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.

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

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s Guide

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.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s Guide

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.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s Guide

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.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s Guide

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

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s Guide

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.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s Guide

The post How to Scale a LMS Website With Lots of Users and Traffic With Rapyd Cloud Hosting appeared first on LMScast.

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.

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

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s Guide

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.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s Guide

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.

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

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s Guide

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.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s Guide

The post Navigating Entrepreneur Dips With Steven Sauder appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode Gina Hoyt, discusses her innovative use of LifterLMS in building a travel agent certification program.

Gina Hoyt is a passionate professional at Avoya Travel Academy, where she is instrumental in developing future travel agents. The academy provides prospective travel agents with a basic education, giving them the know-how to succeed in the field.

Given that the majority of travel agents operate from home as independent contractors, Gina stresses the need of formal training for more sales, larger commissions, and a more seamless entry into the travel sector. Her CLIA and ASTA-recognized certification program offers insights into business setup, industry best practices, and utilizing travel knowledge.

Gina attributes her ability to develop a thorough, user-friendly course to LifterLMS’s rich features, intuitive interface, and complex quizzes, automatic certifications, and wealth of learning materials. Her narrative emphasis.

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

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s Guide

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. Her name is Gina Hoyt. She’s from AvoyaTravelAcademy. com. She’s been using LifterLMS for a bit now. I just found out on multiple sites. But first, welcome to the show, Gina. 

Gina Hoyt: Thanks, Chris. Glad to be here. 

Chris Badgett: I’m excited to chat with you today and learn what you’re up to and what you’ve been building.

Tell us about Voya travel academy.com. What’s the project? What’s going on there? What did you build? 

Gina Hoyt: Sure. The Voya Travel Academy is a. We’ve got an LMS solution that we’re pretty proud of. We’ve implemented a lot of the LFTR, solutions from, oh, the advanced quizzes, the videos. the audio options several different things that we love, but what we’ve built is a course really providing a foundation for travel agent, for a travel agent certification.

So those who are new to our industry who raised their hand and say, Hey, I want to be a travel agent, but don’t necessarily know where to start. This would be the first place to start is, provide getting some sort of education. Hey, when you’re become a travel agent.

And you affiliate with a host agency, you understand what that looks like and what it’s going to take. 

Chris Badgett: How much of the travel agent industry is work from home? 

Gina Hoyt: A lot. So I would say probably 90 percent of travel agents to leisure travel agents. Let me, because there is a difference between leisure and business, but and corporate, but most probably 90 percent of the leisure travel agents work from home today.

Chris Badgett: And tell us about the industry a little bit. Sometimes we think, Oh, the internet, we talked about this before we hit record, but I think it’s cool for people to hear. Like you can shop for a house as an example on Zillow, but you still need a real estate agent to make things happen. I think some might argue people can book flights and hotels online.

Where does the travel agent fit today? Like, how has the industry evolved given the internet and technology? 

Gina Hoyt: Sure. When it comes to air only, and you’re right, we did talk about this a little bit, but if. If somebody was, if I was still booking travel and somebody came to me and said, Hey Gina, I need a domestic flight from Seattle to Vegas.

I’d say, Hey, here’s a website, go check it out and go book your flight. Because at the end of the day, I’m not going to be able to provide much value as a travel agent to an air only. But if you’re talking an international flight or even the whole package, this is really where travel agents, Can show their value in terms of what they can offer, not only with pricing, but in their knowledge, right?

So you, you want to put together an entire package. Let’s say you want, to visit Venice, Rome, Florence, and end up in London for 3 nights and you want that all put together. Can you do that today? yourself? Absolutely. You can. The truth is you can. However, if you’re booking with a travel agent, they’re going to know where to go and they’re going to have their knowledge to draw from in terms of versus you spending hours yourself looking online, right?

And then it’s is that hotel really what it seems like? Where we have a bunch of knowledge that we can draw from and suppliers that give us great values and benefits. And then Very rarely costs you anymore to book with a travel agent. Most people don’t know that or understand that, but our commissions come from the suppliers.

So even if you book with a supplier directly, you’re still paying the commission. You’re just not paying for the support that goes with it. 

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s cool. I feel like that’s a secret of the industry that needs to be out there more so that people know that not just the time savings, but you might even save money.

And, yeah that’s, super valuable. Tell us more about the professional certificate. When people earn that, what do they do with it? How do they think about it? How do you think about it? What is the certification all about? 

Gina Hoyt: So that certification is, It’s both recognized by CLIA, which is Cruise Lines International Association, and ASTA, which is the American Society of Travel Advisors.

We’ve had both of those organizations review our program and give us a thumbs up. They actually both have a some knowledge of what our program is and what it looks like, and the content that we include. When you come out The avoid travel Academy, you’re going to have a really solid foundation in terms of number one.

How do I set up my business? Because again, we talked about 90 percent of travel agents today are work from home, probably very close to that percentage are independent contractors. So they each own and operate their own businesses. But if you don’t understand what that means, you could end up getting yourself into a little bit of trouble on the, and again, there’s nothing to be scared of, right?

It’s just have the knowledge. And that’s what we’re providing in that certification. It’s like, how do, how can you set up your business? What are the different options? What are some of the requirements, is there a requirement industry wide or state wide? in the states that you live in things to look for.

And again, we’re not telling you what to do because you’re going to own and operate your own business. So we can’t however we can provide you some really good insights and suggested best practices in moving forward and what that’s going to look like for you. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. In entrepreneurship, we talk a lot about the ideal customer profile or the avatar.

What type of person, like if you think of the perfect fit person for your program. Is like the perfect travel agent. What were they doing before they made the decision to become a travel agent? And now they’re on this new journey and they’re looking for direction and guidance. Who is that person? If you could paint like a picture of them.

Gina Hoyt: Part of it is, I think that Travel agents can come from just about in any industry, right? We have a lot of health care providers. You know what I mean? That have a lot of people who come from the health care industry or even from an education background but they love to travel. They have that passion and that bug to travel.

And they, love to be of service. Those are two really good qualities. The other piece of that is to never be afraid to keep looking and asking questions. And like you talked to you and I talked about earlier before the show, being that entrepreneur, never being satisfied looking at, okay, yeah, I’m going to do this, but could I do it a little bit better and always keep and keep learning and, I think those are some great qualities of travel agents is they’re, they have the passion and they continue to learn.

Chris Badgett: That makes sense. Yeah, because I’m a traveler. I love traveling. I’ve been to Florence and Nice and the places you were talking about. And I’m like, yeah, if I was going to go back there, I might avoid this thing. I do that thing. And it makes sense that they have to have that travel passion. 

Gina Hoyt: Absolutely.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. Tell us about how you found your way to LFTR LMS when you decided to do this education arm of what you do. 

Gina Hoyt: Sure. Thanks. So we, so there are a lot of, especially post COVID, right? There’s a lot of people who are working from home who didn’t necessarily want to go back into the office, really wanted, they decided that they wanted to don that little entrepreneur hat and, travel is something they wanted to do.

And, We, as a Voya, as a network, years ago, we didn’t affiliate with anybody new to industry, was only experienced only, and there’s a lot of reasons for that, but we wanted to bring that new to travel person in and continue to grow the industry, not only our network, But just the industry overall.

But the biggest thing that what we’ve seen is people with education, some sort of foundational education, their sales are 50 percent higher, their commissions are higher their close rate percentage is higher when they have a solid foundation. So we set out to create a course that can provide that, provide that foundation.

And for me, when I started in this industry, 25 plus years ago I started knowing nothing. And I remember I had interviewed with a agency in the town that I lived in and I came home and my husband said what did they say? And I’m like they offered me the job, but I’m not going to take it. He goes, what are you going to do?

I said, I’m going to open my own. And he goes, okay. And I didn’t know anything about travel. So I made a ton of. And for me, it’s I love being of service. I love helping the next guy, the next, that next person in line who really wants to learn our industry. And so the big thing is you don’t have to make these same mistakes.

Let me help you. Let us help you show you the way, to give you that foundation. Are you going to make mistakes? 100 percent you are, I promise that, but hopefully it’s not as expensive as the ones I made. But anyway, so that’s how we ended up here. How we ended up with LFTR is we looked at several different LMS resources, and I was sharing with you.

I actually seen an advertisement for LFTR. I had never heard of it before, and I went, What is this? And so I started digging in, and I loved the resources that you guys, that LFTR provides, and how easy it was to build and also to teach my team, right? It’s I can teach my team how to maneuver within the software and, they’re not afraid once I show them it’s super simple and there’s, no fear there.

And so those were some really big things for us. It’s can you, can we do what we want to do and can I, is it. Repeatable. Can I show my, can I show my team members? And absolutely. And I, and so thank you. Thank you for that. We love the software. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Was that, was this project your first foray into WordPress or did you have some history with WordPress already?

Gina Hoyt: A little bit of history in WordPress. It’s been years. I, when I had my brick and mortar, I built a website. So that was years ago, by the way. So nothing recent. But I’m pretty persistent. And if I want to do something I tend to eventually figure it out or I’m not afraid to ask questions either.

Chris Badgett: I think you’ve already answered my next question, which was, learning WordPress, I know you had some previous experience, but learning Lifter, there’s like a lot of features and bells and whistles and things to figure out decisions to make. What advice would you have from somebody going into that journey of building an online education website?

From the standpoint that you said you were persistent. So to me, that’s the answer, persistence. But what else would you add around that? 

Gina Hoyt: So for me, Lifter, your team makes so many videos available. And so for me, it was like, I tend. I can read and learn, but if I watch and learn, for me, it’s, that’s how I learn, so I would sit in videos and I would listen, and then I would pause, and then I would try, and then I’d turn it back on, you know what I mean, so again, that persistence, and, but if it was me, if I was recommending somebody, if this is something that you’re looking at, Go look at the videos.

Go watch them. They’re out there. You guys make it available. Thank you. Thank you, by the way, because I could have never done it otherwise. But it’s all there, and that’s how I did it. It was just by that persistence and And watching the things that are available versus saying, Hey, this isn’t available, or I don’t know how to do this.

Go look, it’s there. I promise you. 

Chris Badgett: I think last time I checked, we had 1700 videos on our YouTube channel. And that’s just YouTube. That’s not our documentation and stuff. So that’s, I appreciate you saying that. Are there any features that you like most, or like parts of the software that you or your team likes, or that’s super valuable to the project?

Gina Hoyt: We love being able to use the engagements like the, automatic, certificate, awarding and triggering emails. I’ve literally used all those engagements to do everything. For the team so we don’t have to. I love it. I absolutely love it because that just takes time off of it.

Those are things that we used to do manually and I don’t have to do that anymore. Neither does the team. And so we appreciate that the advanced videos. I love that because somebody wants to plow through a course. And I get, and I understand wanting to go through quickly. I understand it, but I want people to stop, and actually absorb what you’re learning. So we love the advanced videos, the fact that they can’t. They can’t advance without, and we get that all the time. The button’s not active. My first response is, go watch the video. Go watch the video and I promise it’ll appear. So anyway, I mean you guys have, again, you guys have done a great job in terms of making the course layout how to build it.

The course builder is super simple. And then the different features between the advanced videos. There was something else too. I forgot. Anyway. Thank you again. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And what other tools besides Lifter LMS and WordPress do you find mission critical for your online education business?

You mentioned GoDaddy. Do you use them for hosting? 

Gina Hoyt: Okay. Thank you. I was like, what are you talking about? Yeah. Yes. So actually we do use GoDaddy. We’ve got a couple of our product development teams that are considering maybe some other options because like I mentioned we’ve got, we have for three different websites a fourth one that we’re launching right now, getting ready to launch with a new education.

With the potential of bringing a lot more enrollees so we’re just looking at is it. continuing to be our best interest there. Do we want to go someplace else? But some of the other plugins, and I, we try to limit the amount of plugins that we use just because I don’t want any conflicts. But some of the other, We actually use Elementor and Elementor Pro for some of our WordPress features.

So the advanced quizzes, I know you asked what are some of the other things, but that comes from Lifter. So I, while I don’t necessarily use a lot of that feature on the Academy website, And then on two of our other websites that other teams are using, they use the features of the advanced quizzes. So again some great opportunity, that we use there.

And then we also use front end premium or front end admin, excuse me, and then there’s the publish press premium. capabilities pro. So to limit, so like my team, I limit what they can see. If they log into the WordPress website, there’s only certain things that I want them to be able to access. I don’t want them to see everything and be able to maneuver with everything.

So there’s a few different things that we use. 

Chris Badgett: What about, you mentioned videos. What do you do for video usually? Is it mostly you? Is it are you recording the videos in Zoom or ScreenFlow or some Camtasia? What do you use in that department? 

Gina Hoyt: So for our, I have a few videos that I’ve done that I actually record in zoom and I throw them into Camtasia and edit them.

And then other team members, same thing, but we also have some videos from some, of our suppliers because we have some of their certification courses within our program, because our suppliers have seen our product and they’re like, we want our certification program in your academy.

So we pull videos from there. Now we used to house all of our videos in our own, 

Chris Badgett: was it Vimeo or 

Gina Hoyt: it was not Vimeo, but with the advanced videos, we ended up transitioning all of our videos over to Vimeo. So we could use that advanced video feature. Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Okay, that’s awesome. Tell us about just like how you gauge the success of Avoya Travel Academy.

What kind of impact have you been able to have or, maybe a story about somebody’s life that changed because of the training? Just what kind of impact is the platform having? 

Gina Hoyt: For us, what we look at is, okay, so we have a test, we have a test group of students, or excuse me, of new to travel who came to the industry, who had no education, right?

And then we compare those who come through the education, and we compare them post, post graduation, post certification, graduation isn’t the appropriate, certification, And we, compare those two groups in terms of sales and close rate percentages. And as I mentioned earlier, those who take the certification, they have a much stronger base and foundation to begin with their sales, their commissions and their close rate percentage are averaging upwards over 50 percent higher than those who did not take that foundational education.

What that means for somebody, they’re going to stay in our industry longer, right? They’re going to get to do the thing that they visioned, that they had a vision for and that they love doing longer because they’re not going to get so frustrated. That was, I think part of, which was so hard about bringing somebody in new to travel, who doesn’t have a foundation, who doesn’t understand what it means.

It’s though. because there’s not that foundational understanding. They may make a hit, run into a hiccup or a challenge or make a mistake and they’ll turn tuck their tail between their legs and their leave. And it’s no, don’t leave. Let’s walk through and figure out how to make this better.

But we’re able to eliminate some of those before they ever get started. 

Chris Badgett: I want to go back to some, you said earlier you mentioned that you were getting some resources from the industry to include in the training resources. Those is that something you have to license or they’re just happy to give you or how do you sometimes it can be a little overwhelming if we have to create everything ourselves when there’s all this other great stuff out there.

Tell us more about that content. 

Gina Hoyt: So we have Some of our, and if you go to our website, if you look at avoid travel academy. com, you’re going to see sponsored by Norwegian cruise line sponsored by Colette. Those are 2 major industry suppliers who, have allowed us to use some of with, there are, agreements in place on the backside with those 2 suppliers in terms of what that’s going to look like.

So we don’t just go take their content. We have, agreements in place, and then there’s also another. Party, another third party out there that they’ve been in the industry a lot longer than the 25 years I’ve been here. And so we’ve partnered with them as well and have an agreement in place with them and some of their content.

And so they’ve provided us some content. So we’re really pulling content from a lot of different areas. I’ve written and created content. Some of my team has, and then we have industry, other industry people who have. Brought it all together. 

Chris Badgett: I love that. Sometimes it’s not just about being a content creator, but also a curator.

You’re bringing in the and assembling the best possible stuff. 

Gina Hoyt: Absolutely. 

Chris Badgett: Just a quick, fun story sidetrack. I’m sure you mentioned Norwegian cruise lines. 

Gina Hoyt: Are you 

Chris Badgett: familiar with, I’m sure you are like Alaska cruises. 

Gina Hoyt: Yes, been about there about six times, but anyway, go ahead. 

Chris Badgett: So before I did Mercator LMS, I used to work at a helicopter supported sled dog tour business on a glacier above Juneau.

So the cruise ships would come in. Some of those were Norwegian and people would fly up in the helicopter and we’d take them out on sled dog rides. So that’s my old connection to the Norwegian cruise industry. 

Gina Hoyt: Love it. Love it. 

Chris Badgett: Tell us more about I call it the offer stack. So is this like one mega certification course?

Is it a collection of courses? Is it, like what kind of support is included? If somebody has a question as they’re going through it What’s in the stack of the offer? 

Gina Hoyt: So in, we have one course, we do one course, and there’s about a hundred and 19 lessons within that course. So it’s one big one to get through, we give everybody a hundred days to get through the education.

We do have a timeline on there and at the end of the day, it’s if somebody is having a struggle we understand life happens. So it. Reach out to us. We can always work with somebody on that in terms of what that looks like. In terms of support, I have an, I have myself and my team.

We, we support people all the way through. If they have any questions we have a, team email. We ask people to send their questions to the team email. Because if I’m not, if you send an email to me directly or you send an email to directly to one of my team members and let’s say they’re not in the office that day you’re not going to hear back right away where it’s most efficient to send it to our team email.

We pick up the phone, we call people, they can schedule, they can actually schedule. We have a link in all of our emails because we, it’s not just a. Register, take your money and you never hear from us again in that 100 days, you’re going to probably get 9 or 10 emails from the, throughout that process, just touching bases. Hey, we want people to know, look, we’re here. We’re here to help. And we’re here to support you. If you have questions, let us know. So you can call, you can email. You can schedule a call with one of our team members if you have any questions. If something’s not working technically our office hours are Tuesday through Saturday, but I tend to watch emails on Sunday too, just because that’s who I am.

I struggle with walking away. Yeah. So we there’s a ton of support. We’re here to see people succeed not, to take their money, have them register for a course and walk away. You know what I mean? We want to see everybody succeed. 

Chris Badgett: I think that’s fantastic. I’ve done a lot of these interviews and talked to a lot of Lyft Realness users and the ones that are most successful they support their people outside of the content, whatever that means.

You mentioned phone calls and emails, whatever that is. Like people sometimes need a little help along the way, not just access to great content. So my hat’s off to you. You mentioned you had three or four other LMS projects in the works or actively going on. How have you branched out from Avoya travel academy.

com? 

Gina Hoyt: So they’re all industry related and all related back to avoid in some way, shape or form. They are my employer. But we have, like I mentioned, we have the travel Academy. We also have so for. AVOIA as a host agency, the AVOIA network, the AVOIA travel network is a host agency for independent agency owners.

So there’s education that we have support teams that offer education like our early success team. They talk about sales and different things like that. Destinations and so there is a project there where we have a platform where those teams use the lifter software for their that type of education, which is separate from the travel Academy.

And then we have internal training for some of our teams. Some of our, the different support teams for Avoya. We offer, education training for employees. And then we have a fourth one that we’re getting ready to launch. Remember I talked about while we love and we want to provide Avoya and our agents the best possible resources available.

We have a commitment to our industry to the travel industry overall, and there is not a requirement right for somebody to say if you want to be a lawyer, you got to go to school for a lawyer, you know what I’m saying, if they’re in the travel industry, there’s not a mandated certification that you have to do.

But what we find is, again, and I’ve keep touching on this, is those who are in our industry have, who have a foundation, who understand what it means. They’re much more successful. And so we really feel oblig, I don’t know if obligated is the right word, but we have a desire to, help our industry overall.

So we’re actually providing a white label product. Some of our other host agencies in, the industry will be able to provide their agents and their new to network agents and education resource as well, because for whatever reason, maybe they don’t have the resources available to create it or the team, the manpower, whatever the reason is, and we’ll be able to, bring that to the table for them and it’ll be branded with their information.

Yeah, it’s pretty exciting. 

Chris Badgett: I love that. You’re keeping the focus on the industry and the the travel agents at the heart of that. And, and really getting as much impact as you can out there, whether it’s your team, Avoya, the industry, it all works together and everybody wins.

It’s not, I call it the infinite game, which is, somebody doesn’t have to lose for somebody else to win. And it’s just. Let’s help everybody, basically. 

Gina Hoyt: And, I was always taught the sun shines for everyone. You know what I’m saying? There’s enough to go around. And that’s even when I owned my, my, my travel agency and I would hear people get frustrated, I would talk to another agent.

This customer went and booked so and and I’m like, you have to remember the sun shines for everyone. Maybe there was a better connection there. It doesn’t matter. There’s going to be somebody else coming. You know what I mean? And, we really want to provide. Again, the sunshine’s for everyone and we want to provide something industry overall that, that benefits all of us.

