynerchuk bought that website corked and built it into his brand.

And it became part like, and we were friends, but you’re like we interacted before, but yeah, Our wine website didn’t tie onto Gary Vaynerchuk and made some of the biggest wine websites in the world. So it’s like I, for 600 bucks, I lost a little bit of influence with Gary Vaynerchuk, which would have been useful.

And I wasn’t thinking at the time. And I do feel it’s funny. It’s like when you put a price tag on something, that’s your price and you should stick to it. And I’m not like a big biz dev guy. But I think in that moment, if I really was thinking about what was best for that website, if I was like, how do I build influence so that I can turn this into a bigger thing?

It was like, Oh, cool. You got the attention of The biggest, like social, early social media guys talking about wine right now, like building influence with him and his connections was way more important than money at the time. And it’s instead that conversation of cool, I’ll do an ad for your paying.

And what more can I do for you to help you? That would have paid back in spades. If I had been helping Gary and said the other way around what would have, how would that relationship developed?

Chris Badgett: Giving away your best stuff for free. Like in that case maybe not give Gary the free ad, but reduce the price, give him the hookup.

And one way I think about that is this concept from I think I first heard it from Eben Pagan is moving the free line, like not necessarily all the way to free. But information wants to be free. So like you should be giving away uncomfortably free amounts of stuff or valuable stuff. And like you said but if it’s also like available on the internet and other places, what you’re actually selling is your way of supporting it, your unique style that just resonates with people or whatever.

But, and we, but like with Lifter LMS and paper shows pro we give away so much for free with our core softwares that are in many ways more powerful than really expensive paid solutions and it works. So moving the free line and then show, don’t tell. I like that a lot. It’s easy to like, talk about things theoretically.

And some of the way I built influence in WordPress is I didn’t just say you should use WordPress, build a blog, sign up for a hosting account here and install the software. One of the first courses I made was how to build a WordPress website in a weekend. I showed people how to do it.

I just sat down and turned on ScreenFlow and recorded it. Turned it into a six module course. Put it on Udemy, put it on YouTube as a video playlist. And then what happened is, so what I’m, my idea here of creating influence is give away your secret sauce, tell people your process, particularly if you have an agency or whatever.

Because at that time people were watching my videos on Udemy or on YouTube and they’re like, you know what? This stuff is actually complicated. Can I just hire you?

Jason Coleman: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So by moving the free line, then the clients came in. Not just from my local community, but from all over the world. And that was uncomfortable to be like shouldn’t I just build websites for people?

I’m just going to teach everybody how to do it themselves and show them, not just tell them about it. Let’s look at the difference between being a guide versus a guru. I really love this framing. And a guru, like it’s like a religious figure who. Preaches and speaks truth. And this is the way but a guide, and I actually come from a background of guiding wilderness guiding.

So I understand guiding at a deep level. It’s a guru would just be like climb this mountain and a guide is going to be up there adapting working with people, dealing with setbacks, dealing with weather changes, and I think also being a guide. Takes a lot of pressure off like you don’t need to be the guru Giving a sermon.

You just need to help people get results. And the big idea here is Instead of just having quote the best information as a subject matter expert Be like a results getter for people like the guy doesn’t climb the mountain for you like they help you get that outcome of Climbing the mountain successfully you Or whatever your niche is, starting a business, getting in shape, finding the love of your life.

People want results. They don’t necessarily want you to be, give them like the golden book. They really, there’s a underlying motivation and result or transformation that people want. And I think it’s really important when you do become a guide to marry a problem. So don’t necessarily think about who’s my target market.

You should think about that, but what problem do you want to solve in the world? What what wrong do you want to write in the world and just obsess about it? And I can’t really explain how I got obsessed about it, but I love this idea of people being able to post, basically create information products and create this digital content.

Anybody, anywhere in the world could pull it up on a web browser, put their credit card or their PayPal account in and build this online business around. I just fell in love with this problem and tying it to the problem of education because education has a lot of potential to make societies better, improve people’s lives.

And all and help people economically and so on. I just fell in love with the problem. And one of the ways to, get good at this and being a results getter, a helper, a guide is to build the name for it as a customer advisory board. So like regularly I meet with some of our users, our customers, I’m hearing what their challenges are, what their wins are.

It totally informs how I think about. What product do we make? Or you hear about how are we different from the competition? What’s our positioning? And then when I think about problems and marrying a problem I heard this from a guy named Dev Basu, I believe that people only buy three things, which is speed, certainty, or insight.

And there’s a fourth one, which is to stay out of jail, but that one’s more this is why we hire accountants at tax time and so on to stay out of jail. But, and usually the speed, certainty, and insight, sometimes it’s a combination of those, but there’s usually one primary. If I’m, if I was going to do like a health course it, you could take different approaches, like speed, you’re going to get this health outcome really fast, or if I’m going to do certainty, it’s going to be like, okay, this is actually going to work this time.

If it’s going to be insight, it’s going to be. Yeah, the industry is completely wrong and I’m going to give you like new ways to think about health and whatever the specific result I’m trying to get is. So I often think about speed, certainty and insight, not just in marketing and selling, but also our approach to this problem and how we solve it because the speed, certainty and insight people don’t, aren’t necessarily buying you as an influencer.

They’re buying the result. But even under the result is that quality of speed, certainty or insight.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And then the last thing is, this is a classic mistake that experts make. I call it like the library of Alexandria problem where people don’t necessarily want, especially these days with information overload and internet everywhere, infinite scrolling.

It’s not about giving people like so much stuff and like a hundred hours of training and 50 bonuses and all these modules and stuff. What’s the minimum effect? A guide, once you get, wants to get you to the top of the mountain as efficiently as possible while staying safe. And that is They’re not trying to teach you everything they know about mountaineering or climbing or whatever.

It’s just we’re going to help you get this result as efficiently as possible. I think it came from Tim Ferriss, the minimum effective dose, like productivity folks are all about this idea of what’s the minimum I can do to get the maximum output? What’s the 80, 20. So instead of giving your customer as an expert Hey, here, check out my awesome library of knowledge.

It’s I can get you this result quickly. So in terms of guiding, I feel like we’ve been guiding people at Lifter LMS for over a decade now. And we’re not just selling them a product. We’re not just giving them software. We’re not just providing technical documentation. I talked to users, customers, people who are just in the industry, people using competitor products.

We get on live calls and we do all this like personalized guiding. And one of the, one of the last kind of ideas around that is when you’re helping your market they really want you to still be able to help them even in challenging circumstances. And this is why how guiding is different from being a guru.

A guru would say this is the way a guide will be like, Oh, I see you’re having this challenge adapt this way. And you’ll still get the outcome person be different challenge. Okay. Let me help you adapt. And over time you can bake that wisdom into your. actual process. So maybe it’s more automated or whatever, but humans are not robots.

So eventually you do end up with some personalization there and that’s why they like you.

Jason Coleman: I’m hearing there in this guide, the difference between a guide and a guru is instead of here’s my knowledge, take it or leave it. You’re taking responsibility for the outcome. I think that’s a challenge in that you’re trying to teach someone something and you feel like I’m giving them all the information. But they’re not getting it, is that their problem, but really you could be a better teacher by meeting them where they’re at. Maybe you said how to get from a to C, but they’re actually at B, they need a different path guide, guide to get there.

So I like that it’s, and yeah, taking responsibility for the outcomes that you’re given instead of just like being an info dump on people. I hope it’s useful. I think it’d be more effective.

Chris Badgett: And on that note, just like a pro tip, I think the sh it is shared. Like some people would just be like, Oh, I have churned.

My people didn’t renew their monthly membership or the annual thing because they just didn’t do the work. So I, but there is a piece that is shared. Like the people do have to do the work. Oh yeah. There is some failure that’s outside of your control, but there’s a lot we can do as. As the expert to help when there are setbacks.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. Yeah. We all know those folks who, it goes both ways. Like we know those folks who are like the idea people. Who’d never actually get over the hump of shipping and getting something done. And if they’re also selling to an audience of people who sometimes like, I would like to lose weight, but I’m not actually going to do anything to, to make a difference, the folks who are super successful, they find like a different way to talk to a different subset of that group, and maybe some of these folks aren’t hopeless, trying to get results and dealing with it on that level at the same time, I think.

You don’t have to know everything. So you don’t, maybe that’s related. We talked about a few different ways of focusing on helping people and being resourceful instead of omniscient. Like you said, like the library of Alexandria, right? So it’s Oh, it’s not just dumping everything there is to know about this.

If one tactic of how to get the A to B, that will help people. Congrats, something that you can turn into content that you can, give away and sell to, to help people. It’s like a mindset shift of being the kind of person who can find the answers instead of having them.

Like we said, don’t be the no at all. You’ll figure it out. And when you figure it out, then you can share that experience with folks. I’m building a network of experts to consult with. You don’t have to be the only one who knows there’s other folks. Don’t be scared that like they’re your competitors.

They’re also like potential partners that, you know, Oh, this, software’s better for this use case. You should use that software. It’s good for that. Or my content focuses on helping this target audience, but you’re, you fall outside of it. It’s good to know. It’s important to like.

Communicate confidently that you’ll be able to find the answer to them. You want to be known as someone who’s able to find the answers and follow up and come back. It’s it’s crazy. I think it’s crazy impressive sometimes. Through customer support channels or interactions with folks online and checking, they throw a zinger and you’re like, I have no idea.

I never heard of that one. And then if you come back the next day and you’re like, I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking about this and here’s everything I learned about it and how it fits into the stuff I do know. They’re like, wow, that feels like a guide, not a guru. And they’re like, Oh, this is someone who’s really helping me with my specific issues.

Get to where I need to go. This kind of mindset is something I had when out of college, I worked for two years as a consultant at Accenture. It’s like one of the, what do they call it? The big five consulting companies. And that experience is crazy. Cause as a really young person who didn’t know much, I’m thrown like into these businesses.

And people are paying a lot of money for this guy who’s supposed to have the answers. And I don’t know anything yet. This is my first job out of college and I’ve only been here a couple of months. So they really bill you and charge for you as if you have the answers. And I think it’s clear.

to most of the, the people on the the business side that are working with you, they’re like, this guy, kid doesn’t know it, but super quickly and they train you on this at Accenture. They do a good job of like, when they ask you a question, you don’t know the answer. You tell them like, don’t worry, you hired Accenture at a whole team.

There’s a team of experts and I’m going to talk to them and they’re going to give me an answer and I’m going to tell you, and I’ll facilitate this. And You do that a couple of times and they don’t sweat the fact that you’re like, you’re this fresh young kid who doesn’t know anything cause you’ve proven that you’re helping them anyway.

There’s this other aspect of that, that you’re still useful to them at finding the answers, even if you don’t have them. And over time, that’s how you become the kind of person after, you do that for 10 years and a lot of the questions are, I’ve seen this a bunch of times before. Here’s like the three things that help people, you become the person who knows it all.

Chris Badgett: Being the person that can find the answers is, can also help you actually just launch. So I see it all the time where let’s say you’re doing a membership site and you have like individual trainings or mini courses and maybe you think you have to build like a hundred of those before it’s ready to launch.

But if you just have a few ready, And you offer actual one on one or group support, the customers, your early customers will literally pull the product out of you and be like, Oh, okay. They need help with this now. So now you don’t have to just assume, exactly what this person who has come to you made a purchase, ask for your help needs, there’s like a real feedback loop and you can just create in front of them.

I don’t have that for you yet. And then by the time we meet next week or next month. We’ll have a new training on exactly that problem. So I think that’s really cool. It allows you to just launch and pre sell and just help people more in real time, giving them exactly what they need. Once you, your community gets bigger, you’ll start seeing patterns of that.

And you’ll intuitively know Oh, this other thing, they really, I’ve had seven people who really need help with this thing, but that’s where. So your like quarterly plan or your annual plan just gets mapped out in front of you and you’re not guessing because there you have paying customers asking for your help with X.

Yeah. And that’s the benefit of lifelong learning when you make the commitment to that is. You’re also learning how to learn. It makes you more resourceful because you’re kind of Matt, you’re focusing on craftsmanship and mastery. So you’re getting better at metal learning or the act of actually learning, which is part of being resourceful.

Let’s talk about the customer avatar.

Jason Coleman: All right.

Chris Badgett: So this goes by a lot of different names. Some people call it your audience, your niche. Your ICP, which stands for your ideal customer profile. And these things all are like a little different, but I think the customer avatar is really the main, the avatars, the way to think about it.

So who is the ideal person? That’s a perfect fit for your course or your coaching program or your online community your reader, your audience, and. How do you figure that out? And the key to that, in my opinion, is to actually obsess about it forever. It’s a forever commitment. One of the easiest ways to do it is to actually, if you’re like not sure what to choose, and you’re like one of these people who’s like interested in a lot of different things, I don’t know what to make my course about or my coaching program or my online business, just do a previous version of yourself.

Cause you, you remember yourself. So like when Chris or Jason was just starting an agency. And what did they need help with? It’s easy cause you know who it is. If you’re already moving and let’s say you have a services business and you’re trying to productize, you already have these people that are paying you money. You can think about productizing what you know, and you’re learning about their challenges and you’ve already got the this kind of avatar forming like who’s my favorite customer.

Like we were talking about earlier Who do I not want to work with that develops like your anti customer avatar. But once you have this person nailed down, it could be an it could be a previous version of yourself It could be like your favorite client.

That also happens to pay you the most money and be the easiest to work with or whatever So Some people also invent like a fictional version, which is fine too, where you just Oh, it’s a woman who’s just had a baby.

She’s in this income range. She’s just left corporate, whatever. And you’re like figuring out this avatar based on Demographic stuff like we’re talking about there, but also psychographic stuff like, Oh, but they’re depressed because of this. Or, they’re really emotional about this topic and so on.

So you just map out this avatar of like you’re the FBI or whatever, and you’re profiling like some suspect you’re looking for is one way to think about it. And one of the things I like to do when I get into the customer avatar, is do a pain and opportunity map. So what is the, what are the most painful things in this person’s life?

What are their, when on the opposite side of pain. What are their goals? And what opportunity are they seeking. Would they pay money to get closer to? Cause it’s either away from pain or towards pleasure. And if you can find the top six pain points in the top six what do they want to move towards?

And then which one of those is like primary or which, what’s another theme that like governs all of that? Is there an identity transformation? There’s this idea that you can have your avatar, you give them incremental improvements, but if you can actually like change their identity, That’s the most powerful product you can sell.

You can charge the most for it. So an example of that would be like in the business niche if my program is going to help you quit your day job and become an online entrepreneur, six figure entrepreneur, this is like the classic example. That’s like an identity transformation. Somebody who’s stuck in corporate hates their job to entrepreneur with a working business.

He’s happy and has. impact and lifestyle freedom. So that’s like a transformation. So think about that. It is okay to help people with incremental improvements, but those big flips of identity transformation, like I’ve seen one that’s a little more counterintuitive is I’ve seen a user help people move to Australia and become doctors in Australia.

So it’s it’s that’s like a major change. And that’s what his program was. all about. And the other thing that happens, this is just more of a nuance with the avatar. I’ve often, when I started with Lifter LMS, I had the subject matter expert person that we’ve been talking about here is the avatar, the aspiring course creator, the monetized knowledge person, somebody who has a lot of passion.

They want to create impact income and freedom by helping others through teaching and charging for that with the information product. That there’s a lot more that goes to that avatar. I won’t go into the two pages of it, like who they are, but what ended up happening is I was moving forward with this.

I started noticing all these agencies. And, WordPress professionals and stuff showing up like, Oh, the people that build sites for clients in this niche for courses or membership sites, Or e commerce stores and they want to diversify into digital products, but they have this like agency person that’s helping them.

And I started looking at who’s following me on social media. It’s Oh, the people that actually interact with my tweets and stuff is like these agency and WordPress and technology people. So I ended up like having to split there’s two avatars and no matter what I do okay, we’re just going to focus on this one.

This other one’s always here. And so that sometimes happens. But I think it’s a really valuable exercise to figure out the avatar, obsess about it. And just be open to, it’s not something you set in like year one and you’re good, like it evolves and it changes and you end up in weird situations like I’m talking about where I have two.

Jason Coleman: A common template for that shows up in like business to business space is there’s the person who uses your training and then the person who pays for it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Jason Coleman: And they have different needs and avatars. And if you want to reach that audience and sell to them, you have to map both people, the person who’s paying for it and the person who’s that you’re actually, delivering the content for man, a couple mistakes.

I see folks run into. When they’re working on their customer avatars. And I say that because I’ve run into these mistakes several times over and over, like I’m actually talking about myself, my friend who’s had these issues. But I do see it a lot. Cause we help a lot of, similar businesses and people too is one is like resisting, like not going niche enough, not making it specific enough and resisting that.

Under the pretense of I’m trying to make a big thing that helps everybody. And I’ve done that. Like it’s a membership platform for all kinds of things. The problem with that is that that I, this customer avatar is very useful tool when you’re writing sales copy. When you’re figuring out how to build the product and when you’re figuring out. The content or the, learning, if you, it’s almost like you want to go through the exercise of really having a very specific customer avatar.

And feel what it feels like to write like you write sales copying it so hard and you’re like you’re not talking to me You’re talking to chris badgett He’s this old, he’s right in front of you. He looks like this is what he loves. This was, and you’re like, Oh, you’re just talking to Chris Badgett. It flows.

You’re just like, this is what he needs to know. And what I would tell him, some people resist that they want to niche down. And I think also if you do, it doesn’t mean you can’t help everybody. It’s just a bullseye. It’s just the center of the target. And you’ll still help a bunch of people that, you know, but there’s someone in the middle that you’re writing towards.

Chris Badgett: It’s just a quick example of that, like Apple computer. Like when they did the whole, the crazy ones, the artists, the misfits, all this, a lot of other people still have Apple products besides the, the artistic, innovators type people. Yeah, but the avatar and maybe it still is like that.

Yeah, it’s but it doesn’t mean you can’t sell to and help other people

Jason Coleman: Related to that when you’re building your customer avatar. I think a mistake I made early on was thinking about like demographic Information like man or woman or they like, You know, expensive things are cheap things or how they dress or you almost think of building a Facebook ad and you can choose to demographic traits.

And I find that stuff is not as important when you’re building your customer avatar as the things you talked about, which were like, what are their pain points? What are their common challenges? And in like we were figuring out use cases for paid memberships pro. And if there, or there’s a bunch of people who build courses and the thing that’s common among them is not if you think of a yoga course and like a, health food course and a get fit course, the thing that’s not common is that like they’re women and they, I don’t know, demographic information about those folks.

It’s was not as useful as they wanted to build a website. To sell their course. That’s what’s common among them. The, and specific chat. So that’s the top. And then specifically, like what was challenging about it? Was it that they, had struggled to make the content. It was that they struggled with the tooling?nd then you’re like helping them with their specific problems and challenges instead of, I think sometimes people get caught up in the fluff of I’m trying to speak to women, so it needs to look and smell this way, right? And you’re like no focus on the challenges. Another thing to focus on is, the people who want to pay you, it’s assuming you’re doing this, you don’t have some outside funding source and you’re just spreading the word.

You’re trying to turn this into a business. I find like a very specific version of this. And when it comes up is you’re you’re selling something and there’s a cancel, people can cancel and they churn. And I think early on, there’s almost a lot of. recommendations to, hold on to those people.

So you only have three customers and one of them left. And you’re like, I guess like a third get them back. I need that a hundred dollars a month or whatever they’re charging. And you struggle and. I don’t think you should totally ignore that person. You should get the feedback, but very specifically, like they came into your orbit and they left, like that’s a very clear signal that they don’t want to pay you for the thing you have currently.

So maybe take some feedback and you can use that to figure out like, am I creating the right thing? But that customer that left is like not your customer avatar. are, is that the person you’re serving or not? If they are and they left, that’s like a different story now. Okay. I, Don’t want that person to go.

So then think about how you could keep them. But a lot of the people who will bounce out and cancel out and churn. are like, that’s a good turn. They actually don’t need the thing. And you don’t want to strive too hard to focus on those folks. And I think we also talked about like various forms of consulting and customer interaction as a way to get this feedback.

So I guess I’m thinking, how do you find out? It, I’m assuming the situation where you have a little bit of traction, you’re selling something and you want to g. So you want to find out more about your current customers so you can figure out how to find them and make more of them. It’s like focusing on the ones who pay you.

And I think you can have these like consultation calls with them. Sometimes if you’re selling like an info product, it’s Hey, for an hourly rate. You can still talk to me or I mean in the early days, like put an hour, actually probably put an hourly rate and then say, but actually it’s free for the first whatever, or I’m giving, everyone who signs up gets, instead of 300 an hour, they got to talk to me for an hour for free.

But talk to your customers and do like you said that there’s so many reasons why Products of all kinds folks who build them start out as consultants because they were very close with a customer and trying to solve specific Problems and then they realize other people have this problem So if you skipped over that part and you have a little bit of success people are buying your stuff It’s like maybe back take a step back and consult some of them and work really closely with them to figure out who they are and what problems they have.

And so some tools you could do. So like that consultation calls put an hourly rate for people to just talk to you if your time is busy. And then we did a paid memberships pro, and I’ve seen other folks do this, like what we call do it for me setups. So it’s and then like the educational space, I think it’s pretty common of I have a course, but if you want mentorship and like a more, high touch help through this.

You can pay me more and then I’ll do that. And you can price those lower. It’s a, they make, it’s a way to make money. So it’s like another way to make money off your audience and stuff. But I think always think about it as Oh, this is me like learning about a very, not just a customer, but a customer is willing to pay more than what the average customer pays me.

Like it’s a super valuable customer to dig into and try to figure out. And I guess quickly, like when paid nurses pro did the, to do it for me, like how it worked, we were selling for at that time. I think I don’t know, various times, like 100 a year, you gain access to the software and support, but for 500, we’ll spend five hours, like helping you to set it up.

And it was a way to talk to a lot of customers. And again, that thing of figuring out who you like to work with and who you don’t. I remember the stats when we did the, do it for me Like 50 percent of them were perfect. It was like, this is our ideal customer and they just need a little bit of help.

And we help them exactly how we can. We get a little bit like, Oh, we build a tool that we can give to other people where we fixed a bug or we learned something was like perfect. And then after. The five hours was up, like they went on their way and they didn’t need us anymore. Another 25 percent in that cohort were, they needed more.

So it went really well. And then they’re like, you’re the smartest WordPress person I know. Can you do all this other stuff for me? And we’re like, we’re not consultants. We don’t do online. We’re building a product. So it didn’t they like, which is, it’s a good problem to have. And you got to build partners of people that you can push that work off to, but it’s I, you helped me with this.

Can you help me with my whole life? And you’re like, we don’t actually do that. But then 25% We’re just crazy bad failures because we were taking the money up front and then saying, Hey, we’ll solve your problem in five hours. And just the expectations were off. And they were quote unquote bad customers, but that experience of digging it wait, why was it bad?

Why did they think they would get this when they were only going to get this and using that information of how to change the copy and the documentation and the product itself. So that when those people come, they deflect before they pay you.

Chris Badgett: One more pro tip with the figuring out your avatar and who’s going to pay you is to just pre sell them.

Don’t even create anything yet except for the sales page. So I want, I think I want to sell to this person. This is the problem I want to solve. This is my mechanism of how I’m going to solve it. And you can set it up. You can use our softwares to take the money. You can be totally transparent and give them like, Hey, it starts like a month from now and even say if I don’t get this many orders, I’m going to refund your money and so on.

Pre selling helps. I love the idea of if you’re not already a consultant and like really understand the avatar and the The solution in the problem space do coaching first before you try to do a course and do private coaching work with them one on one, even if you’re losing some money, based on your hourly rate or whatever, it’s very validating to make sure like this avatar is right.

I can help them. I’ll over deliver through private coaching or even done for you services. And there is a framework I learned, which is really simple. They can help with this, like structuring these things, which is DIY, do it yourself, DWI, which is done with you. And then DFY, which is done for you.

and the passive online course with no support is do it yourself, good luck. The done with you is like we’ve got courses, we also have like weekly office hours and so on. And then done for you is more like a agency, like you’re hiring us and we’re going to get you the result. We’ll get it done for you.

So using that, those frameworks help and yeah, it takes time to adjust and get that avatar offer clarity. So you got to experiment. It’s part of the learning process. Let’s talk about practicing with intention. I’m pretty convinced you, the reason why a lot of folks fail or lose momentum is that they, not only did they not commit to a problem for an extended period of time, but they didn’t It wasn’t the right problem for them and they didn’t really go all in on a single problem.

They got shiny object syndrome. For me, if you’re going to spend all this time creating courses, coaching community, maybe writing a book, maybe doing public speaking, Becoming the person for this, category of problem. It’s a huge commitment. So in my view, if you’re not willing to focus on this avatar and this problem or problem set for more than a decade or at least a decade, it’s probably not worth doing.

Maybe you don’t love the space enough or. You’re not just, you just don’t have the passion to keep going. So it’s just to make a decade commitment when you choose your problem, particularly if you’re one of those people that has multiple interests, maybe like fitness, maybe like investing. Maybe you like cooking and you’re like, I want to get into this space.

I’m not sure which one to focus on. There’s this test you can do called the onstage test, which is like if five years from now, if you’re on a stage giving a talk about this topic. and your mother or your family or whoever is in the audience watching you like, are we good here? Are you still doing this in five years?

It’s called the stage test and really putting in those 10, 000 hours. So your products and programs will get better with 10, 000 hours. And if you’ve already spent 10, 000 hours in this space and that decade commitment it’s going to work, but it’s a huge commitment. So don’t take it lightly. I think this idea of get rich quick overnight success, it’s just not helpful because it’s not the way it works.