So 

Chris Badgett: What’s, your vision for the future? You’ve been doing this for a bit, like you’re doing a lot already, but is there anywhere else you’re, wanting to go with this or what, is your plan to make Voyage Travel Academy even better? 

Gina Hoyt: So future goals, we’re not there yet, is we’re going to provide some ongoing education.

So some additional courses. Again, we’re not there yet. I’ve got my head in too many other arenas right this second. But as soon as those calm down and we get those launched and implemented, then we’ll start doing some research for some additional certifications. For again, not just our, the agents in our network, but overall industry wide.

Chris Badgett: I love that. And it’s also what’s interesting about your story is this industry is not like heavily controlled or regulated. It’s not like you have to have certain training or continuing ed, but you’ve realized that, hey, these people need this. I’ll provide it. People are using it. They’re getting paid 50 percent better or doing better in the career they’ve chosen.

I think it’s really cool. It’s not yeah. It’s not like you’re asking for permission. You’re just doing the thing that this, these people need and helping improve their lives. That’s really cool. Fun. Final question for you. So in leisure travel, I know there’s a broad question, but what are some counterintuitive underappreciated trips that people could do or ways to think about vacation?

That from your time in the industry, you realize, Hey, there’s a lot of opportunity off the beaten path over here, or maybe try this, but do this differently. I’m just looking for some insight from the inside of travel. What are some counterintuitive insights or little known secrets? 

Gina Hoyt: Oh my. 

Chris Badgett: There’s probably a lot.

Gina Hoyt: There’s a, so my head goes, which part of the world, right? It’s because to me, the world is like a candy store, right? And it’s for me, I walk into this candy store and I go, Oh, where do I start? Which piece do I want first? Let’s 

Chris Badgett: divide it into three parts. Let’s say, North America, Europe, Asia.

If you were to do those three, what are some off the beaten path things or little known, insights? 

Gina Hoyt: Asia, Vietnam. I, oh, Halong Bay. If you stay in a junk for a couple nights out on Halong Bay, I know One of the state colleges in the state that I live in they have a business group that goes, I don’t know if it’s every other year, the students in their business degree program, when I was selling travel, I actually had a friend who was in that course for a while.

And so she came to me and I started doing that every other year for them. And we would put some of the most amazing trips together coming down through central Vietnam and on the coastline and Halong Bay, by far. over and over every year was like the winner. People loved being out on a junk for a couple of nights and having that experience.

So if you’re going to Asia and you have an opportunity to do Vietnam go to Hong Bay. Okay. So there’s that piece. Europe. I know this is, there’s so many, I love Europe. Holy cow, there’s a lot of really cool things and I could go on and on. But one of my favorite cities in, which is probably not most, but I love Amsterdam, I love the canals.

I love the whole, that whole thing. Rome is another one, but there’s a lot of things to go see and do. Aye yai While Greece is amazing, I hate the flight. I’m West Coast, so for me trying to get there I tend to stay away just because of the flight. You know what I mean? I struggle with flights, but Africa, if you ever want to do a safari in Africa, make sure you do one that has a hot air balloon.

The hot air balloons over the Serengeti. Nothing like it. Again, something little, not everybody, not, you can’t book it through everybody, but if you find, if you’re going to look into that, being sure and do the hot air balloon over the Serengeti, it’s an amazing, it’s amazing. North America.

Holy cow. I love Hawaii, but that’s such a, for me, that’s I know I’m West Coast. So again, for me it’s like, a bread and butter thing. When I was selling travel, everybody does it, train travel, TransCanada on VRail is amazing with what the domed cars and the meals and nothing like it.

So that’s really cool going East Coast to West Coast. And I’ve been anyway, so I don’t know if I answered your questions, but I’ve. 

Chris Badgett: You did. And I’ll, let me actually throw two more on real quick. What about Mexico? 

Gina Hoyt: What about it? I love Mexico. If you’re looking for all inclusive and and I hear this a lot, cause I, I have a lot of friends who hear, Oh, don’t go to Mexico because of this and because of that.

And I’ll, tell you the same thing. I tell, would tell them is that As long as you stay in the areas you’re supposed to be in, you’re going to be fine. Do you know what I mean? It’s you’re going to be fine, but if you decide to venture out on your own and go into in into an area that you shouldn’t be in, you might run into some trouble, but I hate to tell you, you’re going to find that in the United States anywhere.

So any major city that you go to. Yeah, it’s fine. And there’s a lot of great, there’s a ton of great resorts, all inclusive resorts. If that if, my kids, they went for their honeymoon last year. I was a couple years ago, not my honeymoon, but I’ve been married for a lot of years. But we go. So I’m not afraid to be in Mexico. We find it safe. Like I said, as long as you’re going to the areas, And you stay in the areas that you’re to be in. 

Chris Badgett: And last one, I may have a trip coming up to the Philippines. Is there anything, do you have any intel on the Philippines? 

Gina Hoyt: In terms of Philippines, what, what type of travel are you looking for?

Chris Badgett: Let’s say I was at a business conference in Manila and then wanted to take a week or so at a more, beach, low key environment. 

Gina Hoyt: So are you wanting to just go to a resort and stay, or are you wanting to maybe do a tour and see more? What, do you know what I mean? There’s so many, it’s not just a, Hey, I want to go here.

What do you got? There’s really an entire conversation for somebody, for a travel agent, to provide you what you, want. There, there’s an extensive conversation that needs to be had in terms of what are your expectations? If you have this thing of I want to visit this, and this, but you say, I want to go to the Philippines and stay at a beach resort and somebody gives you that, you’re going to be highly disappointed because that’s not what you had in mind.

Yeah, it’s not a simple question of go here. Unfortunately, I’m sorry. 

Chris Badgett: I love that. Yeah, so we, as travelers, we need to do more research and at least get directionally, not just like the geography location, but what’s the experience we’re going for? What things do we want to see? What types?

Gina Hoyt: Yeah, and I think that a travel agent who has a really good, solid foundation, they’re going to be able to, start asking you those questions, right? They’re going to know, hey, this is a great destination. Now, share with me some of the are you going to be traveling with family with children?

Is it just you? Or what are some of the experiences you want? Then they can take all of that information. put it together. I refer to it as a puzzle. You know what I mean? And I put all, I used to take all this information and put it together like a puzzle and then I’d provide you, okay, here, this is what the puzzle can look like.

What are your thoughts? What do you think? You do, is there anything in here that I, didn’t include that you want to see or is there too much and we need to take some of it out, some of it out. So anyway. It’s a big puzzle. It’s lots of fun. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. That’s Gina Hoyt.

She’s from avoyatravelacademy. com. Is there anywhere else people can connect with you or any final words you have? 

Gina Hoyt: Sure. On the Academy, you can always send me an email, which is just Gina. Hoyt at avoyatravel. com. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome, Gina. Thank you for coming on the show and thank you for being a shining example of what I call the education entrepreneur and your persistence and all the value you’re creating in the world, helping in this industry and helping your team and all of that.

It’s I love seeing what you’re up to. So thank you. 

Gina Hoyt: Thanks for having me, Chris.

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.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s Guide

The post How Gina Hoyt From Avoya Travel Leverages a LMS To Grow Business appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Aaron talks with Chris Badgett about AI for course creators. He shares the journey of developing DocsBot.ai, from creating a proof-of-concept chatbot trained on WordPress documentation to building a powerful tool that enables companies to leverage their own documentation for content creation, customer service, and more.

Aaron Edwards is the creator of DocsBot.ai, a cutting-edge chatbot driven by AI that improves document management and business assistance. Aaron explains the fundamental idea of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which blends generative.

By giving the AI context, real-world data can help it provide precise, well-founded responses. This method tackles a prevalent issue with AI, which is that it “hallucinates” or fabricates knowledge. By giving the AI context, real-world data can help it provide precise, well-founded responses. This method tackles a prevalent issue with AI, which is that it “hallucinates” or fabricates knowledge.

Data from the actual world can assist the AI give accurate and well-founded answers by providing context. A common problem with AI is that it “hallucinates” or creates knowledge, which this approach addresses.

This podcast offers insightful information on the technological foundations of DocsBot.ai and how it can be used to many businesses, from agencies to course developers, to enhance assistance, productivity, and content reuse.

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

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s Guide

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 my friend Aaron Edwards. He’s from DocsBot. ai. That’s DocsBot. ai. Go check this out. This is not going to be your average episode where we talk about chat GVT or some basic AI concepts, although we are going to talk about that stuff some.

We’re going to go deep. Aaron has been deep in the weeds with WordPress, AI, software development, solving problems for business owners. We’re going to get into it today. This is going to be a fascinating episode, but first welcome back on the show, Aaron.

Aaron Edwards: Thank you for having me, Chris.

Chris Badgett: Good to see you again.

I always love running into you because you’re always up to like really interesting, cutting edge things. Whether it was NFT stuff in the past, solving challenges. With the media library and uploads and stuff like that. I’ve watched you over the past couple, maybe several years launched DocSpot.

So we’re going to focus on the AI component both for WordPress professionals and agencies, but also for course creators. But first, just at a high level, what is DocSpot. AI?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, sure. The idea is let me go back. I’ll tell my story a little bit with it. As you said, I just love playing with the latest new technology.

So obviously as this generative AI stuff started coming to the forefront I was just diving in and building things, playing around with it, learning the latest Tech and stuff like that. There was images and I know we talked about in the previous episode and now doc spot and what I started out is this new technique called retrieval augmented generation.

So, chat GPT dropped in what is end of 2022, I think. And it like wowed everyone, obviously, like we’re like, Oh my gosh. But people quickly realized that what hallucinations were. So these AI models are trained to be like super, super helpful and great assistance so much so that they’ll just make stuff up to make you happy. There’s a new in that time during that fall, there’s a new technique some papers and things that have come out where People had realized that, okay, if you provide like chat GPT with context, for example, you paste in a page of text or whatever about your product or something like that you paste that in there and then you ask a question about that content that you pasted in.

Now it has like facts to ground its answers. So that way it can actually like. Provide like a accurate and valid answer by summarizing or extracting information from that text that you pasted in this context. So that’s what. This new technique called retrieval augmented generation is.

And so, I just was playing with that and I thought this would be really cool just as a proof of concept. And to learn myself is to build a chat bot that was trained on all the WordPress documentation. So I went and I like built like a web crawler that went and crawled all the documentation pages on wordpress.

org. Whether it’s the developer side or like the user kind of side, all that kind of stuff. And then. into a, it’s called a vector database, which is just a way to store that training data using AI embeddings it’s called, which is a way to do semantic search so that if you search for you give a question and it’s able to identify texts that may not have the exact same words in the question, but I do.

but able to identify pieces of text that are the same like semantic meaning or close semantic meaning. So basically that way you can transform a user’s question into an actual whatever the most relevant document pieces of documentation are to answer that question. And so I launched that and it was called, um, chat WP and it’s still online.

It’s a, let me see if I remember the URL even as WP docs dot chat. And that’s still like a free tool that’s out there. Ask me anything about WordPress. And so the kind of ideal of that was, actually I’ll share my screen. Is that all right?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and if you’re listening to this on the podcast, just head on over to the Lifter LMS YouTube channel and look for Aaron Edwards, and you’ll find what we’re looking at here.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, so wpdocs. chat. Just a simple chat interface, where you could ask like questions about WordPress and then it goes. And then from that training data, it’s able to provide like. Output and examples and things like that, even code snippets and stuff that is learned from the documentation.

So that was my my learning experience and proof of concepts. And then what I did is people like were super excited about it. So I slapped a little a waitlist signup form at the bottom of the page. And I said, Hey, if you’re interested in this for your business. Let me know. And I just put a little survey there what are like the key features that you need, that kind of thing.

If you’re trying to use this for your own business and I got a lot of like good responses on that, like a good wait list and the thought, all right, this is like somewhat proven that there’s some desire, for businesses to have something like this. And I spent a month working nights all night, to put out duck spot, so that was the product, which has been going well.

It’s grown a lot, it’s my full time job now. It’s been More than a year and a half. And basically what we do is we make it super easy for businesses to train their support. It can be used internally, like for your team to be able to get answers quickly from your existing documentation, files SOPs, that kind of thing it can be used.

Some of our customers use it. For, the classic content generation or repurposing. So they have their chatbot trained with all their marketing content or whatever. And they can use that to generate, ad copy or different things like that. Or if their agency, they might have a chatbot trained for each of their clients.

And they’ll use that for content repurposing a lot of different use cases.

Chris Badgett: So what was the surprise to you as people started using it? Like who was like the main group and then what were some surprising use cases that started popping up?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. I think the biggest thing, and this is really what led it to it being a success is somehow some Japanese Twitter tech influencer.

Like from my chat bot, like in Japanese and just shared a video of it, answering questions in Japanese. And that went totally viral in Japan. It was so crazy. I like woke up in the morning and suddenly. I had 100 support tickets in Japanese and my servers are crashing. And I was getting all these signups and things like that.

I am really stressed testing it. So it’s like, What is going on? Yeah, so it went viral in Japan, which is pretty crazy. So still probably maybe a third of my customers are Japanese. And that really led me down the path of doing the work that kind of sets us apart from a lot of our competitors and that making sure that it’s very like multilingual and compatible with non English languages.

Most of all the AI announcements and benchmarks and all that stuff that you see. online and all the hype. It’s all English. Like you don’t actually realize it that, that, okay. Yeah. This tiny model that’s like amazing that like Lama or whatever that Lama three or whatever, that meta put out it sounds like so amazing, but you realize, Oh, it’s only trained on The four most common like Western languages, and the benchmarks suck on other languages.

So that’s been a really big thing, like from prompts optimization on the backend to making sure it like can detect languages properly and answer and whatever the language that the user asked questions, that kind of thing. It’s taken a lot of like work and even ongoing as I add new features, making sure that It works for all those use cases,

Chris Badgett: tell us more about like the training data or the source pages.

So for example, if I’m an agency, I may have a bunch of case studies and service offerings and a blog, bunch of blog posts about how I approach my agency work or my clients, or podcaster and I have a lot of podcast episodes. Or I’m a, I have a product that has support library of content. Like, how do people think about source pages and what could be sources?

And at what point, how much source content do you need for this to get really valuable?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. That’s like one of the harder things that we do is like the actual like code to create these like chatbots and do the retrieval augmented generation, and that’s all open source. There’s all kinds of.

Like things that you can do and probably spend that up. If you’re a developer and just a few hours, something that kind of working as a proof of concept, but really the hard part is like figuring out how to take like real world data that businesses have. Whether it’s course content, as you mentioned, documentation, crawling a website, all that kind of thing and transforming that into something that the bot understands and is able to use to answer questions accurately, without hallucinations.

So we developed a lot of different,

Source pages or ways to, Import information to your bot. So whether it’s like uploading document files PDFs or docs, PowerPoint, Excel, whatever it is, each of those things, we have to have different logic for how we parse that and how we divide it up into pieces.

That that the LLM, the large language model AI can understand. So there’s a lot of work in that. You can train it just with like FAQs that are simple to answer. You can have a crawl your entire website, like sitemap, that kind of thing. And connected to tons of cloud sources, to your notion, confluence, Salesforce, get book places where you already have documentation stored, or if you’re using like Zen desk or help scout or intercom fresh desk, like a lot of these popular, like support tools that maybe you have your knowledge base in, or you have your previous Customer support, history tickets in there, and you can use all that to train your bot so that it can answer questions into the future.

So we’re always adding like new data sources. A fun one that I worked on last month is YouTube. Yeah, it sounds awesome. You’re mentioning that you have all these YouTube videos, right? , so being able to train your bot just by dropping in a YouTube video, URL or like a URL to a playlist of a.

Of, up to a hundred different videos. And then it goes through and actually had to, this is the hard part. YouTube does not like scraping. So it’s literally like people don’t realize that’s the hard part. I had to use like a whole network of residential proxies, so it’s actually going through like people’s home computer to scrape the subtitles from YouTube and then use that to train the bot so that you can chat with your YouTube videos.

And and even as you’re chatting with them, it like provides source links to where it got the answer. So it’ll actually link to the correct second in the video where it pulled that answer from which is fun.

Chris Badgett: Very cool. In terms of humans. Potentially being concerned about I don’t want this AI to speak for me, like how what are the options in terms of just cut it loose and let it talk to anybody versus a human reviews before it gets communicated?

Like, how do you think about that moderation aspect?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, I think and a lot of our customers. They’re using it for frontline customer support. So tier one. So if you think about it, first of all, if you have a business, that customers never read the documentation, right? A

Chris Badgett: lot of our support is here’s the link to the doc.

Exactly.

Aaron Edwards: Yes. That’s whatever, 75 or something percent of the average company support is like here’s the link to the document where they answer that question for you, and in the, Previously, there’d be things like search tools and stuff try to identify that to try to prevent tickets being created, deflection, we call it but why not have the same thing that Google does now when you Google something and it gives an AI answer by looking at the top results and summarizing that into a succinct answer instead of having to go to all these pages and read and figure out how to answer your question.

That’s what we do. You take all the existing information that you’ve already written at some point, that’s already been recorded at some point in your documentation or support history or whatever, or YouTube demo videos, whatever it may be. And provide like an instant, like quick answer to them.

That’s grounded in that truth of your training data and also provides links to where it got that information. So they could click out and. And verify that if they want to or whatever. So yeah, that’s one side of it. And I think that these models are definitely well proven to be good enough for that kind of tier one support.

And I’m surprised like what it can answer too. So even like my bot is trained on all my like developer documentation for APIs and things like that. So I find myself like asking questions about how do I give me an example code for how I integrate my widget with Zendesk, And it literally both reads like my documentation, but it’s actually like performing logic and reasoning as well after reading that, just like a human would to generate new answers.

It’s not just copying, copying and pasting verbatim which is pretty amazing that these AI models are capable of doing that reasoning. So that even gets you more than what you’d say is the tier one support, because it’s not just. Not just linking to documentation, but it’s actually able to do some reasoning to

Chris Badgett: that’s very cool.

I know one of the things that I think about when, looking at AI tools is cost and we don’t have to get into the specifics of your pricing because I know it might change. But As the better AI gets, it might require more resources, which could in theory, make it more expensive. Or you need a large training set.

Like, how do you think about pricing and making it work for everybody? The the business owner, you making sure it’s a profitable venture. Like, how do you think about that?

Aaron Edwards: Man, when I launched the same week that the. Chat GPT API became available which was great timing, right? But the costs for that, like even the old, like 3.

5 model, chat, GPT model it would cost, I think three or four cents per question per user question. Now, if you’re getting like 10, 000 questions a month or

something that adds up fast, right? But at the same time, if you compare that to hiring a support person, the answer, those Whatever, 70 percent of those 10, 000 questions. That’s still super cheap, right? It was hard thing to, to factor in. And so what I actually did in the beginning is we did bring your own API key.

So you could actually put in your key from open AI, like into our dashboard and we’d save it like encrypted and use that At cost. So instead of reselling credits or something like that, like some of our competitors do with a markup, we just basically at cost, for the actual processing.

And what’s amazing is in, in less than two years, the The price for how much power you get, like from the AI model has literally dropped more than a hundred times. It’s yeah, it’s been crazy. And as a business who’s like trying to figure out like my pricing models and things like that, and how to charge.

That’s been great both for my customers who are like bringing their own key, but now I’m able to provide access like included to make it simpler for people to get started. They don’t have to have their own key, so like I heard, I think it was

said that if you’re building products on AI, like it’s changing so fast and its capabilities are changing so fast, you need to be building like on the cutting edge to where right now. It’s seems super expensive or super like impossible for it to do. Because it’s just change every two to three months.

It’s like a new model comes out two to three times price drop. It’s amazing.

Chris Badgett: Help us understand like the models in the background are you leveraging open AI or you’re leveraging llama, a combination of stuff? Like how does it, like what powers all this?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, right now we’re using only a open AI models just cause they have the best, like developer ecosystem and things like that.

We are playing with other models like Gemini and Llama. Maybe, like I said, there’s still weaknesses there for other languages. So that’s one of the things that we have to test heavily is we want to support having a chat bot in Japanese, right? And that it’s going to be able to, no matter what language the user asks a question, that it’s able to still find the right documentation, even though maybe your documentation is in English.

If someone asks a question in Japanese, it should be able to use AI to find the relevant documentation and provide an accurate answer to the user. And so for that, you need some of these larger models that are, have much more training data from other languages than English. So right now that’s the GPT 4.

0. That’s what kind of like our workhorses. So food like for free, like along with your plan. And that works for almost all use cases and it’s super fast and it’s super good. Multilingual as well. And then if you like, you want Much more advanced reasoning, like to where it can maybe do some custom coding and things like that as part of its answers.