And when you do marry these problems and stuff, you can revise as you learn. There’s sort of two ways I think about it is, or patterns I’ve seen in the space when you become a subject matter expert. There’s whatever your niche is, you can either be like, I’m the person for X and I have this signature program that delivers this result for this person.

It’s called this name. And then every year you rebuild it, you deliver it. Again and again through cohorts Maybe you just redo all the content every now and again and you have a signature program Then there’s more of like the serial entrepreneur who’s okay. I’m really committed to this avatar And i’m just gonna I am going to build the library But it’s I’m taking micro problems and I’m like building a thing here.

And I just keep going until I’ve essentially surrounded this person with help. And it’s not really a signature program. It’s more of a doctor patient thing, like where the coach is like prescribing Oh, you need help with this problem. Take this training in my program, come to office hours on the weekend.

It’s more. It’s less of this signature structure thing and more of a prescriptive. Hey, you’re in the club and then I’m here to help you and prescribe training and content as needed. And the other thing that’s okay to do is to admit mistakes. If you, maybe your signature program has a major problem in it and Hey, I think I need to take this part out.

It’s not helpful. Or maybe I structured my offer so that it’s actually not starting early enough in their journey. Or maybe I’m not staying with them after they get to this point and they really need me for another part or this middle part is not working. If I’m helping people build an agency and I show them how to do that, but they’re ha my clients are having trouble getting clients.

Like I think what I’m teaching, maybe it’s not working. I got to readjust. And I got to learn. I got to be resourceful. And then in terms of practicing with intention, I take this seriously. So like when I make a commitment, like when I got into sled dogs or I got into the LMS space or I became a podcaster or started a YouTube channel I knew I would be doing it 10 years later.

And that decade commitment is just it’s both sounds like a lot of work, but it’s also freeing you know what, I could see myself in 10 years. And it helps rule out things that maybe you shouldn’t focus on. Whatever’s hot of the day, you might see an opportunity, but do you see yourself doing that in 10 years?

Jason Coleman: That’s great stuff. I it’s funny, it’s like you brought up 10, 000 hours and I know what it means and you know what it means. There’s like a famous essay about 10, 000 hours and that’s like the average time it takes for someone to be labeled as an expert for something or mastery. Yeah. They love all mastery.

And yeah. That’s the thing is we’re talking about becoming an expert at something. And one way definitely is to do it over and over again, like 10, 000 hours. And you like through osmosis, you’ll accidentally become good at it. Like almost anything, if you just do it that often. But I think when practicing with intention will get you there faster and better.

I think like anything that any skill I’ve tried to learn if you trying to get better at guitar. Just learning songs and playing is pretty good. But if there’s a reason, like there’s coaches. There’s a reason that like coaches who aren’t the best can still help people. Who are the best is they’re walking them through exercises that, you know, for guitar, stretch your fingers.

Learn to memorize, these chords and changes and notes and, keys and things. So setting goals for each practice session, like one small concrete thing to improve over time. And so recognizing every time you do, every time you write a blog post, I did it for this podcast, every time I’m recording something I wrote.

So for this, it was, don’t cough. And I wrote the. the overarching topic of this discussion is becoming an expert. So it was like, Oh, remember to like, keep tagging that. So I put that on like on the top of my notes and over time the. These things will become more natural.

And that’s really how you become better at a skill. And I think it’s also how you can learn with intention as well. So yeah, you do the same thing over and over, but better each time. And then I think another version of that is not to be scared to copy from the best.

And so you might feel that you have to do it your own way or pay your dues. Which is, it’s true, but don’t, it’s, it is good to just copy. And there’s an ethical way to do it. Like whether it’s copy as practice. And even I brought up the guitar. It’s you watch like a really good guitarist and you’re like, and let me try to learn that someone else’s song, and there’s like a good course, I think it’s called copy that is like a sales copywriting course. And there’s 10 different examples of really good sales pages. It’s like literally put this on your screen and then type it up and feel what it’s like to write those words as if you wrote them.

And yeah. Building websites or like building courses, like a good, if you there’s a course that you really like, it’s like just steal some aspect of it. You’re not going to copy the whole course, but it’s like copy the structure of the course, but it’s your content. It’s about a totally different subject matter, but you just steal the structure of it.

And if you steal it, be like, Hey, give props to it if it makes sense. Or there’s other ways you can do that. You can take your favorite parts of some of the. other material and and apply it to your own work. And don’t be worried about doing that again. Like you don’t have to be the guru, the person who knows it all.

This just comes out of, your glorious, magical brain is. Being transparent about how you figured it out and working towards this helps.

Chris Badgett: I think copying, that’s in humans there’s mirror neurons in our brain. It’s how we learn language and kids copy their parents and their siblings and stuff like that.

That’s just what makes us human. I’ve heard it called R and D, which stands for rob and duplicate. That’s a funny way to say it. So you want to R and D, but you want to actually give credit. Like you’ve heard us cite, like earlier, I said, moving the free line, that’s Ed and Pagan. You found the 10, 000 hours from Malcolm Gladwell and so on.

So good site credit. And the other thing is to just think about remixing because a great book, like a nonfiction book, came from research where there’s a lot of different ideas. So what plagiarism is like not giving credit, copying exactly, not mixing and matching with other things. And so that’s, I think that’s an important thing for an expert, especially a lifelong learner.

Just because you heard something really good from somebody else in your industry, you can use it. Just give them credit, mix it into your style and your framework and everything. And you’re good. That’s how like great books are written.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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The post Part 1- Becoming the Expert, Education Entrepreneur Mentor Series appeared first on LMScast.

In this episode of LMScast, Tim McIvor, the developer of SchoolPsych.com, a website that offers professional development for school psychologists, joins Chris Badgett. He discusses how to build continuing education.

Tim talks about how he went from working as a school psychologist to starting a charity organization and then starting a company to satisfy the demands of his industry for continuous education. Recorded webinars are available on SchoolPsych.com to assist school psychologists in completing the 75 hours of professional development needed to renew their licenses.

Tim emphasizes how LifterLMS has been essential to his platform, allowing for features like quizzes, automatic certifications, and organized lectures that adhere to accreditation requirements.

He has enabled school psychologists throughout the world to enhance their practices and have a beneficial influence on the pupils they serve by utilizing technology to make training more accessible.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett:  You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Tim McIvor. He’s from school psych. com, he’s a creator. He’s doing a lot of cool things in the education space. We’re going to get into his story. We’re going to learn about the impact he’s making, how he’s using LFTR LMS, but first, welcome to the show, Tim.

Thanks so much for having me, Chris. I’m really excited to talk to you. I love seeing people find success and build cool platforms. Can you tell us what schoolpsych. com is all about?

Tim McIvor: Absolutely. It’s a professional development platform for school psychologists to renew their license through my recorded webinars.

So basically there is a national association of school psychologists and they give out a different accreditation system where you can become a provider and approved provider for this national association. And then once you get that. Like schoolsick. com currently has that once you get that, you can provide certificates that school psychologists can then use to renew their license.

So it’s all built around this system of school psychologists needing these certificates in order to renew their license.

Chris Badgett: Is the license something they have to renew every year or every three years? And they need

Tim McIvor: 75 hours of professional development.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s awesome. And is this I don’t know the industry really well.

Is this like. All public school psychologists need this or how does that work?

Tim McIvor: So pretty much all public school psychologists need this if they are considered a nationally certified school psychologist. And school psychologists are very motivated to be nationally certified school psychologists because it’s an important credential to have for getting good jobs.

And then on top of that, you usually get a stipend for having that nationally certified credential. It’s not technically necessary to work in public schools. It can just there’s a lot of benefits to having it, getting better jobs, getting stipends.

Chris Badgett: Very cool. And just to better understand the industry correct me if I’m wrong, but not every public school has a school psychologist, like where do they operate or do they, does every school have a school?

Yeah.

Tim McIvor: It’s something we get a lot because we go on behind the scenes. So although not every school has a full time five days a week school psychologist for every single public school in the United States. There is a school psychologist assigned to that school. For me personally, for the past 10 years, I’ve worked at three schools.

And so it’s always been two days at one school, two days at another school and one day at the last school. So yeah, we’re behind the scenes. As students, they might not know who I am unless they work directly with me. Okay. And so they might feel like they don’t have a school psychologist or they don’t have this because we are typically assigned to multiple schools.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And just to better understand what school psychologists do, like what are some of the most common psychological issues that the industry helps with in the United States?

Tim McIvor: So basically we’re not the school counselors who are doing all like the counseling and all the scheduling and all the help with the school college applications.

We’re doing the special education evaluations. And we’re doing all the testing. We were writing up reports and determining if students qualify. For services. So our job is very rewarding in that sense, in that we are directly able to work with students who are referred to us, test them on these different tests that we’ve been trained on and determine whether they qualify for additional services under Different special education categories that they might qualify under such as a learning disability autism.

There’s ADHD It counts under the other health impairment category and then of course we do more than this job But as far as the primary role I would say is the special education testing But of course we do a lot of consultation with teachers crisis prevention data analysis and so on and so forth

Chris Badgett: Awesome tell us your story because it sounds like you were a you are were a school psychologist, but you decided to get into the the education side to meet the need of continuing education.

How did you make that turn or what inspired you to, get involved in education for certification and all that?

Tim McIvor: Yeah. It started in graduate school where I was asking around how do you get the best jobs in school psychology? And one of the head people of the Boston Public Schools told me that if you volunteer in a professional development association and she was referring to the Massachusetts School Psychologists Association specifically you would be able to network very well.

That would be one of the best ways to be able to get a good job. And she was absolutely right. People were able to. Pull strings for me to get jobs that were in demand. But that actually ended up being only one benefit. The other benefit is I get to learn how a professional development association works in school psychology.

And then when I went out to Nevada. After I got a job out there, they didn’t have one of these state associations, but because I had done all that volunteer work for MISPA sorry, for Massachusetts I helped create one with about five other very passionate school psychologists, and we created the Nevada Association of School Psychologists is a nonprofit, and we basically Helped the state run a whole bunch of professional development conferences.

It’s still going strong to this day. And I was the president of it from its inception for the first two years. And that’s when I really learned how to build a professional development association from the ground up.

Chris Badgett: That’s very cool. And how long ago was that, that you set out to build the association?

Tim McIvor: That was 2014. And that was actually as my first year as a school psychologist. Yeah. I was doing that and so I was the president of an entire state Simultaneously while being a first year school psychologist probably i’m probably the only person to ever do something like that It was just crazy. But people had a lot of respect for me for doing it Obviously very motivated hard working and it worked out very well.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I’m guessing you were in this industry of continuing education, did you start by delivering it at in person? Why yes. Continuing at events.

Tim McIvor: Yeah I did the traditional route the entire time I was president just doing these in person conferences, but I knew that, with go to training, go to webinar type platforms, you could totally do it live and it would make it so much easier than having to book a venue.

Plus Nevada is such a rural. State in so many parts that for them to all have to fly to one place for professional development, didn’t seem very smart. So after those two years as president, I started looking into how we could make it more accessible for that nonprofit. And I was also taking notes for my own to create a business.

And that’s exactly what I did that the year after I was president in 2017 I created a business where. I was launching live webinars on GoToWebinar, on GoToTraining. But I noticed that I, after the webinar, I wanted somewhere where we had these recordings to put it up for people who missed the training, who missed the webinar.

And that’s where LifterLMS came into play.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So what was your history with WordPress? Was this your first WordPress site or were you already using it for something else?

Tim McIvor: No, I actually had built like five websites by then. I’m one of those crazy people who graphic design is just a passion of mine.

And so like any chance I could get to build a website for example, during my internship year, I was like the tennis coach for the high school tennis team. And I was like, let’s build a website. Like I would find any reason under the sun to build a website. And so I just love building websites and I knew it would be good because I knew I wanted to get into the business aspect of school psychology eventually.

And yeah, I did have a little bit of a background with WordPress prior to this.

Chris Badgett: So tell us about the story of how you decided to use Lifter LMS. Sometimes people get a little overwhelmed with all the LMS is out there and there’s this decision fatigue and like figuring out which tools or plugins to use.

Tell us about how you figured that out and ended up with Lifter.

Tim McIvor: I remember watching a YouTube video in early 2017 about how to create an LMS platform. And it was literally the first YouTube video I looked up was by a guy named Adam and I’m trying to remember the name of his platform.

It was like, WP something crafter, I think crafter. Thank you. WP crafter. Awesome guy created a great video. I think he, he now owns Presto. You know what I’m talking about? Yeah. Yeah. Awesome guy. Really appreciated his videos. Never talked to him or met him in person, but I could just tell he’s a very upbeat, nice guy.

And He showed step by step how to use Lifter LMS and how to set it up. And I was sold. I didn’t actually have to look at any other platform. I did later just because somebody else who I collaborated with, who wasn’t good with technical skills, wanted a platform. And I helped her find Rizuku and Kajabi and things like that.

But for me, I felt very strongly that right from the get go, that Lipter LMS checked all the boxes. And there were a lot of boxes to check because the National Association, in order to be an approved provider and give these certificates for school psychologists to renew their licensure, you had to have quizzes, you had to have evaluation feedback, you had to have, Generated certificates.

The lessons had to be structured in such a way and everything that they required Lifter LMS had. And so I never ended up looking elsewhere. I’ve been a loyal Lifter LMS customer since 2017.

Chris Badgett: Okay. Oh, awesome. You’ve been around that long. Very cool. You mentioned a lot of the things like.

Quizzes and certificates. What other features do you like most about LFTR or use the most?

Tim McIvor: Yeah, absolutely. I really like just starting off the bat the user friendly nature of the platform. And I love how in the dashboard, it just permanently stores your certificates. I can tell you that school psychologists, yes, they’re interested in professional development, but ultimately, They’re most interested in just making sure they get those certificates and that they can find them three years down the road when they are looking to renew their license.

And so for them to see that it’s all just stored with the name of the certificate, the date, and just how easy it is to auto generate these certificates on my end so that I don’t have to email each person really gave me an edge in creating this. Platform because there are other school psychologists who tried to do this type of thing, but didn’t really know how to because they figured, they might have to email individually the certificate and oftentimes what these nonprofits do is after a live conference, they’re, printing out certificates.

I’m going to write the name down. It’s very it takes a lot of time. It’s very time consuming. But the way lifter LMS just sets all this up as very auto generated help save me a bunch of time. So I could focus on. What I really care about which is just teaching school psychologists, best practices.

For me, the passion is all about how can we get school psychologists, the best possible training from the best possible people to make the largest amount of impact on the students we serve. And that to me is A big passion to know that I can be part of having a major impact, not just on the three schools I work at, but also globally.

There are school psychologists across the entire world who are using school psych dot com right now.

Chris Badgett: Oh, so cool. How do you handle the situation where if you’re used to like a webinar or a filmed event where it’s like one presentation. It’s not necessarily a course with multiple lessons.

Are you creating like a sort of a mini course that just has one lesson per course? Yeah, so one hour

Tim McIvor: webinar, followed by a quiz followed by an evaluation feedback and you’ll see that all of my webinars are set up the same way. It’s three lessons and second lessons quiz third lessons evaluation feedback But yeah, it really is just that one First lesson.

That’s the webinar. That’s the content. I’ve never had to use multiple lessons. There are some features on literal mess. I know that would be helpful for like university professors. But for me, it’s just simplified in that sense.

Chris Badgett: Do you do all the website stuff yourself or does somebody help you with it?

Tim McIvor: Yeah there were very few times where i’ve had to go on what’s that website called like code press or something like that Yeah codable where you ask the software engineer To help you fix something, but it was never related to Lyft or LMS. It was related to like security and things like that.

Making sure my website is secure from hackers. I was having an issue with that for a bit. But yeah for the most part, just learning things on YouTube that the one thing that I wanted to make sure I said today was that every time I would. Reach out to your support team. Since 2017, I’ve always gotten great responses.

I’ve even sometimes gotten video tutorials tailored specifically to my website on how to do something, which I’ve never seen a company do before. I’ve never seen a support team that specific in helping their customers. And so that’s why I’m a huge fan of Lyft or LMS. I think that’s where. You guys really stand out.

You have a great product and then it just the best support team I’ve ever seen.

Chris Badgett: I appreciate that. We we think about support, like it’s not a cost center to be minimized. It’s actually a feature of the product. So like we try to go big there.

Tim McIvor: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: You have you do a lot and that’s part of your story.

Hey, I started my first job and built an association at the same time. But like when it comes to content creation. I guess in theory you could teach everything, but you have other people teaching and you teach some, or tell us about how you gather and source all the material.

Tim McIvor: I think at first I thought that I could just do it all.

I did 12. I was broke at the time. School psychologists don’t necessarily make a ton of money. So I didn’t have money to pay speakers. And so the first, 12 webinars I made were all me. And then I noticed that once I started reaching out to guest speakers there was a lot more interest in the website because, I specialized in technology and school psychology and one person I’ll never forget how they explained this to me.

That’s like almost eating your vegetables. Like it’s good for you. School psychologists. should be learning about technology and school psychology, but in reality, they want like the meat and potatoes. They want the behavior interventions. They want all these topics that are highly in demand that I couldn’t necessarily be the expert and give them.

So that’s why I realized in order to truly make this website great I needed to start reaching out. And after I had created those 12 webinars. I had just taken any money I had made from that and put it into guest speakers. And now we’re up to over 50 webinars on the platform.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Do Do the webinars remain current and usable over time, or do they have a shelf life?

Tim McIvor: Yeah, I would say after about six, seven years, some of these webinars need to either be redone or just taken off the platform. And then for my technology webinars, because I did them, I could just go in and update them where needed, which I’ve done over the years.

Chris Badgett: If somebody is thinking about recruiting other Kind of content creators.

Do you now do you like pay them or do you pay them a royalty? Or are they just happy to do it to get exposure or experience? At

Tim McIvor: first, I was looking mostly for people who would do it for exposure. Maybe they had a book. And then there were a few school psychologists who were pretty well known. Who I was just really good friends with and they didn’t mind doing it at a cheaper price.

In fact, one of them I had quoted a pretty high price and said, Oh, you don’t have to pay me that much. I’ll do it for this. Like just very nice people in general, the field of school psychology is not your typical. Tech, this textbook business people. They’re just extremely nice people who are very passionate and have similar passions to mine.

I’m just wanting to get the word out of how to best help kids. But then again, there’s also very high in demand speakers who I don’t blame them for charging very high speaker feeds because everyone is wanting them. And it It’s a big range but as my website’s grown, I’ve been able to get speakers that who are more in demand and charge a higher price.

And so it, it’s grown over time what I can pay people.

Chris Badgett: Is this become your full time thing or you’re also still a school psychologist?

Tim McIvor: As of this as of this year, I actually stopped my full time job as a school psychologist. This along with just some part time consultation with the Boston Public Schools as well as just a few other more minor business ventures is my full time thing.

So basically it was getting to the point where this was doing better. than my full time job as a school psychologist. I felt like I had more impact here globally to help Children. It just aligned with my passions. So I had been a school psychologist for five years in Nevada full time, then a school psychologist for five years in Florida full time.

This is my first ever school year where I’m not actually in the schools anymore. So yeah lifter illness is, has helped me substantially. And in getting to that goal, which is just a dream of mine.

Chris Badgett: Wow. Awesome. Congratulations on that. Thank you. How do I know people who do like professional development or are thinking about it?

What they often ask how do you get clients or how do you get in the flow of people needing continuing education credits? Like how did you Get that going. And what do you continue to do?

Tim McIvor: Yeah, that’s one of the areas where I think I thrive. The most is the marketing component because I am competing with about a thousand other professional development associations that there’s maybe not a thousand, but there are so many different providers who provide these NASA approved certificates.

There are also the APA, which the American Psychological Association, which provides certificates, and our National Association counts those as well. So if you count all the providers from the A. P. A. Then it’s well over 1000 who I’m competing against. But one way I’ve found to really stand out. Is I’m extremely active on social media.

I was watching a few YouTube videos. I remember back in 2020 that had said in order to stand out, you need to add humor. You can’t just constantly promote your webinars. People won’t like it. They won’t follow you. They’ll just get bored of your page. But if with a few exceptions, of course, who are super passionate about professional development.

But if you can incorporate some really funny humor or really meaningful, valuable resources into your social media posts, that schools that call this can find a lot of value. And then every once in a while mentioned that you’ve got a new professional development webinar on your platform. That has been the key to my success.

I’ve gotten over 10, 000 followers on both Facebook and Instagram that way. And they even. In that YouTube video had mentioned these are some of the accounts where they’re using humor and they’re getting like 100, 000 followers. And it was like this accountant, this like random accountant Twitter page that was using pretty good humor.

And I just learned how they did it and then applied it to my page.

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s cool. Is there seasonality to this continuing ed or is it just always happening? People are signing up or do people tend to get their credits at a certain time of year or whatever?

Tim McIvor: It’s all year round, but I noticed that June is a great Time because it’s pretty much the end of the school year.

They’re wrapping up the school year. The kids are out, but sometimes the school psychologist still need to work another maybe week or so without the students. And so they’re getting around to all the things they wanted to do during the school year, but didn’t have time to. And a lot of that is professional development.

Another one is August. And September at the very beginning of the school year school psychologists don’t necessarily have the busiest schedules yet because usually the teachers are still getting to know their students before referring them to the school psychologist and there’s usually a honeymoon to where the students are maybe behaving much better than they typically do throughout the school year.

Chris Badgett: What’s the business model? Are you doing like just a la carte, individual core sales or how do you, what’s the,

Tim McIvor: that was the main difference between when I was only making a little bit of money on this. And when I realized that certain ways to price it took it exponentially more sales.

And What I realized maybe a year and a half ago is that instead of doing just individual webinars, which there’s still an option to for individual webinars at 25 a webinar, you can purchase an individual webinar or for 99. You can access. All the webinars. And I do the sale about three times a year.

I noticed I get most of my revenue just from those three sales. So what I found is that how you do your pricing dramatically impacts how successful you are, because I would say the first five years, I really didn’t make a lot of money just on the individual 25 per webinar pricing setup.

It wasn’t until I started doing that. All the webinars for X amount that people really started flocking to the website.

Chris Badgett: Do you have a, is there an access period on that? Like you get access for a year or is it lifetime access or what?

Tim McIvor: It’s a one year access to all the webinars.

Chris Badgett: Can people take the same training three years later or do they have to do new stuff all the time or how does that work?

Tim McIvor: Sometimes they do. And then I’ll have to go into the certificate and manually edit it. So I want to give LifterLMS some credit because I know you guys started out where the certificate page was very rigid. And by now it’s just so flexible. One of the best things you guys did was create such a versatile.

Certificate set up because that actually has been extremely helpful. The certificates are probably the most important after the content of the webinar itself, the certificates are the most important component to my website. And so when people are saying, Hey I watched this webinar again, three years later, I can go in and manually edit the date to, to show that.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

Tim McIvor: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Do you have any like metrics you can share, like to get a sense of impact, like how many students are over

Tim McIvor: 5, 000 individual users. Over 5, 000 school psychologists and keep in mind, this is a very niche, small field. This is not like school counselors where there’s 150, 000 of them.

There’s only about 30 to 40, 000 school psychologists nationwide. There’s a shortage of us. And so for me to have. 5, 000 users and there’s really only 30, 000. It’s like a six of the entire demographic, which I’m really proud of.

Chris Badgett: Wow. You’ve got 15 percent of the market or whatever. That’s amazing. It’s pretty good.

How do you think about you’ve scaled this thing and it’s going great. Did you start like in Nevada or wherever. And then, like, how did you think about going to multiple states? And you’ve also mentioned international expansion. Like, how do you think about that?

Tim McIvor: Yeah, I just started promoting on these Facebook forums where all the school psychologists talked nationally and internationally.

And I would never promote it on these Facebook forums. I would just basically like share memes to these Facebook groups, wherever all these school psychologists nationally are talking. Then they started following me on Facebook. I noticed for with Instagram, I would just do follow for follow type techniques where I’d follow school psychologists all across the country.

And it really didn’t matter that I was in Nevada because this was accessible.

Chris Badgett: Your ground game is strong. Like you’re doing a lot to get it out there.

Tim McIvor: It was very cool to see what, when I did the Google analytics and see Oh my gosh, this isn’t just in the U S this is everywhere.

I couldn’t believe that.

Chris Badgett: So like you your program’s kind of designed around the U S standards, but like other countries and stuff, except for credit or

Tim McIvor: no, it’s what it is. There’s like a lot of. School psychologists on like military, but US school psychologists like on military bases and they say like without this I could have never kept my kept renewing my national certification for the US.

So sometimes people have plans to go back to the US after X amount of years and so they might be for whatever reason. In a different country but they still want to keep up their national certification here in the u. s And they say my website’s the best way to do that

Chris Badgett: what just shifting gears back to the tech What other tech is really critical to you like software or plugins or themes or hosting that?

You know a really important part of your stack

Tim McIvor: Sure. I think that videos are the next biggest thing. And I really for, because there are school psychologists who are deaf and hard of hearing, and because we are so focused on helping and accommodating students with disabilities, it would be very hypocritical if I wasn’t accommodating school psychologists.

With disabilities such as those who are deaf and hard of hearing. So closed captions is a must for all of my webinars and there are closed captions on there. And then on top of that features that I would love to have is, with the advanced lift or homeless videos. I’ve looked into it and I’ve actually bought it twice and then realized that there was a certain feature that is making it.

Less versatile. So basically, when you’re watching the video, and then you click out of the screen to, for example, click on a different window, or maybe you’re clicking on the PowerPoint slides, the video stops. And I’ve never really wanted that to happen. I want it to flow. For some of my technology webinars.