Then you could jump up to the full, like GPT 4. 0 model, which has dropped down in price substantially to, it still costs less than one cent per question, more like 0. 5 really. So super cost effective. And they just keep getting more and more powerful.

Chris Badgett: Could you describe to the layman, just to highlight the rate of change with AI what’s the difference with 4.

0 in OpenAI versus 3. 5 or Turbo or whatever came before?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah a lot of it’s like proprietary, so they don’t tell us like all the technical details you can infer. There’s been a lot of new inventions. So first of all, was just like the amount of data is trained on, right? Like call that parameters, like how many parameters, that’s the size of the model.

And so like you had Like GPT two, I think. And then GPT three which is like the first ones that they had like an API. If you were really lucky, you could get a key to use that one. And that’s what some of the early like content creation things, um, used and then 3. 5 was basically, they took that same model and they did what’s called RLHF, which is basically they they Took had humans, right?

A bunch of okay, here’s the message. And then here’s what a good response is for that. And so they hired, armies of people and in Africa and other third world countries that speak English and other data set online to do that reinforcement learning on top of the existing model, which is basically where the invention of chat GPT came from.

So instead of being something where you had to figure out these weird Ways of prompting it crazily to where it like completes, like what you started. Now you can just give any kind of instruction and it just knows how to follow that instruction and provide a good output. So that didn’t really change the size of the model.

It just made it much more useful to the average user. And then you had the next big jump in model size and that was GPD four. And they say that went from GPD three is probably something like four or 500 Billion parameters. I think they estimate maybe three or 400 billion parameters.

And GPD four is probably like closer to 2 trillion. Wow. Yeah. And that’s after being pruned and cleaned up and that kind of stuff. It’s more like a tenfold increase, in size. And so that’s why it’s so much more expensive and slower. Cause it’s got to run on a whole cluster of 20, 000 GPUs, because it uses so much memory.

To do all that kind of stuff. And then I’ll put on top of that, then they’re able to do what’s called distillation, which is where you take that big model and you pull out by using like the reinforcement learning and things like that training, what’s the most useful. Parts to you, so it may not have the widespread knowledge from all that training that pulled in, but all the things that people most commonly ask, or most commonly use it for logic, it kept only those parts so you can have a 10 times smaller model that was trained that was distilled from the big one.

I’m just pulling out the most useless things. And that’s what GPT 40 mini is which is like their most cost effective model. It’s super, super fast, super inexpensive, but still very powerful, even in other languages.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And Aaron, while I’ve got you an AI expert and who’s great at teaching and communicating this stuff.

Help me understand the buzz around two concepts. I’m not sure if they’re related or not, but one is having a large context window and the other is chain of thought reasoning. What are those?

Aaron Edwards: Okay. They’re not like necessarily related, but the context window is basically like How much text or video or whatever the input, how much the AI model can handle at once.

Chris Badgett: If you’re using chat, GBT, sometimes you’re like, you try to copy paste and it’s too long or whatever.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. Yeah. That kind of thing. And that’s why we do what my business does is called retrieval augmented generation. It’s like when it was GPT. Context window was 4000 tokens which a token is just like a piece of text.

Like the average word is like four tokens, I think. If you think about that and so you can imagine, okay, you can only post. Roughly around 1000 words or whatever into there as part of your question and also that usually includes the response to. So there’s a input context window and an output one, how much text they can generate.

So that kind of limits you, like how much you can put in, especially when you’re trying to answer questions from your documentation. I just crawled your website and there is what was it like almost 2000 URLs, and all the content from that that’s a lot, right? You couldn’t paste all that into chat GPT to ask questions about it, right?

Chris Badgett: But you can with DocSpot.

Aaron Edwards: ai. Yes, exactly. Because we pre process all that into getting rid of all the extra stuff and just keeping like the important chunks of text and trying to keep the chunks semantically relevant to where you’re not cutting off information between them. And then when a user asks a question, we actually search to find the most relevant pieces.

And that’s what is put in the context window for the model. But there has been. There’s been a lot of doubts if that’s like the best technique as these context windows getting bigger. So now you have GPT 4. 0, the context window is 128, 000 tokens. So that’s a big jump from 4, 000, right? The problem is you got to pay for all those tokens, right?

Cause the cost is like per token, and it’s slightly less for the input versus the output, but still that adds up a lot. So you don’t want every time you ask it or a user asks a question. To have to paste in that whole thing and pay for all that each time, you know, and there are techniques around that, like opening.

I just last week announced prompt caching. And I know Google has that and Anthropic has that now too. They’re a little bit harder to use, but basically if you’re asking the same question or at least the beginning of it. Over and over multiple times in five to 10 minutes, then it actually caches a big chunk of that’s reused each time.

And by doing that, I think that you save 50 percent on those tokens. So there are techniques around that, but still it’s inefficient to paste everything in there, but it is really useful for some things. Like I love using a Gemini. They have a 2 million in context window, which is huge. You can paste the whole book in there, right?

and do Q& A or summarization or whatever over the entire book without having to do what we do, like the reg. And the same thing like with Gemini, you can do like a video Or a bunch of images all at once because their window is so big. It’s expensive, but you can do like certain tasks that you couldn’t do before.

So we’ll see these context windows keep getting bigger and prices drop. And they introduce things like caching. I think these like chatbots and things like this for our use case are going to get even more accurate because we’ll be able to pass. Passing even more information.

Chris Badgett: And how about chain of thought reasoning, or is that a bigger advance from autocomplete or how do you, how would you describe it?

Cause obviously we want like the AI to be as good or smarter than,

Aaron Edwards: basically, like some people do

Tells it to think carefully, and how to think then it actually somehow does that internally before it gives an answer. So it’ll be like something like, all right, divide the problem into 10 steps for how you’ll solve it. And then think about if those are good steps for solving this particular problem.

And then as you generate the output, compare it to these like rules to see if that’s a good output, and it’s not like necessarily doing that internally. It’s just Telling it how to think makes it think better,

which

Aaron Edwards: is weird, right? It’s like those hacks like where people just start, Oh, if you say I’m going to get fired, if you don’t give a good answer, then it gives a better answer, these weird little quirks in the system that people like didn’t realize it’s a little bit like that.

So that’s what the chain of thought is you provide like a specific like prompt template like that, and then it. Can do a better job of more advanced like reasoning answers. And then what open AI did is they just released a new model called Oh one, if you’ve heard of that, and basically what they did is they baked in that chain of thought into the model.

So instead of having to prompt that each time, the model has actually been fine tuned with a whole bunch of examples of chain of thought. I don’t know, like really. Really advanced chain of thought prompt and then how and then the output of how it would develop that and then what the final output shown to the user should be and then they passed in whatever 100, 000 examples of that they had generated or compiled.

And use that to fine tune the model. So now it does that chain of thought internally, but on its own. So that gives you much more accurate, like things, especially if you’re wanting to do things like math or coding or it’s great if you’re trying to do something like, okay, this is. Here’s my guidelines of for how this entire like proposal should be laid out.

The outline and all the things and the logic and everything. Now here’s, I pasted in all the information, now I want you to compile that into this beautiful report. That’s 10 pages long, right? So instead of trying to just one shot that using that, Oh, one model, it’s actually does all that thinking behind the scenes and that means it’s slow because it’ll literally say, it’s like thinking about this.

Considering this, whatever, it can take five minutes sometimes for really advanced job you give it to you for it to do all that internal thinking before it spits out the final product. So it’s really cool, but it’s not like great for like customer support or chatbots to where you, you want to answer quickly.

But it is very good for things that require a lot of like complexity and thinking and reasoning to generate a good output.

Chris Badgett: And that five minutes may be like a year of human time, right? Let’s talk about something really to, for the course creator folks.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah,

Chris Badgett: there’s a lot, there’s courses and content, but there’s also coaching.

So let’s say somebody has been YouTubing on a given topic for years, or they’ve been podcasting on it for years or blogging about it, or they have a course library on their website. How could they use dark spot AI to. Answer questions, but also in more of a coaching context, so essentially a subject matter expert could turn their body of work into a like a digital mentor or coach.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, that’s actually a great idea. I really have been wanting to play around with use cases for LMS. Cause as you mentioned, I think that is really like cool way of doing it, different than just customer support or whatever, being able to chat with, or have that kind of conversation with the course content.

So there’s the one thing to where obviously it’d be like user initiated. It’d be really fun to play around with ways to have the chat bot initiate things. It’s not a

Chris Badgett: process of what’s your biggest challenge and

Aaron Edwards: right. Yeah. That kind of thing. And perform more like reasoning things, even generating like quizzes on the fly or something like that.

Would be cool.

Chris Badgett: Or even prescribing sometimes it’s a problem. It becomes a problem when you actually have too much content and then a student or a client comes in and they’re overwhelmed. So one of the things is just like helping people find the stuff that’s most related to their biggest.

Your challenge.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. And that we do very. Efficiently, as it is. But one of the cool things about DocSpot is you can embed it anywhere, we provide like a simple like chat widget that you can stick on your website, but we have a full featured API. So we have people like we have WordPress plugin authors that have it like built into the dashboard of the plugin.

That’s pretty cool. To where, yeah. So to where users can. Quickly, get a answer to a question about how to use the plugin and you can even pass in like custom metadata. So the chat bot can know, okay, what page it’s on, like what settings page or different things like that. Or you can pass in just random metadata, like, the, obviously the user’s name.

It can personalize responses or maybe like what plan they’re on, that kind of stuff, you know, the links to get to certain pages that are like to manage their account or manage their orders and WooCommerce or whatever it may be. You can pass all that in as metadata, as context to the chat, so that the bot is able to answer user questions, not just from your documentation, but from personalized metadata about the user and their state in your application.

So something like that would be really useful, like for Lifter LMS or whatever In courses. So it can know section of the course it’s on, like maybe what they’ve completed, different things like that, as well as being able to actually chat with the video content or chat with the course content and that kind of things.

Yeah.

Chris Badgett: This concept of a AI tutor is a big deal. Khan Academy, that guy, I know he’s done some stuff with his body of work, but in the LMS space, we’re all chasing that AI tutor, which is. Ideally would be, could be proactive, not just reactive, like we talked about with coaching versus retrieval or reacting.

Yeah. We can’t do an AI, or sorry, go ahead. Did you have something else?

Aaron Edwards: No.

Chris Badgett: We can’t do an AI podcast without addressing like fear or concern with AI. Like, how do you think about the future? Are you worried about AI taking over? For me, it seems what happens when we, when AI becomes more intelligent than the smartest human, I would argue maybe that’s already happened.

Like, how do you think about the future, particularly with the rate of change?

Aaron Edwards: I’m not that old, but I feel like I’ve lived through at least three or four major technology waves where people said, this is going to destroy society or whatever it may be, take all our jobs, and I think the pattern has always been the same, like with new technology, new tools, it just makes us more efficient.

Obviously there’s, but just like any other tool, whether it’s technology, whether it’s a gun, whether it’s money, it just like accelerates people’s base tendencies, like for good or bad, things who use for good or bad For AI, obviously like the fear is, Oh, it’s going to like, obviously the fear is like replacing jobs.

And I’m torn on this because literally my business right now is like to help replace jobs, you have a support bot that can handle like 70 percent of your tickets granted, it’s probably like tier one, so those are the people that are going to get eliminated.

First, the ones with the lowest like capability or education or that kind of things if that happens. But also it makes lives a lot. Easier for the other workers, because they don’t have to answer those boring, repetitive questions or tasks or things like that.

Chris Badgett: And if you’re using it for pre sales, like you might actually start selling more product, which is going to require more support because people don’t have to wait to get an answer about.

Will this work for me? And that’s true.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. Or other marketing use cases. Like I use my custom trained chat bot for when I get like a lead, like someone signs up, like gives them their email or whatever on the site. I actually have the chat bot go and read their website, their business website.

Oh,

Aaron Edwards: and then use that, pass it to, My train chat bot and say, okay, I want you to draft this like really bespoke custom email. That’s recommending all the specific ways my product can be used for their business. So it writes like a totally personally, way better than I ever could with an hour of research, right?

That’s giving them specific things like, Oh, here’s how you can use a chat bot for your carwash network,

Chris Badgett: yeah. Super contextual.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. So it allows like mass personalization. So I think it’s going to lock more things. I think just like other technology, it’s, I think for the most part is just going to be making users more efficient, making them able to achieve more.

I think obviously it will replace some jobs, but it creates new ones. Just like we’ve seen with every new technology. So I think instead of spending your time, like being scared, I think it’s a lot better to spend your time learning. Yeah. Playing the playground. Yeah. The way you succeed in this world of ours, and this has been true for a long time is learning how to learn.

So that means staying on top of whatever the latest technology or developments are playing with that, figuring out how to leverage that and use it in your workflows and your business, um, in your career, there’s that classic quote that your job might not be replaced by AI, but it’ll be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI.

Yeah,

Aaron Edwards: and I love that quote because I think it’s very true, at least right now. Maybe someday we get to that point where, like the AI takes over everything and no one has to work anymore or something. I don’t know, I don’t really see that happening. And I think the same pattern is going to replay itself.

Like things get more efficient, new jobs that no one ever imagined, are created. So I’m a bit of an accelerationist in that. Absolutely.

Chris Badgett: Can you final thing prepare that demo where people can talk to the AI? And as Aaron’s getting that ready think about this idea that somebody could talk to your website just using voice potentially in languages.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, so this is very This is like my weekend project that I’ve been hacking together. But if you, I don’t know if you knew, but open AI just released their advanced voice mode, like both in chat, GPD plus, where you can play around with it. But last week they released an API for it. So you can actually have the real time, like conversations with AI.

And what makes this different than before is before you would have to you asked a question, it would have to first run it through a model to turn that audio into text, right? Then it would pass that text to chat, GBT, which would provide an answer in text. And then it would have to turn that text back into voice again.

latency there. Because you’re doing like three different conversions. And so like a lot of big gaps and things like that to make it just really not feel like a phone call or not feel like a real person. So their new real time API, which they just released. I was just playing with connecting that to DocSpot cause I want to create like voice agents so you can connect your phone number to it, or you can add a little widget like this that I have right here on your website.

To talk like to a human representative, human sounding representative. Obviously there’s a lot of UX things to solve. Right now there’s like a bit of a pause while it’s looking at data to answer a question, which I need to fill in those pauses, but I’ll give you a quick demo.

Hola, como puedo ayudarte hoy?

Aaron Edwards: Can you speak in

English? Absolutely. I can speak English. How can I assist you today? What kinds of questions can you answer? I can help with questions related to DocsBot testing, from features and troubleshooting to integration. Okay,

Aaron Edwards: I want to know about the pricing plans.

How about the hobby plan? How many pages does that come with?

The hobby plan for DocsBot includes up to 1, 000 source pages. If you need more detai

Aaron Edwards: Oh, that’s great.

Chris Badgett: Are you there? I’m

Aaron Edwards: here.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that was awesome.

Hello again. Regarding your question. Let me check if you can train your bot using YouTube videos. Give me a moment. Good news. You can indeed train your DocsBot using YouTube videos. This feature allows your chat bot to provide answers. Talk

Aaron Edwards: faster. It’s too slow.

You can definitely train your DocsBot using YouTube videos. This feature lets your chat bot. All right. Thank

Aaron Edwards: you.

Glad to help. If you have more questions, feel free to ask. So that’s

Aaron Edwards: A rough demo.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Thanks for giving us a glimpse into the future. It’s amazing, Aaron, what you’ve built over at Docspot AI.

So go check that out. If you’re listening to this episode, that’s docspot. ai. And how would you say Aaron was the best way for somebody to get started? They’ve listened to this episode. They’re excited. What should they do to we have

Aaron Edwards: a free plan. You don’t even need a credit card. So you can just.

Click the big, build your chat bot right now. And then you can super simply without even paying, like you can add in like URL to your site or a few different things. There’s obviously limits on how you can train your bot with the free plan, but if you need more than that, you want to try all the features.

We do have a money back guarantee. So we’ll give you 14 days to give it a try. And if it’s not good for you We’ll just give you a full refund. But for most people, it takes like less than five minutes to have a working chat bot for customer support or internal knowledge or whatever.

So it’s pretty magical.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome, Aaron. Thank you for coming back on the show. I really appreciate it. Thanks. We’re going to have to catch up in another year and see what’s going on here. And the way the rate, this is accelerating. It might have to be before a year.

Aaron Edwards: No problem.

Chris Badgett: Super impressed.

And The way you innovate and play in the playground of technology and provide business tools is really inspiring. So thank you for coming. Thanks for coming back on the show.

All right.

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.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s Guide

The post AI for Course Creators with Aaron Edwards From DocsBot AI appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Dustin Hartzler discusses creating a performance continuing education business. Dustin launched a firm focused on continuing education for functional medicine, which will be directed by Dustin’s wife, Melody.

Dustin specializes in starting and expanding continuing education companies, especially in the wellness and healthcare industries. He is from Your Website Engineer. He describes how he and Melody built Functional Medicine CE from the ground up, frequently experimenting with various formats to see which ones work best for their target audience.

In order to accommodate people with more demanding schedules, they first experimented with virtual live events such as symposia, which enabled pharmacists and other medical professionals to participate in real time. Later, they modified the content into on-demand courses.

Dustin highlights the value of community involvement in marketing in addition to the format of their classes. They also look at specialty marketing techniques like customized advertisements and professional LinkedIn communities.

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

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s Guide

Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Dustin Hartzler. I first found Dustin many years ago, probably a decade ago on his podcast, which is your website engineer. That’s at your website, engineer. com. I’ve seen Dustin around WordPress for a long time.

And recently I found out that his wife has a continuing education business. So I want to do a chat with Dustin today and talk about building that type of business, just story of how it all happened and what, how it all works it’s, as I look into the LifterLMS user community, some of the most successful platforms.

From a financial perspective, our continuing education projects. And so when I learned about this with Dustin, I wanted to chat with him about it, but first Dustin, welcome to the show.

Dustin Hartzler: All right. Thanks Chris. Thanks for having me.

Chris Badgett: So your wife, Melody has a business functional medicine, CE. com. CE stands for continuing education.

Frame us in on the niche here. What is. Functional medicine. And why do these people need CE or continuing education credits?

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, for sure. And maybe I’m going to probably butcher exactly what it is. I’m just the tech guy here. But but my wife is a pharmacist and she is an entrepreneur and she has her, hand into lots of different things.

And so the functional medicine aspect side of things is basically doctors can practice functional medicine. Pharmacists can provide do functional medicine, nurse practitioners and whatnot, but functional medicine is addressing the root cause of any type of issue that you may be having. Like you could go to your doctor and say, Hey, my stomach hurts.

It consistently hurts when I eat these foods or anything along those lines. And a conventional doctor will say, Oh, you probably have I don’t know, IBS or like some sort of something. Here’s whoops. Here’s some medicine. Take that and your symptoms will go away. There are symptoms might go away, but they might crop up at different things.

There might be different avenues that, now something else hurts or, something along those lines, or maybe you’ve got heart medication. You have all these things. things. What my wife does and what she is teaching pharmacists to do is to look at the root cause. I think it’s really funny because all these pharmacists like went to school to prescribe and they verify prescriptions.

Like you would think that the first thing they want to do is say, Oh, we’ll take this prescription. This is what’s going to affect you. And it fixed you the best. But when you look at when, if you look at a customer or like a patient, at the, with the root cause of what might be ailing you. And then they do blood work and then they try to figure out, okay, it probably is this, or maybe you have a gluten intolerance and that’s what’s causing your stomach tissue.

So they’ll do some elimination diet and they’ll do some things along those lines. And so that’s what functional medicine is. And so my wife has a couple of different businesses. One is this continuing education, but the other one, there’s another piece where she’ll actually see patients virtually online.

And we came to the conclusion that there’s no real good education piece for pharmacists or doctors or whatnot to figure out how do I learn how to practice functional medicine? Like you can’t just go to Walgreens and start this. You can’t, like that’s not really a thing. And so my wife has been in doctor’s offices before and she has these longer appointments, like a patient appointment might be 90 minutes and she learns as much history as they can and then they’ll send it.

the stuff off for blood work or whatnot. But the whole premise came on. Nobody was offering this type of CE pharmacists named. I think it’s in Ohio. It’s different in every state. I think it’s 60 hours every five years for continuing education to keep your pharmacy license. And so that’s where the niche is.

It’s pharmacists or doctors or nurse practitioners that need continuing education, but they’re interested in functional medicine in learning how to do that more patient root cause approach. And so that’s How the site started.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And my dad’s actually a pharmacist and I’ve seen him do continuing education my whole life.

And I know there’s like different percentages. It probably varies by state on how much has to be in person versus online. Do you, what is it in your state? Do you know?