I say we’re gonna, we’re gonna learn excel in real time so that you can start to crunch the numbers. But if they’re clicking on excel and then the video immediately stops, or if they’re clicking on Google sheets or Google forms, all these different technology platforms, it defeats the purpose. So one of the things I had.

Wanted to mention in the Lifter LMS advanced videos feedback is that I love a lot of the different features. I just wish there was a way to toggle off the when you click on a different screen, the video immediately stops because I think it actually. loses a little bit of user friendliness that way.

I understand the purpose. We want to make sure people watch it from start to finish. But I also think that if people don’t want to watch something, they’ll find a way they’ll just be on their phones with the thing on silent. You know what I mean? Like ultimately we want to give users some flexibility.

If there is a PowerPoint slides on another tab to look at it while they’re listening to the video. And so I’ve actually bought. The advanced videos and then realized it wasn’t for me because of that feature and you know how you can vote for something to be Updated I put in a vote And I don’t think it did very well But I voted to just give it a little toggle on and off that way we can choose whether we want it To be that way or not.

Chris Badgett: I’ll have to look closely at that I thought we had a that was like an option to turn on or off. But if that’s not Okay, that’s good feedback. I

Tim McIvor: would love, right now my users, when they go to my webinars, I have to tell them in the notes note where you left off, because they can’t remember.

Where you left off and I know advanced videos plugin, it’ll remember where you left off, which is why I really want that plugin. But because of the other component of the plugin, I haven’t been able to use it.

Chris Badgett: All right. Yeah. That’s really good. That’s totally sensible. That makes a lot of sense.

Tim McIvor: Cool.

Chris Badgett: And you asking for that live here definitely helps. Maybe

Tim McIvor: other people will see this and vote for it. That would be great. But yeah,

Chris Badgett: what are you using for video hosting

Tim McIvor: Vimeo?

Chris Badgett: Yeah,

Tim McIvor: that’s

Chris Badgett: the standard. That’s great.

Tim McIvor: I know that Adam is big on from WP crafters, big on w bunny. net. And so I, I. I had made it on my to do list to check that out.

Maybe it’s a cheaper option. Vimeo just raised their prices on us. So who knows, maybe bunny. net is the future. And so that’s one of the things on my to do list is maybe transferring it over to bunny. net.

Chris Badgett: All right. Any other like essential tech, like what do you put your email list on and or any other plugins you love and stuff?

So

Tim McIvor: I, I do love how with the Lifter LMS reporting, I can just download everything to Excel and then upload it to Brevo a email marketing. One of the things that I also wanted to give some feedback on was like the memberships. Sometimes people don’t want the subscription of basically having to have it auto renew every time.

But let’s say those same people, they. Purchase a one year subscription to all the webinars on schoolsick. com and then right before that membership is over, they repurchase a membership for another year. They renew without without it. What am I trying to say without their first membership expiring yet?

It doesn’t trigger an entire new year on all the webinars. It has to say expired before that happens. And basically, that’s one of the problems that I’ve run into. And from your tech support, they said that would be a good thing to work on in the future, but it would be extremely helpful because there are people who pay for my membership and then they end up wondering what happens a few days later when all their webinars expire.

Chris Badgett: Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, that is something to look at. So you’re selling the membership is all access with the annual renewal.

Tim McIvor: So for me, I don’t, yeah it’s an annual renewal, but every time I do a different membership, so I have the spring break sale, that’s one membership. Then I have the fall membership.

Then I have the blacks Friday membership. And then I have a new like 2025 spring break membership. So these are all different memberships. So they go from. The 2024 spring break membership and then by the 2025 spring break membership a few days before their 2024 spring break membership ends and then it doesn’t auto renew all the webinars because they’re not expired yet.

Chris Badgett: I see what you’re saying Yeah, we could look at that and how to smooth that out for you

Tim McIvor: Yeah, I think anytime somebody just buys something it should immediately kind of auto update the enrollment to the new okay, this is when the year starts because they just bought it Even if they bought it while they were still enrolled in it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s good feedback. You say you were manually adding people to Brevo?

Tim McIvor: Yeah. Yeah. You can do that.

Chris Badgett: I was just wondering if have you heard of WP fusion?

Tim McIvor: No, I haven’t.

Chris Badgett: I’m going to check right now, but WPP fusion just, excuse me, automates. Passing contacts from LifterMS to the CRMs.

Oh, cool. And I’m wondering if if Brevo is on their list.

Tim McIvor: Yeah. Let me check out WPFusion. I chose Brevo just because it’s cheaper. Know it’s maybe not one of the most well known of the email marketing platforms.

Chris Badgett: WPFusion integrates with 50 or so Oh yeah. I’m there.

I’m done. Yeah, they do have a Brevo integration. So that’s awesome. Thank

Tim McIvor: you for letting me know that makes it a lot easier.

Chris Badgett: And they probably have a Black Friday sale coming up.

Tim McIvor: Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. And I give you guys a lot of credit that the 60 percent off. Sometimes the crazy Black Friday sales that you guys do is just always love those.

Always look forward to those. Appreciate that.

Chris Badgett: And I noticed you do a Black Friday strategy as well.

Tim McIvor: Yeah. That, that’s how I said I got the sales from like exponentially higher when I started saying, you can have all the webinars for XML. That was really what was my biggest breakthrough in business so far.

Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. There’s a saying that I always try to remember cause I’ve been doing running sales and doing marketing for a long time that you get tired of your marketing before your market ever does. So just keep doing sales hammering.

Tim McIvor: Yeah. Hammer. And sometimes I’ll do the same meme from two years ago and people will forget that I even posted that meme.

And so for me, it’s Oh, that’s so lame to post the same joke twice. But then it gets three times as many likes. I’m like, Oh, I guess people forgot I did it or something. I don’t know.

Chris Badgett: And there’s new people that come in.

Tim McIvor: Yeah. New people. Sometimes you have to be a little bit repetitive with some of your content and it saves you time that way.

You’re not constantly having to look for new stuff,

Chris Badgett: how just big picture question, how has the school psych. com website and online business and education platform changed your life?

Tim McIvor: Yeah, that, that’s been the biggest component is that with my day job that I had for 10 years, it was just such a grind having to do basically an eight to five every Monday through Friday, and then go home and work on these passion projects at nights and weekends so to be able to have a platform that helped me very quickly get to where my goals were to the point where I’m no longer working my days, I’m able to just solely focus on my passion projects and be creative.

I honestly have never felt happier in my entire life. And I never knew that this could ever happen. Like I would say five years ago, I wasn’t making that much money. So I never saw the true potential of it. Ironically, it wasn’t until COVID that people started really going from these live conferences to recorded webinars.

And that’s when it started to take off.

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s fantastic. What was the timeline from let’s say when you got your WordPress site set up and you chose Lifter to that moment where you it was really working and you were able to like, how many years are we talking about there?

Tim McIvor: Talking about six years where I realized, okay, I can actually quit my job because this is making more money than my regular job. And then I just to be on the safe side, did one more year in the schools. And that was my hardest year because by that point, my website truly was Extremely time consuming.

There’s a lot of people messaging me wanting to, either collaborate with webinars or this or that it was growing. And so it’s to the point where I really needed to be able to work on this full time. So seven years.

Chris Badgett: Nice. And you’re definitely no stranger to hard work. It sounds and is it besides like having outside content creators that are doing webinar content, is it just you or do you have any team members or,

Tim McIvor: so I do have team members, but they’re not necessarily, I’m like.

Pretty much the main guy who runs this thing, but I feel like it’s always important to get second opinions on things. And so I’ve set it up in a way where there are certain school psychologists who have volunteered to help me out. They’re friends of mine, and I’ll go to them for either advice or just a variety of different tasks that are very are not very time consuming, but are very helpful to me to get second opinions and I’ll make sure that they get all the webinars for free all the time for helping volunteer.

Chris Badgett: And what motivates you like, to do a side project and, just keep working on it grinding for six, seven years. And I know it was like getting growing over time, but what kept you motivated at all that to do all that?

Tim McIvor: A big foundation of that and that was my passion for making sure school psychologists knew the correct the correct best practices.

And I’ll give you a story, which is that in the 90s, there were these reading wars, and it’s like, how do we teach kids to read? theory which focused on phonics and one theory that just basically focused on whole words and context clues. And these two groups were basically constantly fighting over school district money because one had a curriculum for whole word, one had a curriculum for phonics.

And then in the nineties they did all this research saying it’s phonics. Phonics is much better than whole word reading. But in the two thousands because whole word reading had such good marketing and they had so much money behind it and it was a lot more books so they could make a lot more money.

So big corporations were very interested. Whole word reading one out in the 2000s and a lot of children were taught to read using whole word reading, which was not the best way. Now there are going to be kids who basically learned it and made the best of it, which is fine. But the kids who had learning disabilities needed phonics, meaning that we weren’t getting at all students with this method.

And as a result, a lot of kids had fallen behind. And so that was just one story that we learned about in graduate school of how important it is. To know the best practices in order to give the best recommendations, and by now in 2024, a lot of those companies that teach whole word reading are going broke because finally, the word is getting out that, phonics is the sole way you can’t just teach kids to read based on context clues, having them guess what it might, what the word might mean.

And basically taking that one story and applying it to all different areas of school. psychology. We need to teach school psychologists to recommend great interventions to teachers great recommendations to parents of what to do at home. School psychologists are involved with so many different areas of the school that if they’re very knowledgeable, they can equip so many other educators and just have an amazing impact on the children we work with.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s definitely something I’ve seen with people who stay the course and find success is, making money and is nice, but there’s got to be that passion and sense of there’s going to be a why,

Tim McIvor: because the amount of weekends in my late twenties, early thirties, and the amount of nights.

That I could have been out doing really fun hobbies or this or that. You have to have a why when it gets tough and I’ve always had that really strong, why

Chris Badgett: Tim, I want to thank you for coming on the show and sharing your story and I’m really proud of you and it’s it’s really inspiring to see what you’ve done and the impact you’re making in the world and what it’s done for your life and stuff like that.

Keep up the great work. Thanks for being a shining example.

Tim McIvor: Oh, absolutely. Anytime. Bye bye. Always happy to be on this podcast. And if you want me out in a future episode, I’d be more than happy to, honestly, I was so honored to be on this.

Chris Badgett: Great. We’ll have to do it again in another couple of years.

Yeah. We can get an update.

Tim McIvor: Where am I? Where am I in a few years? I would love that.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thank you so much, Tim.

Tim McIvor: Absolutely. Take care, Chris.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In the LMSCast episode, Chris Lema discusses the idea of motivation and explains that it is not an external factor that varies but rather an inherent component of an individual’s wiring.

In the WordPress and technology communities, Chris Lema is well-known for his leadership, business strategy, and motivating ideas. He is the CEO of Motivation AI. He emphasizes that each person has a unique kind of drive that is ingrained in their DNA by equating motivation with fixed characteristics like height or eye color.

Chris contends that people are constantly motivated when jobs or objectives fit with their innate wiring, challenging the conventional wisdom that views motivation as a resource that has to be replenished. He presents the MCode (Motivation Code), a program that examines an individual’s motivational wiring by analyzing their life tales.

People can better understand why certain experiences seem rewarding while others don’t by adjusting their job and surroundings to reflect what really motivates and excites them. He also discusses his work with CaboPress and his position as CEO of Motivation AI, highlighting the significance of comprehending motivation in both personal and professional circumstances.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Chris Lemma. I’ve known Chris for probably a decade or almost a decade. It’s been a very long time. Chris has done a lot of things. Currently he’s the CEO of motivation AI. You can find out about that at motivation code.

com. We’re going to be talking a lot about that today. Chris is also the founder of Cabo press. I believe I went six times. Which is awesome. And maybe we’ll talk a little bit about that. But first, Chris, welcome to the show. It’s great to be here. Awesome, man. Just to bookmark it in for the people out there watching and listening, what is motivation?

I find that an extremely interesting, just core concept. How do you think about it? Yeah, I know there’s a lot, but what is it at the highest level?

Chris Lema: Yeah, I think that’s a great question. I think the easiest way to think about it is like thinking about your eye color or your hair color your height. These are things that you did not control.

You were born and you did not do anything to manifest your eye color. You didn’t do anything to manifest your height. It’s just is what it is. And so I think of motivation, right? The characteristic of motivation as the way in which you’re wired and your DNA, you didn’t control your DNA and you don’t control per se, how you’re wired.

Most people tend to think about motivation in a completely different way. They think about it as gas in the gas tank. So you either have a lot of motivation or you have a little motivation. They don’t think about it as eye color. Cause you’re like I. I always have blue eyes or always have brown eyes and you’re like, and you always have motivation. But what you have is a certain kind of motivation. You’re wired for a particular kind of motivation. And and often when we find that I don’t feel motivated, when we use that phrase, I don’t, what we’re really saying is the things that are in front of me are not stimulating the part of me that is wired in a certain way.

So the things that are put in front of me. Are not aspirational. So therefore I’m not excited about it. And you’re like, you’re not excited about it. But if we took this and we changed it and we made it, so it was aspirational. We made it results driven, or we made it, performance and challenging base, then all of a sudden you’d be like, Ooh, I’m excited about it again.

And that means, okay we’ve locked in. The thing that you’re trying to get done in line with how you’re wired. So how you’re wired is as static as your eye color and your height and what have you. It is not fuel in a tank that has to be replenished. So when you see those means that are like motivation lasts a day, discipline lasts forever.

And you’re like no. Stop back up. You have motivation every day and you, we all know this is true, right? Because there have been times in every person’s life when you’re sitting at home on the couch in your pajamas or in your shorts and a t shirt or whatever. And someone comes in and goes, Hey, do you want to go out?

You want to leave the house? You want to leave the apartment? And we’re like, no. I don’t feel like it. I don’t feel like moving. I don’t feel like anything. And then they say the magic word, whatever it is that you love the most. I was thinking of going for ice cream or I thought I’d go to Disneyland or whatever it is.

And then all of a sudden you’re like, give me two minutes. I’ll be dressed. I’ll be ready. Like you were sitting on that couch and you were like, I have zero motivation. And then they put the right thing in front of you. And suddenly you’re Ooh, I can rally. I’m going to go in my room and I’m going to change.

I’m going to be ready, I’m going to go. The real trick is how have you lived this long and not known how you’re wired? How have you gone this long and not know what stirs you up? What motivates you? What gets you super Oh, I’m changed. I’m going, I’m changing and I’m ready to go. And that’s what the M code does is it analyze your stories.

It collects all this data, has you answer questions, and then it tells you, here’s how you are. Wired based on the stories you told us. So we’re not making anything up. It’s not that artificial choose between what would you do on a Friday night, go out with friends or stay at home and read a book.

Like those are all they’re fictitious. They’re abstract. They’re not. Your own story. So when we ask people to do that arbitrary choice between a and B. We’re going to get an arbitrary answer in the form of a report and codes different in that it’s looking at your own stories and it pulls it together.

Then it says, here’s how we think you’re wired or here’s some of the ways that we think you’re wired. Once people read it and put words to it and see it, then suddenly they’re like, Oh my gosh, that’s why I hated that job. That’s why I love that job. You’re like, yes, that’s exactly why.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I wonder if you can comment on, it seems like there’s a quote crisis of motivation in society. Like in YouTube, if I go to YouTube, sometimes I’m looking at trending videos and there’s a lot about how to get motivated and tell us about what’s going on in society or what and why is motivation important right now?

Why does it appear to be failing right now more than ever or we just more aware of it?

Chris Lema: So so I think it’s there’s several different streams that all come together one of which is we don’t try and connect these dots If you look at the number of creators that exist today compared to five years ago, compared to 10 years ago, and in the U S particularly, again, you don’t want to make this connection, but you can’t help, but go the cost of health insurance and being able to insure yourself independently. So there’s tons of people. 10 years ago, who didn’t do, didn’t even have, didn’t think about a side hustle and didn’t think about going independent and working on their own because they needed their health insurance.

They needed it for their family. So they stayed in a job. And the one overarching dynamic in a job is that you have a boss that tells you what to do. So you don’t have to, you don’t have to figure out what your day’s about, right? There are some jobs where they put your whole schedule of what you need to do in each minute of every day on your schedule, and you just obey.

And then whatever it is, several years ago, more people leaving independently today, more people than that, you have people who are figuring out on their own. But so rise a new problem. What happens when you’ve spent the last 10, 20, 30 years of your life, obeying someone else and doing what someone else tells you, and you’re doing the thing that they told you to do to be successful, whether or not it is the thing you need to do to be successful and whether or not they, at the end of the year, give you the benefit, the bonus, the whatever to say you were successful.

Regardless of all that you’ve been living in one modality, and then you come out to do your own thing and you realize. You’re the boss of yourself and potentially you’re a horrible boss, right? It turns out like you have a whole lot of negative self talk. You’re dousing your brain with negative chemicals because you’re sitting here telling yourself you suck at things.

You’re frustrated and you don’t really know what is the next step. So what’s the result of all that? You get to the end of day, you sit down and you go, I just don’t have the motivation. You’re like no. The issue isn’t motivation. The issue is you don’t have the skills. It turns out walking out of a job and going to build your own empire is not something you do on your own.

It’s not something you do without a plan. It’s not something, and every one of us who has done something like down the outside realizes this would have been a lot easier if I had a plan or if I had a structure, if I had a accountability, if I had partners, if all these things that would help it.

So I don’t think. The crisis is explicitly a motivation crisis. I think we use the term I’m not motivated as a way to reflect on the fact that I’m overwhelmed. I’m tired. And the truth is while that was happening, all the people that left the workforce left the companies in dire straits too, right?

When everyone left those companies now put more work on their existing employees. And didn’t give them more pay. As a result, they’re also getting burnt out. And what do you say when you’re getting burnt out? I’m just not motivated. So we use this phrase, right? But what we’re saying is inside organizations, we’re getting overworked, underpaid, and.

And frustrated by a boss that doesn’t listen to us and outside of work we’re doing our own thing and it turns out we’re not good to ourselves. There’s a lot of negative self talk. We do a lot of things that slowly create friction and stress in our lives. And as a result, we often say the same thing that people at work say, which is I’m just not motivated.

The truth is a better phrase I’m burnt out and I’m lost. And you can get help with both of those, but you got to start by acknowledging what the real issue is.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Let’s talk about motivation code. Yeah. What is it? Why was it created? And how is it different from a personality test like Myers Briggs?

I’m an introvert, extrovert, and so on.

Chris Lema: There are a bunch of really great personality assessments out there. Myers Briggs, Enneagram, DISC, StrengthFinder the list goes on and on. Gosh, one of my favorites is the Colby Index A and there’s so many good ones. Here’s what normally happens.

You take it. It says something surprising to you Ooh, it figured out this thing that I already know about myself, but now this thing knows to you, you love people, you rather be alone you are so excited and you’re an external processor and you interrupt other people when they’re talking, whatever it is, and you go, Oh my gosh.

But even if a personality assessment tells you that you step on other people’s toes by jumping, like you already know what they’re going to say, and then you finish their sentence and you interrupt them and you say the next thing, even if it tells you all that. More often than not, we read it, we go, Oh that’s cool.

That’s cool that you figured that out about me, but I already knew that. And then we move on. So my standard test is wait two weeks and after two weeks, find out if any of these personality assessments have changed your life and what you discover is. And the reason they don’t is because most of what they’re trying to do is solve the magic puzzle that says, we really saw you.

So they give you a name, they tell you what, you’re a panda or you’re green or you’re a dinosaur or you’re a, you’re an ENFP or whatever, whatever they do, they’re going to tell you something and you go, that’s But that’s where the, that’s where the magic ends.

And some of those are science backed and some of them are not science backed. And that’s just what that is. M code is sitting on top of SEMA, which is the science of motivated abilities and that science is now some 60 years old and the The assessment that we put online used to be a manual and there’s still people that do it manually, right?

They handwrite stuff and and the biographers that do that kind of work have been doing that forever. I learned about SEMA and those assessments in the year 2000. And at that point they were being used by Disney and NASA and Harvard, right? They were places where they were using them to look at hiring new employees putting them in, promoting into bigger senior roles, all that kind of good stuff.

And I wanted to use it myself. I couldn’t get access to it because it was only for big companies. Two and a half years ago, I bought all the SEMA related companies. So there were five companies. We bought them all. We merged them into one. That’s Motivations AI and I became the CEO of that company.

And in buying all those companies and pulling them all together, right? What we were saying is, hey, the science is important, but more than just the science is making it all available online. And once you make it available online, then more people can take it. So we now make it available to lots of different people, not just big corporations.

And the goal is not the magic trick. The goal is not, Oh, you finished taking the assessment. Here’s your report. Look, you’re a driver. You’re an achiever. And that’s it. The goal is all the applied science, right? How do you take that science and turn it into something that’s useful for you in your day to day two weeks from now, a month from now?

Six weeks from now. For a boss, it means helping the boss figure out how to create assignments for different people. Why are differently for an individual who is trying to figure out their work, right? It’s looking at, okay, how do you reshape the work you’re doing so that it aligns with your motivation for someone in sales, it’s, how do you look at your prospect and know which of these dimensions of motivation are they, and how to best.

Negotiate a deal with someone who’s a optimizer versus a driver, right? And so all of that becomes right. There is no right answer, wrong answer. There’s no good answer, bad answer. It’s just, look, there’s eight different dimensions of motivation. Let’s figure out who you are, who your employees are, who the people you interact with at work are, and let’s figure out the semantic bridge between who you are and who they are and how to get that language effective, right?

How to behave in a way that allows you To switch between different kinds of people, but deliver the same value to all of them, right? We’ve all had situations at work. Where like I had when I was at liquid web, I had two people and I think, them both, Jessica Frick was one of my product managers and Christine Trinos was another one of my product managers.

And both of them are amazing women. Both of them are absolutely incredible. Top notch eight plus players, but they’re also wired very differently. And so I was giving Jessica one set of jobs and I was giving Christine a different set of jobs. And one day Jessica calls me up and goes, what’s up? Hey, you gave Christina other job that you didn’t give me.

Are you not giving it to me? Because you don’t think I can handle it. And I’m like, what? So I said, Jessica, do you want to do that? She’s no, I would hate that job. That’s why I didn’t give it to you. I gave Christine the stuff that she would not only love, but she would excel at, and I gave you the stuff you would love and you would excel at.

Even if you have the same exact job title, I’m giving you different jobs so that you’re in your sweet spot. I’ve been doing that for decades. When we pull all this stuff together for M code, we were like, we can do this and make it available to every manager, right? We can make it so every manager knows how to do this way more effectively.

And every employee and every employer and every salesperson, all these people can. Be better at what they’re doing when they realize, Oh I need to interact with different people, different ways, because they’re wired differently. And I’m wired in a particular way.

Chris Badgett: So I took the M code and my strongest motivational dimensions are visionary driver and learner.

And so let’s say I was working for you. What kind of work would you give me? And what kind of work would you not give me?

Chris Lema: A visionary. When you think about your goal orientation, right? When you think about how you think about goals, a visionary is transformative. You want to talk about what is the transformation that’s going to happen.

A learner on the other hand is all about the knowledge driven mastery oriented goals, right? And a driver is results and ambition and Solving problems. So those are three different, those are three different things. And what we got to figure out is which is your strongest, right? And which is the thing that would, if I gave you a goal, right?

If you, if I wanted to give a goal to Chris, the driver, I would go, Hey, Chris, we got these issues. We got these and you’d be like issues. I love issues, I just want to stomp out these issues, right? I just want to, I want to close them out. And I want to check them off. I want to get them done. If I’m talking to Chris, the learner, I’d be like, I don’t know if you’ve heard about this new framework.

You’re like new framework. Where do I get access to the new framework? How can I learn everything I can learn from this new framework? How can I put it to use? Give me a project where I can put it to use. And if I talk to visionary, I’m like, listen, here’s what I want us to, here’s what I want us to do.

And if we do this, I think we can completely change the game. Oh, my God. Changing the game. I love that’s what I want. So you’re talking about, three different ways to shape the work based on those three. And so if I spent time with you, if I read through your entire M code report, I’d be like, okay, you When it comes to goal orientation, he’s more visionary than anything else.

When it comes to work style prop, preference, he’s probably more learner than he is driver, right? When it comes to interpersonal though, he’s more driver than he’s learner. So let’s do this. And so you’re going to start shaping how I give you assignments, how I work with you, how I give you feedback.

All of that changes based on who it is I’m talking to, and I won’t talk that way, even if I had the same bits of data to give them, I wouldn’t give it to someone who was an optimizer orchestrator. I wouldn’t give them the same thing as I would give you. And that’s what we’re, if you played basketball in the NBA and you could only dribble with your right hand, you would not play basketball in the NBA.

If you could dribble with your right hand and your left hand, you could maybe get to the NBA. But if you don’t have what we call handles, if you can’t bounce the ball between your leg and around your back and actually start moving your whole body one way and then pivot all the way to the other, if you can’t pivot and turn around, if you don’t have those skills, you don’t play that game.

And the reality is we have a whole bunch of managers and supervisors and bosses. Who can only dribble with the right hand. They grew up in homes where their mom told them, Hey, treat others the way you want to be treated. Since they’re right handed and they can only do the right hand, they expect the whole rest of the world to understand and interact with people that, that talk that way and work that way and do that way.

And your mom was wrong. It’s not treat everyone the way you want to be treated. It’s treat everyone the way they want to be treated. And once you get that and you understand that changes the game.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Can you clarify for me? There’s the strongest motivational dimensions, but then there’s like the top five motivations for me, that’s explore, develop, realize the vision, experience the ideal and meet the challenge.

So what are those motivations?

Chris Lema: Those are motivations. And if you go into your stacked rank list of your 32 motivations, you’ll see 32 motivations with those five at the top, and you’ll have others are at the bottom, you’ll see that the top. Let’s say about 10 are green and then the next 10 are like yellow.

And the last 10 are red. And the red doesn’t mean that you’re bad at them. It just means these aren’t the things that are going to wake you up. So these are all the very specific. So we took all your stories when you were giving them to us and we decoded your answers, mapped them, the stories, and found the elements that made it so that we could take this list of 32 motivations and put them in a stack rank and tell you, these are the things that really.

Light you up. They motivate you. They move you. So of course experience the ideal or realize vision, anything that is more visionary. You’re going to be because visionary is your is one of your top dimensions. You’re going to be like, yeah, that’s my jam. I love, I can see the future.

I can see what I want. And then I want to pursue it. I want everyone to pursue it, I see the vision. I want to chase it down. And so the eight dimensions are the handles that let you hold on to all those 32, if you had to memorize, the top 10 and in what order and what you’d be like, gosh that’s really hard.

And the truth is. They’re in different places, so it’s easier. Yes, you should read through all those top five and all that stuff and put it into practice in order for you to talk about it, in order for you to think about and interact with other people, having a dimension gives you that kind of overlay.

And so if I didn’t, if I didn’t know your scores or whatever, I’d be like I know visionary and learner. I know that because I’ve interacted with Chris and you can’t help communicate your visionariness and your learner ness. Also, I would tell you that, Hey it’s no shock. You’re in the job you’re in.

And it’s no shock. You’re in the industry you’re in, but it’s also no shock that you’re in the job you’re in. And so you’re a living embodiment that. That our assessment is correct because you’re like, Hey, if someone didn’t know the details of anything of your report or your life or whatever, and they’re like, he’s the CEO of a LMS product in a space where he’s trying to teach other people who are educators to educate well and effectively to the whole rest.

You’re like, sounds visionary and learner all day long. We’re not trying to play a magic game, right. And we’re, there’s no magic trick here.

And we’re just trying to go, let’s give you the vocabulary and let’s give you the understanding so that you can better lean into who you are and what you’re doing, but also you realize you’ve had employees at Lyft or LMS that aren’t you.

You’ve had employees that are not visionary. You’ve had employees that are not learners. So even when you go to give them a task, and you’re like, here, just, here’s this new thing, and you can learn it, and you do it, and then they’re like, my job sucks. And you’re like, how can your job sucks? I would’ve loved that.

That would’ve been my favorite task. That would’ve been awesome. I would’ve loved it. And then you discover, oh, they’re not me. They’re different. And what you need to do for that different person is give them a completely different assignment that lines up with them. And it turns out that most of the things we want done can be done a lot of different ways.

You, you used to work in mountains. You know that if someone says, I want to hike, pick a famous mountain, right? Kilimanjaro, whatever, right? I want it. That doesn’t say the full, that’s not the full sentence, right? That’s not the full story. Cause you’re like, wait, with Sherpas or without Sherpas, with oxygen, without oxygen on the East face, the West face, the North face, the South face, like there’s so much more than just, I want to climb that mountain.

And it doesn’t mean that there’s a right answer and a wrong answer. It just means, Hey, some people are for Sherpas. Some people prefer oxygen. And some don’t, some people want to go the easiest route switchbacks up and down. Other people are like, I’m going to hike the ice cliff all the way up.

And you’re like, Hey. Different people are motivational dimensions. Do that. They basically say there’s eight different ways to think about the world. And these are, you’re wired one of eight different ways. In fact, you’re likely wired one or two or three of eight different ways. And if you stay in that realm, you’re going to stay lit up, excited, happy.

That doesn’t mean that you won’t ever be frustrated, depressed. Or anxious it just means you’ll be in your sweet spot more often, right? And that’s what we educate on That’s what we’re trying to do.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about understanding. We’ve talked about understanding self and management and leadership and using these tools What about more laterally?

Let’s say A business partnership or a life partner or friends. Yeah. There’s that kind of thing that happens where sometimes opposites attract, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Maybe you should have some overlap, but then have some difference. Like how do you. How do you think about that horizontal relationship with the M code?

Chris Lema: I think there’s, I think there’s two or three things that you really want to get nailed. And that is you don’t want all of the same. So like on a

Chris Badgett: team

Chris Lema: just like on a team. So I was talking to a guy who was telling me about his onboarding sequence at his company.

And I said, let me guess, did you take the MCOT? He’s I did. I’m like, let me guess you’re a driver. He goes, you’re right. I am. I’m like, yep. And let me guess the people that succeed in your onboarding. All our drivers, they’re all very similar to you. He goes, yeah. I’m like, cause you’ve built an onboarding sequence.

Who would scare the living dates off of optimizers, orchestrators, relators, influencers like they would be they would get the instructions of the onboarding and they’d be like, I’m out. I’m out. And and I go, the problem when you’ve assembled a whole group of. One kind in this particular case drivers love solving problems.

You know what happens when a group of drivers all finish all the problems? They make up new problems. That’s what they do. They make up problems to solve because that’s how they feel alive. So what do they do? They start going, oh, you know what, what could happen? This could happen. They start predicting what could happen, even though it hasn’t happened.

Then they’re like, we got to get everybody pay attention. And then we go chasing off to chase after a fake imaginary dragon that wasn’t really there. Because that’s their language. That’s how they work is overcoming and over, and surmounting the challenges that are in front of them. The same thing happens if you’re two drivers that are married or two, two visionaries married who’s doing the checkbook, right?

Who’s balancing the budget, right? They’re like, Oh, I see visions. I see visions too. And you’re like, Whoa, someone has to make sure the electricity gets paid. So I find that the, my number one rule is is make sure that you’re not all the same. You can’t try for all your partners are achievers and you’re an achiever or all your partners are orchestrators and you’re an orchestrator.

Like you just don’t want, you don’t want. Too much overage, right? It’s going to, it’s going to clash in its own way. The opposite things we don’t have tons of opposites in the list, but there are some, right? Like you could see an achiever and a orchestrator go head to head sometimes.

And so the ones that are more diametrically opposed, those are probably not perfect pairings for people, especially partners or in relationship, partly because you’re trying to constantly make the case for something that the other one just. It’s just not wired for. So for example, I’ve spent a lot of time in startups and it doesn’t mean I haven’t had stints in big corporate gigs but even in the corporate gig, I’m trying to carve out an entrepreneurial effort.

Why? Because if someone tells me these are the three meetings a day you have to go to, and this is the process for doing X, Y, and Z, and here’s how you check the list on all these boxes. And I’m like those are my lowest motivations. So if you look at your stack rank, you might have do it right somewhere in the middle, right?

My do it right is last. It doesn’t mean I want to do anything wrong. It just means the exactitude of making sure that I do it exactly per process is not ever going to motivate me. In fact, it will frustrate me. So when I worked at Liquid Web, a hosting company They had an hope, a whole process for how you book travel, a whole process.

They have used this corporate card. You run it on this corporate travel system. Then it, it’s automatically covered or whatever. And it was all designed so that employees didn’t have to part with their own money at any part of the process. But it was like, you had to change your password every two weeks.

The software didn’t carry all the airlines. It didn’t go to all the cities I wanted to go to. And so it was a pain in the butt. And I just was like, Nope. So what I do, I just started using my own credit card and booking my own travel. And at some point they were like, Hey, you haven’t turned in anything for this track.

I’m like, Oh yeah, I have expense reports. They’re like, when are you going to turn those in? I’m like, whatever. We got to almost the end of the year. They’re like, you have to, if you want to get paid, you have to. And I’m like, I don’t really care about getting paid. I just, I don’t. Like I would gladly lose a thousand dollars of my own personal money on airline tickets, then not lose a penny, but have to use that horrible system because a horrible system was just so broken for what I was doing.

Do it right is never going to be the top of my list. So if do it right, is your number one, right? If Chris Badgett is do it right. Number one, and Chris Lema is do it right. 32. Partnership is gonna be hard, right? Because you’re like, Hey, I want to do this partnership. Let’s just write out the terms of this agreement.

And let’s write out the commitments we’re each gonna make. And let’s write out everything that holds us accountable. Let’s make sure we have a checklist in here and let’s have a meeting where we can back you’re doing all these. And I’m like, partnerships are all about. Let’s make it work and let’s make some money together.

So why don’t we just put something in play? Let’s just run it, see how much money we make. Then we’ll go from there. You’re like no. I need to have everything right. You see how those things just don’t line up well. That’s where, whether you’re talking about spouses or business partners or anything else, in a peer network.

The most important thing is not so much the pairing, it’s understanding the other person, is being able to look and see, okay. They’re an optimizer. So they are process oriented. They’re focused on efficiency. How can I help them and serve them in this relationship? Even though that’s not my first rodeo, right?

It’s not my, it’s not my, it’s not my first, it’s not the thing that I would think about or pursue, right? They are detail oriented. I am high achieving. I care about getting the win and you care about getting all the I’s dotted and T’s crossed. And how do we find common ground? So that’s where M code really helps peer relationships.

Chris Badgett: Good news. We can partner because do it right is third from the bottom of my list. So that helped me understand what is it on the bottom of my list is be unique. Yeah. See, what does that mean? And

Chris Lema: beat and be unique is one of my top five.

So look at us on this screen right now, right? We’re both sitting in nice offices.

We both have nice camera gear. We’re both able to get on video and talk whenever, but only one of us is matching his shirt. To his hat. And the other one is certainly not right. You could interview a hundred guests and I’m guessing I’m the only one who’s wearing a shirt and a hat, the match. And I get up every morning and every morning, I hat and then the shirt that’s going to go with it. And then I start my day. Other people call that decision fatigue and they want to wear the same black t shirt all day, every day, because that’s what Steve Jobs did.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Chris Lema: That’s fine. And they don’t care that they’re wearing the same outfit every day, or even they don’t care if they get on a phone call like this, a video call, and let’s say there’s five people and all five are all tech bros, all wearing black t shirts and they all look identical and to them, they don’t care.

They’re like, Hey, let’s get on with the topic of our conversation. And for me, I’m like, Oh my God, did I miss the memo? Like, why are you all looking the same as a be uniquer? I have owned cars and often lease cars for about two years. Then when I start seeing the car that I’m driving everywhere around, I’m like time to turn this car in because I like having a car that’s unique that says, Hey, that must be Chris summer because that’s the only Bronco that’s cut up that way in Houston, right?

But if everyone had it, then I’d be like, Nah. So I was driving a Range Rover and I love my Range Rover, but then everyone was driving Range Rover. And then I was like, no, I gave it to my wife. She doesn’t have be unique. So she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care how many people have the same car she does.

And I do. So be unique is about, can you stand out? Can you be recognized for the things that, that make you different? You want to be, seen as separate and there’s a whole lot of people like most of the world that is like. Why would I care about that? Like, why would I care about that at all?

So for most people, be unique is towards the bottom, right? For most people, that’s just not a thing. And then for me it’s I don’t know, number two or number three. And you’re like, Whoa that’s a big deal for you. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, it is. I just, I don’t want to be the same as everybody else.

Chris Badgett: That’s really cool. And that feeds into my next question, which is, how do we, I feel like I got lucky, because I, traveled, went into lots of cultures, anthropology, studies, social science. I realized at a very young age that, man, people are different. Man, people have different ways of seeing and being in the world.

And that’s ultimately helped me in work and being a manager and just understanding people very different. And. Being productive. So I got lucky in that I had a background that kind of helped me undo or figure out those blind spots of how people are so different and almost all everybody is.

How does one, remove those blinders and just get a, get better able to do that. As you’re telling that story right there, I’m like, Oh man. If I send Chris a gift, like maybe it needs to match like the hat and the shirt, not just the shirt. And that would say a little more I understand you.

I see you. Yeah. But how do we learn to see the world like others and influence them, communicate with them and so on?

Chris Lema: The first thing is. My, my rough math says about a third of the population doesn’t care. A third of the population just doesn’t care at all about seeing others, like they’re just, they’re on a, they’re on a choose your own adventure game and they’re the only one playing the game and they got the remote control and they’re choosing left left.

And they just, nothing else matters. And nothing we do is going to fix that, right? You have a third of the world that just doesn’t get it. That’s not bad. It’s just an issue of exposure. If you’re living in a country where you have almost no diversity, everybody’s basically the same. You don’t even know to think in that way that, Oh, there might be somebody who thinks up is down and down is up.

And you’re like, what? It just doesn’t, go to a community where they all drive cars. I grew up in Southern California. There are whole neighborhoods of people that have never walked. Three blocks in their life, right? There are communities that don’t have sidewalks.

They’re like why what’s a sidewalk, right? Like their whole life is they got 16. They got keys to a car. They got in their car They drove a mile to their school, right? And you’re like, oh, it’s a mile. I can walk it and they’re like What are you talking about? There are lots of places where people have blind spots, but it’s environmental, it’s not personal.

In the first case, the first third, it’s a little bit personal because what they’re really saying is I don’t need anyone else. I don’t care about anyone else. I’m just doing my own thing. In the second group. It’s. Constraints based on the environment they’re in. They didn’t even know that something, and then you have the third group, which are people who didn’t know, but once they know their eyes are open, then they’re like, Oh my God, feed it more.

Give me more. I want to learn more. I want to learn how to be better here and there. My wife, you can’t go to, you can’t, and Melissa, you’ve met her. You can’t go to a dinner. With Melissa. If you’re hungry, right? Because when you sit down the table and here comes a waiter or waitress, Melissa is going to immediately be like, how do you pronounce your name?

Where are you from? What’s your family history? You’re like, I’m starving. I just wanted food. And now I have to wait for 30 minutes while Melissa. The waiter have their own little back and forth. But she wants I’m starving. every person to feel seen. She wants everybody to feel like, Hey, I know how to say your name.

I know where your family comes from. I know your story. She does that every meal we go to every restaurant we go to everything right. All she wants is more info. Once you start giving it to him, once you’re like. Hey, you know how this is how you do growth and development? And they go, yeah, I’m like, I do growth totally different.

What do you mean? Like I’m all about skill mastery, even if I’ve never done it. If I start doing it, I want to go, Oh, how do I get to expert mode? I want to, I’m going to, I’m going to, I’m going to do all the reps. I’m going to go over and over until I get it perfectly because I’m all about mastery. And she’s I just want knowledge.

I just want to, pull in more information. I want to read biographies and I’m like, what? No, I don’t care about all that. I just care about I want to be the best at doing it or the best in my peer group. And once she sees, Oh, we’re different. Then she can then start thinking about how to approach.

People differently. So you got one third that doesn’t care. You got one third that doesn’t know. And you got one third that would love to know and be eager to get it. And so of course, my answer is go with the goers, go with the one third that want to learn and grow more and then expose the third that are like, I didn’t even know that was possible.

Or I didn’t even know that people could be wired differently. Some of those may move into the first camp and ignore the third camp, because no matter how much you talk to them, no matter how much you do, they’re just like, Yeah, whatever. And you’re just, it’s coming in one year and go out the other.

And that’s a waste of time. So you, and I’m not writing anyone off, but there’s just some people who are like, I don’t care how someone else is wired. I care about how I’m wired and what I do. And you’re like, okay. That is what that is.

Chris Badgett: Let’s contextualize it for a course creator or coach.

So like when it comes to content, like course content, lessons, videos, texts, PDS, whatever, there’s this learning style concept of visual auditory kinesthetic and all these things. And coaching I think of as you can just do coaching without courses, but it’s more human and dynamic and stuff like that.

It’s a support mechanism. So how can course creators and coaches use something like the M code to create better content and also better help their people when they fall down or get stuck?

Chris Lema: So that’s a great question. I think what you’re going to discover is for every person. So we mentioned at the top of the call, I run a conference called Cabo press.

This year we just did our 10th. I had everyone take the M code, right? You do the seating arrangements by the M code. I didn’t do seating. I didn’t do some arrangements, but it definitely influenced some of my lunch groups and it influenced some of our dinners. Here’s the thing you look at 60 people and I would say 80 percent of them, maybe higher, maybe 85 percent were all achievers and drivers, or at least they were an achiever or driver in their top three spots.

85 percent at least. We had two influencers, two learners, one relator, right? Does that mean that there are no relator entrepreneurs? No. It means that all my marketing and messaging, all my recruiting, all my communication targets, achievers, and drivers who are the C who are sitting in the CEO role of their agencies, product companies, and SAS companies.

That’s all it means is that the way in which I talk, the way in which I describe it, The way in which I invite the people that I’m inclined to invite are predominantly achievers and drivers. And they, and there’s a couple learners and a couple, influencers and maybe a relater, but if you look at that relater, the one relater that’s there I’ve done nothing to recruit them.

They have crossed every semantic bridge. And they have crossed every Delta between where they were and where I’m, they did all the work to get to me. They did all the heavy lifting because I was. Translating my stuff to achievers and drivers. And the same is true for course creators and coaches is that you’re going to discover that you work mostly with, you connect mostly with, you shape your messaging, mostly for two to four of our eight dimensions.

It doesn’t mean that for others. Are not going to come your way. It’s just, they’re going to do all the heavy lifting because you haven’t even spent time thinking about it. So when we think about resilience and adaptability, all the stuff that is like support oriented that you’re trying to get up an achiever is going to be goal focused.

A driver is going to be pressure filled, right? Resilient. They’re going to be like, Hey, I can persist in the midst of hard stuff. A learner is going to be intellectually agile. I’m flexible in my brain. I can pick up new things. And you’re going to go, yeah, these are the things that I like to do.

So you might think of, Hey, I’ve been doing one on one coaching, but I’m going to have this once a month group call where anybody can do whatever and support. And you go, okay, but this is for a certain group of people that want to feel connected with each other. That community part that all my stuff for achievers and drivers, there’s no community part, right?

You go to my conference at common press, you get these lunch groups, you get dinner groups. I’m not doing any of those things. I’m not delivering value in those moments, but I’ve crafted those moments So that people can connect with each other because that’s so important or 7 a. m. They go out and they work out.

And this time I did all three workouts, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, which was a huge deal, but it’s creating another sense of community. And there are certain people, relators and influencers who are like, I love this. I love that there’s this place where we connect. And you’re like, yes, I have to craft my offering.

To deliver value to different groups, even if I specifically focus in one realm. So what I would tell a coach, I would tell a a course creator. I say, first go take the M code and you can do it for 19 bucks, right? The light version gives you enough of what you need, but you can take it for 19 bucks and you go and you learn it.

And then as you’re working with your clients, your coaching clients, You there’s a gift. Once you go inside, right? There’s a gift option. You can buy it for your clients. So go buy it for your three coaching clients or your five coaching clients, Jennifer Bourne, who runs PPP, which is a whole community around running their digital agency.

She signed up for a subscription. And then she gave it to all her people, right? So 20 people could take it each month or 25 people could take it each month and she had them all take it so that she could know better who they were and she could then start shaping. It’s not just the content itself, though, that the language you use is going to likely be more aligned to one or two dimensions.

But then what are the other components of your offering that, Connect to something else, right? Influencers love having impact. If I give you a bunch of it’s all about me, it’s all about me, it’s all about me self discovery worksheets, eventually you’re going to be like, I’m tired of just navel gazing and looking at me all the time.

I care about looking out. I want to care about, serving my community. You better give them an assignment that goes in that direction because if they do, if you do this all the time and you’re thinking, but I love to be aware of myself and my stuff. And you’re like, yes, Mr. Lerner, but Mr.

Influencer wants to make an impact on the outside world. And if you don’t get him focused outside a little bit, he’s going to quit your program because he’s going to put you in a camp that says all you do is think about yourself. You don’t care about impact. So I’m going to go somewhere else. And you’re like, whoa, stop.

I totally care about impact. So how do I create. A component of my offering that really lights you up. Or if influencer is one of your main players, or if relators when your main players are optimized, when your main players, how do I change the language in my lesson? To hit them more. What you’ll discover is most of us when we’re course creating and we’re recording lessons, we’re just choosing illustrations that come to mind, top of head, right?

Or top of head when you were writing your script, if you write scripts all of those are just your defaults. So of course, all your stories are going to line up with things that would work for you. That doesn’t mean it worked for everyone else. So once we expose you to all eight dimensions and we teach you about it, of course, our goal is to help you be able to create content in different ways.

And we’ll show you, look, just doing this can shift. A driver article to be an influencer article or a learner article or what have you, right? Or you may go, oh, lesson one is really more driver oriented, but lesson two is all going to be about influencer and impact, right? And so you can weave different lessons in the course of a project so that everybody’s feeling connected to some assign.

Now I like lesson three and the other guy’s I like lesson four. And you’re like, of course you do, because you’re this and you’re that.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Tell us how what somebody should do if they want to get M code for themselves and for their team. And once they get into it, how to best get the most value out of it.

Yeah.

Chris Lema: Okay. So number one, you go to motivation code. com and you buy the light version. If you want to spend 79 by the premium version, it’ll give you way more in the report. But if you’re just getting started and you want to try it. Buy the 19 one. It doesn’t stop you after you’ve gotten the report on the other end and then you get more excited.

It doesn’t stop you from upgrading that 19 paying the additional 60 bucks and getting the premium report accessible to you. Once you’ve done your report then you go to in the, my products, there’s a gift section and you buy. Let’s say your team is seven more people, you buy seven more lights and that’s 19 bucks a pop.

You buy the seven and then you go into, you get the link right for each one of these and you send it to each person and let them take it. And when they take it right, they’re going to be like, Oh my gosh, did you know that do you know that? So it’s super awesome. Yeah. Also we have in that same catalog, right?

So it’s all product led growth. It’s all inside the SAS. When you go into the, my products, just like you were able to buy the the light one or, the or the premium as a gift, you can also buy a 90 minute impact session. And If you have already bought the light and then you upgraded to the premium and you read the full premium report and you’re like, Oh my God, this is blowing my mind is amazing.

I want to talk with someone about this. I want to talk to a certified coach who can help me explore this and go deeper with it. Then you have the ability to buy a 90 minute impact session. And that is awesome. You will thank me forever for that 90 minutes because it’s phenomenal, but then you go, Hey, wait, my whole team took M code.

How do I get someone right? And a certified trainer, how do I get them involved in doing a team training and the team training is 3, 500 bucks, it’ll pull your whole team together. And and it will even create some dynamic slides that show you the nuances between your team, right?

Which becomes really enlightening. Now, I will say this. If you go the 19 route and you buy the 9 gift for your team, and then you buy the team one, you buy a team, it’s 3, 500, whatever. If you’re thinking about buying the 79 premium version, Don’t go that route instead go straight to the team edition Because the team edition when you pay the 3500 for the team session You’ll also be able to buy the premium report for 49 So you get a discount, right?

And so you’re like, yeah I’ll buy the team thing and what you get is a certified executive coach who meets with your whole team and covers not only a little bit of the inside work, but also covers the Outside and the cross connects, right? So it’ll show you, Hey, you have a team and this is what we’re seeing in your team.

And also here are some blind spots or some little issues, or here’s some predictive stories that might. I have literally walked into a room and said so let me guess you have an affiliate program and it’s not working well. And the CEO is looking at his executive team going, okay, who spilled the beans?

Who told him this? And I’m like no I I, no one, you can stop looking around, right? Just look at me. Nobody told me that you guys were struggling. You have an entire marketing department and they’re all this big. Motivational dimension instead of this, what I should have seen is this.

And this, what I saw was this, here’s how that manifests itself. This, and this are likely problems. And they’re like. Oh my God, that’s exact. I’m like, that’s what happens when your marketers are drivers, right? Like they’re just going to go off a checklist. You haven’t had a new item added to that checklist in forever.

And they’re like, yeah, you’re right. I go, because that’s not what they’re going to do. They’re not going to come up with new stuff. So you’re going to need an influencer or later. You’re going to need some of these other people to come in. And that’s how you get the most of it. It all starts at motivation code.

com. It starts with a 19 assessment, but it can be, you can buy a lot more and it’s all there ready to help you make most use of all this stuff.

Chris Badgett: Chris, this has been amazing. Thank you for coming on the show. This is such great work and it has such big potential for individuals and teams and really the world.

It’s very cool. Thank you. Thanks for coming on the show.

Chris Lema: Thank you for having me.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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The post Discover the Hidden Forces That Drive Your Best Work With Chris Lema and MotivationCode appeared first on LMScast.

In this episode of LMScast, host Chris Badgett interviews Jason Yarusi, a successful real estate investor and entrepreneur. Jason’s journey to building a $300 million real estate portfolio is a story of transformation, perseverance, and strategic action in apartment syndication. He shares his path from an unfulfilling start in life, which included working in bars and dealing with personal issues, to creating a real estate empire specializing in large apartment complexes.

Jason Yarusi is a multifamily investor, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and business coach. Through his business, Yarusi Holdings, he has amassed a portfolio of more than 3,000 commercial real estate properties and oversees more than $300 million in real estate.

He talks about how a major accident led him to realize that he needed to change, and how little changes in his habits and perspective put him on a different course. Jason describes his approach of concentrating on a single market niche apartment syndication and growing it via collaboration, procedures, and guidance from seasoned mentors.

Jason provides insightful advice on how to overcome obstacles and create a long-lasting company, emphasizing the need of planning, networking, and open communication with investors. This motivational discussion explores tenacity, self-improvement, and practical guidance for anybody hoping to succeed in life or real estate.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Jason, you’re Roosie. You can find them at Jason, you’re Roosie. com and the live 100 podcast. But first welcome to the show, Jason. Hey, Chris, it’s great to be here. I’m excited to dig into it with you. You’ve got a lot of interesting threads in your story.

One is about how you built a real estate investing empire, how you help other people do the same and your own journey of perseverance and personal development. I think there’s a lot we can learn here, but let’s start with the real estate story. I consider myself a novice real estate investor. I’ve built one spec home I’ve sold two lots.