Dustin Hartzler: No, I do not. But I know that I think it’s based on live and on demand, I think is the way that we do it. So like we’ll have, we’re having a symposium, which is the first weekend, the first Saturday in November, which is seven hours of live CE.

And so via, even though it’s via zoom, if they’re logged in for the whole time, they get live CE credit. Otherwise they can log in and they can watch it later. And then they just basically we’ll watch the education and then they will take some sort of quiz or validation. And then they’ll get that CE approved based on the state that they live in.

So I don’t know the exact numbers. I just know that we as a company should be marketing more towards the end of the year. I think this is an idea that’s probably good. Hey, it’s. October 1st, we should probably send out a reminder Hey, you got three months, if you need some CE here, this is what we’re offering on our site.

And so there’s lots that you could do along that line. But yeah, there’s some sort of live versus on demand, but I don’t know what that is.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Tell us a story of how this started. Like it’s one thing to be a pharmacist, but then how did Melody make the transition to becoming an educator?

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, it, she actually started like right after she graduated, she did a residency at the VA in Columbus, but then like her first full time job was a pharmacy professor at a school of pharmacy. And so that’s where the. The education piece came in and so she taught students and then that was a rabbit hole of these millennials that are like, what’s going to be on the test and just tell me what’s on the test so I can study that.

And it’s she’s that’s not how pharmacy works, right? You have to learn it so that in case. That comes up someday you know how to treat your patients or whatnot. And then and then she moved into a clinic aspect. And then the clinics she was working for, like her and the doctor didn’t really see eye to eye very well.

Then it’s okay, like we’ve been doing the FX med thing for a few years and it’s okay, this might be a good time to jump, but this site started just because she saw nothing else in the space. I think it was two, we did a conference November of 2019. And this was before COVID, of course.

And it was, it was like our wildest dream, right? We hadn’t not much of a list. And she had, I think, six, four, four to six speakers or whatnot. She did maybe one of the sessions. And we sold the tickets we’re just like making this up as we go, right? Like, how much should CE cost?

Maybe 199. Let’s try 199. And we sold 80 to 90 tickets at 1. 99. You’re like that’s a pretty decent payday to do that. And then and it was all recorded via zoom. She has to, it’s a little different in the fact that she doesn’t teach everything on this site. She teaches maybe one session of the four or five.

Sometimes it’s two, sometimes it’s none, but she normally has to pay a pharmacist to do this. And it’s a thousand dollars or 2, 000 depending on what the pharmacist like will, they charge for their hourly time or whatnot. And then we record everything via zoom and then I make it look pretty and then load it into an LMS so that we can so people can see it on demand.

Then again, if our marketing funnels were, Proper, like we should be making money in sales like daily on this. That’s not really the case right this second. We do more, I think people are more engaged in live details and Hey, this is a live thing. We’re going to do a Q and a after each session.

And people, I think enjoy that more, but every once in a while, it surprises us that someone will come in and Oh, I’ll just buy the annual pass and I’ll get all of the CE and that’s five 49 for the year or whatnot. And so it’s a good Hey, we don’t have to do any more work. It’s all there.

But yeah, so that’s the general gist of how this started. And so we’ve done. Two to three conferences every year since 2019. We did see a big drop after COVID shut everything down. Like more people were doing things online, but it seemed like it, less people were coming to our online events.

I think sometimes it’s scheduling we’re like, Oh, this works well for us, but may is a very busy time. So all the graduations and stuff. We’re like, okay, maybe not may, or, this is around too close to Thanksgiving. And so there’s just different things As an entrepreneur, we’re just, just trying to figure it out.

We did do a course on a cruise boat this year which was pretty cool. That was a dream of my wife. Like, how can we do a tax deductible trip like that? So we went to Seattle and then did an Alaskan cruise. And when the cruise was on, like when we were out at sea, Which was like two and a half days.

They would have CE conference, like just at the back of the boat, they could see the icebergs and stuff out the back of the boat, which was really cool. Then I’m working on getting all those videos updated and sent out. And then that might actually be a, like kind of a live in. live cohort type class.

And we might try to do this year to Hey, if you need 14 hours of CE before the end of the year, watch two videos a week, and then we’ll have a live like Q and A at the end of it. So we’re still trying to kick around that idea. But again, like the whole entrepreneur space is just this work, will it not like, let’s see, let’s give it a try.

Chris Badgett: You definitely hit demand with those first 80 people for the ILT or instructor led virtual training. That’s awesome. Quick side note. Did your cruise ship stop in Juneau, Alaska?

Dustin Hartzler: It did.

Chris Badgett: I used to, I lived there for eight years. I used to run sled dogs on a glacier up there as part of a tour business thing.

But that’s cool. I love that idea.

Dustin Hartzler: Absolutely. I think we had, I think there was 19 people that came with us. And Is that huge? No. Would we rather have a hundred maybe, but it was a cool, like intimate group. And we kept seeing those people all across the boat too.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a cruise before, but it seems like whoever you see when you’re getting on the boat, you’ll see them a hundred times throughout the cruise or Hey, we’re having in this group. So we always saw those people all over the place, which was really cool.

And then some of them had kids there that were our kids age. And so they would hang out and do stuff like on the boat while the moms were like doing the CE. So that was cool.

Chris Badgett: Nice. And I just want to double click on that idea that you can do live virtual and create a on demand back catalog of training content.

You can do both. That’s really cool. I think some people get focused on one or the other, but you’re doing the best of both worlds simultaneously, which is cool.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, it’s cool.

Chris Badgett: How does functional medicine CE get clients? Like, how’d you get those first 80 people?

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, I think we originally, we started out, we used somebody on Facebook for a while, like that was able to, generate some leads there, paid for advertising, those people are like so expensive.

It’s like our monthly fee is 1, 500 and we recommend you spend 1, 500 on ads. You’re like, Really? And that’s not really like the best use of our time and money. And then it’s slowly grown. I think my wife finds that sometimes like just being in different Facebook groups, there’s like a functional medicine pharmacist, mom’s group or something, or just even pharmacist moms.

And she’s in there and just, just commenting and just people finding her that way. I think that, so we did that. We did some LinkedIn advertising. We think that LinkedIn is a little bit better for this audience because more professionals are on LinkedIn. I think I’m a kind of a professional, but I never use LinkedIn.

So I don’t know if that’s really a thing. I think the hardest part is like you spend money, but it’s did they really get it from there or did they see the ads and get emails from us? And then, I don’t know, like you don’t really ever know, was our ads been worth it or not? And then recently it’s we’ve been partnering with some supplement companies and some bigger name type things.

So they’ll pay us to do like some of their content for the year. And then. As part of their contribution, they get two webinars, one or two, depending on like their level. Then they will market to their audience, this free webinar. We market to our audience for free webinar. And so then sometimes we’ll have, a webinar will happen and we’ll have 400 people registered and then there’ll be added to our email list or whatnot.

So those are some of the things that we feel that are working, but again, like I don’t know. Is it really working? Is it not? So I think that’s I don’t know how those, where those first 80 people came from. Like I think it was just I think there was some Facebook marketing involved.

There was, for a while we were offering a free signup on our site or, people might be just searching for functional medicine CE or, like that’s the name like is exactly what the URL is. So that is helpful. I think two, we were on a podcast. A friend of ours went to college that we went to college with has a, they call it your financial pharmacist.

And so they do like financial stuff for pharmacists and talk about like student loans and student loan forgiveness and stuff like that. Like we talked about the business on there. And so that was a very targeted audience. And so that might’ve been where some of the people came from, but we try to do as much like free stuff as we can.

Chris Badgett: Is there, when you say free stuff, you mean like content marketing or

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, exactly.

Chris Badgett: So what kind of free stuff?

Dustin Hartzler: So it’s like getting on those podcasts or I’m doing free webinars for different people. Or, do you have sometimes it’s even like creating an event on Facebook. I think that sometimes gets people to come and then Oh, we’re going to, they were, I think they were doing like Instagram or Facebook lives for a little bit like, Hey, we’re having this conference in two weeks.

This is the stuff that we’re going to do. Here’s some of the things that you’ll learn during this conference and whatnot. So those are some things I feel like as a, it’s just, husband and wife duo. And then my wife has a couple of pharmacists that help write some content and write some newsletters and whatnot.

And it’s we’re way overstretched. Like we should be able to like, if we had somebody that could come up with, here’s our strategy for the year. Here’s like how we’re going to advertise or here’s how we’re going to market. Here’s going to be our content marketing strategy. I feel like we could do a lot better.

But then also it’s this is only like a third of all the things that she’s doing. And so it’s should we just put our blinders on and just really focus or what does that look like? But I think she’s so passionate about so many different things, like helping pharmacists, more pharmacists doing this is better, for the world, or for patients.

But then also it’s she also wants to see patients so she can have those Hey, we taught this person this and now they are, they’re feeling so much better. They don’t have to take this medicine or like we reversed IBS or, like not that’s really a thing, but like lifestyle modification is a big Passion of hers.

And so she dips her toe into a lot of different aspects there.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk geography. I know some continuing education stuff is on a state by state basis. You mentioned you’re from Ohio. Are you guys doing the whole us? Is there any international action? What geography are you serving?

Dustin Hartzler: So we can, anybody can listen to the content, but you only, Can be redeemed in the U. S. States and all 50. Yeah, exactly. I don’t think there’s any limitations based on the C. E. Companies are licensed to do to validate. So basically what happens is like we have this conference coming up in November. My wife had to come up with an outline.

Here’s the sessions. Here’s the things we’re going to talk about. Let’s put bullet points to each, here are the key learning objectives. And then they, she submits that to a professional CE company and then they can say, yes, we approve all of these things we will authorize. And then then when somebody goes through all the content, then they can submit their CE and then it’s registered.

So I think as a pharmacist, you can have a few different logins to collect all of your stuff. I don’t know how all the reporting and the dashboards, I basically like inside of our LMS, we’ll take the. Take the details. Here’s what you need to do to submit CE and then open it in a new tab and they have to fill it out themselves.

So there’s no like certification that we do. We just partner up with a company who’s, they do that full time.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Where do you see like, where do you want to go with this from here?

Dustin Hartzler: Up into the right. Is that the right terminology? Yeah, I think, I think we, like I said earlier, I think it would be great to have multiple sales a day without us doing anything continuing that, just building that brand awareness or whatnot, or like even working on the, what does the funnel look like as customers come in? Okay. They signed up for an email list and now they’ll get emails, but there’s no like really onboarding flow or like, how do we promote and how do we like how do we like sell the next course?

Somebody comes and they buy something for November and we’re going to have a conference next year. Like, how do we get them engaged in? We do have a handful of customers that pretty much anything that we bring out, like they will buy, they’re one of the first customers and that’s a very loyal following.

But I think the, the weird part is, and we’ve talked about like the, Oh, some of the LMS is, or some of the E learning platforms are like, you could buy a subscription for 200 and then, you get all access to all the content to do all the things. And it’s that doesn’t quite work in what we’re doing just because we have to pay for every CE that’s redeemed.

Like we have to pay for that. So if everybody was getting all the CE, like that gets to be a little costly on our side. So we’ve jumped around different ideas there, but it would be great to have a You know something that’s very recurring and very regular on a month to month basis versus oh, We made four sales this month or oh, we made 400 sales this month Like it being more consistent in and that’s where we’re thinking I don’t know thinking is the right word but just working with these big internet partners and showing that hey There is value in this list that we have I forget if we have It’s probably under a thousand people that have purchased any one thing but if all a thousand people bought everything we offered, like that would be pretty good, right?

Like that would be, an amazing thing. But I don’t know. I feel like we sometimes like just are like, what’s the next thing? I was telling you earlier, it’s I’m just fixing this site for a conference that’s happening in 30 days. This should have probably been done three months ago.

So we could have had a three month push of here’s all the, like here’s how we could promote this upcoming conference or whatnot. So again, I don’t know. It’s a full time job. And like for me and she’s doing all these things and kids and stuff, it’s just we can’t put the full effort that we really want to on this site.

Chris Badgett: How much of the audience or customers come back? Cause there’s recurring in the fact that they need to get this every year, every two or whatever. How does, cause that’s a snowball that can build over time.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, exactly. I would say, I haven’t really looked at the numbers, but maybe 20 percent of customers have bought multiple things, but it’s not a, so we’ve been doing it, Since 2019, say we’ll call it five years, probably two per, so that’s, there’s probably 15 old, 15 whole things that we’ve done.

And I don’t think anybody, but maybe a handful of people have done more than four or five. So there’s some and maybe it’s the topic too. Like some people aren’t interested. Like we had one on men’s health and we had one on women’s health. And this next one is about lab testing. My wife thinks this one is going to be a really big one just because so many people need to know.

The lab part of things. And that’s where you get a lot of information, just getting blood work and getting those results back in. So if anybody’s listening, that is also a WordPress creator and and a functional medicine pharmacist you can find out more, but but yeah, so that’s the, that’s the thought process about like where we go as a business and whatnot,

Chris Badgett: can you talk about, speaking of being spread thin, you mentioned bringing in other subject matter experts to teach. It sounds like maybe the majority of the content you mentioned they get paid, but how does that relationship work? Or how did you develop? Cause it can be overwhelming, all the stuff to create this kind of business and getting help with the educational content is a big thing.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So how did that come together? So now all these people contribute.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, I think that was some of the relationships she’s formed at some of these different conferences that she’s went to. There’s like a I4M I think is the Institute of Functional Medicine. So there’s lots of educators there that she’s reached out to, but one of them that’s coming for this conference is like one of the sponsors.

And so one of the things that she put in her sponsorship agreement is you’ll pay us this many dollars plus provide a speaker for this session. So that’s like a, Company got to pick who would be the best representation for them. Or she might find out that, Oh, this person is really good with hormone replacement therapy.

Like we’re going to talk about hormones. Let’s reach out to her or Oh, this person is world renowned in gut health or whatnot. And so it’s a lot of times like you find the person and then you like. Say, Hey, are you available this day? Or would you be interested? And then they talk about the price.

And I think it’s anywhere between a thousand and 2, 000. Like we pay these educators because their time is valuable, right? Like they have to spend time if they’re a doctor, like not only do they have to practice, but they have to come up with slides and they have to, meet the learning objectives and then they have to.

The slides have to be done like a few weeks in advance so we can look at them and make sure that are all okay. And I think the first or second one, like my wife did maybe two or three of the sessions, and she was just like completely dead because she has to do all like the back end paperwork and get all the stuff ready and then Promoted and all that kind of stuff.

And sometimes she’s Oh, this one’s going to be really easy because I don’t have to promote and present anything. I just have to get to sit in, I get to learn. And so that’s a valuable piece too. So she gets to learn and she gets educated. And so it’s the best of both worlds that we’re paying for all these people to get education by this specific person, but then she also will learn and she can add that to her tool bag of like things that she knows or how she can practice and whatnot.

Chris Badgett: So Dustin, you’re a podcaster. I remember listening to one of your episodes a long time ago that as a non developer, I’m like, finally, I understand what the database does and how that works and stuff. So just a question related to functional medicine CE, does Melody have a podcast for the niche? Or have you thought about that?

You’re like pro podcaster.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah. So her other business is it’s called farm to table farm to table dot life, and there’s a podcast over there. And so that one is talking about social interview, some of her team. So that business is pharmacists are basically like, they can only practice in the state that they are licensed in.

This education piece, like you can teach for, for anywhere, but Actually do patient care. You have to be licensed in different states. So on that side of her business, she has 40, some like 1099 employees. And then, so she’ll have like conversations with them. They call it the table talk. And so it’s basically like people sitting around the table, talking about different health things or like stress or meditation or movement or things like that.

And we’ve done it that way because we feel like patients are more likely to want to learn more about fixing their gut health or fixing their, learning more along those lines, but we haven’t done it for this business per se, mainly because the podcast editor in this household, which is also me, is way behind on that podcast and my podcast per se.

But but yeah, there’s always ideas and I don’t know If that would be a really, that could be a good free content marketing strategy too, to do podcasts or even should we do like a 30 minute snip of here’s this course. And then that would be probably pretty easy.

Like here’s the first, 30 minutes of this lecture that you could get for free and then you can buy it for the rest of it. So that could be a strategy too. Wow. Yeah. There’s just never enough time for all the ideas. And so

Chris Badgett: repurposing existing content to like, Hey, get the full thing and get credit.

That’s cool. That another way to reuse it. Yeah, I think,

Dustin Hartzler: I think the hard part for me is I’m not the, I’m not the pharmacist. And so I don’t know what’s most important. So like I would have to have somebody help me like, Hey, of this hour long session, and I do use the script. So like I could plug it into the script and give the URL to somebody and say, Hey, tell me what time codes are best to put in a podcast.

And then we could put a little intro and an outro and then go from there. And so that could be, and. That’s a really good idea that we just generated on the fly. And maybe I’ll do that. Maybe I’ll set that up during my sabbatical coming up.

Chris Badgett: Nice. Nice. What year did you start your podcast?

Dustin Hartzler: Your wordpressengineer. com. It’s actually your website engineer. We don’t want to mess with the trademark dealio. That’s going on. I funny story though, it was like in 2010 when I started, I submitted to 99 Designs and I said, my name is your website or your WordPress engineer and or the WordPress engineer, or something like that.

And luckily somebody on Upwork, or it wasn’t Upwork, it was 99 Design, said, Hey, that’s a trademark infringement. You cannot use that in A URL. And so I switched and I pivoted, and this. In what we’re talking about in WordPress these days. But I switched to your website engineer. That was when I started freelancing.

That was December of 2010, I think is when my first episode came out. And I was very consistent up until about 500 ish. There was some gaps in there close as I got closer to 500. And then the last couple of years has been a dumpster fire with my content creation strategies, just because there’s so much more I felt like at the time it was a really good way for me to get clients because they’re like, I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t want to do it.

And then also that was my contribution back to WordPress. It’s I’m not gonna I’m not gonna be able to fix code or, contribute to core, but I can spend some time like giving free education. And so that’s that’s where my spin was. And I love doing it. I still enjoy doing it.

I still like Just don’t have the bandwidth as much as I’d like to. And so I did commit officially unofficially on my show that I’m going to come back. I do have a, I mentioned I have a sabbatical coming up and part of my sabbatical is switching all my themes from old school storefront to like new block themes.

And I want to report back of Here are some gotchas or here’s some things to think about. Or like you might not remember, think through these things when you’re making that type of transition. So I might have some time, but it’s really hard to justify Hey, this is me, like spending two hours a week creating free content, but like I could spend two hours a week Tweaking and optimizing different workflows for something that it might actually generate monies.

But I still enjoy podcasting and I enjoy like the WordPress space. Of course, I’ve been to the last, I think six WordCamp U. S. and just being able to hang out with people in person and like chat and learn how they’re using WordPress and whatnot has been really cool and exciting for me.

Chris Badgett: You and I are obviously big fans of the podcasting medium, and it’s, I find people find their content personality type, whether that’s YouTube, podcasting, writing, social media, like people have their different flavors that resonate the most with them.

But how have you as a podcaster benefited the most? Focusing on that medium and being consistent and creating all this content.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah. I think that, I think creating podcasts is the easiest person.

Chris Badgett: Once you’re set up, once you’re set up

Dustin Hartzler: and you’ve got the gear and whatnot. And I was, My show was anywhere between 15 and 22 ish minutes is what I was shooting for.

And I was trying to get it done in 90 minutes. That was really my, if I could prepare, I could record and I could edit and get it out in 90 minutes. Like I felt like that was good. And you write a

Chris Badgett: high quality blog post in 90 minutes, right? Yeah, exactly.

Dustin Hartzler: And if you get really good, after maybe the first hundred episodes, there’s not a lot of editing.

editing. I even got to the point where my edits were like, Hey I’m talking about the news or I’m talking about this plugin that I want to share. I just flubbed up. And I was like, yeah, I’m just going to restart the whole section over again, instead of like me having to go back and listen. Descript makes it really easy these days where you can see the exact words that you’re talking.

You’re like, Oh, I can see, let me just remove that. That’s pretty simple. But like back in the day, it’s I don’t want to have to just say Oh, the first announcement was good and now I have to go to the second one. I had to find that. And that way I could just like chop whole sections of the show out.

Then that made it a lot easier to like edit. And a lot of times I didn’t even edit, you get very comfortable with not saying or the, like stuttering around or whatnot, and then you can get it out faster. I felt like that was always good. I always felt too, that.