I have a rental a second property that I rent out right now. I’ve run an Airbnb business off of my house. Which was just a travel trailer that I fenced in, in my yard at one point, but I’ve always loved real estate and been fascinated by it. But just to give some context, can you tell us about where you’re at as a real estate investor today?

Jason Yarusi: Yeah you say novice, 99 percent of the world have no real estate investment. So you are well ahead of most in the world who have gone out there and probably thought of it, but never taken action. That’s usually the biggest piece with real estate is it’s such a big blue ocean.

You can do so many different things with it. Yeah. But sometimes when there’s so much opportunity in so many different directions, you can go, it paralyzes you, right? You get stuck because you just don’t know where to start, right? So kudos for you just getting out of the gate and, myself, I, I faced some some loss like during my high school years, right?

So some friends passed away. A girlfriend was killed in a car accident, went to college. I was just lost in what I wanted to do, right? Just didn’t feel like I had much direction. I’d feel like things were crumbling around me. My dad had a small family business that was constantly struggling.

I got into college, through sports and just didn’t really have much desire. So I ended up picking business as a major. Got a finance degree and left college. Just was not really motivated. I moved into New York city, just, doing odd jobs, didn’t want to do anything with my degree.

I didn’t want to do anything with, business or finance. And so I just started working in bars and restaurants and it was, it was fun, but it wasn’t fulfilling. If that would make sense. Like you’re just doing stuff. It’s like energetic, but you’re just like, what am I doing? And around you, you have a lot of people.

Friends who are, getting jobs, right? They’re getting that full time jobs. Maybe they’re, getting married. They’re doing all these things that seem like they’re progressing in life while you’re here. Just, going living by the moment, right? And with that, that breeded, a lot of chaotic results, and I just wasn’t really happy with where I was.

It just didn’t wasn’t really satisfying for the day in and day out. It just wasn’t being productive like within my own life. And work did that for a couple of years, and then one night just angry at the world. Out of nowhere, I was riding my bike home at two or three in the morning. Got hit by a car. It threw me in the air. I got taken to the hospital and some broken bones. And some stitches in my face.

I got a pin in my wrist and I get out of the hospital and just getting back to my apartment. My mind is so focused. I need to get back to work because I need to make rent. And I had this like moment of pause. I was like, okay. This is a crazy thought and just hit by a car. I’m at a place I don’t want to be.

I don’t like the job. I don’t like where I am. And now I’m thinking about is how after this I can just get back to exactly where I don’t want to be. So I made like a pack for myself. It wasn’t this like magical transformation overnight, but I was like, okay, if I’m going to keep doing this, then I have to be okay getting these results and not complain about it.

or I need to start to change something. But the thing was, I just didn’t know what to change. So slowly and surely, I just started to do little things, right? So get up early, right? Stop drinking after work, right? Stop, doing things that weren’t really in a path that was going to be positive.

Start working out start reading, right? Just start putting myself into the moment. other areas where people positive and little by li to change. So I went from the bar to owning a bar, New York City. I opened a New York City before movi out of nowhere, Hurricane decimated, a lo

business. This small business really was targeted heavy construction jobs that did a lot with lifting homes. So his business went overnight from a couple jobs to like thousands of calls a day. And so my little brother was working for me. My now wife was working with me. We moved to New Jersey and helped dad really scale up the business.

And that was fun, but it wasn’t really again the direction I wanted to go. So we kept asking what was it? At this time, my now wife, she was pregnant with her first child. And Our day was so chaotic. It was so busy that if there was 25 hours in a day, I could have done it. So we came upon the word real estate, right?

And that, like we said earlier, was just this big blue ocean. What we did is we just started to try different formats. So we went out there, we started, flipping houses, we built houses, we started wholesaling, we started doing Airbnb’s, started doing all these different forms of real estate. It was going fine, but it was just, we weren’t, Really, we were doing good, but we weren’t doing great because it was just anywhere and everywhere.

One day came upon someone who was buying apartment communities, and they were actually buying larger apartment communities, putting together a team, putting together a process and allowing the process and the team to do the work. And that was that moment where I was like, I get it. This is how you can really scale a real estate business is that you have to go all in one sector and one part of a piece of the puzzle, put together the team, put together the process, put together the pattern, and then rinse and repeat.

So we stopped all the other real estate we were doing. We went all into learning the large apartment investing business. And back in 2017, we brought a 94 unit while living in New Jersey and Louisville, Kentucky. And that was the first of the evolution of buying apartment communities. We’ve now since brought about 3, 000.

400 3, 500 units pretty much down here in the southeast, mainly large apartment buildings, and it’s been about 320 to 340 million of real estate.

Chris Badgett: Wow, what a cool story. I have a ton of questions So when you started learning from somebody that there was like a system and a process you could put in place to scale this multi family or apartment strategy what were you learning through?

Was it through books? Was it through a mastermind, through online courses, coaching? What was it?

Jason Yarusi: So the first was a podcast, right? Came up on a podcast because and what happened was like, I heard that cause you hear, you go on podcasts and you go on a real estate podcast and one day to the next it’s tax liens, flipping wholesaling, it’s all over the place.

So I heard that. I was like, whoa. Okay. I understand that model. That model really makes sense. What I did is I put the blinders on instead of going on to the generic real estate policy. I went all in from learning podcast and learning from books and then looking for networks, right? Looking for groups that were doing this, right?

So I just found people that were doing it. I found two different people that were doing it in two different ways. One was buying it through syndication. That’s a model we use a lot where basically you’ll pull funds from investors and yourself to be able to buy a large asset. And the other We’re buying it through their, basically friends and family, like one or two partners in themselves and they were managing it themselves.

So I took both processes, I learned from both and then I put together my own process to back in. Because what I found is that lots of times we want to recreate the wheel, right? You want to redo the process and make it like your own when in fact, if you just see other people, that are doing it successfully.

You say what are they doing? And you follow that pattern. It allows you to get out of the gate to be successful in trying to re engineer this whole process for yourself.

Chris Badgett: How did you get the kind of startup capital for the first 94 unit property?

Jason Yarusi: Yeah. Great question. So had a great Suggestion by someone is that it’s always, we want to say, Hey, once I get the deal, I’ll get the money.

But once you get the deal, the hardest thing is to get the money because now you’re under pressure, right? So instead of me being able to come to you, Chris, and be like, Hey, listen I’m learning about buying apartment buildings. I’m really excited about this. The reason I can do this is because they have cashflow.

They have appreciation, depreciation. tax benefits debt pay down and you’re able to put together a team to run all this. So I don’t have to do the day to day. So we’re going off to large assets and I give you all the understanding and reasoning for you to understand the investment that you can go make a qualified decision, right?

But if I need your money today, then I have to say, Hey, are you ready to invest right now? Because I have to close in 30 days. That’s not a good feeling for you. And it puts a lot of pressure on me. So I had a very great suggestion is that I created the type of property I wanted to go after. So I knew that in Louisville, I was going to find a 75 to 125 unit apartment building.

It was going to be built between 1970 and 2000. That was really focused for the workforce housing. It was going to be in the south side of Louisville because that’s where a lot of the workforce housing was targeted And the price was going to be anywhere between three and seven million depending on the product right depending on the property And then I did my analysis and I made a one page, a very simple one page about what I was going to find.

Now I’ve set the standard of what I’m looking for. So now when I was talking to brokers and talking to bankers, I was telling specifically what I wanted to find, right? So that now helps me. It also starts setting a reticular activator in my mind in motion because now I’m looking for it, right?

Everything in front of me, that’s what I’m targeting on. Then I started to talk to my network. I started talking to basically my friends and my family. And saying, Hey, listen, I’m looking for this kind of investment. I’m going to do this for a number of reasons. Some, we just mentioned the cashflow appreciation, right?

And you can partake in this because you will be a partner in the deal. However, I’m going to do all the operations, all the management, all the generation. I’m going to sign a loan, put together the whole process, but you’re going to come in there as a passive investor. It’s going to offer these kinds of returns.

That’s the returns sector we’ve set up for it. Would you have interest if I can find this? And what that did is it didn’t put any pressure on them. And then it gave them a very simple one page to go back there and explore. But I would find that I was able to get commitment between 25, So by the time I found the 94 unit, I had already mentally raised about 1.

of yeses. right? It’s not money I took in, but I had the confidence that I had been able to raise that amount of money through people who would have interest when I found it. So when I did find that deal, I just went back to the people and within that it was almost like I think it was a day and a half. I had all the capital committed because I had already done the pre work and the pressure was no longer on them because they had already got all their questions out.

Some the one pager was sufficient, right? They got it. Someone to see a lot more detail and then we’re able to get into the weeds, but it didn’t put this over resounding pressure of, Hey, I got this deal. I need you to give me an answer right now.

Chris Badgett: So how long after that deal went through, did you realize Hey, this is definitely going to work.

Like this is all going to work out well for everybody involved.

Jason Yarusi: Pretty quickly. You take 45 to 60 days just to get like your feet under you. But what was empowering there is that I, at the same time of finding investors, I was putting together teams, right? I was finding who was gonna be my property manager, who’s going to be my insurance broker, who was going to be all the team around me.

So when I took on the deal, it wasn’t me trying to find the, like all the nuts and bolts of how the deal works. I had qualified team that just put this into the process of what they do each and every day. So I said, okay, here’s my objectives with the deal. Here’s what I want to do, here’s my renovation plan.

And here’s my marketing plan, right? Give me your feedback and your suggestions as we get into this. When we closed, we were running out of the gate, but to see it in formality of like just saying, okay, the renovation would take place. And now we’d be able to get a unit leased within two or three weeks or seven days at the new rental rates.

That’s when the proof of the pudding started coming to say, okay, the business plan is actually hitting the stride right now. What we’re anticipating is now actually being executed on the back end.

Chris Badgett: Wow. And what had to change in your mindset to pull that off? Like, going from guy who was in the accident on the bike to being a guy who could put a deal together for 94 units.

Did you break through any mental barriers or mindset shifts? I’m sure you did. Just let us know what happened.

Jason Yarusi: Almost everything. And you find when you grow up your belief system for better or worse is formulated by just your surrounding, the people that your family, your parents, like who you’re around in school just who you grew up with what. patterns within terms of people that pretty much are in your daily life or even like what you watch on TV. And not for instance, I just, there, there was a ton of scarcity in my world, right?

A ton of things of just that there’s never enough, or if someone did something that they, someone made a lot of money, they probably had to do something bad to get it right. There was all these just. Bad beliefs in my mind that we were always limited in our growth, right? limited in our opportunity.

We wouldn’t have these opportunities, even though others did, that wouldn’t be our world, right? I was constantly in a state of blame for many years, right? Just saying that where I was at was everybody else’s reason, right? My parents reasons, my school reasons, the loss I had, or, the government blame, whoever, like I would’ve pointed a finger at them until one day I just said, really with the idea of what was happening is that no matter what, it’s me, right?

I I am the one making these decisions here. So I can, and the stokes have the part of you control what you think, right? And you control how you act to what’s given to you, right? And many times we get lost in this format is that we lose control of how we’re acting to what’s coming to us, right?

Sometimes. It’s not fair, but that’s okay. It’s just life and how you show up in the moment really can set the stage of how you can continue to progress. So the more I started to put the onus on, okay, I can only control my actions, right? I can only control what I’m doing each and every day, I can’t control the goals, right?

I can’t like the 94, I couldn’t control. If and when that showed up, but I knew if I did the steps, it was, and I said, okay, each day I’m going to get up and I’m going to call brokers. I’m going to underwrite deals. I’m going to make offers, right? I knew it was going to give me one step closer when that goal was going to come.

I don’t know. And when I got out of the mold of just saying that the goal was the pinnacle moment, it was just the actions became the pinnacle moment. It’s like a lot with working out. If you run you may have the action of you want to do a goal of a marathon, but that doesn’t start with you just doing the marathon that starts with you getting up, three to five times a week and start to run three miles, five miles, in different parts, different starts, different sprints, long runs, doing your training, your actions that you control. It’s a lot with, our habits of life. We get so lost in the goal. Like right now, like we’re coming to the end of the year. Most people like you’re probably waiting for like the new year to start.

I get my new year’s resolution out of the way, but 92 percent of new year’s resolutions fail. Why is because we set this big overarching goal that we have no foundation to start. So like today I’m gonna lose 40 pounds. You haven’t worked out in a year and a half, but you’re just gonna go lose 40 pounds.

So the first weekend you work out for three and a half hours the first day and you’re like, Oh, I’m so sore. And maybe you’re like, I won’t go back. You don’t go back for nine days. And then you work out for a half hour and you just get busy again. And then it all goes off because we haven’t built the foundation to start giving us the support to be able to progress forward into the actions of what will bring us to where we want to be.

Chris Badgett: So how old were you when you got the first 94 unit deal?

Jason Yarusi: 36. All right. 37. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And then how long has the journey been to today? How many units is it today?

Jason Yarusi: To be honest, we just closed three 55, so we’re probably about 3, 500 units right around there. So who

Chris Badgett: did you need to become to scale from 94 unit guy to 3, 500 unit guy?

Or were you, or did you, is the stuff we already talked about, it just was the natural thing that carried you through?

Jason Yarusi: No, absolutely a great question, right? Because with the 94 unit and then I did a 48 unit and a 58 unit, right? And it was myself and my wife run all these projects and then we were capped, right?

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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The post How Jason Yarusi Built a 300 Million Dollar Real Estate Investing Portfolio and Teaches His Process appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Wes Tatters and Michael Eisenwasser present Rapyd Cloud, a hosting solution created to meet the particular requirements of high-concurrency, dynamic WordPress websites.

Michael Eisenwasser offers extensive experience in creating social networking solutions for WordPress, having co-founded and operated BuddyBoss for more than 14 years.

The infrastructure of Rapyd Cloud was created by Wes, a well-known server architect in the WordPress community, to meet the particular requirements of systems like BuddyBoss and LifterLMS, where users see customized content. With platforms like BuddyBoss and LifterLMS, where each user gets tailored information like unique newsfeeds, course progress, or quizzes, traditional hosting frequently falls short.

Significant computational demands, frequent site crashes during periods of heavy traffic, and the requirement for expensive over-provisioning of resources are the outcomes of this. By providing dynamic resource allocation that adapts according to demand, effective pricing based on average consumption, and state-of-the-art infrastructure with cutting-edge AWS technology, Rapyd Cloud addresses these problems.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMSCast. I’m joined by two very special guests. We’ve got Michael Eisenwasser and Wes Tatters. They’re from Rapyd Cloud, which is innovating in the hosting space, particularly for sites that have a lot of dynamic content, have a lot of concurrent users. This is a big challenge in our industry.

They’re here with the solution at Rapyd Cloud. But first, welcome to the show.

Michael Eisenwasser: Thank you.

Chris Badgett: Thanks a lot. And Michael was actually a guest on the show, I think about nine years ago, a very early guest. So it’s really fun to connect after a decade. Before we get into the rapyd story, tell us about the history here.

Cause this came from the buddy boss world. So tell us, yeah,

Michael Eisenwasser: sure. So I had been running buddy boss with my partner Tom for the last 14 years. So we’ve been in this industry for a long time, and BuddyBoss was actually acquired just a little while ago in June. And and BuddyBoss also has been a good partner with LifterLMS for a lot of these years.

Many of our customers, when they want an LMS, they work with LifterLMS. And so BuddyBoss has social networking features, LifterLMS has the courses, and probably more than half the BuddyBoss customers were doing social learning. And that is really hard to host. So that was the biggest challenge that our customers would face.

And the biggest pain point for most of the customers was that they could not find adequate hosting anywhere in the WordPress world. And so they would either, if they got any level of success, they’d have, if you have a normal WordPress site, that’s like a blog, it’s pretty straightforward to host.

You can just do hard page caching, but if you’re trying to host a site where every single user is seeing unique content, that’s where it gets challenging. So on a buddy, while site you have a community, imagine you’re like Facebook, every person who’s logged in. As a different news feed, different messages, different profile, they’re effectively seeing a different website.

So if you have a hundred people log in at the same time, your server has to create a hundred websites. And then you add an LMS on top of it. And now every course, every quiz, it’s all unique. Not every course, but every their progression through the course and their progression to the quiz and all that.

It’s all in notifications. It’s all unique per user. So our customers couldn’t find adequate hosting sites would crash during launches. The only solution they had was to go to a traditional host and pay for like the top tier hosting plan, they were afraid that it might crash. So they’d be. Paying exorbitant amounts to have enough overhead all the time.

And so we, and we can go into it and tell the whole story, but basically we created a first party hosting solution that provides something that does not exist in the WordPress market. We provide hosting for sites that have a lot of concurrent users who are seeing different types of content rapid is built to ground up the service.

Those users. And if you have that kind of site that will you’d be shocked at how fast it is on rapid and how competitively priced it is for that customer base because it’s all around us. It’s very efficient at doing that.

Chris Badgett: Let’s just take a moment to celebrate the innovation in the room here. And what I mean by that is we took WordPress.

And then buddy boss brought Facebook to your WordPress website. What’s your LMS brought like you, Demi to your WordPress website. This is, these are incredible innovations in the space when you really think about it. And of course, when you think about it in the traditional software market, Like you, the way you described Facebook was great.

How everybody’s essentially getting a different website or somebody taking a course has unique things on their screen and unique quiz questions and progress and all this stuff. It’s heavy on hosting. And I feel like this part of the market has been underserved simply because I think it’s just a, in the grand scheme of things, it’s a smaller fraction of the where hosting companies get their customers from, but it’s an important piece of the internet that has special needs and attention required.

So take us into the tech a little bit. Like what, what has the traditional hosting industry. Just not been doing to really accommodate dynamic high concurrent user sites.

Michael Eisenwasser: Sure. So was can take over that. I’ll just introduce Wes. Although a lot, some people may know who he is, he’s pretty well known in the WordPress world.

Wes is a. server architect mastermind who has designed at a high level our whole server stack for Rapyd. And with that Wes can answer.

Wes Tatters: I think one of the challenges for dynamic hosting is that there’s no one solution fits all the boxes. Traditional hosting is a set of boxes. You have this size box, or this size box.

And for dynamic hosts, it’s the big box. It’s the box that’s not going to crash when their site has a new marketing campaign that launched on, or a product that goes viral in a WooCommerce platform or a new cohort starting of classes The traditional solution, once you’re in this dynamic spaces, you’ll initially be told you need a VPS or you need a eight CPU cores or 32 gigabytes of RAM.

You’ll be told specific, numbers that you’re supposed to meet to try and to to achieve what you need at that peak point in time. The problem is most of us don’t need that. 8 CPU cores or 16 CPU cores or 150 workers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But to achieve that in the standard hosting world, that’s what you have to do.

You have to go and buy a product, which is often very expensive or overpriced in terms of what you really need. Instead of a product that suits your needs. So we started from the ground up looking at what BuddyBoss customers needed. First, we realized that most BuddyBoss customers are shaped.

What that means is that at different times of the day or different times of the week, they have different user experiences. Some sites might have load in the morning. And some sites might have loads in the evening. Might only be busy on a Saturday. So that was our starting point, designing a platform that didn’t punish people or penalize people for the periods of time when they weren’t busy.

That was the starting point. It’s finding a way to even out or balance out or average out a customer’s utilization across a period of time. So at Rapyd, we don’t technically sell CPU cores. Yes, if you look at our site, you’ll find mentions of our plans are like to CPU cores or like for CPU cores. But what we’re actually doing is simply selling people processing resources.

So if you need a lot of resources or a lot of processing power on a Monday morning, you have availability and access to that when you need it. Providing you average out your load across a week, you don’t then get penalized for that spike where all of a sudden at Thursday afternoon, you need 150 concurrent users or a thousand concurrent users.

So it’s designing the architecture in a way that is different to a traditional hosting platform. To do that, we built it on top of some of the best infrastructure available. We use Amazon. We’re an AWS partner. We utilize their latest high performance resources at all times. So you’re not on a rapyd platform getting a small CPU core or a, an old, 10 year old, 15 year old processor.

This is the other problem we have with traditional hosts. If you look at the problem of hosting we have a term called race to the bottom and it’s been happening in the WordPress space for some time. How can we get it cheaper, how can we get it cheaper? And ow can we get it cheaper?

And the way hosting companies get their hostings cheaper is not to upgrade them. They don’t put modern CPU cores in, of course that costs money. So we’ll just run it on the CPU for the last five or 10 years. We don’t, we don’t improve our platform performance. We don’t improve our network performance because all those things cost money.

So what you wind up with is product that over time I’m running on infrastructure, which is incredibly old. Some of the hosting companies out there are running data centers, big data centers that to upgrade will cost a small fortune. So they leave them where they are. They’re sitting on first and second generation Intel CPU cores.

We’re now on fifth generation CPU cores. They will, being launched this week. In terms of server. Rapyd will always be on the latest. Product that’s available. Currently, we’re running exclusively on AMD fourth generation CPU in the service space. So it’s about choosing a platform and choosing a product that’s ideally suited to the dynamic space.

Latest technology, best infrastructure and best practices right across the board.

Michael Eisenwasser: Yeah, we’ll even upgrade the CPUs in the background for an existing plan on the customer, which we’ve done

Wes Tatters: since launching. Yeah, as new technology becomes available, everything updates. The customer doesn’t even know it’s happening.

We doubled our display, we doubled our disk performance in the last two months increasing all of our disk infrastructure. It just happened. The customers aren’t aware that anything’s happening inside the infrastructure. Um, that’s our sort of objective and that, that’s our guarantee long term.

We’ll always be there ensuring that what our customers get is best for their needs.

Chris Badgett: That’s great. And that’s a great philosophy to have from day one as you build the company. I think one of the challenges of the hosting industry for non engineering users, which is most users, is they hit a pricing page or a compare page and they get a little lost in the technology.

So just for a short spot in this interview, could you give us some high level education on, CPU, RAM, PHP workers? What does this mean? Like we’re supposed to, as a non technical buyer, we’re supposed to Oh I think I need this or that, but we don’t really know. So can we do a public service and level up some understanding of that?

Wes Tatters: Yeah. 100 percent

PHP is our underlying platform. It’s the software that ensures that WordPress runs. PHP is a very mature product, but also comes with its own set of problems. Every time someone requests a page on a website, it requires what’s called a PHP worker. So that’s a program that’s going to run to generate that page request.

Number of PHP workers that are available on your hosting controls the number of page requests that can happen at the same time. It’s that simple. If your site says you’ve got 10 PHP workers, then it’s impossible to generate more than 10 simultaneous requests because those PHP workers are single threaded.

They’re exclusive to that page request. So if you’ve got a site with 10 people visiting at the same time, then 10 PHP workers will be running every time that page request hits. Now, the problem is when we get into big WordPress sites might be a hundred concurrent users. So now we’re talking about something that might need a hundred PHP workers to generate all those simultaneous page requests.

On top of that, we have sites like BuddyBoss and Lifter that use Ajax or REST requests. Every one of those requests also needs a PHP worker. So in BuddyBoss for a number of years, BuddyBoss, to load the BuddyBoss activity feed used to take four page requests. So it would load the main page, it would then load the activity feed, it would then load a notification window, and it would load a message, messaging window.

That’s four PHP workers, four concurrent requests to generate that single page of information. Again, now you add a hundred concurrent users on the site, and all of a sudden you’ve got quite a lot of performance load. The other challenge with the PHP worker is that PHP workers need exclusive memory.

So while a PHP worker is running, it needs a little block of RAM that’s available to it and only it. Now on a small blogging site, it might be a simple blog, you might only need 20 or 30 megabytes of RAM. Exclusively allocated to that PHP worker. On a dynamic site with BuddyBoss, Lifter, WooCommerce, we have sites that need 250 megabytes of RAM to load that page, to do all the processing.

Similarly, in WP admin, we have sites potentially needing up to a gigabyte of memory. To handle all that background processing. When you’re in a block builder like Gutenberg, all of the juggling that’s happening requires a lot of extra memory. PHP workers are uniquely linked to two things.

The, a number of concurrent users and the avail of, and the amount of them available memory. Inside your hosting. So if your host says, for example, you’ve got unlimited PHP workers. It doesn’t make sense because to have unlimited PHP workers would mean you needed unlimited memory. And we all know that your plan only gave you 16 megabytes, gigabytes of Ram or eight gigabytes of Ram, or maybe 32.

So we get into a lot of. of marketing jargon that doesn’t necessarily match up with our technology needs. We then get into challenges about what that all means. The first question comes CPU. So a CPU obviously is a computer. We know what a computer is. And we know that our iPhone has a a CPU in it. We know that our computer and our laptop has a CPU in it.

The CPU is the processing unit that does all the work. No two CPUs, however, are created equal. It’s a bit like buying a four cylinder engine car or an eight cylinder engine car. You can actually buy two four cylinder engine cars, one that’s super powerful and one that’s incredibly slow. Of course, they’re different versions or different iterations.

So over time, most of the hosting companies have wound up in situations where they sell CPU cores at a price point. But not necessarily the latest CPU. So if we look at the CPU world in the hosting world, there are currently four generations of hosting service CPUs available from both AMD and Intel that work with WordPress.

Very recently AMD have just released their fifth generation CPU cores. Each time a new CPU core is released, the main thing that they’re trying to achieve is better performance. So which means that CPU, the new model runs faster now, for example, we transitioned during a beta from third generation to fourth generation CPU cores in our platform.

We actually delayed our launch by a month. We were working with AWS to ensure that we could launch on a new platform. Received a 30 percent page load performance increase by changing from a third generation to a fourth generation CPU. Now, in again, the dynamic world, 30 percent page load increase is a big win because the amount of time it takes to generate your page controls concurrency as well.

Chris Badgett: So

Wes Tatters: if your page takes a long time to generate, that means the PHP worker is allocated to that page request for a longer amount of time. So if we can reduce the amount of time it takes to generate that page, we can again increase the amount of concurrency in the

Chris Badgett: platform. A business and a technical question here is, as you all looked at developing Rapyd Cloud the market wants like high performance hosting at a great price, And this part of the market that’s really good at high traffic, dynamic content, concurrent users.

How did you what insight did you have where you had the aha that I think we can pull this off and create a way better product at a better price. And then how do you do that? Technically?

Michael Eisenwasser: Sure. The insight I had or Tom and I again for years and years, we dealt with seeing Buddy West customers complaining about performance constantly.

And often they would blame the product and say, the product’s not built efficiently enough, or has some performance issue. And we knew if they just were on really good hosting, it would work there. There’s just the nature of it. Was explained when you have, if you have a hundred people log in at the same time, it is hard to host that no matter what you do with the product.

People don’t realize something like Facebook, the amount of resources that go behind it to host it. So we wanted to. Build a solution for this for a long time, but servers were not our core competency. Our core competency was building software. But nonetheless, we did everything we could to improve the performance of buddy loss itself as make as efficient as we could.

And we had one year, a number, a couple of years ago, where I guess about three years ago, we pushed out an update to BuddyBoss where we spent months just trying to optimize all the code and make it as efficient as possible. Get rid of all the low hanging fruit, double queries and things like that, optimizing a lot.

And we spent a long time working on, I believe it was BuddyBoss 1. 9. 1. 9. Yeah, 1. 9. It was a good release. And we want to market that we’ve made the product much more efficient. And so we were trying to figure out how do we run benchmarks on this and prove that it’s faster. Because if you have one user logged in, it doesn’t really mean much.

You have to simulate huge amounts of concurrent users and run benchmarking as that. And we spent a couple months trying to produce all the data to prove that it was faster and write a blog post and a video about it. And so we finally were ready. We pushed the release live and published our results. And the same day, Wes is in our Facebook group, publishing his results.

He’s you’re right. It is faster. The stuff he was publishing was more sophisticated than what we had. Wes, and we were, that’s, we were shocked by it. Also Wes had been in our Facebook group for a long time. Anytime people did have these performance issues, Wes would be there like, Hey, DM me.

And then they’d come back later and post that their site’s running fast. Now that, Whatever was did fixed it. So when this happened, Tom was like, Hey, you know what? We got to hire Wes. We’re like, let’s hire him. Let’s finally do this. We had wanted to for a long time. Let’s, we’d want it to build something like that.

Once I’m like, let’s hire was take his recipe. And make it the best it can possibly be put resources behind it, build a development team behind it. Take everything we know from all these years at BuddyBus. We know how to do customer support and how to do software development. And so we took what he had created, which was working really well and made the best version of it.

And then we took all the stuff we know about software development and user experience and By the way, an extremely easy to use. Customer dashboard. So even though Wes is talking about all this technical stuff, customer perspective is not like that. The customer experience is super easy to use dashboard.

We’ve taken care of everything. Like you can update plugins. You can update themes. We have patch deck on there running, showing if you have security vulnerabilities and you can update the plugin there. And we have WooCommerce settings. We are not a lot of people know it yet, but we are the fastest host in the world for WooCommerce sites.

So we knew we could pull it off because of that. Then once we started building it before we even had the dashboard available, we had some customers who had apps, buddy bus app running, and we’re having really big performance issues. And some of these people were paying, thousands of dollars a month in hosting.

They were complaining and saying, we’re not sure if we can stay with buddy bus, cause we have all this performance problems and it’s getting expensive to host. We said, Hey, we have this thing. We’ve been working on the backgrounds. We want to give you private access to this. Dashboard’s not ready, but we’ll put your stuff on our hosting.

And they were just shocked at how fast it was. And the user, once we saw the feedback from the customers and then watching, you can go to love. rapid. cloud and see all our testimonials. It’s incredible. Once we saw the feedback from all these customers, one after the next thing, like you’ve transformed my whole website, I can’t believe how fast it is.

That gave us the confidence for okay, we’ve really done it. We’ve pulled it off. And we decided it was time basically to sell body boss. And focus all of our energy, all of our time, all of our effort on.

Wes Tatters: And part of that As I said, we’re very closely tied to BuddyBoss by being a separate entity.

It gives us the ability to open dialogues that possibly would have been harder to have. If we were just BuddyBoss we are here for every dynamic platform, every dynamic. So WooCommerce, Lifter, LearnDash, Tutor LMS Peepso the membership plugins, The membership we’re actively talking with the fluent team who are leasing a community product of a fluent community.

It’s in late beta now and will be public within weeks. Rapyd is ideally suited. To those platforms. The reason it’s ideally suited is that one of the things that communities do is get successful and it’s very different to have a blog. And I talk with people and say, yeah, a lot of.

People, when they start their WordPress site are really over the moon. When they hit that hundred visitors a month, I’ve started to get something credible when they hit that hundred visitors a week, they’re starting to go, this might be a, this might be a business, a hundred visitors a day, and they’re going, if I can keep doing this, I can, Give up my day job.

The smallest BuddyBoss sites, some of the smallest Lifter sites, are actually really quite sad if they’re only getting 100 visitors a day. Because their communities, they need people coming in, checking their Facebook feed, or checking their feed, looking at the, looking at conversations, visiting blogs. If it’s a Lifter site, they need people to complete the course.

They need the, they need them to do it. Do all the lessons and complete the course. It’s a cohort that’s joining. It might be a 30 person cohort. They need to get in and do those things. So in this space, the small numbers that people are excited about in a blogging site become quite rapidly. Oh, we’ve got a success problem.

I have a small customer that built a A social learning platform based on Buddy Boss to teach indigenous people in New Zealand, the Maori people, their own language. The like many languages, the cultures die. She built this little site just to teach the people in her local community.

Then last year was approached by the New Zealand government going could we like run this in every last room? She’s now got a buddy boss site with thousands of concurrent users at nine a. m. Every day. In classrooms across New Zealand that success is this same problem. Because what we do is different we need this dynamic server capabilities.

And next year, she’s told me only recently, she’ll have 30, 000 people trying to log on Monday morning on the second week of February. Can I handle this? And we can work it out for her.

Chris Badgett: I actually have a background in anthropology and cultural survival is a important topic to me. I also love New Zealand So that’s such a cool.

Cool story Let’s maybe you guys can help me answer a question that i’m sure you’ve gotten to particularly around buddy boss when people come in and they have questions they have big hopes and dreams they’re hoping they get a thousand ten thousand a hundred thousand sometimes even millions of users on their site How do you direct them?

Then they ask which, which hosting do I need? Like, where do I start? And let’s say they’re like, Oh, we just

Wes Tatters: say rapid, but yeah.

Chris Badgett: Like, how do you think about that scale? Like in the past, I’ve always first, it’s probably a good idea to pre sell and. Get some validation and just choose a host that can grow with you as your needs change.

But yeah, how do you answer that at rapyd, like in terms of somebody’s they’re coming in and let’s say it works like your New Zealand person, how do they, how does the relationship and the plans and the pricing. Particularly what people don’t want is for them to get a traffic spike and the site goes down or their launch is way more successful than they ever thought.

Like, how do you think about that relationship of kind of validating and getting started and then just scaling over time?

Michael Eisenwasser: So our starting plan. Is if you pay annually 29 a month, and that is a, not going to handle huge amounts of concurrent users, but that is an entry point. So people can get started on rapyd very inexpensively.

The smallest plan we’d recommend for a site that really has concurrent users as a production site, if you pay annually is a hundred a month. So, there is a inexpensive entry point into rapyd. And as you grow and as your needs go up, you can bump up to the next plans and to increase your tier in rapyd, the customer can do it in the dashboard themself.

And it’s instantaneous. It really is. It’s two seconds.

Wes Tatters: One of the things to understand, though, is that even on our cheapest plans, they’re on the same server. They’re on the same CPU cores. They’re actually getting the same performance regardless of which plan they’re on. What really changes as you increase plans is the amount of concurrency.

Or the amount of visits that you have access to within the platform.

Michael Eisenwasser: We can also speak to as performance boosts. So this is something that’s not live yet, but it’s working technically in the background. We’re going to build the dashboard end of it soon. And this will allow customers to increase schedule in advance, increasing their server resources for a temporary period of time.

So you could let’s say you have a launch on Friday, you could schedule in advance, starting Friday morning for the next 48 hours, I want the resources of the top tier plan, and the moment this that it begins. All the resources of the top tier plan will be dynamically allotted to your server. And when the period ends, it will drop back down.

So that’s coming early 2025, and that’s going to provide even more flexibility. But even now, because of the auto scaling nature of Rapyd, site’s very difficult for a site to crash on Rapyd infrastructure.

Wes Tatters: We we’ve done a few where we’ve worked with customers manually. We the the agile

Sorry, the Agile conference this year came to us and said we use BuddyBoss app. We want to run our BuddyBoss app as a community tool with inside the Agile conference. We’re going to have between three and five thousand people at the conference, and we want to use our BuddyBoss app to, to publish our calendars, all our session times, and let people communicate with each other.

And we did exactly this year. For them. They came to us and said, Hey, from Friday to Monday, can we have a big plan? So we did the boost. They didn’t even know what happened there their product and their their conference ran exactly the way they wanted it, but it was outperformed exactly the way they wanted it.

Their customers were thrilled. And on the Monday morning, they switched back down to their standard startup one plan, which they’d been using for development because their website. Is it really going to be used now for another six months until the next conference? So that’s the sort of flexibility that we provide to our customers already.

And it will be available in the dashboard, as Mike said, early in the new year as well. But we have a very active customer support and customer success team. One of the things that we knew when we were at wrap at buddy boss was the importance of support. So

Chris Badgett: how do

Wes Tatters: you think about support? Very differently.

We bought with us from BuddyBoss a number of BuddyBoss support team. Everyone at BuddyBoss who was in our support was effectively a PHP plugin developer. They understand PHP. And they understand WordPress. They understand plugins. That means that the support team that we bought in to Rapid. are actually skilled in building WordPress sites.

We will go the extra mile with our team to ensure that our customer sites work reliably. And we run free performance assessments. We run, free site evaluations. We’ll

Michael Eisenwasser: migrate your site to Rabbit for free, no cost.

Wes Tatters: And during that migration, we’ll fully assess the site. We’ll make a performance report analysis on, give them guidance on plugins that are causing problems show them how to improve site performance in the plugin level itself, help them with database optimization platform optimization.

We also deliver object caching natively in our product. Object Cache Pro is a native part of what we do. Tools, amazing products and relay his replacement for Redis that improves performance in factors. And again, for dynamic sites, object caching is the only caching that works.

Page caching isn’t available.

Michael Eisenwasser: I’ll mention one more thing about support. So our support system, it’s not like you send an email and wait two hours. It’s 24 seven live chat support with very fast response times. Customer satisfaction. If you look up Rapid Cloud on Trustpilot, or go again to love. rapid.

cloud, you’ll see the testimonials. The customers are really happy with our customer support.

Wes Tatters: We also built out a native AI based support platform that adds as an adjunct to our dashboard. So when you arrive at our at our, your site, you’ve got a button down the bottom, open the support. The first question you ask is instantly passed to our AI.

And we’ll respond with active answers from a massive knowledge base of information that we’ve been building and compiling, not just about hosting, but about PHP and about WordPress and about plugins. So on average our support response time is under 30 seconds. Did you,

Chris Badgett: Did you use Docspot for that?

Wes Tatters: No, it’s built. It’s built as a part of our with our with our support our chat system partners. It’s a product called intercom and, as I said, that average response time of 30 seconds from the person asking a question in many cases, they’ve in that time also received a set of information from our AI that gets them a starting point.

We find that about 35 percent of our support requests are actually answered successfully just by our AI.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And tell us more about the migration. Is it true, like hands off migration? If somebody is listening to this or watching this and they’re like, you know what, I’m ready to make the move.

I just want to like. Sign up and have them for

Wes Tatters: me. Is that the promise highly managed average migration times about an hour and a half, we can actually complete a migration. Often the impact of often the slowest amount of time in the migration is just getting the details that we need out of the customer.

We will do. everything. If a customer gives us access to their cloudflare account, we will even handle DNS mapping for them. We handle migration through a set of stages. It’s fully managed fully monitored by our platform and excuse me. And So much so that we actually do two migrations.

We do an entire test migration to make sure that a customer site is 100 percent compatible, 100 percent suited. I will say this. We don’t support older versions of PHP, for example. Some customers are still sitting on PHP seven point something. From for security technology reasons, we don’t support PHP.

So we assess all of those things before migrations and work with customers. We’ve worked with customers on their old sites, helping them to upgrade and ensure that all their plugins were PHP ready before migration.

Chris Badgett: That’s a great service. Another just public service announcement I wanted to make is that.

particularly for new people who are, have dreams for their online community, online learning platform. And you think about, you see these expensive hosting plans as an example, but the reality is like the agile conference that you mentioned they’re selling tickets. So you have to have real estate for your website to live on.

And the more people that need to get in the door, you need bigger real estate. So it transfers over to hosting. And so it’s really, Just baked into the business plan. You’re going to sell more tickets. Oh you’re on a higher end hosting plan that costs more, but you’re also selling, 10, 000 courses a month.

You’re making a lot of money. It’s just paying for Your real estate or your storefront or your school, which is part of it.

Wes Tatters: It is a bit of the disconnect with hosting. We see people that are running very successful six and seven figure businesses in buddy boss. Especially if they’re teamed with lifter or tutor LMS or other products that enable people to very easily monetize their products that they do sometimes skimp.

On the hosting. We’ve had customers that were losing their customers because their performance wasn’t adequate because their site, the customer going, this is great, but I can’t wait 30 seconds for the buddy was out to load my activity. And we’re looking at the site going, yeah, but. On rapid that same activity feed loads in under a second.

There are reasons to ensure that what you’re doing in the hosting space, especially in the dynamic space is paid for. And is recompense. I’ve got some small buddy boss sites that are still my old customers. They got a thousand members. They’re paid members. They pay 8 a month.

They’ve got real revenue. And they’re happy to contribute a percentage of that real revenue to the right sort of hosting, high performance, highly scalable reliable and delivering them what they need on a daily basis.

Chris Badgett: We’ve talked a lot about BuddyBoss, community stuff, LMS. You mentioned it, but could you just touch a little bit on WooCommerce?

A lot of Lyft or LMS users, as an example, also use WooCommerce. But how does a WooCommerce site perform on RapidCloud? And how do you think about speed on an e commerce site?

Michael Eisenwasser: Sure. E commerce sites face the same challenges as the other things that we’re talking about. Every user is looking at different stuff in their cart, different stuff in the checkout.

And if you run a campaign and you have a lot of traffic coming to your website and everyone’s trying to check out at the same time, your site can crash. And there’s nothing more heartbreaking than to have your site crash while everyone’s in a cart trying to check out

Chris Badgett: one Black Friday or whatever.

Michael Eisenwasser: Yeah.

And Rapid is the fastest hosting for WooCommerce in the world. It is. And we’ve, we have a WooCommerce settings page in there where we can talk to more about Elastic Search. Elastic Press, all the integration we’ve done from the live card. Yeah.

Wes Tatters: So one of the things that. One of the challenges for a big word commerce site is that as it grows, especially as their product base grows or the number of products in their cart, they have big performance hits.

One of the reasons for that is that WordPress search is not very efficient. It’s a slow product. So we partnered with Elastic, which is the a search infrastructure that pretty much takes all of what WordPress tries to do, you know, and this words and gives natural language search inside the WooCommerce dashboard.

It’s literally a drop in. So you drop it into your site, and from that moment when you start typing into the WordPress search bar, you are now using Elasticsearch. The Elasticsearch platform gives a 10 to a 50% performance improvement in search alone. It also adds native language and natural language search, which WordPress doesn’t really do very well.

In the dashboard. The other component that we focused very heavily on is caching of WooCommerce. Now it’s the one area where we actually say page caching is okay, if you do it properly. And we do it properly by page caching just the product pages and those product pages are always in sync and always active.

So much so that the customer doesn’t even know that it’s happening. If they go and edit a product inside their WooCommerce page hit save and changes. It’s instantly updated. The page caching is instantly flushed and reset for just that page. And from that point on, that page, the next time they visit, is going to be served with the latest up to date page caching.

We, we built our platform on Lightspeed Enterprise. It’s a web hosting server infrastructure. Designed specifically for very high concurrency. It’s very similar to Apache, which everyone knows. It’s like the product that everyone starts within the hosting business, but is 10 to 50 times faster at handling concurrent loads.

But again, On Rapid, the customer doesn’t need to know any of that.

That’s fantastic. It just works in the background. Same as WooCommerce caching, same as, Elasticsearch. They’re just features of Rapid that come same as object caching. They’re just there.

Chris Badgett: You guys have definitely been marinating in this problem. I say great businesses really build the business around their customer, not the product, right?

So you’re like looking at this customer that has this really needy website. That’s really important and connecting people and ideas and stuff, but it needs a lot of resources. And you’ve really designed this around helping that person. And then having a great business is just going to be a side effect of taking care of really good care of that person.

One of the things

Wes Tatters: we did do is look at the ways that sites get slowed down. And if we can identify something in WordPress. that actually slows your site down, we will work on ways to improve that performance. One of the actual classic examples that very people, few people understand is malware security.

We go and we install Melcare, or we install WordFence, or we install all in one, security. When we do that, we install a plugin on our WordPress site. That actually slows our site down. Everyone knows, oh you install WordPress, it makes your site run slower. But it is more secure. So we looked at that and went, there’s got to be a better way.

We partnered with a platform called Monarchs. Monarchs is a server level security platform. It’s not a plugin inside WordPress. It runs on the server. It has no impact on WordPress performance at all. Which means you don’t need a word fence plugin or a mail care plugin or a

Chris Badgett: backup all in one

Wes Tatters: security.

They’re all offloaded. Our backups are exactly the same. It’s all at the server level. So what that does is means that we’re continually optimizing the WordPress stack to be as fast as it can with just the things that it really needs, which is your theme, your plugins and your content. All those other overheads, be it security or backup.

Michael Eisenwasser: Cron jobs. We have the option to do, to run the WordPress Cron at the server level. Nice.

Chris Badgett: Oh, you guys have thought of everything. You probably hear that from your customers a lot, man. You guys have thought. And we will

Wes Tatters: continue to innovate. We’re talking about new products now. I’ll tell you, we may offer other things like SEO.

Michael Eisenwasser: Yeah. I see it with building SEO tools in there, but I can just tell you what, when we go too deep talking about all the technical stuff, customer can get confused, but at a high level you can go to our pricing page and see the benchmarks we’ve done. So we’ve benchmarked our startup one plan, which is our most popular plan against all the other popular managed WordPress hosts.

We’ve done a series of benchmarks and rapid is the fastest at every single benchmark against every single popular managed WordPress hosts that we’ve benchmarked against. And we guarantee it. If the customer buys, they have a 14 day refund period. If it’s not faster, we’ll refund them. We guarantee it’ll be faster.

Chris Badgett: Faster or it’s free. I love that. And I did notice that by the way, when I was on your pricing page, I’m like, I’m, I was really glad to see the benchmarking data. Cause it’s okay, now you’re helping people really understand.

Wes Tatters: And anyone that wants that data, the whole lot’s available. It’s a 150 page document that breaks down exactly how we benchmarked exactly the processes we used.

And people can go and replicate. Any of it. We’ve given them all the tools. So you want to replicate this on your own hosting? Here’s how to go and do it. So we’re very transparent about performance. We’re very transparent about being in the performance community active in the WordPress space, active in the make WordPress space in the performance area it’s something that I would say we’re passionate about.

Because impacts our customers.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and they got to keep their sight up and growing and scaling and all that. Go visit RapidCloud. That’s R A P Y D dot cloud. Check it out. See what we’ve been talking about. Wes and Michael, this has been a great conversation. I love that you’ve married this problem and not just recently.

You’ve been working on this for years and you have all the history with BuddyBoss. And Lifter and WooCommerce and other more needy WordPress plugins. That’s awesome. I’m so glad you created this. So everybody can head on over to rapid dot cloud. Is there anywhere else you want people to connect or other things for them to check out?

Michael Eisenwasser: They can follow our YouTube channel. We’re publishing tutorials and stuff there. But yeah, rapid. cloud is the starting point. You can find everything there from the navigation in there. You’ll see access to our knowledge base and our benchmarks and everything.

Wes Tatters: As I said, we’re very transparent.

Take a look at us. We tell people to go and look at love. rapid. cloud. It’s our vanity page. All right. But it’s a lot of really happy customers giving us honest, Testimonials about what Rapid’s managed for their platforms.

Michael Eisenwasser: They can also go to feedback. rapid. cloud if you want where we publish a roadmap of future, everything that we’ve pushed live since the product went live is there.

The things we’re working on now, things that are planned. And we post updates just like we used to do a buddy boss. We’re really open about our roadmap and things we’re working on.

Chris Badgett: Nice. Thanks for coming back on the show, Michael and Wes, for the first time. Let’s not wait nine years, but I’m really glad to have you back on.

Thanks so much for coming guys. And keep up the great work at Rapid.

Michael Eisenwasser: You too. Our pleasure. We love everything you’re doing at Lifter and it’s an honor to com.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Jeff Chandler discusses his experience fostering community, authenticity, and enthusiasm within the WordPress ecosystem.

Jeff Chandler is the founder of WP Tavern, a leading hub for WordPress news and community engagement. He talks about how, for him, food became a unifying factor, creating a specialized community through common interests such as the WP Foodies group.

On social media, Jeff stresses the need of being authentic. He calls himself a “WYSIWYG” personality who adheres to the idea that “your vibe attracts your tribe”. He talks about how his early writing on WordPress inspired the development of WP Tavern, a gathering place for interesting conversations and relationships among WordPress users.

Jeff’s experience demonstrates how genuineness and individual interests may establish enduring communities in addition to fostering meaningful relationships.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMSCast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Jeff Chandler. I’ve known Jeff from around the WordPress community, Twitter, being online. We’ve met at WordCamps before. And I wanted to have a conversation with Jeff about writing building community Using wordpress, but first welcome to the show jeff.

Jeff Chandler: Thank you very much It’s a pleasure to be here

Chris Badgett: and you can find jeff on twitter at jeff row. The o is a zero I love watching your tweets. i’m a foodie. I used to take more pictures of food, but I always like seeing the My friends that have food interests, like posting stuff. Where did that come from?

From you? It seems like there’s a community of people that are really like knit about that.

Jeff Chandler: Yeah. The last time I checked, I have about, I have over 11, 000 photos on my iPhone and if 80 percent of those are pictures of food, it would not surprise me. But I just, I don’t know. I just got into the habit.

There’s food is really. It’s like a connector and it could, there’s a sense of community around food but man it’s interesting when you have a meal and that meal just takes you to a different place. Like why I didn’t know food could be this good. Or I’ve never had this kind of experience before.

And so a lot of times when I’m taking a photo of food, it’s just a way for me to remember it. And. Actually, it’s come in handy a few times. My wife has laughed at me and joked around and said, why do you take so many pictures of a food? Then she’ll think of a recipe or something that we want to make.

And she won’t remember exactly what was in it or what it looked like. And I say, honey, hold on. So I go back into my phone, I bring up the picture and I show it to her. She goes, Oh, you know what? I don’t mind you taking photos of our food now, but yeah taking the picture of a meal. I love good meals, love good food.

And it just turns out that I’ve been doing this for a long time and now we’ve found some of my tribe on Twitter and we have this hashtag called WP foodies, and we usually send each other photos about what we’re having for dinner. Or if we come across a nice meal or whether it’s a food truck or something like that, just a way to to share and participate.

It’s our own little community, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, but yeah, every, everybody, I think everybody likes food. Everybody needs food in order to survive, but I just like taking pictures of it and having a a photographic memory of it. And I will tell you, man, the one time we went to this fancy place.

And I figured the steak there would be amazing. So I had a steak and my wife had the scallops and the scallops that my wife had the first time I bit into the scallop, I closed my eyes and it like took me to this, I felt like I was going on a magic carpet ride. And I said, there is no way a scallop should.

 Kind of experience over a steak and by golly, from there on, after I did not order the steak, I ordered the scallops.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s use that as an entry point into community. And particularly with social media I’m of the Bent where if you meet me in person, i’m the same person you’re gonna see online You know, I have my professional business side, but I’m also a real human with my own interests.

We were chatting before the show about hiking, getting out in nature, gardening running, stuff like that. I like to bring just some of my just casual self to my social media. I’ve noticed you do too. How do you think about that? Is that, Intentional or what’s your philosophy behind that? What need does that meet for your soul or your spirit?

How do you think about social media and being you?

Jeff Chandler: For starters, it’s a bit of a bummer that I don’t hear a rooster going at you sometimes when I tuned into this podcast, I would hear a rooster and it would bring this whole certain farm life dynamic to the show. So I know you’re in this nice office now, but I missed the rooster.

I thought it was better. It’s

Chris Badgett: you can’t hear, yeah. And by the way, I don’t recommend moving roosters and a whole bunch of chickens across the state. It’s a pain to do that, but we did it successfully.

Jeff Chandler: Yeah, I could imagine. Oh now you have a joke. Why did the rooster cross the state?

Something like that. Yeah. So going back as far as how I present myself and who I am as a person. On social media, I have never shied away from the fact that I consider myself a whizzy wig. And for those of you who don’t know, that is what is what you get. And I have never strayed away from that.

I, the only person I know who to truly be as myself. And so there is no, I’m never. Really encountered any need to be somebody other than myself. So that’s who I am. That’s who I’m most comfortable of being. And it’s worked out. And in an age of social media where people are doing everything they can to please the algorithms and whatnot, and try to go viral.