If you wanted to create a high quality blog post, especially in WordPress, you needed either some sort of like video or you needed some sort of Oh, I need these nine screenshots to really emphasize what I’m talking about. Then you’re like these screenshots are going to be outdated. And then it’s like now the whole thing’s, the audio medium is really good. The fact that yes, the content sometimes gets outdated, like you don’t visually see that as much. I just felt like that was the easiest way for me to get in. I loved listening to podcasts. And I, when I first got out of college, I got a iPod, like video, a video iPod with the wheel that I could download podcasts because I had an hour commute each way and I was like, okay, let’s start listening to podcasts.

And so I’d listen to those through my like tape deck. Converter type dealio. And I was like, this would be really cool to start someday. And so then I did and I was like, Oh, this is really, it’s a fun thing to if you put time and effort into meeting people, like doing videos like this is really cool.

Or sometimes it’s like I just don’t have the time to coordinate all of those things. And so that’s why I went to a solo show for probably the last 300 we’re all solo shows because it’s I don’t have time to coordinate and like with kids schedules and whatnot. And I think now I’m to the point where my day is really like pretty open.

The kids are at school all day. And then I have meetings at work, but I can set up like Calendly and get those all around there and whatnot. So I think that it’s a good medium and it’s a one that you don’t have to prep for as much, like you can make show notes in 15 minutes about the things you want to talk about and then you can just riff on them.

So that’s where I found like the most benefit for me was the easiest. And I felt since I’m a. Podcasts consumer, like I feel like I could take bits and pieces from a lot of podcasts and then turn them into my own.

Chris Badgett: Nice. That’s just almost said Justin, Dustin Hartzler. Go check out functionalmedicinece.

com. It’s a great example of continuing education. And check out the podcast, your website, engineer. com. Dustin, thank you for coming on the show and thank you for being a shining example. And with your wife, Melody being an education entrepreneur, you’ve got to wear a lot of hats and it’s amazing what you guys have done.

And I know it’s like intense and busy, but I’m so glad that you found product market fit and yet that launch. The initial launch, you got 80 people and have just continued to iterate, test things out. That’s really a cool thing. And it’s great that you can do that with your wife.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah. I think it’s super fun.

And for me, like it also gets that, Hey, how can I best use WordPress to make it easy for the people that are managing the site? And so there’s some cool things like, Hey, we should probably instead of doing it this way, maybe we should use some. Post meta field, create some custom boxes so they can just put the information in and then I can use a template and then pull that information in properly or whatnot.

So there’s lots of cool overlap. And so I don’t have to be the knowledge worker and I don’t have to know everything about the CE and whatnot. And I just, here’s what we want. Here’s what we’re going to try. And I get to do that as the tech guy. So it’s super fun. There’s no like conflict with my day job and there’s no Yeah.

What do I want to say? There’s no limits like and there’s nobody saying Hey, this isn’t the right path. Or, if you work on a team and you get to develop a feature and they’re like, no, do it this way, do it this way, do it this way. Like now there’s no one like that. So I can just tinker and play.

And there’s always room for improvement. I think that’s maybe one of the. The best examples of I know we connected over Lifter LMS because like I was, I originally started this with a custom post type and I was going to customize like each of these things, like each course was in its own thing.

And then I moved to LearnDash and then I’ve done Sensei and I’ve looked at Lifter and I’ve, I’m like, I think Lifter is where I want to be. And so like there, it’s never static, right? There’s always things that be improved and changed. And as WordPress continues to develop or, the different plugins and stuff, I think that is really the neat thing.

Working at automatic, like the. The first line in our creed says I’ll never stop learning. And so I think that’s really cool. Oh this thing, new thing is out here with WordPress 6. 7 and I have 550 podcasts that I’d like to implement it. So I’ve got to go in and have to redo all of my posts.

There’s all kinds of things that you could always do and always be improving. And so I think that’s one of the cool things about WordPress. It’s a cool thing about having an e learning platform that just experiment and try and, Do surveys to your customers and figure out do they find it valuable?

Do they not? What are they looking to learn things along those lines? And once you slowly grow a list, like you’ll have people that will give you feedback and so yeah, it’s been super cool. It’s been a cool adventure and I’m excited to keep it going up into the right and maybe someday we’ll be wildly successful and we won’t have to do anything, but just crank out CE content and instead of the beach all day.

That might be a little while.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. And it’s cool that functional medicine is about helping people improve their lives so that I’m sure that gives a sense of purpose and mission and all that stuff too. So it all comes together. Dustin, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it.

Wish you and your wife all the best success.

Dustin Hartzler: Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s Guide

The post Creating a Pharmacy Continuing Education Business with WordPress appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett and Kurt Von Ahnen discuss LifterLMS’s Black Friday and Cyber monday deals, which runs throughout November and ends on Cyber Monday, December 2nd.

This year, LifterLMS is offering an exclusive 60% discount. By using the coupon code: BLACKFRIDAY24 you can enjoy an extraordinary 60% off LifterLMS products.

The LifterLMS Black Friday and Cyber Monday deal will go live on November 1, 2024, on the Black Friday landing page: LifterLMS Black Friday.

Additionally, there will be a lifetime discount of 70% on Cyber Monday on the Infinity Bundle. This lifetime offer will only be available on December 2, with a price of just $3,000, including bonuses. The bonuses include essential YouTube and marketing courses. These resources equip prospective course developers with the tools they need to successfully connect with their audience.

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

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s Guide

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 repeat guest. His name is Kurt Von Annen from Manana Nomas. Kurt is a LifterLMS expert. He also does work at LifterLMS itself. Today, we’re going to have an interesting discussion about what’s going on this time of year, but first Kurt, welcome back on the show.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Oh, thanks Chris. It’s great to be here, man. It’s always good to talk to you.

Chris Badgett: Let’s go ahead.

Kurt Von Ahnen: You go, I was just going to say. You wanted to get together. You invite me on the show. It’s awesome. And every time this time of year rolls around, it’s always interesting to see what we’re going to do this year.

People would say, why have black Friday deals? Why have sales? We all know people expect it. And so a Lifter LMS has always risen to the occasion. And I don’t think this year anybody’s going to be disappointed. I want to Just let’s just get it out of the way, man. Say it up front.

Like what is the black Friday deal this year? Some people have already taken advantage of it as the month already started but overall for people that don’t know yet, what’s the deal?

Chris Badgett: The deal is for black Friday at lifter LMS. And we do things a little differently. We like to remove the urgency and all that stuff.

So we actually do a black Friday sale for all of November. And this year, and typically that runs through cyber Monday this year, black or cyber Monday is actually on Monday, December 2nd. So the sale runs from November 1st through December 2nd. And the deal this year is the biggest discount we’ve ever done, which is 60 percent off of LFTR LMS.

You just have to use the coupon code black Friday, 24 at checkout. And you can go to Lifter LMS. com forward slash black dash Friday, and you’ll see all the deal details. Anybody who makes a purchase is going to get access to the bonus pack, which is 2, 000 worth of bonuses. If you purchase between November 1st and December 2nd, and we’ll go over what those are in a little bit.

And the cherry on top, the last part of the deal. Is something we do exclusively on Cyber Monday only, which is. A lifetime deal promotion. So at Lifter LMS, we offer a lifetime deal for the Infinity Bundle, which is the everything bundle. It’s everything Lifter, LMS makes. It’s for unlimited websites, and we’re doing that at 70% off.

So go check that out. That’s for three K $3,000. You can get your lifetime deal for everything. Lifter LMS makes unlimited sites. And that one is only available cyber Monday only. So if you’re thinking about that you want to mark your calendar for December 2nd, cause it’s only going to be available on that day.

And if you’re already a customer, by the way, whether you want to take advantage of the regular black Friday offer, let’s say, and get the universe bundle or get the infinity bundle on the annual subscription we can prorate and discount the value of your current license. You just have to send an email to team at Lifter LMS.

com. We’ll hook you up with a special coupon code so that you can get. Prorated for the value of your current license and also get the discount on either the regular Black Friday deal or the 70 percent off on the lifetime deal in addition to your proration. But that is a deal this year. You’ll see links to all this stuff on the Lifter LMS website on the pricing page.

And LifterLMS. com forward slash black dash Friday. All the info is there.

Kurt Von Ahnen: I’m having like flashbacks because I remember and people that know me probably think I’m a very grounded person that makes really good decisions. Wink. But I’m pretty sure. I did a black Friday deal almost like nine years ago.

It’s either eight or nine years ago when I signed on with Lyft or LMS, you’ll have to look up my order and see how old I am. But I signed up and I got the bundle, the extra things. Those have an incredible value that I don’t think enough people really leverage, as someone that does the weekly office hours call we do the ask me anything calls, I don’t know of any other software company that.

Does live support like live group support in a mastermind kind of situation, has the support tickets has social support like through Facebook pages. As a customer, when I first came to LifterLMS, I remember just thinking anything I need to know is in the knowledge base. Like anything that I tried, any kind of obstacle I ran into, I want to do this.

I want to do that, I want to connect this thing. I want to do that thing. There was something in the knowledge base that kind of put me in the right direction. Back when I was using crappy themes, I didn’t have sidebars working. I was frustrated for a little while, but the information was in the knowledge base those extra goodies that come, right?

So you’ve got marketing one on one for course creators. That’s a course, right? Yeah. And then you’ve got what the, something about YouTube traffic systems. Yeah. So the YouTube, go ahead. That’s another course, right? Yeah. All right. Between those two things, do you think, and just put it out there, someone’s new, they’re like, I don’t know if I want to be a course creator.

It looks really hard. Some guy parked next to a Lamborghini on Facebook said I should have my own online course somewhere. And then they go, okay, I’m going to do it. I personally think the marketing one on one course and the YouTube training course, I think that’s enough background information in combination with Lister LMS.

To launch a course creator initiative.

Chris Badgett: Absolutely. If, and if I can just pick one, if you want to get excited about one of the bonuses you get, if you purchase during the sale, all of November and the first two days of December, it would be the YouTube traffic system because. It’s one thing to build a course as a subject matter expert, but if you don’t have a way to get leads and build an audience and get people over to your website, the YouTube traffic system breaks it down exactly how to do that without becoming a full time YouTuber.

It teaches you the principles, the strategies, and the tactics to make four, just four strategic YouTube videos. That if you make those for your target audience and put them for free on YouTube and have proper call to action and linking to your course or your website or your contact form or whatever.

It’s going to set you up for some automated free marketing and traffic growth to your website. If I could do one marketing strategy as a course creator, it would be the YouTube traffic system.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Awesome. Awesome. Now the other one that I’m partial to that I see value in, and it’s, I think it’s another one of these unsung heroes.

I’m an agency. I work with a lot of other course creators trying to make their product. So you’re constantly dealing with different serial entrepreneurs that they’re out there. Let’s just face facts. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re probably a bubble off, right? You’re not like mainstream society.

And so your communication bullet points are all over the spectrum. And I’ve noticed. People lean into their strengths and try to ignore their weaknesses and they come at a, they come at a project in a way that leaves them really vulnerable to certain gaps. And you have that online education company startup checklist.

And that to me is, that is gold for someone getting started. Because you might be really focused on really cool graphics or really focused on integrations or really focused on video or whatever it is. And there’s going to be something in that checklist. That’s going to be a gold nugget for you. That’s going to go, Oh crap.

I didn’t think about that. And then you make sure you fill your gaps and then you launch as a fully, empowered, ready to go entity, ready to do something.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. The startup checklist was born out of, my 15 years of being an entrepreneur and seeing a lot of pain and working with a lot of clients of.

Maybe they’re down the road or they’re getting in the weeds on this thing, but, oh, we haven’t even set up banking for the business or we haven’t really structured our website and our domain name and thought about email and all these like key things that if you don’t. Do in the beginning, just create a world of pain.

So even though this is not like a huge thing, it’s not a big time investment, but if you go through the checklist and make sure you check all these off, your future self will thank you later for building a online education business that you got these things done correctly in the beginning.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. Now something that some people might think is like an also ran category but you give it away as part of these bonuses is.

And I dismissed him at the beginning as well. But then it’s amazing. Cause at the end of the project, these things bubble to the top and you’re like, Oh, I wish I had that. And you have it. That’s the you’ve got the graphic set for certificates, but also for the achievements. Now I’m not a. By nature, I’m not a gamification person.

So when I created my first few projects, I didn’t even think about gamification. I was like achievement badges. Who needs it? You got the, you came here to learn something. You learned it move on. But as it turns out, as I grew in my. e learning career, I came to realize that not everybody’s wired that way.

People aren’t just motivated by the information alone. They still, some people still require that dopamine hit of I accomplished something, I got a badge and it’s pretty cool that you’re able to provide that for people so that they don’t have to overthink it or burden themselves with it in development.

Chris Badgett: A hundred percent. And if you’re not a graphic designer, It’s great just to have a, a catalog of graphic assets that you can use. The achievement badges are great. Those are like pop up graphics that you can have when people complete lessons, sections, or courses, and that can add gamification.

And even if your subject matter is serious you can still incorporate these things and it does provide a little reward dopamine hit for the learner. The whole idea of achievement badges, this is a United States reference, but there’s something we have called the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts, and they have this like sash they wear, or their shirt, and they have all the badges of all the things they’ve accomplished, and they’re pretty proud to show that off, and when they learn a new skill, they get the badge.

But if I could offer one, just one, I would say take a second look at certification if you haven’t thought about it. Some of the most financially successful LFTRA LMS websites are where people are selling continuing education or some kind of certification that allows their learners to either get a job or keep their job and So you can add certificates and even if you’re not in that direct use case having a certificate of accomplishment Is nice to have, even if it’s like a fitness program or a cooking class or whatever, it adds a little bit of that gamification.

It gives somebody something they may even print it out and hang it on their wall and stuff like that, or share it on social media and help get you more customers. So check that out. And then I also just wanted to mention the bonus office hours mastermind event we’re running. That’s something. That you get no matter what level you purchase that by default, you get that.

If you have the universe bundle or infinity bundle or higher, which is the lifetime infinity, but even if you just purchase one add on for LFTR LMS at a 60 percent discount, you’re going to get access to one of those calls so that you can get your questions answered live. In a group format with other great people trying to do similar things as you.

And it’s just a super valuable resource to get direct help. So that’s something else you’re going to get in the bonuses.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. In my almost a decade of playing in the masterminds and stuff, it’s amazing. How much more quickly you can develop as a professional. It’s that, iron sharpens iron thing, right?

It’s not just lifter people in there. And it’s there’s a group of people and you get ideas and feedback from multiple people, which is a really great setup.

Chris Badgett: Absolutely.

Kurt Von Ahnen: So can we switch gears? So first off, we could talk about deals in general and why even having deals is important. We hit on the people expect it.

But I’m really curious why we do the lifetime deal with Lifter LMS.

Chris Badgett: So the reason we do a lifetime deal and by the way, I always said I was never going to offer one Because the reasons for not offering them are it can be helpful in the beginning of a company when you’re just trying to get new users and get started But when I started thinking about lifetime deals, oh, it’s really too late and technically from a financial standpoint It hurts the value of your company to have people that are receiving ongoing benefits that aren’t You Paying on a recurring basis.

But at the end of the day people have been asked about it forever. So we decided to offer it cause Hey, that’s what the people want. And I’m in the business of giving people what they want and helping people. And I don’t have plans to sell Lifter LMS. So honestly, I don’t really care about the valuation.

I’m here to help people. And even if, providing lifetime deals, quote, hurts the valuation of the company, we have no intention to sell. Why not? People are asking for it. They want it. They want the unlimited sites they believe, and they know that their platform is going to be here to stay for years, if not decades.

So why not invest upfront cap? That expense is what it is. And then you’re good to go with lifetime access to the tools and the support. So people want it. We offered it in order for us to offer it. It does cost us money to support people, improve the software, maintain the software, keep it secure and everything.

So it is of a higher price. But for Cyber Monday only, we wanted to make it as accessible as we possibly could to the most possible people. So a lot of people who are on the fence are thinking about getting a lifetime deal, Cyber Monday for our one day, super big discount, lifetime deals sale, it’s really the time to get it.

If you’re looking to get in and get it for the best price. Now,

Kurt Von Ahnen: I want to touch on this because I am a sucker for a lifetime deal.

Chris Badgett: We all are. I have lifetime deals. Like it makes sense. If you’re going to use a tool for a long time and the price is right, go for it.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. And here’s what I’ve noticed.

I’ve noticed that a lot of lifetime deals that I’ve got from a certain AppSumo kind of company sometimes You buy the lifetime deal and it just shrivels up or it’s not feature packed or it’s not what you expected. But I just want to hit, I just want to hit it square on the head for people.

Like maybe people are thinking are they going to fade? Are they going to go away? Are they going to this, going to that? And I think just looking at the last. Year to 18 months with LFTR LMS, it would be anything, but things have, I think things have ramped up. Maybe I’m maybe my perspective is skewed cause I work with you guys, but I know that we’ve got a new version of groups coming.

I know I’m getting really great feedback from that new feature notes. How long did notes come out, Chris?

Chris Badgett: It’s been several months at this point.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, but not years, right? It’s a few months. Favorites, the idea that users favorite and read a heart over a lesson and then other students can read a heart and then that’s just really cool.

It’s an interactive feature with favorites around all the lessons. One that I haven’t used much, but I’ve heard great things about is advanced coupons. And that’s only six months.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. About

Kurt Von Ahnen: that. Yeah. About six months old there. And I think one of the most recent things is a thing that we’re calling instant courses.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Courses that you can suck into your website, import them in, and you can do whatever you want with them. They’re real courses. You can add your videos, you can resell them, you can modify them. Yeah you’re right, Kurt. The pace of. Development, not just of making new features and new add ons is increasing, but also improving what we already have, listening to user feedback.

I got to give props to the lifter on this team. That’s really working hard and developing all these things. Cause you’re right. It is accelerating, which is one of the reasons to get a lifetime deal. Because if you like the pace of things and you like seeing the trend we’re on, you can lock it in and ride that train forever without having to have an annual subscription.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. I, some people, sometimes I find the lifetime deals offered too early. In the journey for some folks. But in Lyft LMS’s case I, when you finally offered the lifetime deal, I was like, it was a mature enough product already, and then it’s just continued to mature and the customer base has continued to have an influx of new folks.

And just me being me, I speak. Transparently, vulnerably. I just think that I don’t think stability is an issue. Like I think the community is super healthy and we see the greatest people come to the calls. They asked me anything calls and the mastermind that we do. Now let’s go, here’s the subject I hate because I’m going to jump on Thursday’s mastermind call and everybody’s going to ask me when.

But as far as like upcoming. What’s on the roadmap for LFTR LMS development wise, what could people look forward to?

Chris Badgett: There’s a lot. And the way we figure out what to build next at LFTR LMS is really by listening to the people, to the users, to the customers. And we look for patterns. We look for trends.

We look at our own insights, what we’re seeing in the industry. And we use the software ourselves and have like our own opinions of what we think needs to happen next. But some of the areas that you’ll see more focus is more stuff happening in e commerce land, just optimizing e commerce. That’s always a priority because we want to help you out there watching and listening to get paid and have the best e commerce experience.

Quizzing and assignments is really big for some people. There’s a lot of evolution and advancement we can do there. What we have already is already really good, but we’ve gotten some good feedback around those areas. The social learning aspects, the online community, not just selling courses, but also community, improving our social learning add on is an area we’ve got queued up for focused, as well as coaching.

In addition to courses and community, many people offer Coaching. And that can take many forms. And we have an add on for that called private areas with a lot of fresh ideas and things to add and focus on that. So those are just some of the areas that we’ll be focused on. And that whole time we’re always improving the lateral and that’s core.

For example we’ve done a lot lately and we’ll continue to do more advanced privacy and media protection and security features and all those things to protect your intellectual property and stuff like that. So it’s really a constant innovation train, but those are some of the highlights.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. And again, thinking about last year, as far as updates to what we consider core, I remember there was an update to the user experience in the course builder.

Chris Badgett: So now

Kurt Von Ahnen: we pre populate the course builder with a certain amount of lessons and a section and some of those intuitive prompts. And then we also now have the drip feature available for the whole course. Instead of having to go through each lesson and set it up individually. And so people might not think that’s a big deal, but if you have a website with a hundred courses on it, that just became a really big deal.

So that’s super cool. As we start to wind down, Chris, I want to encourage you tell us the deals like one more time. It’s November. It’s almost Black Friday. Okay. You could have already have taken advantage of the deal and gotten 60 percent off, but we’ve got something else coming cyber Monday and you have the codes that people can use.

So let’s run through this again.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. So it’s black Friday, all November sale. So that’s 60 percent off. And that’s on any add on bundle. That you want and that’s from november 1st to december 2nd because that’s when cyber monday is this year on december 2nd So to get that you just need to use the coupon code black friday 24 that being said if you’re looking to get the infinity bundle lifetime deal, which is everything lifter lms makes that is only going to be available on cyber monday, which is december 2nd And you’re going to get 70 percent off the full retail price, which is 10, 000 is the full price.

So you’ll be able to get it for a 3, 000. I think it might actually come in at 2, 000 9, 9, 9, but you get the gist of what I’m saying. And that’s the cheapest you can get the lifter LMS lifetime deal. You can come, but you can always come back later and pay more for the lifetime deal. But if you’re on the fence and you’re thinking about, I think I’m my platforms here to stay and I want to get the best deal mark your calendar for December 2nd to get the lifetime deal and whether you get the lifetime deal or just a regular black Friday.

60 percent discount. If you purchase between November 1st and December 2nd, you’re going to get six bonuses valued at 2, 000. And everybody gets that no matter what you purchase. So that’s just another benefit for taking advantage of this. And if you’re listening to this, I also just want to thank you.

I know this time of year, we do send a lot of emails. It’s an important part of marketing, getting the word out, making sure people realize there’s a sale going on. There’s this lifetime deal opportunity. It’s on this day and all that. All the email traffic and stuff will come down. You’ll in the future, you’ll just be getting more spaced out emails about LMS and all that.

So thank you. As we do this important aspect of marketing for our business with promoting the black Friday. And Cyber Monday period.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Perfect. And then just one last time, folks, you can go to LifterLMS. com forward slash black hyphen Friday forward slash black hyphen Friday. And Chris, I think that kind of wraps it up, man.

Chris Badgett: That’s it. It was great to chat, Kurt. I really appreciate it. And thanks for helping spread the word and get into this Black Friday all November sales event that we do really appreciate it.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Oh, no worries. I’ve been a member of your community for going on a decade, and it’s always great to welcome new folks in.

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. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift.

Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s Guide

The post Announcing the Cyber Monday Only Lifetime Deal and LifterLMS Black Friday All November Sale appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Brian Town highlights the loneliness that comes with entrepreneurship despite its apparent success. He talks about the psychological effects of managing a company, fixing difficulties all the time, and dealing with impostor syndrome even after years of expertise.

Brian Town is a video marketing specialist and seasoned businessman, best recognized as the founder and CEO of Michigan Creative, a full-service creative firm that specializes in web development, branding, and video production. He published a book called “The Lonely CEO“

Brian openly discusses his battles with burnout, providing details on how the constant pressures of managing a company may negatively impact both mental and physical well-being. He emphasizes the value of self-care practices like meditation, consistent exercise, and even taking breaks when necessary in order to have a good outlook.

Additionally, Brian draws attention to the strain many entrepreneurs endure in juggling their personal and professional life, where work frequently takes precedence.

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

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s Guide

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 Brian town is the author of the lonely CEO. You can find that at the lonely ceo. com. He’s also the founder of Michigan creative. That’s at Michigan creative. com. It’s an agency. We’re going to talk about some things that people don’t talk about when it comes to being an entrepreneur, being lonely.

The challenges there. We’re going to talk about entrepreneurial mindset. We’re going to talk about marketing and branding and just see where we go from there. But first welcome to the show, Brian.

Brian Town: Chris, appreciate it, man.

Chris Badgett: Let’s start with I don’t want to say dirty little secret. It’s more just like the taboo thing that people don’t talk about as much, which is.

The loneliness part of entrepreneurship because entrepreneurship gets a lot of acclaim and you know There’s a lot of people we put on the pedestal some of the great entrepreneurs of our time even in the smaller world in our towns and cities and stuff. We may be recognized as a success. We have a successful business whatever that means But it can be super lonely.

Let’s dig in there. What compelled you to write an entire book about that topic?

Brian Town: A mental breakdown.

My, my wife is a entrepreneur. She runs her own business too. And she won an award pretty recently. We won an award pretty recently and people were like, Oh man, you guys are the power couple.

We’re like, I wish they could come by our house. And, Sometimes you see like how stressed out we were and how worried one of us is on any given day and how we’re wondering if we, that imposter syndrome, we talk about that a lot and I just think it’s just a lonely place. And luckily I have her and she has me, but I think, every business owner that I’ve talked to, they have that same kind of.

Worry. It’s just, there’s so much, as you start to grow, she has nine employees. I have 16 and that just, there’s so much that you’re thinking of. And my biggest fear has always been, and we’ve had a handful of times, three, four, five, six times where I was like, I got to go pick up a check.

I got to find some money to make sure that we’re making payroll stuff is the things you lose sleep over. And it’s not just Oh, wow. That didn’t work out. Shut it down. It’s a little deeper and I think, your friends don’t get it. Everybody thinks you’re great success. Cause on paper and in reality, like we are successful, like things are working, but there’s been some months that most recently too, that we’re like why are we doing, What are we doing?

And I think everybody listening right now probably sometimes has felt that way and maybe be feeling that way right now. So I think that dirty little secret is it probably one of the hardest things that I’ve ever done. Yeah. Same thing. My wife says the same thing. Now, that being said, there’s so much good that’s come from it.

Whether we, let’s pretend that everybody fires us today and all my employees are like forget you, we’re leaving 14 years running an agency. Through the pandemic, my wife’s starting a business and becoming really successful pretty quickly. That’s success. We don’t see it that way.

There’s always gotta be more and what aren’t we doing?

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I think the concept of enough is like a thing to meditate on. What does enough mean?

Brian Town: And I think that’s the thing is like this last couple of months, I’ve been really off my game and I haven’t been meditating and I haven’t been.

Eating very well or sleeping very well. And, I think when is enough, I think is one thing that I need to do more of, but then also, I’ve been better about this over the last couple of days, but, really looking back at all the great things that you have and the great things that you’ve done, like this building, for example if I’m real stressed out, cause we didn’t get this one client or something.

I, I need to go look around, like there’s, 12 people working here right now, and it’s beautiful. And our clients, love everything that we’ve done for most of them. And so I think it’s that we all need to do a better job of not just if you’re a business owner, but I think appreciating and having gratitude for what we’ve done and what we have.

Because it’s great. And I think it’s hard to do as a business owner, because the minute we get off this call, or if you’re done listening to this, you’re thinking, all right, who’s emailing me that needs something, who’s mad, whatever, we’re always trying to think of that next thing. Why we have all this other stuff to deal with, because we’re parents and, we have tons of animals at home and it’s just It’s a stressful thing.

Chris Badgett: And the entrepreneur is a problem solver. So when you’re done with one problem, feed me another problem.

Brian Town: That’s what it is. My wife said it the best. She’s I thought I’d start this med spa and it’d be great. She’s a PA and it’d be a great thing. And it’d just be a lot of fun doing it.

It is, and it’s been really successful, but it’s always something. Most of her day, when she’s not seeing patients, I work over there one day a week. It’s solving problems. Employees go, Hey, what do you think about this? What color do you want this? And what are we going to do about this package?

And it’s all day long. You’re solving problems. So then when you get home and your fifth grade daughter needs you to help solve problems. This very complicated math, you’re like, man, I don’t know if I’m up for it.

Chris Badgett: I’ve had too many problems today. I get that.

Brian Town: Oh yeah.

Chris Badgett: How does you mentioned imposter syndrome.

I think it’s different in the very beginning, but it never goes away. Like, how has that changed for you over 10 plus years?

Brian Town: Yeah, it never really has. I’m terrible. I’m a classic case of imposter syndrome. Nobody would know it. But it’s, for me, it just, I think a really good example is when we were pitching just on Monday to Jiffy mix, which is a huge, if you’re from Michigan, they’re they are in Michigan, but they’re all over the country.

At first when they sent it to us, I’m like, okay, we’ll do this proposal. And then they asked us to come in and pitch. And then we were getting ready to pitch. I was like, we can’t do this. There’s gotta be the Ann Arbor or Detroit agencies that it’s pitching on this as well. Like we’re just here from Lansing and We’ll give it a shot and, so dumb, like I’m thinking that and then as we start to put the proposal together and showing case studies, and I looked at it Monday morning before we had to go and I was like, yeah, man, maybe we are the only ones that they should go with.

And it went really well and the pitch went really well and. We were ourselves and we do have that type of work and we can do it. And I think I don’t know why I get like that and I don’t know Necessarily if it’s a bad thing we talk about this a lot too is like I think if we didn’t have This imposter syndrome our whole entire lives maybe we wouldn’t be where we are today because I’m always trying to better that imposter because I’m, I’m worried.

I’m like I’m going to have to outperform him then because just in case they find out who we really are. And, sometimes it gets in the way a little bit, but a lot of times it’s just been how I’ve run my life and always. It always tried to get better and better. So I don’t know, man.

Chris Badgett: I’ve heard a saying that behind every entrepreneur, there’s like a trauma or a shame story or something. And maybe that’s where that imposter syndrome was born. I don’t

Brian Town: know.

Chris Badgett: Loneliness is for real. Like it’s interesting. You’re married to an entrepreneur. My wife has her own business. It’s a side thing she started, but she’s not like crazy entrepreneur person like me.

So we have me and then we have a normal person in the house. But I’ve definitely found a lot of solace in spending time with other entrepreneurs and, And then I don’t feel so lonely and all the weird stuff we think about or ways of being in the world or, common ground and it doesn’t feel so lonely anymore, but how’s that been for you in terms of fighting loneliness, like what are some things you do

Brian Town: Yeah, I think you’re right.

I think being with other entrepreneurs has been super helpful and, talking to people that have been through it. And, for me, I need to probably start my podcast again, because that was always very helpful and doing these kinds of things too, like podcaster. Good for me too, because I can, I get, it’s the only opportunity I get to talk about like the good stuff that we do and that I’ve done, and I remember when I was going down this journey of the book and then building my personal brand, when I was.

Working with a ghostwriter for the personal brand and posting and those kinds of things. I was just telling my normal story. Like I was a teacher, I had four kids, had a kid in college, decided to start a company one day. When I got done telling that, they’re like, Jesus, man, like you’ve got a lot of you’ve got a really interesting history and you’re really got a lot of great things.

But we just hang out and. And talk to other people that are still doing it. So we just think everybody can do it.

I was like, Oh, do I, Really? And because for us, man. It’s I just, we just hang, I think one of the things that we have to realize is that not most people don’t start companies and even that small few that don’t make it. So the percentage of you and I being able to still be here today, is pretty small.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s normalized.

Brian Town: Yeah, it is for us, and I, I think for me, having her be an entrepreneur now too, cause before it was like safe and, she was the.

But, I even think, I remember when she was working on her job and there were still, I think a lot of employees today are feeling entrepreneur ish too, because they have to do things on their own. And so I don’t know, I think for me, the writing, the blogging, the posting, and then doing podcasts has been super helpful.

Because it’s just an opportunity for me to maybe think I know what I’m doing.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Brian Town: Sometimes.

Chris Badgett: I know one person who like has that list that you gave to your ghostwrite content person about your life and they actually keep it in their like on a note on their phone. And before they ever have to go speak or be a guest.

They read it to like get in the mindset of Oh yeah, I haven’t done a lot of stuff. I’m worthy to be here. People want to hear what I have to say or whatever. It’s easily forgotten that where you’ve come from or everything you’ve done.

Brian Town: I just think mindset is a crazy thing. I probably would have been done a great job a couple of weeks ago and faked my way through this, but.

I wasn’t at a spot where now when I’m talking to you and telling you about these things, like I actually believe it and feel it. Cause there was just a lot of stress going on a couple of weeks ago and a lot of things that I was just like, I don’t even know if I want to continue to do this, I get like that every once in a while and it’s like, all right, nevermind, things are good, and it’s that mindset piece that. When you get out of that, it’s hard to do the things that, you need to do to stay in it. So like I wasn’t meditating. I wasn’t exercising, I wasn’t writing very much and I’ve noticed that over the last week that I started to pick those things up again because I felt like doing them Mindset’s totally different.

Chris Badgett: What other mindset tips do you have? You mentioned a lot there like your routines of self care meditation exercise just acknowledging that, Hey, maybe you’re at a low point and it tends to go back up, but what else?

Brian Town: Yeah. My morning routine it’s in the book, we, I make fun of all the gurus and stuff for do an ice bath, man, and wake up at 4am and then, go get a two hour massage.

I’m like, all right listen, I got pooping all over the house. My daughter’s mad cause she can’t find her backpack. It’s that’s not happening. I, I’ve got a couple of meditation apps that I use. And so really my routine in the morning is pretty easy. I try to get up coffee and then do a little bit of meditation for about 10, 15 minutes.

Try to write down a couple of things that I’m grateful for and thankful for and what I’m looking forward to that day. And then a winter two from yesterday and then exercise. And, that’s, that, those are the things that it doesn’t have to be like tons of weights or whatever, like just something that, that gets me in that right moment.

The other thing that I wasn’t doing for a while and now I’m back in it and I’ve got a card in my pocket. That’s just my moonshot card was what I call it. And it just, there’s a, it just says, Hey, I’ll be making million dollar, million dollars a month in a calm and creative way.

And it’s just something that I read in the morning and a million dollar month is like crazy, right? Like we’re nowhere near that. And, but it’s one of those things that, is in my pocket that I can just remember and I can feel it. And so when things are coming up where I’m like, eh, maybe I shouldn’t reach out to this client or I don’t feel like doing this or whatever, I’m Oh, hold on a second.

Is that really fit to where I want to be? And so for me, getting back into that routine and keeping those things going have been super helpful.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned calm, that’s cool. Like for such a short statement to add calm in there makes a lot of sense. Cause you could make a million dollars a month creatively and be totally like at your wits end.

Brian Town: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So like it’s a little folded piece of paper. That’s just my third grade handwriting that says a million dollars a month, I’m so grateful that I’m making over a million a month at a calm, creative or calm, confident and creative way. And so I don’t know if I’ll ever hit a million dollars a month, but yeah.

It’s like that moon shot. Like it’s crazy. Like when Kennedy was like, we’re going to go to the moon. We don’t know how we’re going to do it. And we’re going to do it. It’s called, yeah, there it is. And it’s just funny how, like when I was not in the right mindset, not even did I not put it in my pocket.

I was like I’m not going to put that in my pocket. Cause it’s never going to work. And that’s so stupid, like a child.

Chris Badgett: What what causes people to feel stuck as a founder or entrepreneur? We’ve touched on some of it, but what else is in that bag of. Corrects.

Brian Town: Yeah. I think for me, it’s the pure chaos that you can control, right?

So you can control that chaos. When you’re in the mode that you don’t think you can, or it’s not going well, it can get out of control pretty quick. So I’ve been, I’ve done a really good job at really mastering my calendar. And blocking things to get things done and outsourcing tasks and not doing the things that, you shouldn’t be doing.

And it sounds easy and it sounds common because you hear this all the time, but it’s an art.

Chris Badgett: I feel like I’m still mastering my calendar and I’m pretty good at it, but it’s like constantly evolving. I don’t think it’ll ever stop.

Brian Town: Yeah. And I think doing the high level things that you should be doing as a CEO, and then we can’t always do that.

I’ve got these bills. I’ve got to talk to this client. I probably got to write something. Those are not really on my to do list that should be, but, having time that real good focus time to build your company and to vision think about, put those in your calendar.

Because if you don’t, especially if you have lots of employees and clients, like it’s just going to get filled with zooms.

Chris Badgett: Once you get some work done on yourself. Part of self is leadership. So what, 14 years into an agency and you, I believe have many, or if not all team members in the building with you whether they’re remote or in the office, leadership is required. What have been some of your leadership lessons and fumbles along the way?

Brian Town: How fumbles we, I don’t know how long this is, but I’d write about those a lot in the book too, because, I think my, so one of our core values is that, we’re all leaders and A great leader makes everyone around him or her better than they are. And that’s something that I’ve used when I was a high school teacher.

I use that same statement. I used it when I coached youth football it was just all these little pieces that I think my job is to make people leaders in this company. Then their job is then to make other people that they’re working with leaders as well. So I’ve surrounded myself with people that are better and smarter and brighter than I am.

One of my business coaches told me this, and it really stuck with me. But he was like, I was talking to him how I was worried and I was down. I was like, and he’s like, Hey man, I’m telling you, your team is going to feel it. And he’s like, if you’re down 10%, And I said I’m down a lot more than 10%.

He’s like, all right, listen, if you’re down 10%, your team’s going to feel it by 40%, and I was like I get on our team calls and I’m usually inspirational, but it’s not working. Nobody’s listening. He’s it doesn’t matter. He’s your job as a leader is to always be that one that is not necessarily pushing or, getting people to do things.

It’s to inspire them to be great. I’ve always done that in every classroom that I’ve been in, and every speech that I’ve given is my job is to inspire someone to do something and to be great. I think that’s what a leader is. And the issue with leadership today is like, when I tell this in all my classes and everything that I’ve done, it’s you’re not taught leadership, right?

And none of us off the top of our heads, especially young people can think of a good leader. I can think of a ton of really bad leaders. Bye. They can’t really think of well, who’s a good leader. And so it’s something that has to be taught a lot. And I think for me, my when I get in trouble with my leadership is, when I’m not trouble, that’s not what I meant, but the things that I’ve been really good at is taking ownership of going, Hey, I was not following the core value on this.

I was not doing this and that was really poor leadership. And so here’s what I’m going to do, to rectify that. And that alone fixes 99 percent of the problems. Like a politician, like you’d want them just to Yeah, I did that. That was terrible. And I shouldn’t have done that.

But of course they’re never going to do that, but for owning up, owning up to things when you’re not, you’re doing things that don’t meet the core values, that’s leadership.

Chris Badgett: It was about 10 years into my entrepreneur journey where I really learned the value of company values or core values, and it’s particularly powerful if you can get them to overlap with the same ones you would carry in your personal life.

And I was reading on your website before you came on. One of y’all’s is everyone we come in contact with should have a better day. And I was, I thought that’s a cool one, that’s really cool. And that the way I learned it, you can hire and fire against your core values. So it’s what you look for in the team you want to build and they’re in the character of the people.

And if it actually, nobody likes firing people. But when you see the values, and examples over time, it’s and you try to correct and change and learn and grow. And if it’s not happening, it’s, it makes that whole process easier just to have those.

Brian Town: That’s like I said, there’s lots of things that, that if we shut down tomorrow, I would be proud of.

Those core values would be one of them. And, really we help companies write their core values because I love to do it. The, the core values, the stupid core values are like customer service and integrity, like bullshit. Bullshit, that’s stupid. And so what I wanted to do is make sure that we had core values that were written in a way that.

I wanted people to be like that at work and not at work because those are the type of people that I wanted to work with. But I also felt like core values should be able to help people as well. And I think for me, that core value is my favorite. And I’ve taught that to my kids. My, it came from my dad and it was just, it’s for them too.

So look up, help somebody open a door. Be nice, whatever. If even smiling at people in the store today is like unheard of. And so my son does that all the time. And his girlfriend is so annoyed. He’s like, why are you like, why does everybody want to talk to you? And why is everybody friends with you at the store?

He’s no, I just look at people and they want to talk to me, and but for me, I was always telling people it’s not necessarily for them, but it’s. It’s for you to, it’s for you to feel like, okay, maybe you have made a difference today. Maybe you are a good person. And so I think those core values for us are the only way that we review and rate our employees.

And then we use them on all of our pitch decks as well.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah. As I look at these and I’m transitioning to the marketing part of the conversation. About what your customers want to know before they engage with you or buy from you. And for me, like before talking to you on this podcast, I’m scanning the website and I saw the core values and I’m like check on all the ones that are there.

I’m like, this is going to be a good conversation. I’ve always felt like the about page is really important to a business. But yeah, tell us more just for whether it’s an agency or anybody in any business. Creating online, like what what do customers need to know and feel before they engage?

Brian Town: Yeah. I, our new site, which is this one that you’ve been looking at I’m really happy with the way that is. I think, for us, like what we always felt is that. I’ll go back to the Jiffy Bix thing is and I told this, there was a room of 15 people and. I was like, how do I separate myself from someone that’s going to come in here and be super technical and have 50 sites this big that they’ve built is I felt like they probably wanted to work with someone that they felt like they could work with.

For people that had good values because that’s a value based company, right? And for me, I think today it’s very, it’s very difficult today to separate yourself from your competitors because everybody has the same tools, right? We can all make our websites look great. We can all say that we have X amount of combined experience, which is the dumb thing, don’t put that on your website.

I think people want to know that they’re going to work with people that. That are like them, that have the same values that they have, but more importantly, that they have somewhere in their culture that they’re helping their employees with these values and we expect certain things.

So like a good example of customer service would be everyone you come in contact with should have a better day. So instead of putting customer service on there if that’s the thing, whether they go with us or not, I want them to have a better day because they met somebody.