I’m just being me and if I go viral, I’ll go viral, but I really don’t care. It’s just, I don’t have any interest in being anyone but me. But yeah, and I’ve come across a lot of people these days that appreciate the genuineness and the bluntness and the truthfulness of someone like me.

Although I will say I tell the truth a lot. And, but if your wife asks, does she look fat in this dress? Trust me, that is an opportunity that you want to not be as truthful as you’ve always has been, because if you say the wrong thing, it will hurt. Literally. I’m talking

Chris Badgett: from experience here. Yeah. There’s a saying your vibe attracts your tribe.

So if you be yourself and you attract a certain people that are interested in whatever you’re into, whether it’s WordPress or food or being a homebody or whatever it is. You want people to mag to become magnetized to the real you, right? That’s a lot less work to just be yourself.

Jeff Chandler: Yeah. And then on Twitter, it’s a whole thing of, back in the day. At least when I used to produce the WordPress weekly podcast back when I was still working for WPTAV and writing for them and publishing articles at least people could hear my voice, but I haven’t been on a podcast and I haven’t been really out there as far as my voice is concerned for quite some time, for a number of years.

And I do find it to be a bummer of people reading my tweets and sometimes not being able to hear the genuineness behind the words that I’m saying, or being able to hear that I’m speaking from the heart or that I really mean when I’m saying, and so that’s a bit of a bummer but by and large, for the most part, everyone that has followed me for a number of years.

Knows that, I’m me and what I say is what I say. I’m not going to yank them by the chain. And so I’ve been able to establish that, Hey, what is what you get. That’s what you’re going to get out of

Chris Badgett: me. You mentioned riding at the WP tavern, which did you start that?

Jeff Chandler: Yeah. I founded WP tavern back in the beginning of 2009. And it was prior to that, I had started writing for Mark gauche of web law tools, collection. com, which at the time was the largest and most popular website devoted to WordPress news. In fact, it was in the WordPress dashboard. That’s how popular it was.

And Mark, actually, I started the blog and I was writing about. Publishing articles about things I was learning about WordPress at the time. And Mark happened to come across some of my articles and said, Hey, how would you like to get paid to write about this stuff? And I said, wait, is that a thing? Can you get paid to write about WordPress and articles?

He said, yeah, I said, absolutely. Let’s give it a shot. And then on top of that. I’m writing and publishing articles on the site that’s in the WordPress dashboard. Meaning everything, anything I publish shows up in the dashboards of WordPress users all over the world. Woo. Let’s go, I’m not going to say no to that.

So I started doing that for a little while. And a lot of my articles generated a number of comments. So I started. Creating a sort of community around the things that I was writing. I did, I had a I did that for about a year or so and created a following. And there was a domain that came up called WP tavern.

It was actually a gentleman by the name of Kyle Easelick. He was running a website called WP hacks in a lot of OG WordPress. People might remember that domain name where he was publishing things code snippets and things of that nature. For WordPress. And he said, Hey, I have this domain available.

You like to use it. And I said I don’t know what I would use it for or whatnot. So I made a blog post and I reached out to my community and I said, Hey, there’s this domain available. Should I break off from one blog, tools, collection. com and do something on my own? And. What do you guys think?

And everybody who chimed in said yes, do it. Have a forum, do whatever you want. We’ll follow you. So I’m like, okay. So Kyle graciously donated the domain of WP tavern to me. And it turns out that it was the perfect domain and it was perfect for what I wanted to do, because when I thought of a tavern is generally a friendly place where everybody knows your name, you come in.

You talk about what’s going on. You have some conversations. It’s a friendly and mostly polite atmosphere, but every now and then you’re going to have a bar fight and you’re gonna have to clean up broken glass and broken tables, which we ended up doing because of GPL debates and some of the other stuff that was going on in the WordPress world, but by and large.

WP Tavern was a huge success. And at one point, the who’s who of the WordPress world was a member of the WP Tavern forums. And if you wanted to get in touch or interact with who’s who of WordPress, you went to WP Tavern.

Chris Badgett: Wow. Let’s rewind the story. Before you started getting paid to write, where did the skill of writing come from or the, and the passion as well,

Jeff Chandler: man, this, wow, this goes way back.

I gotta tell you, so I’m not, it’s not like I took a journalism class. It’s not like I took a writing class. I started a long time ago. Started with there was a website way back in the day. E2 effects. And it was a. It’s what we would today, it would be similar to wordpress. com where it was, you had your subdomain and there’s a lot of other people that were using that website.

But one of the coolest things about E2FX was that it had a lot of community and networking aspects built in. So you could follow each other’s blogs or sites. You could read each other’s comments. You could, there was this whole It was like social networking, but via blogs, it was really cool, this network effect.

And what I did was I just wrote about things that I was interested in wrote my opinions about tech news that I was following. And it’s just a thing that I enjoy doing. It’s not, I didn’t take any courses or take any college courses or whatnot. I just wrote based on. No, I just wrote and published.

That’s pretty much what I did. There’s no magic to it, but the more I did it, like anything, the more you do something, the better you get at it. And that’s what happened with me. And look I had no intentions of becoming a full fledged journalist or becoming a reporter on certain things.

When I looked at it as this is interesting to me, I have thoughts and views and opinions about it. I’m going to write those and publish them. And that’s it. And if people comment on them, great. If people don’t, that’s fine. But I was just doing it for myself. And it turns out that particular skill set was valuable and other people other people could benefit from it.

Chris Badgett: I think writing is a super skill. There’s blogs and things, there’s emails, there’s copywriting on webpages. The more there’s like creating an outline for a video or a script or a business plan, or it’s just the ultimate skill. How do you in your mind see the difference between, I’m thinking about somebody who’s like a subject matter expert in a topic, And they’re thinking about, really getting into writing and creating content.

Of course, they want some SEO benefit, but how do you think about the difference between journalism and reporting versus opinion pieces versus SEO content? I think people get a little overwhelmed of what do I write about and how do I write it?

Jeff Chandler: So back in 2014, on my personal blog, jeffc. me, I wrote an article.

I wrote an article titled I am a bad journalist. And in this article I highlighted the fact that A, I never wanted to be called a journalist. B, I never called myself. A journalist. See, I never considered myself a journalist. To me, the word journalist means somebody who really goes after the story.

They do in depth investigation. And they double, triple check their sources. They do a lot of things that you would expect a journalist to do. And I never really did any of those things. I just. Took my views and opinions, and maybe I would interview somebody or I’d get I would ask somebody a question and use it as a quote, but then I would just publish a post and I was just really, I’m just a Joe Schmo, Joe, the plumber or whoever it is now that we’re that we’re describing as the average person, I’m just taking something that I have an interest in and then publishing my thoughts.

And maybe I come back to those at some point later usually it was just for me, but then I ended up getting an audience and it was an accidental audience. I wasn’t out there searching for an audience. I wasn’t out there saying, trying to get all these people to gravitate towards me. It was just me just writing stuff and hitting the publish button.

And then the magic happened where people started gravitating towards it, like a little, like a nucleus. And then just more and more. More and more things started getting attracted to the core. And it just worked out that way. And in my, I don’t know if I should say career, but in all the times I’ve written and published stuff on the web.

I’ve not once been concerned about SEO. Everyone out there is concerned about SEO, about titles, headings. How do you write this? How do you write that passive voice, this voice, anything about SEO? I threw SEO out the window and guess what? It worked for me. And it may not work for you. It may not work for somebody who is in a position of copywriting and writing articles for a business who is really looking to get that tap into that SEO and that audience.

But everything I did was from a human perspective. So I wrote as a human.

And it turns out that that was a great strategy for me in the long run.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. It sounds like the traffic came from the story and your voice more than keyword optimization or anything. Exactly.

Jeff Chandler: Yeah. I keyword optimization, title optimization how I wrote the stories and I didn’t care about anything about keywords or anything of that nature.

I just said, look, I’m going to write this, as a human would read it and that’s it. And if I get SEO traffic, great. If I don’t big deal and it worked for me, but I will say that and that’s just from a personal writing and publishing standpoint, but I have worked for other businesses that SEO because they need to stand out because they’re in a highly competitive atmosphere against all these Places online that are absolutely doing everything they can with SEO and keywords.

And I got to tell you, I, that’s where I struggle. I’ve always done things my own way. And when you have to write things in a way that benefits, the SEO bots and trying to get things to rank I’m terrible at it.

Chris Badgett: Let’s let’s talk a little bit about just tactically, writing is an art and a science.

So first question, that’s a little more tactical. When you’re in your flow like how many articles a week would you do or how would you set goals or does one story take a full week or is it like come out of you like super fast because it’s you’re inspired or how do you think about volume of writing when you’re in the flow?

Jeff Chandler: And I think it also has to deal with what is it you’re writing? Is it a, is it an in depth topic. And is it something that’s going to require a lot of research? Is it something that’s not super time sensitive that you can spend a few weeks on or a few months researching? In my line of work, everything I pretty much wrote and published was how can you say time based or relevant, recent based.

So I used to cover a lot of news, a lot of things that were happening. And so I would end up just writing about what I knew, and then I would get in touch with some people. To figure out answers to what I didn’t know. Then, within a day or two, a lot of times a lot shorter than that, because I was dealing with public information that people already knew.

And I would just compile that in a way, and then I would publish the article. And in my mind, I, one of the things that I eventually learned is that you don’t, when it comes to writing news posts, is that you don’t have to have All aspects and everything, correct. You don’t have to have the whole story in one post.

You can write about what you know and the things you don’t know you can mention, but you can always follow it up with another post when that information comes to light, if it ever does. So I had, I had that mindset of let’s compile what we know into a post, put it together. Have some things in the back of my mind that we don’t know and let’s see what happens.

And then eventually they would either come out with another statement or the information would present itself and I would write up a follow up post, but when I would get into the flow and the flow is awesome. If nobody has ever been in the zone, boy, they need to make something that you could just trigger yourself to be in the zone because you feel unstoppable.

And it’s just a great feeling. But when I was in the zone, words would just flow from my head into the post editor, like nothing, and I would put everything together. And before you know it, I had 700, 800 words written and it felt like nothing. And for me, an 800 to 1000 word post is a lot when I’m dealing with news or something dealing with WordPress.

So yeah, I could go through, I could publish two or three posts a day. Sometimes I could do definitely multiple items, multiple posts per week, but in the realm of WordPress, look, WordPress is a huge ecosystem. There are things happening all the time internally within the project and externally in terms of what people are building and using.

Or the issues that they’re experiencing, there’s always something to write. And my job and sort of a skill I developed was, what is it that’s going on out here that other people should know about? And that’s something that you don’t really, you can’t, I don’t know, you can’t really train yourself for it.

It was self trained. And it turns out that a lot of the things I picked and choose that other people should know about were correct.

Chris Badgett: From the sort of journalistic reporting standpoint, let’s say somebody is involved in the community, be at WordPress or the foodie scene or some health and fitness niche or some like parenting topic, whatever it is, there, there is a community around every topic.

How did you think about sourcing your like what to report on and where the story is? Where would you, what advice would you have for somebody who’s like, all right, I’m involved in X community. How do I find the story to write about?

Jeff Chandler: I started off with me. I’m using something like Google reader or freely and subscribing to a number of different websites that dealt with the topic that I was covering that I was writing about.

Subscribing to a lot of those websites figuring out where the watering holes were for these people. So various forums. Slack instances comment sections on particular websites, different social media, Twitter Facebook, what have you, and trying to insert myself into those areas via commenting or sharing my opinions or something loosely based on what I wrote about, but putting it in there and just trying to get my name out there so people can see me in these watering hole.

And then. Outside of that just, I think my personality and my ability to be friendly with people and to listen and not to be so one sided and to be great at engaging in a conversation, whether that be a debate or just hearing both sides. And I think that had a lot to do with people gravitating towards me and the things I wrote and just wanted to be part of my inner circle.

I think. I think attitude and how you approach people goes a long way towards building your vibe, your community.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned comments. I don’t like this question, but I’ll ask it this way. Are comments dead? And we all know that like social media has changed things, but there’s still blogs published today that have lots of comments on them.

But how do we think about comments in 2024, 2025? If we have a website or we want to get engaged in our community on comments.

Jeff Chandler: That’s a great question. And to be honest, we’ve been asking our comments dad since 2015 or before that it’s something that keeps up. I think, I definitely think there are situations where it makes sense to have comments disabled, depending on your goals and what you’re trying to accomplish with your content.

But. I think back to how important comments were for me and I remember publishing articles and waking up the next day or within hours, I’d get my first comment and boy, it felt great. It’s oh my God, somebody read this and took the time to comment on my article. That is pretty cool.

And most of the time these days, that doesn’t happen. It’s spam or somebody’s saying things that you don’t need to have published or, somebody is angry and upset comments used to be a great way to, to build community, to have to start your following and. It was the social networking before social networking, and then you had your trackbacks and your pingbacks, which, which was really cool.

And I, I don’t know if it sure seems like comments are dead, but with the Fediverse and the different things that are being. Created to provide that social networking aspect, but to your website and then to your comments, I think they could make, they definitely can make a comeback.

Chris Badgett: Can you describe the Fediverse if somebody isn’t familiar with that?

Jeff Chandler: That’s a good question as well. I’m not quite sure of the. Technicalities of what the Fediverse is, but from my understand, from my very basic understanding, it’s a way of, it’s a way to decentralizing, centralizing, decentralized materials. Maybe the people out there are cringing at the, at me just saying that thing but it’s to bring a lot of disjointed things together.

And so you don’t have to be inside of a closed wall or should say a walled garden, you can be, you could be open and treat your website as one place and freely have access to other things and other content, other comments. Other places. And you can create that sort of network effect. And if if somebody wants to throw a book at me right now, because that’s all wrong, please do.

But I do know that the Fediverse is a great thing. There’s a lot of work going on with the Fediverse. I think there’s a WordPress plugin out there. It’s Pub, pub, something, of it, okay. There’s some plugin that’s being worked on out there to utilize the Fediverse, but there’s great stuff ahead.

And one of the coolest things, one of the best things about my early days of blogging is that networking fat, the networking effect where I could follow people, chime in on their blogs and all that stuff. And I’m hoping we could somehow recreate that, but not have to be tied to one particular service.

Chris Badgett: Speaking of networking and spam Matt Medeiros is in the live stream comments and he would like to know who was your favorite podcast co host.

Jeff Chandler: Okay. Before I answer this, and because this came up the other day, Matt, you need to change your last name because. I and many other people always have to Google what your last name is in order to spell it correctly.

All right. You do us all a favor in a WordPress world and change your last name to something that is easy to spell. So we don’t have to Google it. As far as my favorite co host, huh?

Boy, that I had a lot of great times with John James Jacoby.

He was even killed. He was very smart. We had a lot of great in depth conversations about WordPress things on the show. And he was one of my favorite guests, but my other, I would say my favorite probably was Malcolm Peralti. And that’s because for the longest time, he was the devil’s advocate.

So when I would look at something very positive and this is great, he would be like Jeff, what about this? And think about this way and that way. And I’m like, and it wasn’t as if he was trying to be a downer, he was just coming at it from the opposite perspective. So while I was the optimist, a lot of times he was the pessimist and you know what, for a show talking about WordPress, that was a perfect combination.

And we had a lot of great conversations and interviews because of that dynamic that we had.

Chris Badgett: I like that insight. I don’t know if you’ve ever listened to the all in podcast, but it’s there. The, some of the hosts like have very different views and it’s what makes it interesting. Yes, but there’s friends.

That’s not like they’re fighting or anything.

Jeff Chandler: Yeah. And quite honestly, if you’re going to listen to a show where everybody has the same opinion and everybody’s not challenging each other. It’s boring. Nobody, it’s just come on. Somebody should challenge something. Somebody should say. No, we’ll think about it this way and think about it that way.

That’s where you get into the nitty gritty. That’s where you get into the innovation and the different ideas and perspectives and where you end up in a place that you may not ever thought you would be in.

Chris Badgett: Speaking of community, WordPress is really interesting to me because for what I’ve obviously been here for a long time now, but in the beginning.

I was just like on the outside of any kind of community aspect, there’s this cool tool. I’ve learned some tutorials on YouTube on how to use it. And it was several years into my journey where I really started to discover like, Oh, there’s all these people on social media. Oh, there’s these events I can go to.

Oh, these, some of these people are becoming real friends, either online, in person, hybrid, both. And it just evolved. How do you think about community in today’s world? I’m also asking in the context of if we want to get involved in a community, like whatever, foodie niche, some health and fitness nature, whatever, how do we do community?

Jeff Chandler: Yeah, it’s, it all starts with, publishing and getting out there and just being cognizant of the fact that there are other people out there. It’s a big world. There’s a lot of people and there are going to be, you’re almost guaranteed to have others out there with the same interests as you.

And use your personality, use your ability to get out there to post and create this core, this nucleus and, in such a way to where it’s inviting of others to join you on this journey and be like, Hey, oh, you’re into that too. And you’re into that too. Yeah. All right. And it starts, you gotta start small, but you gotta just do it.

You gotta start it because if you don’t, you have nothing to gravitate towards you. A lot less thinking and a lot more doing or else. What you’re not even accomplishing anything, but in the WordPress space, it’s still very easy to start up a meetup or find a local meetup and to find people who are just getting into the software, despite it being 21 years old.

There’s still a lot of people just coming across it. And meetups are great. Meetups are, I participated and ran a meetup here in Northeast Ohio, a number of years ago. And it was fantastic. You get to. You get to teach WordPress and figure out that WordPress is not as easy as you thought it was when you’re teaching something, which was a revelation to me and just getting to talk to these people and getting to know their experiences and their journeys of how they came to WordPress and whatnot.

It’s very cool. And how the, These people just how they ended up in WordPress sometimes is really cool. But yeah, community is very important. And I will say that the WordPress community for me has been, look, Chris, over the years, when you’ve, when a lot of people have asked, what’s your favorite thing about WordPress?

One of the, one of the top answers is a. Community and be all the plugins and the ecosystem and everything like that. But community, that’s the word meaning people who are welcoming each other in people who are who share their knowledge and their time with no cost associated, just on the basis of being friendly.

That’s the community part of WordPress that a lot of people love. And this community aspect of WordPress has helped me out tremendously. On a personal basis throughout, throughout the years of 20, 2019 through 2020 and 2021, I was unemployed and there were many times where, you know, my, my cell phone service was shut off or my car was about to be repossessed or certain bills, my mortgage wasn’t going to be paid.

And while I didn’t. Feel comfortable doing it. I did reach out to the WordPress community and I said, Hey is there any chance you folks can lend me a hand and get me through some of these tough times and they delivered time and time again, they delivered, and there are many other instances of people in the WordPress community who really needed some help and collectively we pulled through and got them through some of their toughest moments in their life up to that point.

Community is very special. Nobody should ever take it for granted. And when you build it, when you build it and they come, man, take very good care of it because there’s nothing like an awesome community that, that you’re a part of, it’s almost like a side family, to be honest, and work camps to me are like family reunions that I want to go to.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. When it comes to community. WordPress as an example has an in person component with events and whatnot, but what would your advice be around? Let’s say somebody is just starting out. Maybe there’s an in person aspect, but they don’t know about it. Not necessarily with WordPress, but any community, sometimes people like behave a little differently on the internet or whatever.

So if somebody is like either starting a community or trying to get involved in an online community, what are some things to think about that might be counterintuitive compared to. More formal in person community, like your local town, for example, or things to be challenges or things to be cautious about, or opportunities.

Jeff Chandler: Oh, let’s see. I don’t know. Maybe expand them, maybe expand upon that. And we can have a conversation about that. Maybe you answer that question and then I’ll chime in.

Chris Badgett: So some challenges for me with, I’m actually like an extreme introvert, right? Sometimes I come off as an extrovert because I make a lot of videos and do webinars and, have content out there.

But if I go to a town event, You’re going to see me on the edge of the event. I may not even go but like in the online world let’s say being an introvert as an example, one, a lot of what I’m doing is like one on one interaction, this call included, which is my sweet spot as a, as an introvert.

But when in online community, sometimes they can be so massive. Like for example, there’s this concept called Dunbar’s number. Which is the human being through our evolution and whatnot is only designed to be able to maintain 145 relationships or something like that. But like you mentioned WordPress I don’t know there’s a lot of people using WordPress and maybe I’m just guessing 20, 000 people that are really active in the community aspect of it online, I can’t keep up with 20, 000 relationships.

Jeff Chandler: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So that’s a challenge. Another challenge is sometimes people on the internet or through email or social media or whatever, like they tend to they’re more trolls and let’s say less of a filter or. Sometimes you can get involved in a community online anonymously, which you can’t really do in person.

So that’s a challenge. We talked about comments. Like it’s good that there’s comment moderation in WordPress so that you can just get the spam stuff out of there as an example. So that’s a challenge. Sometimes big communities, there’s language barriers, that’s a challenge. Yeah I’m just spitballing with you, but those are some of the challenges.

And and also I think one of the big opportunities with an online community is in my second half of life when I really became an online person, a lot of the relationships I have, like where I’ve actually shook somebody’s hand or given them a hug or something like that, it may have existed for years online and it was cool.

We were friends then, we’re friends now, but like a lot of, there’s more opportunity to start relationships. Online, which is really cool.

Jeff Chandler: Yeah, I agree. Yeah. There’s many times where it’s funny when I used to host the WordPress weekly podcast back when I was doing WP tavern, I used to go to a WordCamp and believed or not, I’ve never been this extroverted.

Which is seeing if you look at my, if you look at my tweets online and you look at the way I project myself online, you’d think, boy, that guy is really into being around people, but I’ve been to word camps where I’ve stayed away and I don’t introduce myself to anybody and I go into introvert mode. So it does occasionally happen to myself as well.

Yeah, I project myself as an extrovert online, but in person I could sometimes go into introvert mode. It was funny at the WordCamp, I was speaking with somebody and there is a woman that was two rows behind me and she goes, excuse me, are you the host of the WordPress weekly podcast? And I said, yeah, how did you know?

And she goes, oh, I could tell that voice, That, that voice.

I’m like, oh yeah. So that was pretty cool. Yeah. And then we ended up with a just being able to talk and get myself out there and have her. If I wouldn’t have been talking or if I wouldn’t have been out there, throw myself out there into the community, into the in person aspects, she probably never would have met me or had that opportunity to do but yeah.

These days, word camps in the WordPress community, specifically we have done a really good job of protecting each other. For these situations where no, we have the code of conduct, we’ve got an incident response team that WordPress has but by and large we’ve been doing, we’ve done a great job of looking out for each other.

At these events. That’s not to say that some incidents haven’t still occurred. But no, this community does a great job of looking out for each other.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about WordPress specifically. I first touched it in 2008, so I’ve been here for 16 years. And if I, in some way it is, not that I’m perplexed, but I’m like, how am I here?

I end up being like why have I become so obsessed with this tool and what we’ve done with it and like the community around it and everything. Why is publishing and e commerce and online education so important to me? And it’s like a process of discovery. And I’m just looking into like, where does all this passion come from?

But I’d ask you for your side on WordPress, you wouldn’t have done all this like writing or gotten into the flow on writing or invested so much time in the community. And so on in the project without some passion, where does the passion for the surrounds of software WordPress come from?

Jeff Chandler: So I want to go back. I want to throw this back a little bit to comment, because I want to share a funny story about comments. Comments are actually the reason I got started. I chose WordPress way back in the day. At that time I was a big fan of Joomla. And for those who don’t know Joomla yeah the default theme in Joomla, I think was solar flare.

I think if I recall really uniquely out with the top and the header part with the header image and the top left nav menu. See it’s burned into my brain. But Joomla at the time didn’t have comments natively built in. You had to purchase a module or a commercial plugin or something to bolt it on.

At that time, somehow, some way I heard of something called WordPress and it had commenting built in. So I tried it out and tried to implement the website I was building into WordPress. And I said, no way I can’t do this. WordPress is too difficult. Not even going to try it. Went back to Joomla, ended up with.

The same frustrations. I said, okay, you know what, I’m going to give WordPress one more try, I’m going to take a deep breath. Once I discovered once I read a tutorial and discovered it, I could change how things worked by changing a number in the code, which was a parameter or an argument and realizing that changing things.

And the behavior of either the plugin or WordPress itself was that easy. That’s when I got the WordPress bug. That’s when it got me. And plus I had comments built in natively. It was free. And so that’s when I built the website on WordPress and then I started writing about, and this was mostly to help me.

I started writing and publishing everything I was learning about WordPress. WordPress at the time. And it just so happens that a lot of other people in that time period were just discovering WordPress. And they too were also writing and publishing everything they were learning at the time as well.

So I was part of this, there’s a unique situation looking back on it of this. Large crowd of people learning WordPress all at the same time, which lend, which lent itself to everybody helping each other and everybody looking for resources to level up their WordPress game at that time. And going through all of that built up my passion for WordPress and being able to realize, wow, editing and being, being able to do these things and WordPress is very powerful and it’s so cool.

And then having, And interacting with all these different people at the same time, it just became a lifelong I wouldn’t say lifelong cause I’m still living and it’s still there, but I still have the passion for WordPress and mostly the community and the people who build it to this day and to this day, WordPress is 21 years old and man, it’s still there.

I still have a love for it. And it’s still there.

Chris Badgett: It sounds simple. But I still, I’m just as passionate as I was when I first, when it first clicked for me, similar to you, it was this idea that you could publish something and anybody, anywhere in the world. Could look at that thing on their computer.

Just blew my mind that like your voice can go everywhere that the internet is, and that’s still like amazing. And that’s just something we just overlook and like we’re in it all day. So we don’t think about as much anymore, but that’s amazing.

Jeff Chandler: Yeah. The main overarching goal of WordPress to democratize publishing is pretty great.