Chris Badgett: And that’s visceral.

You can feel that. It’s not like 99. 9 percent customer satisfaction. It’s a different, has a totally different feel to it.

Brian Town: Yeah. And I just, my favorite, I’ve always wanted, cause I read a lot of detective novels and my dad and I used to watch a team together and I always wanted to be that guy that’s got a problem.

Oh man, you should just really talk to Brian or Michigan creative. And that’s what people do. They’re like, eh, I don’t know, you know who you should talk to. And that’s, I wanted to have that piece. I also felt that, one of our core values is creative and it’s in our name and obviously it’s what we do, but I just think there’s such, such a great value in being creative.

I think people like you and I, and probably the majority of your audience takes it for granted, cause they’re just, that’s all they’ve been all their entire lives. They were the ones that did videos for school projects and, just the weirdos and

Chris Badgett: I was like, yeah, I remember the first video I did for a school project with a VHS yeah, I did the same thing.

Brian Town: That’s why I’m sitting here right now is because we used to do videos with my mom’s little VHS camera tape to tape editing and my 11th grade English teacher, Mrs. Eichel said, Hey man you ought to go into video production. That’s what I did. I went to college for video production.

That was my first job. I taught video production after that. And now, we do a ton of videos. But anyway, I think, not only your core values, but really, they want to work with a company that they think they could work with. And then also getting that brand and message, we’ll. My favorite exercise to do with clients is what we call finally. I think everybody on this could do this with their brand is. I, we made the mistake of the same thing is that we wanted to be every, everything to everyone all the time. And I still think we’re not as niche down as I would like to be.

That’s why I love what you’re doing. The niche, is great. I think if I could start all over again, I’d really think about niching to one particular group. We’re doing that more in the manufacturing space and the food space, which I’m loving. But, that finally exercises what I love to do with customers, because, as we have a couple of seconds to grab somebody’s attention.

And so what, what would it take for someone to come to your website or see an ad for a couple of seconds and for them to go and they’re on their phone on the couch at eight o’clock at night and they’re scrolling through stuff and they see your ad and they’re like, ah, finally, I’ve been looking for a company just like this, or I’ve been looking for a product just like this or a service just like this.

And that’s what I think We all need to work at, and it’s just funny because even some of the biggest companies that we’ve worked for, like they’ll come to us and they’ll go our website and our messaging is fine. It just doesn’t really tell who we really are. And I hear that over and over again.

And I’m like, great, that’s what I like to do. I love to do that. And I think, some of these really large manufacturing companies that we work with, one of them was like that. They said that same thing. Like we are the leader in the world in what we make and everybody knows it.

And, but if you go to our website and our social media and our videos, like you wouldn’t know it and they’ve got competitors that are coming up and their websites look awesome, videos look awesome, but their products aren’t as good and they’re getting pissed, so I think for me what is that message that you’re trying to get to that right person at the right time? On the right device in the right moment is what marketing’s always been. It’s really never changed. We just somehow with that gets lost because we’re trying to do so many other things.

I think

Chris Badgett: speaking of a couple of seconds to make an impression how can you help like a business owner? Think about having a more visually appealing logo and website. I’ve, I, as an example, I’m not a great designer myself. I love naming products in business. I think I have a really unique there, but yeah.

And when you talk to a potential client or existing client, they don’t necessarily have the tools and the language to tell you exactly what they want or what they think they want or what’s going to make them happy. And more importantly, their customers are prospects happy. So how do you approach the strong visuals, particularly in the logo and the web design?

Brian Town: Yeah. Yeah. So I’ll tell you an easy path to that. And then I’ll tell you a story of how I think it matters, I, it’s asking a lot of questions. Like my job is, has never been to. Come up with a great idea for you necessarily. We get to those, but I think what we found is that by just asking a bunch of the right questions, somebody usually says like that perfect tagline that’s in the business, they say that perfect, like here’s what I was thinking it should be.

And from that, those brainstorming sessions and the forms that we have, people fill out that says, why should I be your customer? If you’re at a coffee shop and someone asks, what do you do? What do you tell them? Like all these little pieces and things that we do. It’s just awesome to see people say things cause they know they just, they’re busy with everything else and they don’t have, they don’t know what to do with it.

I think our job is to take those great ideas. And build it into something that can be visual and creative and work on a bigger, in a bigger scale. And I always, I always try to, and it doesn’t always work for every client but I don’t know, maybe it does. Like I always try to get them to think about a symbol.

Like we want your logo and brand to be a symbol for something. And it’s really easy to do and fun to do with nonprofits. And we, I think how I even noticed talk like this, like I’m not classically educated in brand and marketing. I’ve learned all this stuff through figuring it out as we go.

It really came to us when we were doing some work for a company or a nonprofit that used to be called Wayne County safe and Wayne County safe, this is like ultimately one of those stories where Hey man, if we don’t do any other work, we’ve made our, And this was years ago. And I knew somebody that worked there.

So it was a small nonprofit that was in charge of in the beginning. The story goes that there was a PA Kim that worked at an emergency room in Detroit and she got assault victim in there and she had to perform or use a rape kit on her. This sounds terrible, but she was like, I’m a PA and I don’t know how to do this.

She was like, how can that be? And so she started Wayne County safe, which was in charge of getting the backlogs done that happened in the city and trying to get all these kits processed. It turned into a assault center turned into a mental health facility for women. Now it’s the largest, one of the largest assault And women’s health centers in the country.

So they came to us and they’re like, Hey, we got to change our name. It can’t be called Wayne County safe anymore. Cause this kid

Chris Badgett: first told me, I thought it was, it sounded like a armored car service or something.

Brian Town: She’s it’s too big. They’re in Wayne County, but it’s, we’re starting to do more.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Brian Town: And we need to rebrand and we need a new website and we want you to do it. And she’s we’re gonna have to go through the process and, whatever. But we ended up getting the contract and our job was to come up with a new name and a new brand. And so I remember talking to my staff.

I said, look, we got to come up with something that’s a symbol for hope. When someone sees it, we want them to go, all right, maybe I’m going to be okay. So when I’m going through all the workshops with the staff, I kept talking about that and getting them to tell us the stories. And some of the stories are awful, right?

But there is light, tons of light that’s been there. We came up with a new name called Avalon and I don’t remember how we came up with it. So Avalon healing we’re like, okay let’s do our research and let’s pitch it. Our designer at the time came up with a logo and They, they ended up going with it.

And so we built the website and the brand and flash forward a couple of years. I’m helping them with a podcast and I’m just, I got my headphones on and I’m over at their office and there’s some guests and one of the guests who didn’t know who I was like telling his story and he was like and then someone said, Hey, check out Avalon.

And then he went to their website and then he went to their building and he saw their brand and logo and he was, or he saw the logo and he’s yeah, then I thought. Man, I just felt like I was going to be okay and I was like, what did he say? I didn’t say anything, but I was like, I told my staff, I was like, you guys, we did it, and so then that approach, we were making that up as we went.

Of course I was like, Oh yeah, we do this all the time. And my staff’s what are you, what do you mean? We haven’t done this before. I’m like, don’t worry. And now that story I tell a lot, and I still take that, that into even whatever manufacturing business or whatever, I think the idea here is that you want to be able to see their logo or wordmark or whatever, and be able to understand that it’s there.

It’s the best or it’s high quality or that’s the only company that you want to get to and we’ve been like that our entire lives it’s all about brand like the nike talk about the big brands. It’s the same thing.

Chris Badgett: Oh, that’s awesome You mentioned story. How do you help clients with storytelling?

Brian Town: Yeah, they’re historically, they’re typically not very good. And what they say to us all the time, we have

Chris Badgett: products and features and services.

Brian Town: Yeah. They always talk about what they do but not who they are. I have to go and speak again to the association of general contractors. I think it’s in Colorado this year.

My talk is about how to attract millennials to the trades, or I’m sorry, Gen Z to the trades. Millennials are old. And the, when I did it in Atlanta, I was like, there’s 80 people in the room. I was like, how many people here have a picture of a building or some construction tools on your homepage?

Everybody’s hand raising, great. That’s what you do. And that’s great. But they know that’s what you do. Like people know that’s what you do. And but who are you? As a company. And why should I come work for you? Getting them to think about telling that story of who they are as a company and why they do what they do, it really helps because I’m like, what happens is people first come to you because of that, and then they’re going to go start to research and see if you have the right products and services, but they’re always going to come back to that.

That’s one of the things they say to us, which I love is they’re like that’s why we hired you. We’re not creative. Yeah. I’m like, I know,

Chris Badgett: I don’t know your story, you got to talk to me, man.

Brian Town: And so a couple of different ways that we do it, I think, one of the ways that are really helpful is, if we can record videos of them telling that story, that’s great.

But the process that we have works really well. Where, we have them just answer all these random weird questions and give it to as many people as you can. And then we’ll take all that and we’ll make a summary out of it. Then I’ll go back in and start asking questions. And that three step process seems to work pretty well because.

People know it, it’s just, they have to be asked. It’s like a, it’s like a high school classroom. Like you can’t, the thing I always used to tell new teachers, if I was training, I’m like, don’t ever say, does anybody have any questions? Like at the end of talks to that’s the dumbest thing to ever leave for question.

No one has questions. No one wants to ask questions. You have to ask the right questions to get them to answer it the right way.

Chris Badgett: Very cool. Yeah. I think, Nike, part of the reasons that strong is Michael Jordan’s story, right? Like the story of his life and many brand champions or influencers or whatever, it’s about the story.

Brian Town: Yeah. Apple’s the same way. Yeah.

I’m going to put a hundred songs in your pocket, and it’s the same thing. That story and really their product, their product’s cool and whatever, but it’s just. I think how they were able to do it. It’s the idea of having an Apple, having that was a status symbol.

It’s not as much anymore, but that’s how they, you were cool when you had a Mac desktop, you were that cool weird guy.

Chris Badgett: Especially if it was the green one or the orange one or whatever. I have to ask you as an agency person, who’s done a lot. How do you get clients?

It’s a, the biggest thing I hear from people who are particularly if they’re earlier on in their journey. Yeah,

Referrals are great, but what else can you do?

Brian Town: Yeah. And that’s what I spent the most of my time doing as the CEO and in a chapter in the book, I talk about sales and that’s all that matters.

And sales to me is something that I think, we’ve tried to outsource sales. We’ve tried to hire salespeople. Not much success. We’ve got one right now that she’s pretty good. So Liz, if you’re listening to this, I’m not talking about you. But is, I think there’s multiple approaches to how you get good clients.

The easy things that you have to do and as marketing companies, for whatever reason, we don’t seem to do a great job at this. But is, you have to make sure that your search engine optimization or SEO is good. Yeah. We do AdWords for ourselves. We always wanted to make sure that our social media was the best.

Cause I didn’t want somebody to go there and go, I’m not going to hire you to do that. For us, that was all those pieces, but then as a CEO and as the owner, a couple hours a day, an hour a day, every day, you need to be in charge of doing some sort of sales activity and it’s a learned, Thing.

I took some bunch of courses for years in Sandler and read tons of sales books because I had no idea how to do sales and sales is probably one of the hardest jobs that you’ll ever do because we’ve, we’ve tried sales people and that are new and hear me thinking, Oh shoot, we’ll just give a young person some little bit of salary and a great percentage.

And they’ll kill it. I could make 200, 000, they only got to sell four websites or whatever, whatever it is. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Brian Town: But what they don’t understand is that they’re going to get a ton of nose and their percentages are terrible for closing, no matter how good you are. And so I think, always having those sales activities in the pipeline and always following up.

And so my job every day. I have a, I think an hour and then a half hour blocked off to do sales activities. And sometimes it’s just going into the CRM and following up with proposals that I’ve written, have written. Sometimes it’s reaching out to customers. Sometimes it’s prospecting for other ones and sending random emails, but a couple of big, easy wins that I think that we don’t think about doing is we always think about getting new customers.

I’m guilty of that too. When I’ve got, I don’t know, I think we host 200 some WordPress websites right now, and we’re starting to do better at this, but I should be going back over every single one of those and start reaching out to go, Hey man, here’s what I’m thinking. Let’s rebuild this. You’re not doing SEO with us.

What do you think about that? Or, Hey, did you know we do AdWords and, I’ve got a pipeline of customers that have been with me for 10 years that know and trust me. And I’m looking for someone that has never even heard of me. And so I would work your list of your current customers and then also.

We know we say referrals and referrals that come in are great. And it was funny because one of my sales trainer one, one time was like, Hey man, how many referrals did you get this year? And I’m like, I don’t know, 30. I have no idea. 30, let’s say 30. He’s cool. He’s like, how many of those did you ask for?

That’s why I didn’t ask for any of them. What do you mean? I said, no, man, that’s not how referrals work. They just come in. He’s no, dude. He’s call up your friends and call up your best customers and call up your colleagues and go, Hey, how’s it going? It’s okay, cool. Let me know if there’s anybody else I should be talking to that might be a great fit and they’re usually pumped.

If you’ve done a good job for them, they want. To help someone else. And they’re like, Oh man, you should call Rick. Rick’s got this manufacturing company. He’s getting fed up with, whatever. I’m going to, I’m going to email you too. And he’s going to be, and he usually is Hey man, you guys got to call Brian.

He’ll take care of you. And that’s almost like. A done deal, but you got to ask. And I love giving her, that’s like my favorite thing to do. Like I love giving referrals. If someone treated me, really well, like my insurance guy, you’re happy to do it. I’m man. I’m like, I do it because I know that’s going to make me look good.

Yeah. Cause they’ll call him and go, man, was took care of us in a half hour. I’m like, I know. But so I think working your current customer. The list doing sales activities every day. I’m being okay with getting nose as soon as you possibly can. Yeah. I want nose. I’d rather I want nose. Yeah. Like I just want them to go, look, man, I don’t like you.

Your goatee is weird. I don’t want to go with you. I’m like, great. Don’t pretend. And then not. Email me back. And so I think that’s important. And then get some training, get classically trained in sales. It is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do.

Chris Badgett: What what’s in your agency stack?

Cause I know a lot of folks. Yeah. Particularly over here in WordPress, like they just build websites, but it sounds like you do paid ads and other things. Like what is on the menu at Michigan creative?

Brian Town: Yeah. Sometimes I’m like, man, I wish we just did WordPress websites. That would, cause when we started and I didn’t know, like I quit teaching.

On a Friday and started this company on a Monday. I had no ide, I had no idea what marketing was. And I didn’t know how to build websites. I ran into a former student a couple of months later and he, and I’m like. Hey man, what are you doing? He’s Oh, I just graduated, but I’m not really working. And I’m like, do you know how to build websites?

He’s yeah, I think so. And he was my 10 year, 10 year employee, WordPress developer. But so yeah, so we, we started and just being like, we’ll do everything. But for us right now, what we’re really trying to focus on is WordPress websites. Video production is a big part of our business.

I’ve got two full time producers and a director.

Chris Badgett: And what’s that? Is that like the sort of like the homepage video or social media video or what is What, how are you using video for your clients?

Brian Town: Yeah. What we really like to do. So yes, to all that. And what we really like to do is create brand anthem videos.

So it’s like that 92nd Superbowl, like commercial voiceover, the thing that you’d watch. And get inspired to, to work with that company. So we do a lot of brand anthem videos and I love doing those. So storytelling so we do some commercial work and some social media videos as well, but a lot of our work is, and we do a lot of interview videos too, but a lot of our work is in brand anthem and I love video because it’s that’s what I started in.

But I also really like it because these guys that I got now Matt, Zachary and Anne Marie, they run it like a, it’s entire separate company.

Chris Badgett: It’s like a division. Yeah, I

Brian Town: don’t even have to be a lot of these shoots and even recently they’re like, Hey, is there any way we could just start writing the scripts?

I’m like, wait, what do you mean? You don’t like my script writing? I got a little bit. They’re like, no, it’s just I think it’d be, I’m like, fine. But So I love that department. They’ve done just such a great job and the work they’re putting out is really cool. And I get to go sometimes and I love to ask questions of people like sit across from them on the camera and just get them to tell their story.

Like I love doing that. But then we do a ton of brand and graphic design and then also, digital digital ads, mostly social ads. We do some pay per click and then SEO.

Chris Badgett: A question about the brand anthem. I’m curious here. Is it, is the, is your agency doing the narration or you’re bringing in like the founder or somebody, or is it like hands off for the company or are they like the talent or I’m sure they have input and stuff, but how does that come together?

Brian Town: Yeah. A real brand anthem, what we do is we end up. Interviewing them and talking to them and then we’ll write the script. And then once they approve the script, then we’ll assign shots to the script, the shot list. And sometimes it’s a day, a full day shoot. Sometimes it’s a couple of days.

So we’ll go in there and let’s just say it’s a manufacturing plant. We’ll go in there and get all the shots of, employees working on the machines the CEO, people doing and interacting and just trying to make it look, good. Cool is not a good enough word, but try to make it, we want somebody to watch it and we want it to do a couple of things.

We want it to go, Oh man, like this is the company we’re looking for. Or it also works really well for employment videos too, where they’re looking to get people interested in coming to work there. And then typically what we’ll do is we’ll hire a professional voiceover person. Sometimes we’ll let them pick, do you want male, female, old, young and then we’ll just put that voiceover in.

With music and with the shots that we’ve taken. Once we have that day shoot, like they’re pretty much out. Now we have done videos where we’ll interview the CEO and that’s a little bit of a different where we still are using B roll interview, the CEO, the marketing director, whoever, CEO.

And we have done those. My favorite ones to do are just the brain anthem with voiceover music. I think every company should have a brain anthem.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah. So for you out there watching, if you have an agency, maybe consider adding that to your stack.

Brian Town: And they’re great.

Cause they turn out really cool every time. Like I haven’t made a brain Anthem. We haven’t made a brain Anthem that the customer wasn’t like, Oh my God, this is awful. Like they always turn out really good.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. This has been awesome. Brian, if I want to take it back to the lonely CEO, if somebody out there, whether you’re running an agency or whatever your company is, or your education entrepreneur, if somebody’s feeling stuck alone, a little lost and they have all this chaos going on around them, number one, they should get their book, your book.

It

Brian Town: still has the not for sale copy, but it’s still there. Almost there. It’s like a real book.

Chris Badgett: What’s the first action they should take. It, they get your book, but what’s the first like tactical thing, even if they just turn off this podcast and they’re in that headspace, what’s a possible next step for them?

Brian Town: Yeah, I, man, I love kind of thinking out that five years, that 10 years, like, where do you want to, like, where do you see that company? Cause that’s fun. Throw it out there and just be like, this is where I want to take us and this is why, and then come back to that day and, reflect on how far you’ve already gone.

And I think I want them to understand I really want you to understand because no one, like I can. Tell you a quick story about how this will maybe resonate with your audiences. I was doing, I do a little bit of coaching and I was coaching this entrepreneur Stephanie and she was her husband ran a gym and in front of the gym was her business, which was a smoothie shop, coffee shop.

Whatever. And she was like, I was sitting in there with her and I was just helping her. And she was really getting, it was really tough. She just felt she’s I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t think anything that we’re doing is good. And I’m like, hang on, man just look around you.

This is beautiful. Like you’ve got your own shop, man. You got. There’s been like 10 people that have walked through here while we’re talking. And I said, you’re doing it. You’re making it happen. You’re the right person to do this. It’s just that self confidence I think for her, knowing that there’s a way to do it, she felt like she was trying to do everything and all at once and it wasn’t working.

And so I think. And this is from the e myth, but this, this is where I got it from, but Michael Gerber said it, when you’re in that small business and it’s just you or you and one other, you’re having to wear multiple hats but plan that out. So from nine to 10, you’re the CEO, from 1030 to 12 or whatever, you’re the marketing director and start to put in those things in place in more of a scheduled structure way.

So you don’t feel like you’re having to do everything all at the same time. And I think lastly, just. Realize that you are the one to do it. And everyone else is feeling the exact same way that you are right this moment, like as successful as I sound, I don’t have any of this figured out. Like I’m worried about the same stuff that you’re worried about.

Which when people used to tell me that, I’m like, Whoa, that doesn’t sound good.

Why am I still doing this? Like when those commercials come on from a bank and they’re like, yeah, start your dream and start our own business. My wife and I are like, yeah, don’t do that. Yeah. Are you sure? But yeah, just realize that you’re the one to do it. What’s the worst case scenario. I told that to someone, one of my clients, coaching clients.

I said, what’s the worst case scenario. Worst case scenario is you’ll, she was doing a, and it’s very successful. Just in the last year, a golf simulator, brand new business. She had no idea about how to do it. And I go, what’s the worst thing that’ll happen? The worst thing that’ll happen is it won’t work and you’ll shut it down.

And you got a couch, you had a master’s degree. You’ll either do a different business or you’ll go work for someone that’s it. That’s the worst case scenario. It’s we’re all pretty smart or we could all probably get jobs. It wouldn’t, we would hate it, but that’s the worst case scenario.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. The worst case is often not as bad as it feels if you like really think about it.

Brian Town: Yeah, but as a failure for us, if we had to shut down, it’s, we didn’t make it. 99 point whatever percent of the people never even started.

So I don’t know how that’s a failure. I’ll need to watch this and remind myself of this.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome. That’s Brian town. He’s from Michigan creative.

You can find that at Michigan creative. com. Go check out the book, the lonely CEO. It’s got its own website, the lonely ceo. com. Brian, thanks for coming on the show. Is there anywhere else people can connect with you or any final words for the listener?

Brian Town: No, man, bryantown. io is a great place. It’s got all our links on there.

And yeah, no, I don’t think final words, I think that simple realization that you’re the only person to do it and you’re the right person to do it, I think is something that I wish I would have heard years ago. I think sometimes that’s enough.

Chris Badgett: Thanks, Brian.

Brian Town: All right, man.

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.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s Guide

The post Overcome Entrepreneur Loneliness and Master Marketing with Brian Town appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Eric Davis gives a concise rundown of sales funnels and explains how WordPress and LifterLMS customers can maximize their earnings by using the Upsell Plugin.

Eric Davis is the founder of Upsell Plugin, a tool designed to help businesses maximize sales by optimizing their checkout processes. He explains that a sales funnel is a set of procedures intended to lead potential buyers through a buying process by employing strategies like order bumps, upsells, and down sells.

The Upsell Plugin improves this process by allowing firms to build various sales routes while strategically increasing average order value. Although cross-selling is not the plugin’s main purpose, Eric recognizes it as related product offers even if the plugin’s main focus is upselling.

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

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s Guide

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 Eric Davis. You can find them over at upsell plugin. That’s upsellplugin. com. You can also find upsell plugin on the Lifter LMS add ons page. Today we’re going to talk about upselling sales funnels, how to do it in WordPress and dive into the magic that is upsell plugin.

But first welcome to the show, Eric. Awesome. Thanks for having me, Chris. Yeah, it’s great to be here and chat with another person. Who’s into marketing and helping people make more money and stuff. Absolutely. Let’s lay the ground floor for people who may be unfamiliar with sales funnels, upsells, downsells, give us a high level education of, key concepts of a sales funnel.

Eric Davis: Absolutely. Maybe I overthink it, but it’s pretty straightforward nowadays. Essentially you have somebody that’s coming to your website. You’ve gained their trust already for getting them to your site and they’re ready to purchase something from you. Specifically, let’s say a course via LifterLMS.

So now that you have them strategically and they’re engaged in your website. You’re going to want to sell them more. And there’s no better way to sell more to somebody while they’re actively checking out on your website. So What the upsell plugin allows you to do is while they’re checking out. You can take them to a separate page after they purchased that initial product and offer them an additional, course product. Whatever it is that might, help that person achieve whatever results they’re trying to accomplish.

When it comes to sales funnels, again it’s a, it’s a term that’s became more hot over the past five or so years. There’s the order bumps, the upsells, the downsells, that stuff. So somebody is going to land on your checkout page. You have some order bumps and the order bumps.

What I like to describe order bumps as is if you’re going to your grocery store and you’re checking out, there’s the gum, the men’s, that kind of stuff. So it’s like an impulse buy. You want to grab that piece of gum, add it to your cart. You’re increasing that average order value, that order value of that customer.

After they check out, you essentially send them to another page where we call it an upsell offering them another, lifter LMS course. Do you want to add this to your order? Yes or no. If they say yes, you just upsell them on a new offer. And if they say no, you essentially can take them to a downsell.

Your sales funnels with the upsell plugin can have as many. Pieces as it wants, there’s no limitations, but that’s a high level approach of a sales funnel. Hopefully it made sense.

Chris Badgett: That makes sense. One where I get confused and maybe you can shed some light is I get upsell, I get downsell, but what is a cross sell?

Eric Davis: A cross sell is more of so it all goes hand to hand, at least in my mind, the way I think about it. But a cross sell is essentially, offering them a product that’s similar already to what they’re checking out for. But when it comes to upsell plugin, we don’t really offer cross sells typically with that.

It’s more of, taking them through a strategic checkout path. A cross sell from my experience at least is more of, something that’s popping up during that process of the checkout and selling them on another product or service.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Let’s look at some like Lifter LMS examples.

And by the way, we’re going to be doing, this is a podcast episode. So you’re watching us talk, or you’re most likely listening in your earbuds. But we are going to actually do a video demo that you’ll find on the Lifter LMS YouTube channel. It’s going to be a separate video. So we’re going to be talking about ideas and concepts here. But if you’d like to see this in action Eric’s going to do a demo and that’ll be on our YouTube channel as a standalone video.

Look out for that, but just to go over some other ideas, just to get the gears turning on how you could use upsell plugin with Lifter LMS. One example is you may like it. Let’s start at the beginning. Let’s say the first upsell is a course. Maybe you have an ebook that you’re selling, but then you want to be like.

In the checkout, like upsell from that, getting the ebook to also get a course or, and just, I’m just going to keep going up the chain. If you’re selling a course maybe you have a membership that includes private coaching or group coaching. So great. You’ve got the a hundred dollar course. Do you want the coaching for a hundred dollars a month or whatever it is?

And then you can upsell that way. Downselling is also fun. Let’s say let’s say you have an expensive membership to your academy of courses that has, five, 10, 20, a hundred courses in it. And somebody. It’s too much, It’s not right. It’s overwhelming for them. They could downsell into just a single like introductory course.

That’s much cheaper. So just throwing out a couple of ways to think about this.

Eric Davis: Absolutely. And if I can add on to that a little bit, cause again, as you mentioned it’ll make more sense when they see it in action. But one of the reasons I developed the upsell plugin as well. I’m not trying to bash WooCommerce for example, or anything, WooCommerce is an amazing tool. I use it for some of my own personal projects, But when it comes to, let’s use Lifter LMS again, as an example, and it comes to selling courses and membership, I’m a big believer in helping your customer obtain whatever results they’re looking for.

So when it comes like WooCommerce, for example, and letting them pick and choose what courses they want to add to their cart, to me, you’re doing a disservice to your customer. Because by overwhelming them and bombarding them with so many courses, they’re probably going to get too sidetracked and too much, information coming in overload that they’re not going to be able to reach whatever they’re trying to achieve.

So that’s why with the upsell plugin, it’s not like a basket. It’s not, let me, here’s my cart. Let me choose these six.

It might sound great. It might sound like to you as the core seller, the lifted Lifter LMS website owner. Hey, I just sold six courses. It might sound great, but you’re probably going to lose in the long run because by having them add those six courses to your card and checking out, they’re probably never going to really reach what they’re trying to achieve.

So with the upsell plugin, you’re taking them through a strategic path. I want to, I want to learn how to fix an engine on a car. Okay. I’m going to add that course to my checkout. Okay. I just checked out. I now have the course and I’m ready to start learning how to fix engines.

What goes along with that? Not necessarily how to fat fix basketball hoops, but it would probably make more sense on. How to fix, how to change a tire on a car. Okay. That makes sense. Let me, I want to add that to my order. So ultimately you’re helping them probably figure out how to, become a better mechanic or something. Or how to fix cars or how to, more everything’s related to that car.

And then they’re going to become, once you help them achieve that result on becoming a better mechanic and learning how to fix cars. They’re probably going to now become a lifetime customer of yours. So instead of letting them choose how all these different courses on things to do, and maybe that was a poor example, but ultimately what I’m trying to say is if you can take them through a strategic sales funnel on the course that you know, make most sense for them to achieve whatever they’re trying to achieve.

You’re probably going to end up, having a customer for lifetime. And that lifetime value is going to be more than if they just came to your site one time, purchased six courses, added them all to your cart, the cart, and then they never really get any with those. Again, hopefully that made sense, but that’s the process of, the upselling and downselling, you can ultimately do whatever you want with the upsell plugin.

But what I strongly suggest is not just going to upsell them on something just to make more money. You’re going to upsell them and offer them a course that makes sense with what they just purchased from you to help them achieve the results they want to achieve. And now they’re going to be like, I’m, they’re going to love you for helping them achieve what they’re trying to accomplish.

And they’re going to be. A lifetime customer.

Chris Badgett: I love that. Just to expand on what you’re saying there. I think Russell Brunson over at ClickFunnels did a really good job with instilling this idea to the internet marketing world that you don’t need a website, you need a sales funnel.

So it’s. If you’re new to these concepts like what Eric is talking about, having a guided experience. Imagine if you could not put a menu on the top of your website or even footer links and the experience that you’re crafting is they go from one page to the next page and they have decisions they can make Oh, I don’t want this right now, then we’re in a downsell.

Oh, I do want this right now. We’re in an upsell. It’s an extreme example to not have a menu on your website. And literally. The entire thing is landing pages that kind of have a decision tree in them, but that’s the way to think about it and understand it. For example, if you do a ad, you want to send people to a landing page with a specific offer or call to action, not necessarily give people a, the menu and all these places they can go.

You’re trying to do a specific sales funnel that starts from an ad or another call to action from, let’s say a YouTube video or any, anything. Okay. So thinking about that flow and guiding the user through your offer and giving them decisions is a really smart way to think about that.

Let’s talk technically a little bit like, so in the example we’re talking about, typically upselling happens from like a landing page. First there’s an offer on a landing page. There’s typically a call to action button. It’s somewhat good practice to have one call to action so that users don’t get or visitors don’t get decision fatigue.

But where talk about the technicality of upsell plugin in terms of. Handling the checkout, landing pages, WordPress. What are the pieces that come together to make it possible? So

Eric Davis: the beauty in my mind, at least the beauty of upsell plugin is we didn’t want to take over any of the page builders or the websites or the course, lifter LMS.

Everybody has a specialty and they do an amazing job. I would be lying if I said, Hey, I’m going to create a page builder. That’s better than Elementor or better than Divi. I’d be lying about that. But So ultimately, the way that click with the way that upsell plugin works is we integrate directly with everything.

So it’s really just links and short codes. So you can just install upsell plug on your site and use everything you pretty much already have set up. All you have to do is take a short code for the checkout form, plug that into your checkout page that you’ve already designed. And now the checkout form would be populated.

And then when somebody purchases course a, let’s say we created a product inside of upsell plugin called course a, We say, where should they be redirected to? After they purchased this, we can redirect them to a sales page that we created. That is now doing the one click upsell functionality of subplugin with course B.

So when it comes to the integration process with WordPress and everything, Lifter LMS we’re not redesigning anything, essentially. We’re working with whatever you already have in place and allowing you to use, all the amazing tools and features that those other tools already have.

Chris Badgett: And we’ll go into this in in a video, but lift their LMS just technically, if you’re thinking about how do I connect all this together as an example, courses and memberships have an option to have a. A different sales page for your course than the default lifter page. So you have two options.

You could have a custom page or you can embed that checkout with shortcode right where Eric is talking about. And of course you could link, you could have a button somewhere on your site that, or a menu link that goes into the flow that you want people to go into for upselling.

Eric Davis: And then the way that the upsell plugin, and like you’re saying exactly correct, we can even take it one step further because the way that.

Our integration works and it’ll make more sense. Once we do the screen sharing, people see this, but you create a product inside the upsell plugin. That’s again, let’s just call it course a and inside of when you’re creating that plugin, when you’re creating that product, there’s an integration tabs with Lifter LMS that you just simply enable it.

And you say, when somebody purchases this and product enroll them into course a and Lifter LMS. So you can create a sales page however you want and then that checkout call to action Button when they click on it would take them to the checkout form And that checkout form when they go through that process will automatically add them Into a course a on lifter lms because you have the product attached to the course inside of lifter lms

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

Let’s talk a little bit about integrations so You have a lot of integrations. Of course you integrate with Lifter LMS, but you also have, for example, MailChimp and active campaign. So how did the email marketing tools like that integrate with upsell plugin? Awesome.

Eric Davis: Yep. So again pretty basic, at least to me, maybe I look at it too much.

But you essentially, add the API keys from MailChimp or ActiveCampaign, for example. And then what we allow you to do is just like we, just like I explained with Lifter LMS, if they purchase a specific product, you can tag them and, or add them to a specific list inside of your email marketing service.

Awesome. So again, let’s work with course a, if a person, if a customer purchases, of course, a, you can add them to course a list inside of MailChimp and tag them course a as well. So now when they make that purchase, they automatically get added to MailChimp. And then again, that’s huge because if we go back, I’m talking about, this customer becoming a lifetime customer of yours, you now know inside of your email marketing system what they purchased.

So you can follow up with them appropriately if they were on your marketing campaign. And now they purchased for say, you can set up an automation now inside of active campaign, MailChimp, all the other ones, we want to remove them from our marketing campaign. We want to add them to our, automation sequence for when somebody purchases a course a, so we can follow up with them appropriately.

We allow you to add your customer to a specific list or tag. With, most of the main email marketing solutions. So you can follow up with them using their powerful automation tools. And we also have a Zapier app as well. So if the email service you’re not using, isn’t we don’t have a direct integration with, we have a Zapier app that will allow you to connect with, pretty much any of the main guys.

Chris Badgett: Nice. And this is a good point to clarify on as upsell plugin creates its own checkout and has its own integration with Stripe and PayPal,

Eric Davis: correct?

Chris Badgett: You’re going to do this. You need to connect to your Stripe and PayPal, even though Lifter has those things. If you’re going to go down this route, it’s totally fine to use the upsell plugins, PayPal and Stripe integration, which is essentially the same thing as the Lifter one, and I’m really glad you created this because Lifter LMS does not have.

These kind of sales funnel like tools. So I’m really happy that you’ve done this. I also noticed affiliate WP on your integrations. That’s popular with lifter LMS users. What tell us more about how that works?

Eric Davis: Yep. So just as most website owners know, having an affiliate program can be extremely powerful.

It just helps you have users drive essentially traffic and sales to your site. So we have an integration, we have a direct integration with two. Affiliate programs. One is or affiliate tools. I should say is affiliate WP, which is a wordpress plug in. And then another one called I dev affiliate.

I think I dev affiliate has a direct integration with lifter LMS as well. But I did affiliate is not a wordpress plug in. It’s standalone solution. But it’s really powerful. And I like it a lot. I personally use I personally use IDevAffiliate, but AffiliateWP is another really good one.

And it’s pretty basic how it works. Again, it’s, just if the customer, you create your affiliate program using AffiliateWP, your customers, clients, whoever you’re influencers, whoever you’re trying to attract becomes an affiliate of yours. They now have their referral links, the referral codes, when they send the traffic to the website, if that customer checks out and purchases a product via upsell plugin, that affiliate will generate the commission based on the commission settings that you have set up inside of affiliate WP.

So again, going back to the page builders and things like that on how we work, we’re not trying to, sometimes people are like, you don’t have an affiliate program. And I, my answer is we don’t have affiliate program because we’re focusing on creating a checkout solution that’s going to convert for you.

That’s going to optimize for you. We can spend our time and try to figure out how to convert an affiliate or create an affiliate program, but affiliate WP does an amazing job. That’s why we would rather integrate with tools like affiliate WP, Lifter, ML, LMS, that does an amazing job. Instead of saying, Hey, I want to create, I own LMS.

I don’t. I would rather say use lifter LMS and use upsell plugin. So it’s the same process with the affiliate program. You use affiliate WP use the idea of affiliate because their programs are amazing. And then use upsell plugin as the checkout process.

Chris Badgett: Nice. I also see you have WP fusion, which is very popular in the lifter community.

Could you step through how that works with upsell plugin?

Eric Davis: Absolutely. So they have an integration on their end and then we actually have a direct integration on ours as well, but it works pretty much the same way as like the email marketing where, you know, that’s, I know WP fusion can be used as a membership tool and things like that, but it all ties back to your email marketing service system.

So it’s essentially the process works the same way where. You can add when it’s all on a per product basis. So if you need to do something with, WP fusion where, when somebody purchases Corsair, you want to enroll them into, tag them on Corsair inside of your affiliate program, or I’m sorry, inside of your email marketing system through WP fusion, you can do so again, it’s, I keep using the word basic. Maybe it’s not basic. Cause I’m just looking at it all the time. But that’s essentially how it works. Everything is like on a per product basis. So you can be extreme, so you can be strategic about your followups and everything like that.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I just want to throw a pro tip out there. So if you’re thinking about using the upsell plugin, and let’s say you already have, you’re using Lifter LMS as e commerce or the Lifter LMS WooCommerce integration. And you’ve got like a catalog of courses, but you’re trying to get more sales.

You’re trying to experiment with, let’s say, paid ads like Facebook ads or Google ads. And for that, it’s particularly helpful to use more of a sales funnel flow. You’re getting the traffic, you’re paying for traffic. You want a specific landing page. You want to upsell down and downsell that traffic and give them that more sales funnel, like experience that you can control, but also add more clarity, value, and ease to the visitor.

That’s a great way to get started with the upsell plugin. So you don’t necessarily have to like re engineer if you’re already moving, you don’t have to re engineer how your site currently works, but you can actually just add more value by. Doing some ads and doing some upsells. And it doesn’t even have to be ads.

You could be experimenting with, let’s say a strategic partnership with some, somebody else’s podcast or YouTube channel. And you want a specific flow for people coming from the call to action from there, that’s a great way to get started with the upsell plugin. Tell us the story, Eric. How did this all start for you?

Why why create this? Or how did I know people get fastened? There’s a fascination here because like you said, you’re super focused on just the upsell. Optimized checkout flow. How did that start in your story?

Eric Davis: So my story is, as you already mentioned click funnels, for example. So I’ve been developing websites for the past, probably about 10 years now.

And. About five years ago or so when ClickFunnels was really, making their main push, maybe it’s been more than five years now, my clients would come to me and say, Hey, I want to build a sales funnel. I said, awesome. That sounds great. Let’s create a sales funnel. Just like you, Chris, I’m assuming, I love WordPress and I like to stay inside the WordPress ecosystem just cause it’s open source.

If you want to. Do something as long as you, or, you can have a team around you that knows how to accomplish it and create it. You can create it with inside of WordPress. So when my customer, when my clients would come to me and say, Hey, can you help me create a sales funnel at that time?

I would say we can, but we either have to sign up for click funnels or there’s the solutions, with WooCommerce and if you’re selling courses and membership, it’s just. In my opinion, too much. It’s just, we have to buy another six or seven extensions, subscription extensions, things like that. In the beginning, I was helping them with those different, channels, but then, being the WordPress level or lover, I was like, there, I feel like there’s just this missing piece in the WordPress ecosystem for creating and being able to easily, I should say, create a sales funnel.

So that’s why for the past five years, I’ve been spending, my time, my energy, my money on developing the upsell plugin, continuing to maintain it because everything essentially is built into the upsell plugin. So again, you don’t need WooCommerce. It integrates directly with Stripe or PayPal and everything, subscriptions, you don’t have to get another extension through us.

It’s, it’s all right there. It may, to be honest, maybe it’s a poor business decision, having, I should be upselling people and buying more and more modules and things like that. But currently the way that, and for the past five years, the way we’ve been selling the upsell plugin is, everything is built into it.

Yeah. Again, I just thought that there was, there needed, I just thought there was a missing piece inside of the WordPress ecosystem for somebody that wanted to quickly and easily create a sales funnel. So that’s why, ultimately I’ve been. Developing and maintaining the upsell plugin.

Chris Badgett: And I just want to mention too I just went over to the click funnels pricing page and you’re looking at spending about 3, 000 a year with click funnels and upsell plugin, just like in WordPress, like they’re way, way more economical solutions for literally more power and customization and stuff like that.

Just throwing that out there. This has been awesome, Eric. I appreciate our chat. We’re actually going to switch to go create a video together about how specifically with screen sharing to use the upsell plugin with Lifter LMS. So go look for that on the Lifter LMS YouTube channel. Also be sure to check out the upsell plugin.

That’s upsellplugin. com. You can also find it on the Lifter LMS website. In our third party add ons where we recommend tools to help add even more value to your learning management system. But Eric, thanks for coming on the show. Yeah, we’re here to help you make more money like upselling and downselling and all this is can be very powerful and better for your users to have a clear path and give them decisions and stuff like that.

So thank you for making upsell plugin and thanks for coming on the show. Awesome.

Eric Davis: Thanks for having me, 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.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s Guide

The post How to Upsell Courses and Memberships with the Upsell Plugin appeared first on LMScast.