And it’s something worthy of getting behind. And trying to strive, be open and free to allow everybody to have their voice, to be able to have a tool that they can use to get their voice published online. It’s a very noble and worthy cause. And it’s, it has been, and still is.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

That’s Jeff Chandler. You can find him at Jeff row on Twitter. The O is a zero. Jeff, thank you for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. Thanks for sharing your story writing tips, community conversation. Really appreciate it.

Jeff Chandler: Thank you for having me. And Matt, change your last name.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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The post The Craft of Writing, Community Building, and WordPress with Jeff Chandler appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Steven Sauder talks about how he overcame the difficulties of becoming an entrepreneur, started his own marketing firm, and started his podcast, “Through the Dip”.

Steven Sauder is a seasoned businessman, Steven Sauder founded Hustlefish, a digital marketing firm that specializes in paid advertising, SEO, and website creation. He talks about a crucial “dip” he had when trying to quickly grow his firm by spending substantially in infrastructure and employing account directors, only to watch the plan collapse because of poor sales and excessive expense.

He learned from this experience how crucial it is to test concepts carefully and put sustainable growth ahead of pursuing quick expansion. Steven’s podcast offers insightful information for others by focusing on the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and the lessons they have learnt from conquering them. His organization, Hustlefish, offers digital marketing services such as SEO, paid advertising, and website creation to customers that appreciate consistent, achievable growth.

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Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a very special guest. His name is Steven Sauder. You can find him at Hustlefish. That’s at hustlefish. com. But first welcome to the show, Steven. Thanks. It’s awesome to be here. We’re going to talk about Steven’s podcasts. And we’re going to talk about his work as an agency.

We’re going to talk about marketing and different ways to think about that. But let’s start with your podcast, which is new as of this recording. It’s about to come out. I’m going to be a guest on the show. It’s called through the dip. Is that right?

Steven Sauder: Yeah. Yeah, that’s correct. We’re just getting started.

It you can find it right now on Apple podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to it. But all there is like a little one minute and 30 second intro. But if you head over there and you subscribe You’ll get notified the second we drop our first real episode, which Chris is going to be in the first batch of those.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. A podcast is no small commitment. Tell us the story of Through the Dip, why you’re starting it, what the angle is, who it’s for. And yeah, what it’s all about.

Steven Sauder: Yeah, that’s a great question. I’ve been around entrepreneurship pretty much my entire life. I worked for a lot of entrepreneurs. So people that were starting businesses for about 10, 15 years started one with one guy who was working out of his kind of a, like a one car garage.

And there was only four of us. Now I think they’re up to 80 people and they have some international offices thrown in there. So just being on that ride has always been a lot of fun. But about seven years ago. I started my own business and starting your own company is uniquely different to working for somebody else’s. Even though you get to watch what it’s like to start a company.

When you’re in that seat, trying to make the decisions and trying to decide Where the company should go or what. How you should spend your money or should you do a. Or should you do B it’s just a very different feeling and a very different seat to be sitting in. And while I’ve been working and building our marketing agency we’ve been working on it for about seven years now. And there was these moments where you where growth kind of stalls out.

The goals that you set, you start slipping and all of a sudden. Like these big, brilliant dreams that you had start slipping away just a little bit. Because life hits and whether it’s like the economy going up and down. Whether it’s some other force in the industry, Whether it’s personal life stuff and all of a sudden every once in a while, you find yourself in this dip and things will start going down. You have to start making some tough decisions around, where were you going to spend your money?

Who were you going to pay? All these kinds of big questions that aren’t necessarily easy to answer. And there’s not a cut and dry answer. It’s not like this is right and this is wrong. And you’re sitting there and you’re having to hold all of those things and try to figure out and navigate your way through the dip.

As an agency we just went through a dip about a year ago. I feel like some of the lessons that I learned going through those dip was some of the most important lessons that I’ve learned. I don’t think that I could have learned them any other way. And so in going through that All of a sudden I had this curiosity to talk to other people that have navigated their companies their businesses through a dip and what lessons did they learn?

What was it like? How did they make those tough decisions? And especially when you have the moment to look back a little bit and reflect on those decisions. We, like answering those questions of what would have you told yourself. Or what would have advices would you give yourself. Or even I think more you, interestingly would you do it again? Is the pain that I’m going through that dip worth it? So that’s where the idea of the podcast through the dip came from is to connect with other entrepreneurs and just learn about their lessons of navigating a business and making some of those tough calls and tough choices.

Chris Badgett: I love that. There’s a lot of content on the internet about success. And, winning and what I would call survivorship bias, but what about the hard times? So yeah and surviving that and figuring all that out and helping others with that. It’s a really noble podcast. I look forward to.

Being a serial listener to it. I love learning from other people’s stories. Tell us about one of your dips from about a year ago and your agency or whatever was going on there.

Steven Sauder: Yeah, we had some really ambitious growth plans and we had a, what I thought at the time was a really good plan to do it. I don’t, I still don’t think the plan is necessarily bad, but we put a lot of eggs.

In a single basket. And so what we decided to do was we were going to try to double our agency over the next 12 months. And what we wanted to do was go out and hire sales people or account executives, if you will, like that’s what we call them in the agency world, in different local markets.

Cities that had about somewhere between 150, 000 people more or greater up to about a half million people is the largest that we were looking at and have them get really plugged into their local community and sell our marketing services to other business owners. The premise behind that was that marketing is such a relationship business that it’s really hard to run ads around it.

It’s really hard to convince people to buy your product without having some sort of relationship because you’re asking them to put up money and you’re going to take that money and make, go spend it to make more money and then give that money back to them. It’s almost like like the financial advisor kind of world, also a very relationship driven world where it takes a lot of trust to kick something off.

So that was our plan to grow. So we hired three. Different account executives in different locations. We hire team around it so we can handle the increase flow. And we spent a lot of money on software so that we would be in a good place to be organized and streamlined and efficient as we started growing.

But the problem is that the sales never materialized the way that we thought they were. That what we thought people could do Just fell flat. And I think there’s a multitude of reasons for that. Like whether it was the right person or maybe we were selling or trying to sell the wrong thing, or maybe we didn’t have our services quite packaged up as well as they could, or build as much marketing around it as we should have.

I think all of those things played a little part in why it didn’t scale the way that we wanted it to scale. But. Ultimately what that resulted in was our overhead was incredibly high. We were just like burning through cash to have all these people, a part of our team. And then this question comes up, it’s like, how long do you burn through cash with the hopes of.

Hitting that sales goal that you have, like, how hard do you push to meet that goal? And at what point in time do you have to just pull the plug and take a loss on it and just say. You know what, this isn’t panning out the way that we expected it to work. We got to stop the bleeding somewhere and we got to downsize and we got to scale back to what we could do so we can live to fight another day.

So ultimately at the the beginning part of this year, we made the decision that, you know what, the numbers just are not looking good. There’s no way you could look at the numbers and reasonably assume that things were going to change the next three months. Unfortunately we had to go and do some layoffs and let go of some great people on our team, like people that I wish we could have kept. But there’s just no way to keep someone if you don’t have the sales to support that salary and it’s not it’s just not sustainable.

And so we ultimately had to let some people go, which was really disappointing. But now we’ve been able to right side that ship and we’re still growing just not as fast as I initially wanted to, or initially had planned. But it’s amazing to just like looking at myself like my attitude or what I was feeling.

In the moments when things weren’t going as well and the moments where things are going better now and like the level of anxiety and how I was trying to deal with that and working harder and longer hours, but like that not seeing that payoff just gets really discouraging. And all of a sudden, like just my energy level it’s felt like I just gave everything I could, but there was no more.

To give and you’re not sleeping at night because you’re trying to figure out maybe if I did this, maybe if I did that, maybe I could, get this deal to work out. There’s, I think there’s something to be said about pushing and fighting hard for something, but also not pushing too hard for something that you’re trying to create, to have it right.

Either things are going to happen and grow with you or else you’re fighting against everything Tooth and nail and maybe the world’s trying to tell you something else. Like maybe you’re going down a wrong path there Or you’re fighting a battle. That’s a little too hard to fight.

Chris Badgett: So if you could go back in time And talk Excuse me to your previous self when you were considering building a sales team knowing what you know Now what advice would you give to your previous entrepreneur self?

Getting ready to hire all these account executives.

Steven Sauder: I’d probably tell myself to go slower and to test things out more before doubling down. I think it’s really easy to have this mindset, at least for me, that like time isn’t on your side. Like I only have so many years here in this world. I only have so many, like so much money that I can make or how big can I get this?

Like I, I want to try to grow this company to be as big as I, as it can get. And I only have so many words, years to do it. So let’s go fast. But I think that’s a really dangerous mindset cause it gets you, it gets you into you referenced this earlier about people broadcasting this idea of success, right?

Like 10 X and everything. Or how do you. Like this idea of like viral growth versus this idea of just like sustainable growth. Like by virality is inherently not sustainable. If you look at viral marketing campaigns, usually it’s, it is something that like, Moves forward incredibly fast, but it doesn’t have a long lifespan.

Like very rarely does a viral thing have a long, have any sort of legs that carries it for years. It carries it for a moment and it’s cool for that moment. But I think approaching life where you’re not fighting against time and you’re not fighting against scale and you’re growing at something that is, you’re looking at more like sustainability, in growth.

How can you hit the next milestone without risking everything? There’s too much, there’s too much I think, wait that or I’m not sure what the right word to use. But people lift up people who like, not hit the home runs all the time. But it’s not the home run hitters that carry a baseball game.

And when the championship, like they’re a part of it, but like the people that could just show up and have a good batting average and just do get a couple of singles, maybe a double here, there that’s how you move the chain. That’s how you move the bases. That’s how you score.

In football and baseball and this is the truth of sports and it’s the truth of business too, but everybody wants that Hail Mary pass or that home run hit and it’s easy to fall into that trap.

Chris Badgett: So for context, what’s on offer at Hustlefish? What does the marketing agency offer? What kinds of services?

Steven Sauder: Yeah. We are a digital agency, so we do paid media. So like PPC, like Google meta tick tock like Instagram, Facebook, like all the, like the ad stuff we do SEO, and then we build a lot of websites and do some branding stuff around that. So essentially someone comes to us asking like, Hey, how.

How can I sell more of my things? Then we look at that and figure out what levers need to get pulled to scale your business or to sell more. And in working with a lot of clients, our best clients are Let’s The ones that have realistic growth models that are slow and make sense. And I’ve seen this a hundred times with the people that come in and say I want to become five times bigger and here’s this tiny budget.

But if we do it right, we can get there. It’s it doesn’t work out 99. 9999 percent of the time. But somehow I fell into that trap too. Like I, I was just like, Oh man, I think we can do it. I think if we make all the right decisions we can pull this off. But service wise, like generally when a client comes to us, we look at three things.

We look at one, do they need more traffic coming into their site? Do they just need more exposure? Two, do they need a higher conversion rate? To get whatever they want done. Or do you need to work on profitability and more of just business model type stuff? Generally, when someone’s talking about growth and scaling their problem, or the thing that they’re trying to fix, or the thing that they’re trying to propose to propel forward falls into one of those three areas.

And so we’ll help out with the first two. If it’s a little bit larger on the business model side. We’ll usually have some conversations around what they could do differently, but ultimately they’re the ones that have to fix it. But when people are coming to us looking for growth, those are like the three areas that all of our services plug into.

Chris Badgett: So we ask this question a lot on this podcast, but particularly for the agency folks out there. You tried outbound sales with sales team, but what is over the years actually working in, to answer the question, how to get clients, like what’s the mix? How do you get clients?

Steven Sauder: I think it is. For a marketing agency.

It’s all about relationships and like building those relationships with people and it’s hard to hack relationships. You can’t you can’t fake it, you got to log the hours. You got to log the time and be there and help people out wherever you can help them out. And. So I think some agencies have figured out ways to scale via like outbound type stuff. Although I’m always a little dubious about the numbers that they’ve projected out there just because all the agency owners that I know and talking to them and their numbers and what sales is looking like for them.

It’s almost always comes down to who they know and the relationships that they’ve built over time. So how long has Hustlefish been going? So we, Hustlefish is about seven years old now, but for a long time, it was just like a side hustle sort of thing. And so in reality, it’s been like more four years where it’s been a real business with like employees and like a full time commitment, for me, versus, working on a.

Chris Badgett: How much of the business comes from referrals from existing clients? I

Steven Sauder: would say maybe 40 to 30 percent of it comes from like referrals where we don’t know the person at all. And We know the person that referred them, but we don’t know the referred person that comes and talks to us.

But we usually have a good idea of how that relationship got connected back to us. And the rest of it’s like very one to one sort of relationships where we know. The person on a more personal level than just a random business sitting out there in the middle of nowhere.

Chris Badgett: How much has local played an aspect in your agency?

Like in the media area where you live versus the wide internet. Yeah.

Steven Sauder: A local is a hundred percent where. Everything comes from I, I don’t think there, I don’t think we could trace any of our customers back to a purely digital relationship where there was no geographic sort of point. We did this really interesting test about two years ago where we did a bunch of cold emails.

Reaching out to other agency owners saying, Hey if you have you’re really great at, creative copywriting but we can help build websites for you. We got some really great clients all inside of the state that we were in. So Indiana once you sent to somebody across the state line.

It was pretty much crickets. Like we got some conversations, but like this, the sale never closed or it wasn’t a great client. There’s something I think really important about geographic region and the amount of weight and trust that people put into knowing that you are there. There’s people that I didn’t meet in person.

For a long time that I chatted with, because we were in the same geographic state, like that’s the only commonality. And the only reason why they said yes to talk to me. And that’s where like the relationship started. But if. If I would have emailed somebody all the way across state lines to somewhere else, I think it would be way, way harder.

I think the one thing that’s interesting about this though, is I’ve had the exact opposite experience in the WordPress community, has this has no idea of geographic location. It has everything to do with the love for WordPress or the commonality of using that tool set or that technology.

And so I think there’s something really cool that WordPress has been able to do that many other industries have really struggled to.

Chris Badgett: In your offer stack. You do some WordPress stuff, but you also do things like paid ads and SEO, which doesn’t necessarily have to be WordPress based. How did you, how do you think about the stack of what the tools you work with and using things outside of WordPress as an example, some agencies are like super focused on WordPress and everything is just related to the WordPress site, but like running paid ads is very different.

And those are different platforms with different roles and that kind of thing. How do you think about focusing an agency on one piece of the stack versus providing more of the portfolio of solution that you do?

Steven Sauder: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think we started off just doing development stuff and that’s pretty much all we did. You build somebody, a website, and then all of a sudden either a. They need to get better conversion rates out of They’re users. Which is a little more dev centric. But still pretty firmly based in like this idea of messaging and how do you say something and but then also if.

You also need to get traffic for that site. So a lot of people have great ideas but then just don’t have the execution to generate the traffic around it. And so we would build these awesome sites and they’re just sit out there. And we wanted to get a lot more involved with how do we get these sites to do the thing that they’re supposed to do?

So drive traffic and drive conversions. And to do that, we just started working our way. Back up that, like we started out with SEO first cause it’s the closest to development maybe. And then, added paid ads onto that added, conversion rate optimization onto that.

Then as you add those services and then all of a sudden you start having people that are coming in with different technologies. Like they’re using Shopify instead of WooCommerce. Or they need a custom app built cause they’re doing something crazy custom that no one else is doing. And all of a sudden we started working in a bunch of different platforms and a lot of different services.

It became more about what is the ultimate goal. What are the best tools to use to hit that goal versus this is our little niche or stack that we’re playing in.

Chris Badgett: I love that. What’s a counterintuitive insight that you’ve figured out with working with paid ads over time?

That’s not as obvious. Oh that’s a good question. A

Steven Sauder: counterintuitive

I think the more hyper specific you can get with ads, the more interesting they become. And a common way to do that is to go down this route of like. How do I resonate with my person’s needs the most? Yeah. I think a more interesting way to do that is how do I throw up a face that somebody recognizes? Or how do I have somebody that is in their world talking to them?

So for instance we’ve been doing a lot of thinking about podcasts and like how to grow this podcast, right? An interesting way to do that would be to say, all right, when we do our podcast. I could take our podcast, chop it up into a bunch of little like ad snippets and throw it on Instagram Facebook or whatever.

And market to people who are in the WordPress space. Who are into courses and teaching people how to do things. And the chances that they would know you and recognize your face is insanely high. And so like I could run an ad instead of saying. I’m going to run an ad to people who are in this industry.

I say, how do I talk to somebody in this industry? And then funnel them to my podcast. That would be like a very interesting sort of way of doing it. If you’re thinking about it from a local standpoint. Who locally do people know? So I think an interesting thing is like a lot of, or some colleges have a kind of connection between like the college marketing department and other.

Companies and like we’ll do cross promotions with like their players and other companies and stuff. And so like you could take a basketball team, and have them come to your restaurant. And you could run ads with the basketball team at your restaurant. So all of a sudden now your ad isn’t, Hey, do you want.

Pizza or whatever it’s, Hey, check out where the basketball team hangs out. Like you love your college’s basketball team. You should hang out here. And so you’re not, you’re not approaching it from a need standpoint. You’re having people resonate with a need. You’re having people resonate with a person, which has a lot more deep, personal, like emotional ideas behind it.

That I think you can connect with people in a more real. Sort of way because it’s person to person or it’s moving it closer to person. So I don’t know I think for my like a counterintuitive ad sort of thing I think that’s an interesting way to start looking at ads is not just saying how do I?

Write the best copy or say the thing that resonates with people. How do you get? The person that already resonates with that person to say the thing. It’s a little bit similar to like influencer marketing, but done it in a more like local air way that someone who wouldn’t call themselves an influencer marketer would engage with that or something like that.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. In our pre chat and related to what you just said you’ve mentioned marketing with heart. So going more for the heart than the need or some logical argument. Tell us more about what out in the world is the possibility of marketing more with heart.

Steven Sauder: Yeah. I think there’s things that people resonate with more than solving a problem or making money or doing whatever.

So if you’re creating a course for somebody, um, I was talking to this person about they have this blue, they teach people how to play the ukulele and do bluegrass jams. So you could market that in two different ways. You could, you would go to somebody and you could say, want to learn the ukulele?

I can teach you how to play the ukulele. Or you could say, want to learn how to play the ukulele and jam with friends or want to learn how to jam with friends. I will show you how to jam with friends or be a part of a jam session. And I’ve seen signs up and I’ve seen people doing jam sessions and parks and stuff, and I always been like, Oh, that’d be cool to be able to join them.

I have no idea how to be a part of a jam session. I can play the guitar a little bit. I’ve never jammed with people though. So that’s a very foreign concept to me, but all of a sudden, like you’re taking this idea of learning an instrument. But putting it with people and putting it in context of society and a social sort of element around it.

And I think that touches a lot closer than this need of, Oh, I need to learn how to play the ukulele is no, I need to learn how to play the ukulele so I can jam with people. And that moves it way closer to. You could say like a need or want in somebody’s heart, but it’s more tangential than what your product or service is offering, but it actually like connects more with people and with people’s hearts, because I think relationships and doing life with other people.

It is such a huge part of emotion and life in general. There’s a there’s an improv comedy club right down the road. And they do improv lessons. They get some people who just want to learn improv. But almost all of their marketing stuff is you want to make friends? Like improv class is the way to do it.

And you have this huge group of people that I don’t think would ever take improv,but they’re like, I want to know how to connect with people better. And I see that link between improv and connecting with people. So I’m going to go sign up. I’m going to go sign up for that class. They’ve taken their product and services and not just Oh, I’m teaching you how to do that.

And they made it something bigger. They made it into a community and they have a lot of other things that go around that, like reinforce that idea over and over again. But I think that gets you closer to what people love and what people care about the closer you can get to that and not just, Oh, here’s the list of the problems that I solve.

I’ll teach you to do X. Play the guitar. Or here’s an app that solves why like I think like what you’re doing with like lifter is really cool. Yeah, here’s an, here’s a plugin that you can post courses. Awesome. That’s a need solved. But if you can say no, here’s how you create a community and here’s how you create a course so that people are engaged with you and this is how you build this whole thing around this idea that you have, like that’s, that way more.

then just like a plugin that solves a problem. And things like LMS cast and like podcasting and the stuff that you do at like showing up at WordCamps and stuff like that. I think connect that all together. And it’s no, it’s not just a plugin for sale. It’s something larger here.

There’s something bigger than just solving the problem of how do you do courses on WordPress?

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And yeah, it is something bigger, which I’m sure we’ll talk about. In our interview, so If you’re listening to this or watching this on youtube write down or go look for through the dip there was a great guest on this show.

His name was dane maxwell. I think he lives in indiana or illinois He wrote a book called star from zero and he had this framework of for really any business, but the whole thing was customer result mechanism. And he said, one of the biggest problems with businesses is that people get really focused on their mechanism, like running ads or stand up comedy.

Or playing an instrument. That’s just the mechanism. And we all know this as marketers is the people buy what they really want as a result. But often when we’re selling a service or a product, we over focus on the mechanism. And he had a word for that mechanism first thinking. And when you look at results and broaden out from jus. People who want to use my mechanism, that’s not really a target market.

That’s not really a clear result, but things like make friends. Discover community. Even community respect is something under the iceberg of conscious awareness. Like sometimes people buy a product because they’re looking for more respect from their community. It’s like a motivating factor.

Steven Sauder: I think what’s interesting is that. What I’ve found is people that focus on the mechanism this isn’t like a blanket statement. But there’s, I think there’s this tendency or this trend that like, if you focus on the mechanism. It’s often because you don’t understand, or you don’t know the heart component of that first. Like you have set out to solve a problem to whatever, to just solve that problem, right?

Like you are like, let’s take like lifter LMS, for example if you were a Person that was like. I’m going to build a plugin to sell. What should I build? I think there’s a market gap in learning management systems on WordPress. All right, we are going to build that plugin and we are going to put all the features in it. W’re going to solve all our customer stuff yet.

It’s really hard to move out of the mechanism place and get into something deeper. Because it has to almost flow from something deeper inside of you as the founder and the creator of this thing. Like it has to start at a level that you actually care about this thing for something larger than just solving the problem.

And what I’ve talked to, I don’t know if this is good advice or bad advice. So take it with a grain of salt. But I almost think that if you find yourself working on a product and it’s just all about the mechanism it is better to step back is the product that I should be working on right now, or is there a product that I could be working on that I truly care about?

I truly care about bluegrass music and I would love to figure out how to get more people involved in that. And so now I’m solving this problem to do it. Or. I truly care about this idea of businesses going through the dip and it’s not lonely. It’s not terrible. You learn some of the best things.

You shouldn’t try to avoid the dip at all costs possible. Like sometimes going through it is the only way you’re going to get to where you want to go. And so how do we celebrate the hard times and the lessons that we learn and the hard one. And there’s something like deeply meaningful about that for me that is propelling me forward to do this podcast versus just Oh, there’s a space.

I want to do a podcast. What could I do a podcast about? I think it should be X, Y, or Z and let’s just do it. So if you find yourself focusing on the mechanism, I think it’s really hard to shift and start focusing on the other. I forget the other two triangle things that you said, but it’s probably hard to focus on.

You have to focus on those unless you actually care about it deeper than the problem.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I love that. And the other two were clear customer and results. So like actually having a specific avatar and the result, which has me, the result has many layers. And I think what you’re tapping into is yeah, they may want to get in better shape by signing up for the gym, but underneath all that, they may want to.

Quote, look good naked or, be more attractive to the opposite to whoever they’re going after or whatever. And it’s, there’s like all this stuff below the surface and the closer you get to that, the stronger your marketing is.

Steven Sauder: Yeah. Yeah. If you, I think that it is the avatar thing is hard to create a good avatar if you don’t truly care about that avatar to begin with.

is, if you look around examples I don’t know if you’re familiar with beehive, like the newsletter software but the guys that created that, they created morning brew and they lived and breathed emails and they know what they’re doing. And the stuff that they’re launching is just like incredibly smart compared to all the other newsletter stuff that I’ve engaged with.

And it, You get this feeling that it’s coming from this very personal place of like I did this thing and it was hard and my goal is to make this thing easy for everybody like I’ve been there and there’s this resin there’s this way that they resonate with their audience that I haven’t seen come from a lot of other other tools.

There’s others out there that are similar, but I’ve, but it’s, I don’t know. It’s interesting.

Chris Badgett: And just a cheat code for that. Some of the most successful people I see with like courses and coaching programs and building communities and stuff, they’re really, their customer avatar is really just helping a previous version of themselves.

So number one, your own story and your own past pain points and everything. So instead of going and trying to find an opportunity in the market. Look in the rearview mirror of your life and, look around and see other people at that spot currently. And that’s a cheat code because you understand it too.

You can identify that person and help find them, but yeah, just to tip.

Steven Sauder: I think then three I think all of us looking back at our future selves that were or our past selves that were struggling with something like, you just want to give that person a hug and be like, man, you’re going to figure it out.

It’s going to be okay. Here’s how, and here’s why. And here’s there’s something that, that connects your soul back to that person. And by being,

Because you have that connection, I think you can create this stuff that just resonates with that person so much deeper without having to like try to come up with some weird cliche avatar to try to fake it or something like that.

Chris Badgett: And that’s why Steven’s starting the through the dip podcast. So go check that out.

He’s been through dips and he’s, knows other people have been through. And he’s curating and looking to help entrepreneurs as they navigate the dips. So that’s a search for through the dip podcast. You can also find Steven at hustlefish.com. Is there anywhere else people can connect with you, Steven?

Steven Sauder: No, yeah, those two places. Through the dip. com, you can sign up with your email address right there, and you’ll get notified when we’re launching our episodes.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thank you for coming on the show, Steven. Really appreciate it. Awesome. Thanks, Chris. Really appreciate the time.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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